Widor: Organ And Piano Music – Simone Vebber

Organists are frequently asked a question by curious listeners and by church-goers who have only a shallow knowledge of music: “What difference is there between a piano and an organ?”. Indeed, the contrary question is much more easily answered: what the piano and the organ do have in common is little more than the sequence of white and black keys. Everything else, including the means by which sound is produced and how it is regulated in volume, timbre and articulation, is entirely and dramatically different.
Therefore, even though many pianists can play the organ and vice-versa, a performer who can master both instruments at a truly professional level is very rarely found. Using one’s ten fingers to press the keys represents just the basics of both instruments. The mark of accomplished pianists is their touch, i.e. their capability to fine-tune the attack of the fingers on the key in order to modify both the intensity and the quality of the sound. To these ends, pianists also make use of the pedals, which can be used, in turn, in various degrees and combinations. On the other hand, the organ’s pedalboard is, to all purposes, one further keyboard on which the organist’s feet play adroitly; a variety of devices – first and foremost the organ’s stops – are employed in order to intervene on the quality and quantity of sound. If pianists frequently complain about the quasi-impossibility of playing on their own instrument in concert halls, and about the consequent necessity of acquainting themselves with new pianos on every occasion, organists need to carefully study each new instrument they need to play, since the differences between two given organs can match those between a Baroque string orchestra on period instruments and a modern symphony orchestra.
Indeed, Charles-Marie Widor (Lyons, 1845 – Paris, 1937) saw the organ precisely in this way: as a full orchestra whose immense variety of sounds was only waiting for a skilled organist to awaken it. Widor came from a family of organists and organ builders, and therefore was deeply acquainted with the secrets of the organ and of organ-making since a very young age. The Widor family numbered, among its friends, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811-1899), one of the greatest organ-builders of all times and the creator of the French Romantic organ – a new variety of instruments with a previously unimaginable power, flexibility, personality. Some of the most imposing organs in the French cathedrals and basilicas were created or improved by him, including that of Notre Dame in Paris (which rather miraculously survived the devastating fire destroying the cathedral’s roof in April 2019).
Cavaillé-Coll acted as a mentor for young Widor, advising him to move to Brussels in order to study with Jaak Lemmens and with François-Joseph Fétis; later, Cavaillé-Coll actively supported Widor and succeeded in obtaining for him, in 1870, an appointment at the church of Saint-Sulpice. That same church was home to one of Cavaillé-Coll’s masterpieces, which had been inaugurated only a few years earlier, in 1862. It was (and still is) a monumental instrument, practically unmatched at the time of its building, and which was furnished with more than a hundred stops and almost seven thousand pipes (among its many features). Widor’s provisional appointment at Saint-Sulpice (where he was initially employed for one year) led him to a six-decades-long job in that church: it can be said, therefore, that the Saint-Sulpice organ was the source of inspiration, the working tool and the ideal setting for all of Widor’s numerous organ compositions.