Kapp. Bach. Fessy. Rachmaninoff. Elgar. Vierne. Guilmant.
Pärt. Saint‑Saëns

“You write what you feel with your nature and only at your heart’s command,” wrote Artur Kapp (1878–1952), one of the founding fathers of the Estonian school of composition. An heir to the Petersburg traditions, Artur Kapp took everything good from his organ tutor (Louis Gomilius, 1898) and his composition tutor (Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, 1900) at the conservatoire. After graduating from the St Petersburg Conservatoire, Kapp spent several years as the second organist at St Peter’s Church. Artur Kapp’s legacy of compositions covers various different genres: symphonies, oratorios, concerti and pieces for various ensembles and chamber and vocal music. The composer’s works for organ are also highly significant. They begin with the Sonata in F Minor, written when he was still a student at the St Petersburg Conservatoire in 1897. This was followed by Variations on a theme of a chorale, two organ concerti, Sonata No 2 in D Major, fantasias and a host of other compositions. In these works by Kapp, a romantic disposition is blended with traditions of the Viennese classical school and medieval polyphonic art.

Organ music forms the main component of the legacy of Johann Sebastian Bach (1785–1850). The cycle Fantasia and Fugue in С Minor was composed between 1723 and 1750. Bach united the polar sections – an improvisational fantasia and a stern, polyphonic fugue – in the two-part cycle.
“Fantasia” is a word of Greek origins which denoted “imagination”. In music, it is common to use it to refer to an instrumental piece where the composer, abandoning traditional structural methods, lets his own imagination run freely. The fugue is the intellectual peak of the polyphonic style. The stormy pathétique and the lofty lyricism are the two emotional realms in Bach’s Fantasia in С Minor. The Fugue is an utterly perfect architectonic construction. The scherzo quality and playfulness of the theme of the fugue, its plasticity and the sharpness of the rhythmic drawing contrast with the chord “monuments” of the fantasia. In terms of form, the fantasia has no limitations and is free in terms of its structure, while the fugue adheres strictly to established canons.

Charles-Alexandre Fessy (1804–1856) was a representative of the French school of composition for the organ. He entered the Paris Conservatoire in 1813, and studied organ under Benoist, who trained several generations of French organists, including César Franck, Camille Saint-Saëns, Alfred Lefébure-Wély and Charles-Valentin Alkan among many others. Fessy worked as an organist in several major Paris churches, such as L'église de la Madeleine and Saint Roch. Among the intense variety of genres of the composer’s works, the Bolero stands apart. This is the name of both a dance and the musical genre born in Spain in the late 18^th century. The movements of the dance, performed with an inner strength and passion, are underscored by the resilient accompaniment of the guitar and the drum. The sounds of the castanets add to the rhythmic illustration of the composition with complex figures that are woven together into an unusually capricious pattern.

Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff’s (1873-1943) Exercise in Vocalisation, Op. 34, was published in 1912 as the last of his Fourteen Songs, Opus 34. It was initially written to be sung (soprano or tenor) with piano accompaniment. The unusual beauty and heartfelt conviction of Rachmaninoff’s melody provided the impetus to arrange this work for many solo instruments as well as for symphony orchestra. The arrangement of the Exercise in Vocalisation for organ is yet another rendering of this work.

“Edward Elgar holds the same position in English music that Beethoven holds in German music” and “Elgar is only our Shakespeare of music” were accolades conferred upon the British composer by his contemporaries. Essentially, after Henry Purcell, he became the first national composer to place British music in an international context. The music of Edward Elgar (1857–1934) is a looking glass that reflected Great Britain in the Victorian era. The orchestral march cycle Pomp and Circumstance (1901–1930), consisting of five pieces, received widespread acclaim. Elgar was known to audiences first and foremost for his magnificent March No 1 in D Major Land of Hope and Glory) from that cycle. Today, too, Elgar’s marches are performed on celebratory occasions at Buckingham Palace and at Westminster Abbey. British music lovers did not hurry in their acclamation of Elgar, but he was actively championed by Bernard Shaw (who published articles as a concert and opera critic). The time was soon to come when the situation would change. In 1904 at Covent Garden, the first Elgar festival was held; the composer was also elected a member of the prestigious Athena literary club, and in July that year he was also knighted.

Louis Vierne (1870–1937) was the heir to the two greatest French organist-composers – César Franck and Charles-Marie Widor. The main genre of Louis Vierne’s work was to be the organ symphony. He wrote a total of six symphonies. The genre, traditional for symphony music, was transposed for one instrument. In the conditions where the symphony organ appeared in France, built by Cavaillé-Coll, the birth of the organ symphony was entirely justified. The orchestral quality in Vierne’s scores stands out for its immense variety of timbres and stylistic techniques. During the creative process, like a true symphonist the composer immediately heard the theme in a precise timbre. The main instrument, which Vierne played constantly as a church organist, starting in 1900 and ending with his death, was the organ of Notre Dame, with its cast colouristic possibilities. It was for this organ he wrote all his symphonies bar the First (it was written for the organ at the Église Saint-Sulpice).
The grandiose scale of the cathedral space was reflected in the form of the symphonies and in the decorative structure of the organ writing. The composer created the monumental frescoes on the basis they would be performed by a virtuoso organist who had a perfect command of all the nuances of his profession. A lyricist by nature, Vierne inherited the traditions of the Romantic school: the Impressionistic aquarelle colour of Debussy, the chord monumentality of Saint-Saлns, the precision of Liszt. This variety grew and extended through baroque polyphony and classicist severity.

Alexandre Guilmant (1837–1911) was remarkable ambassador of French organ music in the last thirty years of the 19th century. Guilmant had a successful career as a concert organist in countries throughout Europe as well as giving concerts in America. Thanks to Guilmant, audiences once again heard the music of forgotten early French composers – Titelouze, de Grigny, Clérambault and Couperin, and unknown works by Liszt, Schumann, Rheinberger, Franck, Saint-Saëns, Widor and Samuel Wesley. Guilmant also taught the organ at the Schola Cantorum in Paris, established with his support.
Guilmant’s works were written for a French symphonic organ. Like Franck and Widor, the composer stood at the very source of the organ symphony – a genre brought to life by the organs of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll. This new type of organ offered inherent and exceptionally rich timbre and dynamic possibilities, which were taken up and brilliantly used by French maestri. Guilmant’s works include eight sonatas (two of which – Op. 42 and 91 – were initially symphonies for organ and orchestra) they embody the dazzle and expressiveness of true concert music.

The appearance of the organ in Arvo Pärt’s music was not by chance. The composer turned to the instrument as a result of a new style of composing which he himself named tintinnabuli in 1976 (from the Latin for “little bells”): “the beauty of the natural sound of a bell is associated with the concept of euphony, with the triad, which becomes not just intoned, but also constructive, depicting the form of the main cycle.” In a period of creative silence, for several years the composer studied music of the medieval era and the Renaissance: “Understanding such music means understanding its religious content,” the composer wrote. The ageless style of tintinnabuli has no analogies in the music of the past: Pärt took something from rhythmic organum, something from bourdoning, but he never doubled anything exactly. In his organ works, the composer only revived the traditions of medieval and Renaissance polyphony.
In the work Trivium (“Crossroads”, 1976) Pärt referred to the spiritual polyphonic genre of the 14^th century – an isorhythmic motet. The name of the cycle is not a chance one. Many movements are complexly woven together in it. Avant-garde sonoristics, with its particular attention to the sonorous qualities of sound and the general minority of the sounds; the strict organisation and rational consideration of serialisation meet with the ancient colour of organ timbres, jubilant fugues of orchestral voices and “Gothic” cadences. The cycle consists of three parts that are identical in terms of rhythm. A dynamic principle forms the basis of their alternating: soft–loud–soft. The “musical path” from the variations to the theme, a common thing in contemporary music, symbolises enlightenment and it reflects the path leading from searching and doubt to truth.