Pete suggests

Email registration

Free weekly email update

Great products and special offers for Spectator readers

Click here for great value events

Click here for exclusive articles, offers, tasting notes and discussion

‘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

‘In the days before recordings the only way you could hear orchestral repertoire was either live or in arrangements,’ explains James O’Donnell, the organist of Westminster Abbey. ‘And because of the range of its sounds, the organ became the perfect instrument for mimicking the orchestral works.’

This partly accounts for the enormous growth of symphonic organs in Britain’s town halls, says O’Donnell, where they were just used for concerts. The proud and often competitive civic movement was a vital spur to the organ explosion, each great city trying to outdo the other in providing the most impressively high-tech instrument.

Equally important were the virtuoso organists, who sprung up to play these municipal instruments. With whole symphonies under their fingertips, these new stars drew in the crowds like few performers before. Over 7,000 people turned up each day for the week-long sojourns by Camille Saints-Saens and Anton Bruckner at the Royal Albert Hall in 1871.

And British organists also flourished, many achieving an iconic status by the early 20th century. ‘They begin to appear in magazines such as Tatler, their full-page photographs being published alongside the goings-on of the Prince of Wales or the images of the leading learned men of the age,’ explains William McVicker, organ curator of the Royal Festival Hall.

But it was in America that the organ reached an apotheosis. Few places were better suited to the spread and growth of this monumental instrument. Aspirational values, civic idealism and philanthropic zeal — with seemingly bottomless reserves — all conspired to provide the ideal conditions for an epic organ craze. Organs sprung up in almost every municipal auditorium, the recitals attended by masses of obsessive fans.Some 10,000 turned up at the San Francisco municipal organ recital in 1917; 30,000 at the one at St Paul, Minnesota; and 20,000 at Cleveland, where the police ‘soon gave up in despair as an eager mob swept all before it’.