Friday 18th of September 2026 5 pm
Architecture in Sound
Program
Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937)
Symphonie No. 7, Op. 42, No. 3
i. Moderato
ii. Choral
iii. Andante
iv. Allegro ma non troppo
v. Lento
vi. Finale
Programme Notes
When Charles-Marie Widor became organist of Saint-Sulpice in Paris in 1870, he encountered an instrument that redefined what an organ could be. Aristide Cavaillé-Coll’s monumental organ, inaugurated in 1862, was the largest in France, with five manuals, almost 7,0007{,}0007,000 pipes and more than one hundred stops. It possessed flutes, string stops and reeds of a richness comparable to that of an orchestra, as well as what was then the revolutionary capacity gradually to build and subsequently restrain the sound. Widor would play this organ for more than sixty years. It became his artistic laboratory and the sonic model that made his organ symphonies possible.
Widor regarded the modern organ as an essentially symphonic instrument. By the word symphony, he therefore did not mean an orchestral symphony transferred to the keyboard, but music shaped in large-scale spans: contrasting movements, motivic coherence, virtuosity, and registration whose colours were to be deployed as carefully as the instruments in an orchestral score. The first eight of his ten organ symphonies, including Symphonie No. 7 in A minor, Op. 42, No. 3, were intended primarily for the concert hall and the organ loft rather than for the immediate requirements of the liturgy.
Symphonie No. 7 in A minor, Op. 42, No. 3, belongs to Widor’s second set of four organ symphonies, Op. 42, composed between 1878 and 1887. The symphony is laid out in six movements. The outer movements, both in triple time and with features of sonata form, provide powerful frames for four movements in which the organ moves between chorale-like solemnity, dancing elegance, pianistic virtuosity and profound meditation. Beneath this diversity lies a clear cyclical idea: the principal theme of the second movement, Choral, serves as a kind of germ motif and returns in various guises throughout the work.
The first movement throws the listener directly into a musical landscape without preparation. Manuals and pedals enter in octaves at full force, while angular rhythms are interrupted by brief, charged silences. There is an almost austere concentration in the movement’s momentum and in its concise, unequivocal final cadence. Camille Saint-Saëns later wrote to Widor that “most organists retreat in terror before your works” — an apt, if affectionate, comment on the technical and musical uncompromisingness that marks the symphony’s opening.
The second movement, Choral, reveals another side of Widor. It is not a chorale prelude in the traditional sacred-music sense, but a freely conceived, variation-like movement based on two contrasting subjects. First comes a broad theme in A major, briefly shadowed by the minor mode and carried on into C-sharp minor before returning with renewed firmness. The second theme moves more gently and elusively, in 6/86/86/8 time and pianissimo, from A minor towards E minor. The first material then returns and is transformed through new keys and tempi. Eventually, the second theme grows into a long, sustained soprano line in which the first theme emerges as a cantus firmus. In a later variation, the texture becomes more distinctly Baroque in character, before a coda sets syncopations in the right hand against an augmentation of the theme in the pedal. The movement’s architecture is exceptionally clear and has been compared to the double theme-and-variations movements found in Haydn, especially Symphony No. 103, and, on an even broader historical scale, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
The third movement gives the music a gentler, almost pastoral character. It opens with a characteristic Neapolitan harmonic turn and takes the form of a sicilienne in F-sharp minor and F-sharp major, with Mendelssohnian elegance and light staccato articulation as its stylistic background. In the central Animato section, the expression intensifies and the tonality moves towards B minor, yet the fundamental dance character remains: one of the work’s most graceful moments of respite after the relentless energy of the first movement.
The fourth movement is an intermezzo, a toccata and an étude all in one. Here Widor combines Schumannesque flow with a pianism that is almost Lisztian. It is the most pianistically conceived movement in the entire symphony: above a slow melodic line — a minor-coloured transformation of the Choral movement’s cantus — broken chords surge up and down in uninterrupted figurations. The image of great waves is apt, both for the physical demands of the movement and for its sonic effect in a church acoustic. John R. Near has identified Franz Liszt’s Vision, the sixth of the Études d’exécution transcendante, as a possible model. Liszt’s piece has been described as a musical vision of Napoleon’s funeral procession, and a related monumentality can also be sensed in Widor. In the revised edition of 1900–1901, Widor substantially reworked the movement and shortened it by 444444 bars — a revealing example of his lifelong self-criticism and his concern for proportion.
In the fifth movement, Lento, the perspective deepens. The key of C-sharp minor, opening out into C-sharp major, contributes to a journey from darkness towards light. The movement is constructed from contrasting sections in which proclamation is set against prayer and introspection. Its lofty, hovering and almost Orphic tone has suggested a distant kinship with the poetic and enigmatic pages of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto. After the virtuoso motion of the preceding movement, this is a space for stillness, breath and spiritual intensity.
The finale reconnects with the driving force of the opening movement, but with even greater sharpness and concentration. Its principal motif appears in the pedal with an Aeolian colouring, set against an open fifth and brief chordal outbursts. From this austere, powerful gesture, Widor builds a densely worked movement in which the motif is continually illuminated from new angles. It has been described as epoch-making organ music: new, breathtaking and even hair-raising in its conception. Yet its effect comes not only from tonal volume and virtuosity, but also from formal control — from the way a few precise ideas are driven towards an inevitable conclusion.
The cyclical treatment of motifs gives Symphonie No. 7 a distinctive inner unity. The first theme of the Choral movement is not identical with, but shares clear affinities in melodic direction and scalar profile with the Andantino section of César Franck’s Pastorale, Op. 19, likewise dedicated to Cavaillé-Coll. Widor’s theme is then heard, at times unmistakably and at others almost subliminally, in the melody and gesture of the remaining movements. The symphony thus unites the splendour of the French Romantic organ with an unusually consistent compositional design: behind every sonic manifestation lie memory, transformation and return.
In Symphonie No. 7, the organ becomes orchestra, architecture and storyteller. Widor uses its resources to create a world of massive foundations, shimmering motion, sculpted melodies and dramatic contrasts — music that still makes immense demands on the organist, while equally rewarding the listener with a rich and coherent journey through sound.
— Programme notes by Johan Hammarström
Curriculum Vitae
Gustav Jannert was born in 1977 and grew up in Falköping, Sweden. He studied church music and completed a diploma programme in organ performance at the Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg, where his organ teachers were Hans Davidsson, Magnus Kjellson and Johannes Landgren. He also studied early music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel, Switzerland, with Andrea Marcon as his organ teacher. He subsequently complemented these studies with a master’s degree in piano in Cluj-Napoca, Romania.
He lives in the village of Vechea in Romania, teaches piano, and performs in chamber-music concerts and organ recitals, principally in Romania, Germany and Sweden.