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‘Booming, beaming waves of noise’

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Wednesday, 10th September 2008

Igor Toronyi-Lalic looks back to the early 20th century when organs were in their heyday

Today, assassinations are less likely at organ concerts — as are appearances from prime ministers or presidents. It is in many ways quite difficult to imagine that previous age where organists and their instruments were so revered that presidents attended dedications, though the recent organ Proms offered up the full Victorian ferocity of the Royal Albert Hall’s Willis organ, a wonderful glimpse of what once was.

Unlike today, there was nothing modest or marginal about the mighty organ in the 19th century. In a time of industrial and scientific revolution, the world’s most complex machine could hardly stand still. Instead it grew mightier and mightier, morphing into ever-grander shapes and sizes, absorbing the latest knowledge on pneumatics, electricity, steam engines and hydraulics to make it doughtier and more durable.

At the forefront of this advance was the Royal Albert Hall organ, with its two huge steam engines, tucked away in the basement. When it was opened in 1871, the Royal Albert Hall had higher wind pressure below the pipes than anything else in the world previously. At full blast, it’s booming, beaming waves of noise could both envelop and puncture you. And at its inauguration the stunned local press could only describe it as an American, steam-powered devil.

‘Organs were suddenly no longer dependent upon a drunken man with a pint of beer,’ says Ian Bell, organ consultant to the Royal Albert Hall, ‘but could produce as much wind as anyone could envisage.’

At the same time, the Romantic musical movement emerged, demanding ever-greater complexity and power. It provided a new corpus of organ compositions that depended on these larger instruments, and a popular body of orchestral symphonies that the public craved to hear in organ transcriptions.