Organ Loft Whisperings

edited by Agnes Armstrong pub. Sticut Tuum Productions, Altamont, New York ISBN 0-9747338-0-6.

Available from Organ Historical Society 
(Book 33806, $36.95)

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Organists enjoy a good gossip as much as most people. How many interesting but lost snippets of information must have been lost because no one wrote down what had passed?

Thanks to Fannie Edgar Thomas, we can still listen in to the concerns of Paris organists at the end of the nineteenth century. Miss Thomas was Church Music Correspondent (and how many of those are there to-day?) to the New York Musical Courier. In 1893, Alexandré Guilmant took leave from his the Conservatoire, where he was professor and from the church of the Trinité, where he was titulaire, for one of his periodic tours of America. This was immensely successful and generated such interest in the French school that the editor of the Courier took the unusual step of sending Miss Thomas on a prolonged visit to Paris. Her weekly reports (1893-94) are reprinted in this volume and make delightful reading, not least because her style of writing is classically lucid, quite without the pomposity that makes many Victorian writers unbearable to-day.

Occasionally, she remarks on organs in Paris churches - this one has so many manuals and so many stops, that is a new instrument by Cavaillé-Coll, another has carpeted stairs to the console. Here and there a music list for a service or a recital programme is noted, but her main interest is in people and in their activities. Guilmant himself she says has a "humane and social disposition, personal magnetism and a partial mastery of the English language"! Saint Saëns is off to winter in Algeria and she occupies sermon time in noting personal characteristics of organists - perhaps the physical appearance of one and the murmured asides of another would be considered worth recording.

She reports, with approval, the efforts of Charles Bordes in establishing Les Chanteurs de Saint-Gervais and the impact of this choir on the church music - and on the funds of the church. She shows herself a true Victorian in seeming to regret that the organ there has not been altered since the time of Couperin. (It has not been altered materially to this day and must now be accounted one of the city's treasures.) The sad state of Notre Dame cathedral at that time comes as something of a surprise: the titulaire was so badly paid (as were many of his colleagues elsewhere) that he could only afford to travel in on Feast days.

All this is illustrated with photographs from the period and brings to life a legendary period of music. It is a most interesting book for bedside reading or for finding that extra fact not recorded elsewhere.

The only place in Paris where Fannie Thomas felt warm was the organist's study in St Sulpice - so it deserves to be seen, as here through a mirror in Jenny Setchell's illustration.

Reviewed by David Bridgeman-Sutton. 2006

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