This page last revised 9 January 2001

An organist an accomplished man!... Well, I suppose it is possible, but it rather upsets one's notions, does it not?
(George Meredith: Sandra Belloni, 1889)

The organist is often depicted as a humble, dowdy figure:

He brought with him his two friends, Dr. Dawson, who was already known to Charles, and an obscure organist from somewhere or other... whose name everybody forgot...
(Margaret Kennedy: The Constant Nymph, 1924)

The organ began a little breathlessly, played by Miss Pimm in her Windsmoor Sunday suit. The congregation rose stiffly to its feet.
(Joanna Trollope: A Village Affair, 1989)

Often the organist is shy:

...he went with his parents to Sunday service in the village church at Oberweiler, where a young music student from Weissenfels used to prelude on the little organ and accompany the singing of the congregation, even attending its departure with timid improvisations.
(Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus, 1947)

Sometimes the dullard organist affords humour to others:

A year after the death his mother had married Edmund Morgan, a widowed church organist of mind-numbing dullness, and had retired with him to Bognor Regis where they lived on his father's insurance money in a spacious bungalow in sight of the sea, in an obsessive mutual devotion which mirrored the meticulous order and tidiness of their world... The conjunction of Morgan's job and his instrument offered endless possibilities of adolescent jokes, particularly when he and their mother were on honeymoon. 'I expect Mr Morgan is pulling out all his stops.' 'Do you suppose Mr Morgan is changing his combinations?' 'Poor Mr. Morgan, labouring away. I hope he doesn't run out of wind.'
(P.D. James: Devices and Desires, 1989)

The organist's job may be deemed worthy of condescending amusement:

By then I wanted to smack her, a girl so morally upright she had to be the most odious hominid ever to walk planet Earth, in her non-animal hide shoes... She deserved an Olympic gold medal for Amazon discusthrowing. She deserved a Nobel Peace Prize for saving retarded baby whales. She deserved to play organ for the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.
(Amy Tan: The Hundred Secret Senses, 1995)

The professional value of an organist's career may be called into question:

"You didn't see her musical gift?"
"Oh, yes. That was clear from when she was little... We thought she might give her music to the church. Lead a choir and play an organ. There's always a place for that. But can you build a whole life on it? We didn't think so."
(Robertson Davies: The Lyre of Orpheus, 1988)

Sometimes the organist feels unwanted, and the vicar is obliged to spend:

...a difficult hour persuading the voluntary organist at New End (a retired primary-school headmistress who felt she was being taken for granted) to continue, at least temporarily...
(Joanna Trollope, The Rector's Wife, 1991)

And from 'Staying On' (1977) by Paul Scott, where the speaker is discussing Old Maybrick:

"He's got the date of the Church right but is out by a year over the installation of the organ, according to Billy-Boy, but then Maybrick only played the bloody thing. Maybrick was an enthusiast. Enthusiasm is the most ruinous thing I can think of."

In the following, from Jonathan Kellerman's 'The Web' (1995), the speaker is talking about a local doctor:

A saint. Cleaned up the water supply, vaccinated the kids. Like that German fellow, Schweitzer. Only Dr. Bill don't play the organ or no such foolishness. No time for nothing but his good work.

The organist in E.M Forster's 'The Longest Journey' (1907) has rather more vigour:

Chapel was over. The organist was prancing through the voluntary, and the first ripple of boys had already reached Dunwood House.

The following is from 'The Land Girls' by Angela Huth (1994), set during the Second World War:

But then a woman at the organ - who wore a badge saying Dig for Victory among the speckled feathers of her hat - launched into 'Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring', her plump fingers chomping at the notes with surprising skill...

Organists are often noted for their advanced years, and intractable natures:

There can be no doubt of the new archdeacon's zeal and enthusiasm... Upon his struggles with the organist, an old gentleman who had been in office since 1786, I have no time to dwell; they were not attended with any marked success.
(M.R. James: The Stalls of Barchester Cathedral, 1911)

And their eccentricity, sometimes of a pathetic kind:

Miss Annie wrote hymns of praise. She did not compose music, but she fitted her devotional rhymes to such popular tunes as she knew, and could play on the wheezing old organ; mice had been at its bellows and its voice was as vagarious as that of Miss Annie herself.
(Robertson Davies: The Cunning Man, 1994)

'Under Milk Wood' (1954) by Dylan Thomas features Organ Morgan ('Bach every time for me'). His single-minded enthusiasm for the instrument is a source of frustration to his wife:

Third Woman: And how's Organ Morgan, Mrs. Morgan?
First Woman: you look dead beat
Second Woman: it's organ organ all the time with him
Third Woman: up every night until midnight playing the organ.
Mrs. Organ Morgan: Oh, I'm a martyr to music.

And:

Mrs. Organ Morgan: Organ Morgan, you haven't been listening to a word I said. It's organ organ all the time with you...

And:

First Voice: Organ Morgan goes to chapel to play the organ. He sees Bach lying on a tombstone.
Organ Morgan: Johann Sebastian!
Cherry Owen (drunkenly): Who?
Organ Morgan: Johann Sebastian mighty Bach. Oh, Bach fach.
Cherry Owen: To hell with you,
First Voice: says Cherry Owen who is resting on the tombstone on his way home.

Some organists are held in great respect locally:

It was a case of a strong-minded tail wagging a far from reluctant dog; the tail was Dr. DeCourcy Parry, the organist and choirmaster, and the dog was Father Ninian Hobbs, who knew nothing about music and had a tin ear, but who sensed a splendour in Parry's services that was appropriate to his ideas of Divine worship... Dr. Parry was a composer of gift, and he wrote a lot of music specifically for St. Aidan's, and thus brought it a distinction unapproached by any other Toronto church. He had a fine gallery choir of men and women who sang out of sight at the back of the church, where the organ was and where Dr. Parry was free to exhort, signal, and do all that a choirmaster must do, without being seen...
(Robertson Davies: The Cunning Man, 1994)

Though later in the novel we read:

Nor were relations really cordial with Dr. DeCourcy Parry, who seemed to think the organist in a church had an authority which was quite out of proportion to his real importance, significant though the Ministry of Music (the Canon's happy phrase) must always be.

In Thomas Mann's 'Doktor Faustus' (1947), the eccentric organist is rich in slightly arcane musical lore. The composer Leverkühn says:

"Kretschmar, my teacher, he was an organist, a fugue-man, you must know..."

Kretschmar is also described as:

...a stutterer [who] might have meant a real boon to the cultural life of Kaisersachsern if there had been any such life to begin with.
. . .
His organ-playing was expert and excellent, but you could count on the fingers of one hand those in the community able to appreciate it. Even so, a considerable number of people were attracted by his free afternoon concerts, in which he regaled us with organ music by Michael Praetorius, Froberger, Buxtehude, and of course Sebastian Bach, also all sorts of curious genre compositions from the time between Handel's and Haydn's highest periods.

Kretschmar was "a man gifted with great and urgent riches of thought, passionately addicted to giving out information." His lectures discussed such subjects as: Why did Beethoven not write a third movement to his piano sonata op.111?; Beethoven and the fugue; Music and the eye; The elemental in music.

An earlier incarnation of Kretschmar was Edmund Pfühl, organist at the Marienkirche in Lübeck, who appeared in Mann's first major novel 'Buddenbrooks' (1901).

His little book on Church Music was recommended for private study in several conservatoires, and his fugues and chorals were occasionally played when an organ sounded to God's glory. These compositions, as well as the voluntaries he played on Sundays at St. Mary's, were flawless, impeccable, full of the unremitting, severe logic of the 'severe style'. Their beauty was not of this world; it made no appeal to the layman's ordinary human feelings. What spoke and so gloriously triumphed in them was a technique amounting to an ascetic religion; a technique elevated into a lofty sacrament, into an end in itself. Edmund Pfühl had little use for the pleasant and agreeable; it must be confessed that he spoke of melody in disparaging terms. Nonetheless, he was no dry pedant. He would utter the name of Palestrina in the most profound and awe-inspiring tone. But even when he brought forth from his instrument these old-fashioned masterworks, his face was lit up with feeling and rapt enthusiasm; and his gaze would be fixed in the distance as if he saw there the ultimate pattern of all events brought forth into reality. This was the musician's look: vague and vacant precisely because it dwelt in the realm of a purer, deeper and more absolute logic than that which shapes our words and thoughts.

Herr Pfühl detests the music of Wagner:

"That is not music, believe me! I have always flattered myself that I know a little about music - but this is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed fog shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in art. I will not play it!"

It is Gerda Buddenbrooks, his chamber-music partner, who slowly makes him see the virtues in Wagner's music. And it is her son, Hanno, whom we find with Pfühl in the organ-loft at the Marienkirche:

Sometimes, too, little Buddenbrooks was allowed to sit up with the organist at the Sunday service at St. Mary's, which was a very different matter from remaining below with the other people in the nave. High above the congregation, high above Pastor Pringsheim in his pulpit, the two sat alone, in the midst of the mighty tempest of rolling sound which simultaneously freed them from the earth and dominated them by its own power. Sometimes Hanno was blissfully allowed to assist his master with the stops.
. . .
...those two up there were both of the opinion... that the sermon was nonsense, and that the real worship amounted to that which the Pastor and congregation thought of as a mere devotional accessory: namely, the music.
Herr Pfühl had a constant grievance in the lack of understanding there was for his accomplishments down there among the senators, consuls, citizens and their families. He therefore liked to have his small pupil with him, to whom he could point out the extraordinary difficulties in what he had just played. He performed marvels of technique. He had written a melody which was the same whether read forwards or backwards, and based upon it a fugue which was to be played 'crab-fashion'. But after performing this wonder - "No-one can tell the difference," he said, and folded his hands in his lap with a gloomy look, shaking his head in despair.

'The Leopard' (1958) by Giuseppe di Lampedusa is set amidst the social upheavals of 1860s Sicily. Prince Fabrizio of Salina must come to terms with the political changes which erode his position in the community. He has an unlikely friend in the cathedral organist, who stands with the local dignitaries during a formal procession:

There was Ciccio Tumeo, the Cathedral organist, who was not strictly speaking of sufficient standing to be there with the authorities but had come along all the same as friend and hunting companion of the Prince, and had had the excellent notion of bringing along with him, for the Prince's pleasure, his red pointer bitch Teresina, with two little brown spots above its eyes; a daring rewarded with a special smile from Don Fabrizio.
. . .
The organist rushed off so as to have time to deposit Teresina at home and be back at his resonant post at the moment of entry into the church. The bells were clanging away ceaselessly... and as the little procession entered the church Don Ciccio Tumeo, who had arrived panting but in time, broke impetuously into the strains of Verdi's Amami, Alfredo.

Later in the novel the Prince and Tumeo go hunting together. Tumeo opens his heart to the Prince:

"I know nothing of politics. Such things I leave to others. But Ciccio Tumeo is honest, poor though he may be, with his trousers in holes" (and he slapped the carefully mended patches on the buttocks of his shooting breeches) "and I don't forget favours done me!... The one time when I could say what I thought, that bloodsucker Sedàra went and annulled it, behaved as if I'd never existed, as if I never meant a thing - I, Francesco Tumeo La Manna son of the late Leonardo, organist of the Mother Church at Donnafugata, a better man than he is! To think I'd even dedicated to him a Mazurka composed by me at the birth of that..." (he bit a finger to rein himself in) "that mincing daughter of his!"
. . .
Don Fabrizio had always like Don Ciccio, partly because of the compassion inspired in him by all those who from youth had thought of themselves as dedicated to the Arts, and in old age, realising they had no talent, still carried on the same activity at lower levels, pocketing withered dreams; and he was also touched by the dignity of his poverty.

Robertson Davies' novels 'Tempest-Tost' (1951), 'Leaven of Malice' (1954) and 'A Mixture of Frailties' (1958), known collectively as the 'Salterton' trilogy, feature the bohemian organist of Salterton Cathedral, Humphrey Cobbler, who describes himself as:

"...the running sore of Salterton society."

He has little respect for most members of his profession:

"Funny chaps, a lot of them. Seem to have no faces."

He is of the opinion that:

"...the one thing which is more important than peace is music. It is because I believe that that I am poor. It is because I believe that that many people suppose that I am crazy."

He is enthusiastic about the music of Purcell, appreciating his relative obscurity as a composer:

"Kids don't peck and mess at little scraps of Purcell for examinations. Arthritic organists don't torture Purcell in chapels and tin Bethels all over the country, while the middle classes are pretending to be holy. Purcell is still left for people who really like music."

He is not fond of popular musical taste:

"Music is like wine... the less people know about it, the sweeter they like it."

His most memorable scene is in 'Leaven of Malice'. The Dean of the cathedral has been alerted to strange goings-on one night; he walks over to the cathedral to investigate:

At first it seemed to him that the chancel was filled with people, but when his astonishment subsided he judged the number to be six or seven. In his own stall - the Dean's stall! - a man was standing on his cushion, waving his arms in time to the music of the organ and the voice of the organist. It was a good tenor voice, and it was singing:

Man, Man, Man,
Is for the woman made,
And the woman for the man!

Cobbler, thoroughly drunk, tries to excuse the behaviour of his students to the Dean. The ensuing scenes are rich with Davies' ironic humour.

Sometimes, organists appear to be of dubious character:

Worby proceeded to explain that during the alterations, services were held in the nave, the members of the choir being thereby disappointed of an anticipated holiday, and the organist in particular incurring the suspicion of having wilfully damaged the mechanism of the temporary organ that was hired at considerable expense from London...
That was funny morning altogether: nothing seemed to go right. The organist he stopped in bed, and the minor Canon he forgot it was the 19th day and waited for the Venite; and after a bit the deputy he set off playing the chant for evensong, which was a minor...
(M.R. James, An Episode of Cathedral History, 1919)

In Thomas Hardy's poem 'The Chapel-Organist (A.D. 185-)', the organist is a disturbingly attractive young woman:

"A handsome girl," he would murmur, upstaring (and so I am).
"But - too much sex in her build; fine eyes, but eyelids too heavy;
A bosom too full for her age; in her lips too voluptuous a dye."
(It may be. But who put it there ? Assuredly it was not I.)

Reports of her loose morals reach the ears of the chapel elders, and lead to calls for her dismissal:

..."O, rather than go, I will play you for nothing!" said I.
'Twas in much desperation I spoke it, for bring me to forfeit I could not
Those melodies chorded so richly for which I had laboured and lived.

Eventually, unable to face the prospect of life without church music, she poisons herself at the end of her final Sunday service:

I drink from the phial at a draught, and they think it a pick-me-up; so.
Then I gather my books as to leave, bend over the keys as to pray.
When they come to me motionless, stooping, quick death will have whisked me away.

For the full text of this poem, click here.

In 'Virginia Fly is Drowning' (1972) by Angela Huth, the heroine's mother attempts to talk about the facts of life:

By that time, Virginia's actual experience was only increased by one further kiss, from the village organist after a multiple christening, and one old finger running down her thigh in the tube - but she did at least know the facts.

Marcel Proust's great novel-sequence 'A la Recherche du Temps Perdu' includes an extended visit to the seaside resort of Balbec. A rejected passage describes a concert in the casino there, which some items played on the organ. This is a rare literary account of an organ performance in a secular setting. It is also a good example of Proust's often underestimated comic touch. For this humorous passage, click here.

The organist appears as a slightly irreligious figure in the following, from Arnold Bennett's 'Anna of the Five Towns' (1902):

... the revivalist, mounting a stool, suddenly dominated the congregation. His glance swept masterfully across the chapel and round the gallery... It was as though the man had in a moment measured their iniquities, and had courageously resolved to intercede for them with God, but was not very sanguine as to the result. Everyone except the organist, who was searching his tune-book for the next tune, seemed to feel humbled, bitterly ashamed, as it were caught in the act of sin. There was a solemn and terrible pause.

Also in a secular setting is the following, from Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's 'Heat and Dust' (1975):

His afternoons were usually spent in a popular restaurant - a palatial hall with marble pillars not unlike the palace at Khatm. Three times in the course of the afternoon a lady in a long tea gown played selections on a multi-coloured organ; and listening to her with pleasure, the Nawab would turn to Harry: "How nicely she plays - just like Olivia." He had always been quite unmusical.

The organist is a central character in Edmund Crispin's murder mystery 'Holy Disorders' (1946). The protagonist, Geoffrey Vintner, receives a summons to play at Tolnbridge Cathedral; the telegram says "all the organists have been shot up dismal business the music wasn't as bad as all that either you'd better come at once". An unadventurous bachelor, Vintner responds unwillingly.

There were compensations. The Tolnbridge choir was a good one, and the organ, a four-manual Willis, one of the finest in the country. He remembered idly that it had a horn stop which really sounded like a horn, a lovely stopped diapason on the choir, a noble tuba, a thirty-two foot on the pedals which in its lower register sent a rhythmic pulse of vibration through the whole building, unnerving the faithful...

Crispin was himself organist and choirmaster for a brief period at St. John's College, Oxford in the 1940's. His detail is therefore more realistic than that of many authors.

'I'm going up to the organ-loft,' said Fen, 'to find out what can be seen from there.' They all followed him, toiling up a long spiral staircase. Then, abruptly and without warning, they were there.
The cathedral was sunk in intense gloom. A few last rays of light still struck through the clerestory windows, resting upon capitals with stiff foliage. Enormous shadows moved and flitted with terrifying quickness. Geoffrey could dimly see the big four-manual console of the organ, the structure overhead which bore the tall, painted pipes, and, on his left, a large music cupboard...

In 'Death of an Expert Witness' (1977) by P.D. James an organ-loft is searched after an attempted murder in a chapel:

He stepped through the carved organ-screen into the chancel. It was empty. The door to the organ loft was ajar. He clattered up the narrow winding stairway into the gallery. It, too was empty.

In Colin Dexter's 'Service of All the Dead' (1979), Philip Morris is a schoolteacher and the organist at St. Frideswide's Church, Oxford. As well as having an affair with the churchwarden's wife, he has an amorous close encounter with one of his 16 year-old pupils:

"I want you, Carole!"
"I want you, sir." ("Sir"! My God! What was he doing?)

In this murder mystery the corpses begin to pile up at an alarming rate. It appears that the churchwarden was killed during the concluding hymn of an evening mass:

...a murder planned meticulously at the very moment when Paul Morris had just opened the diapason stop on the organ, and was doubtless drowning the church with the last verse of 'Praise to the Holiest in the Height' or something f f f.

How ironic that only a few days previously the churchwarden had gone to the betting shop:

He noticed that by some strange coincidence The Organist was running in the two-thirty...

It is left to the redoubtable Inspector Morse to disentangle the web of intrigue, hatred, lust and bribery which lies behind the various deaths. He visits the church to investigate:

Where was the organ? He got to his feet and walked up the broad, shallow steps of the chancel. Yes. There it was, on the left-hand side behind two rows of choir-stalls, with a blue curtain stretched across in front of it to hide the body of the organist; and a mirror, too, fixed just above the high top manual, so that, however much he was concealed from the view of all others, the organist himself could keep an observant eye on the minister and the choir - and on the congregation as well, if he wanted to. If you swung the mirror round a bit... Morse sat himself behind the curtain on the organ-seat and looked into it. He could see the choir-stalls behind him and the main body of the chancel. Mm. Then, like a nervous learner before starting off on a driving test, he began adjusting the mirror, finding that it moved easily and noiselessly; up and down, right and left - wherever he wanted it.

'The Devil's Juggler' (1993) by Murray Smith includes a spymaster-organist who is described as:

...an owlish man, with podgy jowls and keener eyes than any bird of prey and a ready sense of humour. A brilliant medieval scholar, if not the ablest spymaster in the trade, he himself was an Anglican, and played the organ in Westminster's Saint Matthew's Church whenever business permitted.

An undertaker-organist is featured in Thomas Harris's 'Silence of the Lambs' (1988):

Lamar, a lean funeral home assistant with a whiskey bloom in the middle of his face, came in... [he] was very gentle with his organist's hands, opening the young woman's lips while Starling placed the one-to-one Polaroid against the face to get details of the front teeth.

In 'Utz' (1988) by Bruce Chatwin, Utz's friend Orlik attends a church in Prague for his funeral service:

While Orlick waited, he was approached by a man with a curtain of grey hair that fell below the collar of his raincoat.
"Do you play the organ?" the man asked in a catarrhal voice.
"I fear not," said Orlick.
"Nor do I," said the man, and shuffled off down a side-street.
At 7.57a.m. the same man unbolted from inside the immense baroque doors of the Church. Without a nod to Orlick he then climbed into the organ loft and, seating himself amid its choir of giltwood and trumpeting angels, began to play a funeral march composed of the two sonorous chords he had learned the day before: from the organist who was too lazy to stir from bed at this hour and had found, in the janitor, a replacement.

In 'Easy Silence' (1999) by Angela Huth, a string quartet visits the church of St Nicholas in Malá Strana, Prague, to give a concert:

The magnificence of it all caused William a certain stiffness of limb and straightness of back. What impressed him most was the fact that Mozart himself had played the organ here—so his eyes, too, must have travelled among the huge figures and pillars.

One of the most perceptive portraits of an organist is by Joanna Trollope in 'The Choir' (1988). Leo Beckford holds the position of organist at Aldminster Cathedral. He is "an outstanding organist and much too modest". His lifestyle is somewhat bohemian:

Leo's curtains were not drawn, as Ianthe had known they wouldn't be. In fact, there was only one curtain as Leo had taken one down once to wrap up a friend's fiddle for a journey to London and the curtain had never come home again. He had a centre light and four lamps and he was sitting at the piano with a score and pencil, wearing a green T-shirt which said 'Warwick University Ski-Club' on the back, which was typical of Leo since he had never been near either Warwick University or a ski-slope in his life.

This is contrasted with the domestic establishment of the assistant organist, who had

...a wife and a baby, and a basket of lobelias and striped pelargoniums hung outside his front door and his knocker was polished and there were three clean empty milk bottles in a special little crate on the step.

Trouble brews in the Cathedral close; the Dean's wife opines:

I knew we were wrong to appoint Leo Beckford as organist. He's wholly unsuitable and his attitude is absolutely secular.

Leo escapes the local troubles by taking himself off "to record, at the invitation of a significant company, pieces played on the organs in private chapels in some of the great houses of the north." The ensuing machinations, as the Dean attempts to disband the choir in order to pay for improvements to the Cathedral fabric, and Leo is eventually forced to resign, is outside the scope of this brief sketch.