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Music for Grand Organ and Orchestra The Opening Concert of the Albert Schweitzer Organ Festival Hartford Friday, September 27, 2019, 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, September 29, 2019, 3:00 p.m. Trinity College Chapel, Hartford, Connecticut The Hartford Symphony Orchestra Carolyn Kuan, Music Director Christopher Houlihan, organ John Nowacki, narrator Program Notes By Alan Murchie Charles-Marie Widor (Born February 21, 1844, in Lyon, France; died March 12, 1937, in Paris) Symphony for Organ and Orchestra (No. 6), Opus 42 bis I. Allegro maestoso When Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), theologian, organist, physician, and humanitarian, was detained as an enemy alien at Saint-Rémy during the First World War, he was left for a considerable period without access to a keyboard, unable to play the music that might have helped sustain him through that difficult time. Schweitzer tells us how he survived: He spent hours memorizing music in his head, “playing” one extremely difficult work in particular over and over, so that once he was released he might be able to execute it flawlessly. The work: Organ Symphony No. 6 in G minor by his teacher, Charles-Marie Widor. This poignant snapshot offers a brief glimpse into the deep, multi-layered friendship between these two men. Widor, the elder by about thirty years, was for many years Schweitzer’s teacher. Yet Widor himself tells us how often master wound up as student; how regularly and how naturally these roles were reversed as two kindred spirits found each other in their shared love and reverence for Bach, for balance, for beauty, and, most of all, for the organ. Widor was taken by his student’s unusual insight and compassion; Schweitzer was touched by his teacher’s innate generosity. He would later write: “Many a time, if [Widor] got the sense that my purse was rather slender, he would take me after our lesson to his favorite haunt and invite me to eat my fill.” The two men would ultimately collaborate on a new edition of Bach’s complete works for organ solo; for generations, it was the leading authority for organists seeking a deeper understanding of Bach’s enormously complex music and how to play it. Widor’s Organ Symphony No. 6 is an ecstatic and comprehensive expression of love and reverence for the organ, asking the organist to do just about everything humanly possible to demonstrate its power, its extraordinary range of color, and its enormous expressive and dynamic range. It was thus only natural that, when Widor was asked in 1880 by the Prince of Wales to write a grand work for organ and orchestra for the Royal Albert Hall in London, he simply took this organ symphony (together with one movement from an earlier work) and expanded it to create the Symphony for Organ and Orchestra, Opus 42 bis. For the work’s first movement, heard in this performance, Widor changed very little in the organ writing; the organ solo in the new work is almost identical with its earlier incarnation. There’s a reason for this: it is a superb conception, an innovative and deeply-affecting movement rivaled only by the famous Toccata for popularity among Widor’s works. Music for Grand Organ and Orchestra – Progam Notes by Alan Murchie – September 2019 – Page 1 Formally, its tripartite structure signals traditional Sonata-Allegro Form, yet it plays out to the ear more as a Theme and Variations. The theme, instantly memorable, resembles a dark, insistent chorale in thickly-voiced block chords. It’s followed by a cascading passage that could be considered a “second theme,” but which functions mostly to lead us back to another iteration of the chorale. As the movement plays out, the composer finds endless ways to weave his chorale theme in and out of the musical texture, playfully throwing it to the organ pedals, then to the left hand, speeding it up and slowing it down, using snippets of it as countermelody or as passage-work. Through it all, Widor maintains a firm grasp on structure, making us wait just long enough for the inevitable moment when the chorale returns ever more triumphantly, giving us the double sonic thrill that Berlioz called “the Emperor and the Pope” — the full organ matched by the lush orchestral voices the composer’s score demands. Johann Sebastian Bach (Born March 21, 1685 in Eisenach, Germany; died July 28, 1750 in Leipzig) Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564 Widor called Bach “the father of us all.” For Schweitzer, too, Bach was the one essential. Widor loved telling the story of Schweitzer’s first organ lesson, at which the 18-year-old sat down at the organ and announced, “I’d like to play something for you.” Widor asked, “Sure. Play what?” Schweitzer responded, “Bach, of course.” It was in their shared exploration of Bach that Widor wound up, to his surprise and delight, learning from his unusually gifted and insightful student an elusive interpretative secret Widor had sought for years. Musicologist John Near tells the story in his study Widor: A Life Beyond the Toccata. Widor had for years admired Bach’s chorale preludes as “models of pure counterpoint.” Yet he had been perplexed by Bach’s musical choices, some of which he found mercurial, odd, quixotic, mystifying. Why would Bach suddenly shift from one texture to another, seemingly without adequate preparation? Why would Bach, in short, violate his own rules so regularly? One day, according to Near, Widor threw the question to Schweitzer as they examined a particularly abstruse prelude. And Schweitzer responded. Bach, as Schweitzer articulated it, was a musical “painter.” While we hear counterpoint and know that rules underlie Bach’s writing, those rules tell only part of the story. Bach painted colors and textures with a palette inspired by the chorales themselves. Each chorale, as Schweitzer saw it, sprang originally from a thought, an idea, a prayer. Bach’s choices were inspired by these thoughts, these prayers, and in his musical responses his choices as “painter” were pre-eminent. For Bach, as Schweitzer saw it, the thought or prayer that lay behind a chorale ultimately took precedence over accepted compositional “rules.” For Widor, this was a game-changing insight. Near quotes him: “I could now see that these small pieces really were less models of correct counterpoint than poems of an elegance and emotional intensity without parallel.” Schweitzer’s goal, over time, was to present Bach anew to the world not just as a musical genius, but as a mystic. He saw Bach less as the dutiful cantor writing German music for the Lutheran church than as a comprehensive composer synthesizing French, Italian, and German styles to craft something we might call “universal” in its scope and comprehension. The Bach of Schweitzer’s synthesis is fully on display in the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue in C Major, BWV 564. The work is as Italian as it is German, as worldly as it is introspective, as infectious as it is reflective, as virtuosic as it is simple. Bach wrote it when he was fully in Vivaldi’s thrall: the beat is driving and insistent, the melodies are clear and memorable, and the harmonies are simple; much like Vivaldi’s, Bach’s tunes follow sweet, swaying, predictable patterns. And the performer has a chance to show off, just as the violinist, flutist, lutenist, or trumpeter might in any of Vivaldi’s myriad, enchanting concerti. In fact, showing off may have been a primary catalyst for the work’s inception, for Bach composed this early in his career, when he needed showpieces to demonstrate his — and the organ’s — ability to dazzle. This is, of course, far from the Bach of myth, the dour Lutheran who turned out music to satisfy the clergy, following the rules unsmilingly. And that was precisely Schweitzer’s point. Albert Schweitzer at the organ Music for Grand Organ and Orchestra – Progam Notes by Alan Murchie – September 2019 – Page 2 Gene Scheer (born April 2, 1958, New York) Albert Schweitzer Portrait Sandwiched among the music on this program, all linked so closely to Albert Schweitzer, is a much more recent work even more explicitly evocative of Schweitzer’s life and work. The selections by Widor, Bach, and Mendelssohn echo Schweitzer’s musical passions. Gene Scheer’s Albert Schweitzer Portrait, for orchestra and narrator, goes in another direction entirely, focusing instead on Schweitzer’s humanitarian efforts and his personal philosophy, grounded, as Schweitzer articulated it, in a guiding “reverence for life.” Schweitzer had frustrated Widor for a time by leaving behind their collaborative Bach project in order to build a hospital in French Equatorial Africa. Widor knew his friend well enough to understand that this call to service was as essential to Schweitzer as his call to music. “What can you do,” Widor said at the time, “when a man says to you ‘God calls me?’” Scheer’s Portrait serves as something of a musical travelogue as it takes us up the Ogooué River in Gabon, to a time and place in Schweitzer’s life in which he discerned his growing belief in the spirit of compassion that he felt was common to all humans, in the call to reverence for life in all its forms, in our ultimate and essential human connectedness. Schweitzer is so well known to us as musician, theologian, and humanitarian that it’s easy to forget that he was also a medical doctor. In 1913, he founded a hospital in Lambaréné, in the region now called Gabon. A special focus of the hospital was its care for patients shunned for having highly infectious diseases such as leprosy.

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