GILDED BIRDS

Howard Goodall, composer, on the organ in the Church of Saint-Sulpice, Paris.

GB Tell me why you chose this.

HG To tell you the truth, I had it down to a shortlist of four. I’m probably one of the few people in the world who would choose an organ rather than a beautiful painting or a landscape or something, but I’ve found organs beautiful since I was a child. When I was at choir school as a boy, I was interested in music and I played the piano and I started doing a bit of composing. I was a chorister at New College in Oxford which had had an old Victorian Organ in it that had been ripped out. So they brought in a little chamber organ temporarily, and then when I was nine years old they built a brand new, daringly modern organ right in front of my eyes, piece by piece and week by week. It was so incredibly exciting. I think, in my childhood, I never let a church go by without going in and looking at the organ. They’re extraordinary to me because they’re beautiful pieces of architecture, they look lovely and they also make a beautiful sound. Not many things can tick so many boxes at the same time. 

Throughout my life I’ve had some very fond relationships with various organs. My father was a French teacher and used to take English children to French schools in the holidays. On one occasion we stayed in Normandy and the local cathedral (Lisieux) had an organ that was built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (who also built the one in St Sulpice), and playing it was an incredibly transporting experience, it could sound both majestic and sublimely delicate. I decided that Cavaillé-Coll was my favourite organ builder.

Fast forward, I made my first TV series for Channel 4 in the late 1990s and it was called Howard Goodall’s Organ Works. I didn’t make up the title, can I just say. It was a four-part series about pipe-organs across the world. Can you imagine that being made now? In that process I got to visit some of the organs that would be on my shortlist here. There was one in Leipzig, right on the edge of a huge opencast GDR mining area, in a tiny church. People were not encouraged to go to church in the GDR so it was a very poor church with a very sweet vicar who had kept it going for a tiny congregation. But the organ in the church had been unchanged since JS Bach inaugurated it. The only thing that had happened to this one was that they’d added an electric blower so you didn’t have to pump it yourself. We also went to what is generally agreed by organ buffs to be the greatest organ in the world, which is the Müller-organ in the Sint–Bavokerk in Haarlem, Holland. It’s an absolutely astonishing instrument, unchanged since Mozart played it. That was very close to being my choice for you. It’s very ornate and beautifully decorated with gold leaf, and makes a dazzling sound. 

But we did also, on my birthday, film in Saint-Sulpice where Daniel Roth, the organist, played Widor’s Toccata which I suppose is the most famous organ piece there is. Widor was the organist there and wrote it for that organ. Two things are remarkable about the Saint-Sulpice organ; the organ, when you look at its tall, imposing structure inside this cavernous neo-classical church in Paris, and its console, the part you sit at to play – the mothership. It’s a thing of absolute beauty, rather art-deco-ish, even though it was designed in 1862. The idea of someone redesigning an organ console so it swept around you in a semicircle was aesthetically elegant but also incredibly practical. A lot of things that I like are beautiful because they work, even if they’ve abandoned their original function, like old agricultural equipment. Behind where the organ player sits is a tiny, hidden room, tucked into the one of the towers, where the organist could have a cup of coffee with a lovely view across Paris. There’s a little window and opposite is a penthouse flat that’s owned by Catherine Deneuve.

GB Do you have a certain piece you like to play when you sit at these organs?

HG Not these days because I’m very rusty and conscious that other people are usually listening.  Also, in a nerdy way, you try to play something that’s appropriate to that instrument. What I really like to do is improvise. 

GB Do you think contemporary works for organ actually work when played on old instruments?

HG One of things that besets the organ world is that only about half a dozen of the really famous composers wrote for organ. You’ve got Bach, Messiaen in the modern era, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saens, Widor and Cezar Franck. But it’s not an instrument that famous composers in other realms really wrote much for, so there’s a slight question mark over its repertoire. Almost all organ music written since Olivier Messiaen (1908-92) sounds like him. But what I would say is that Hans Zimmer’s film score for Interstellar, which is a masterpiece, is dominated by an organ. Interstellar is about an attempt by astronauts to find another planet to live on because Earth is dying. It’s about quantum physics, time travel and an epic father-daughter bond. Zimmer chose the organ because when you’re in space, your vulnerability is that you’re in an exposed metal box and even one tiny molecular gap in the box means you won’t be able to breathe and that’s the end of that. Because of that, he wanted an instrument that actually breathed and you could hear the breathing. He felt that organs have this breathing sound, which is partly to do with the bellows, which is running through them at all times, but it’s also partly to do with the fact that he remembered the particular organ of the Temple Church in London, hearing it as a boy in the 1960s when it was powered by an electro-pneumatic action – basically, lots of pipes with pneumatic air powering through them. It was a huge innovation and made the organ much easier to play. However, it also transpired as time went on that the thousands of pipes that carried all this air got worn out and sprang leaks, so by the 20th Century a lot of them were wheezing like mad. He remembered that when you heard the Temple Church organ, you could hear its breath at all times, wheezing through the building. He brought a string orchestra into the Temple Church and recorded the whole score in there, so not only would you hear this actual organ but you would hear its air even when other instruments were playing.

There’s a very charismatic, young organist called Anna Lapwood and she plays a version of Interstellar, which is her way of saying, don’t give up on the organ because of its repertoire. I’ve written for organ for my themes for Mr Bean, The Vicar of Dibley and the first series of Blackadder. 

The point about the organ which makes it different from almost any other instrument is that it belongs in a building. A few organs have moved from one building to another but mostly they’re associated with one building. In most cathedrals, when you build a new organ, you keep bits of the old one, so there’s a continuity and a relationship with the sound of the room which is unique to the organ. The best organs will have been tuned (and ‘voiced’) to the acoustic of the room they are in. This feels like very 20th/21st-century thinking because we understand so much more about acoustics now, but organ builders have always had to know where to place the many different sounds they make. With a lot of organs in big buildings, you’re playing parts of the organ which are miles away and you have to play knowing the delay between you touching the key and when the sound comes out. The largest pipe organ in a church is in Westpoint Military Academy in Upstate New York and the reason it’s so enormous is that they began a tradition in the 19th Century that when someone from Westpoint was killed in action, relatives could give, as a memorial to their lost ones, a rank of pipes for the organ in the chapel. There came a point where they’d more or less run out of space. When you’re sitting at the console you’re playing pipes that are 12 feet away from you and also pipes that are maybe 200 feet away from you, so it’s a very peculiar acoustic experience.

GB If you want to record an organ like that, where do you put the microphones?

HG You don’t go too close to it. You put microphones in the middle of the building and hope for the best. Digital recording has made things a lot better: on vinyl recordings from the ‘60s you can generally hear traffic in the background. A lot of the pipes are very gentle and delicate and lots of organs are in city centres.

GB Are there people making new organs now?

HG Fewer than there used to be and they’re very expensive to install. But, in America, churches can be quite wealthy and being an organist is a proper job. If you’re a small parish church in England and your Victorian organ has fallen apart it’s a huge decision to spend £100K on a new pipe organ, rather than a few thousand on a digital one. 

GB Going back to your organ in Saint-Sulpice, do you find it physically beautiful?

HG If it didn’t have pipes in it, you’d think it was a very ugly old piece of furniture – but the pipes rescue it. Unusually for big organs, the case was actually designed by the same architect who designed the building. Even in its day it would have seemed old-fashioned. The church became the Temple of Victory after the Revolution and was deconsecrated. It’s never really shaken that off. It feels more Temple-like than church-like. One thing church musicians complain about is that if you put too much Victorian clutter into a building, you can spoil the sound. I like an organ that is comfortable in its acoustic space.

GB What makes something worthy of the word Beauty to you?

HG I suppose I would say that there’s something peculiarly memorable about the object and the experience you associate with it. Even though it was thirty years ago, I can remember exactly what it felt like, sitting at that console, just dazzled by it – and I’ve seen a hell of a lot of organs in my life. One other comparable experience was when I was a probationer chorister of seven years old and they had the last ever service of the Eton choir because the choir school was being closed down. They got three other choirs to come and sing, including mine. I was too young to sing so I asked if I could sit in the organ loft. There’s a very beautiful but gaudy Victorian organ in Eton chapel and I can still remember exactly what it was like to sit in that organ while it was being played. They were performing the 19th-century stalwarts by Charles Stanford and Samual Sebastian Wesley and to me, an impressionable seven-year-old that evening in the organ loft was fantastically atmospheric, even the smell of it, which I can recall even now. I would say that of all the organs I have seen, very few stay with you in the sense that you can just close your eyes and be in that place and see it again. To me, something beautiful is something that just won’t leave you, that stays forever imprinted in your imagination.