Organ recitals in S:t Jacob's Church

Friday 10th of April 5 pm

Titanic

The music that has grown up around the sinking of the Titanic moves in the borderland between document and legend, funeral chorale and symphonic fantasy. It gives voice both to the monumental – a modern technological miracle that goes down – and to the deeply personal: individual destinies, heroism, fear, and consolation. The organ, with its wide dynamic range and its ability to shift between intimate prayer and cathedral-like thunder, has become a natural medium for such musical memorials. In this program, narrative, chorale variation, and tonal painting meet in three works that in different ways reflect the same catastrophe.

The spiritual song most clearly associated with Titanic’s final hours is Nearer, My God, to Thee, written by Sarah Flower Adams in the nineteenth century with Jacob’s dream as its theological backdrop: the ladder between earth and heaven becomes an image of how the suffering human being can nevertheless draw nearer to God. The basic idea of the text is that adversity, suffering, and loss can paradoxically bring the soul closer to God, a thought that has made the hymn especially charged in stories about people literally facing death. Rarely has a hymn lived so many parallel musical lives: in North America it is most often sung to the tune Bethany, composed by Lowell Mason in the 1850s, while British tradition largely relies on John Bacchus Dykes’s Horbury, named after the village where the composer found stillness and comfort. To this can be added Arthur Sullivan’s melody Propior Deo, particularly associated with Methodist use, as well as another setting by him, St Edmund, which means that the same text sounds in different melodic garments depending on confessional and geographical context. This very multiplicity has played a major role both in determining which versions have been linked to the Titanic myth, and in how later composers have chosen to quote the hymn.

The program opens with a musical depiction of the sinking itself, in which the organ takes over the role of storyteller from the popular ballad tradition that quickly emerged after 1912. The title The Wreck of the Titanic connects to the many songs and ballads that spread across both Europe and North America, where the catastrophe was retold in stanzas, often with a mixture of moral reflection and concrete description. In the organ version, this ballad-like storytelling is translated into sound: wave motions in pedals and manuals, contrasts between quiet nocturnal atmosphere and brutal crash chords, and often a clear sense of forward motion that mirrors the fate of the ship. The listener is invited on a musical journey from pride and security to shock and reflection, where echoes of hymn and chorale can be sensed behind the dramatic gestures – as though every harmonic shift carried a new turning point in the story.

The French virtuoso behind In memoriam – Titanic was a pupil of Alexandre Guilmant and a contemporary of Marcel Dupré, and belongs to the generation that firmly established the grand, concertante French organ style of the early twentieth century. His career took off when, in 1906, he became organist of Saint-Eustache in Paris, a post that placed him at the heart of the city’s flourishing musical life, while he also began touring extensively in Britain and the USA before eventually settling in New York during the war years. As a composer, he was less interested in strict liturgical function and more in free, symphonic organ art: his two collections of twelve pieces show a palette in which French romanticism, orchestral color, and virtuoso technique come together in works written for the concert hall. In memoriam – Titanic, the first piece in Opus 10 from 1913, bears the dedication “To the memory of the Titanic’s heroes” and moves stylistically in a borderland where a Wagnerian sound world meets the Anglican hymn tradition. The initial, slowly ascending harmony clearly alludes to the prelude to Wagner’s Das Rheingold, where the music rises from deep-lying chords like a sea slowly awakening; here it is the Atlantic that emerges from the depths of the organ. Out of this floating sound mass the melody Horbury – the British variant of Nearer, My God, to Thee – gradually appears, at first discreetly, almost like a memory, and then ever more clearly. Instead of a simple chorale setting, the composer lets the melody undergo constant variation: the harmony becomes increasingly chromatic and charged, and the tension builds toward a dramatic climax where the first line of the hymn bursts forth in the pedals in octaves, first in its original register, then even more insistently a third higher. After this culminating moment follows a slow exhaustion – recitative-like passages seem to attempt to regain strength, but fall back into resignation. Throughout the work the composer exploits the organ’s rich resources: in one of the most suggestive passages the melody is placed in the very darkest register, like a voice from the ocean floor, before it later sounds on vox humana above a hovering dominant chord, as though a choir of lost souls were calling through the night. The ending in E flat minor is experienced almost as a musical sinking; it is as if both ship and music disappear beneath the surface, leaving behind a quiet, but not entirely reconciled, state of silence.

The German composer who concludes the program spent most of his life in Leipzig, was largely self-taught, and combined an intense interest in theory with practical virtuosity at the piano and later the organ. He ranks among the great renewers of the twentieth-century organ repertoire, not least through his extensive cycles of chorale settings in which the Lutheran tradition meets late-romantic chromaticism and impressionistic colors. The fact that he came relatively late to the organ did not prevent him from quickly becoming one of the instrument’s most imaginative exponents; his works often require advanced registration and a sensitive use of the instrument’s full expressive range. The background to Improvisation über den englischen Choral “Näher, mein Gott, zu dir!” is deeply personal: in his youth he played in the town band in Markranstädt near Leipzig, where he became close friends with the oboist Alfred Jochade. After a conflict with the band’s management their paths diverged, and in 1912 Jochade was engaged in the Titanic’s orchestra – where he perished in the sinking. According to the composer’s daughter, the seven versions of this work that exist – including the organ version – were written in memory of the lost friend, even though no personal dedication appears on the title pages.

Despite the word “Improvisation” in the title, the organ version is carefully structured around the American tune variant Bethany by Lowell Mason, the version of Nearer, My God, to Thee that, according to many accounts, was played by the ship’s musicians in the final stages. The hymn melody returns in several different guises, with rhythm, tempo, and harmony gradually changing, as if the listener were seeing the same motif through the prism of different trials. In the middle of the work, the continuous flow is interrupted by a highly contrasting section in which the chorale Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir – “Out of the depths I cry to you” – emerges, giving a clear textual and theological resonance to the Titanic theme. After this dramatic outburst, the main theme returns in a simpler harmonization above an ostinato in the pedals, as if the music were trying to formulate a purer, more stripped-down prayer after the storm. The ending, marked “ad astra” – “towards the stars” – links “Kyrie eleison” with a slow, high-lying upward movement in which chords on celestes are allowed to ring out in almost unreal long arcs and finally fade away to an almost inaudible whisper. Here it feels as though the weight of the catastrophe is, for a moment, lifted and transformed into a quiet yet intense gaze directed towards heaven.

— program notes by Johan Hammarström