Organ recitals in S:t Jacob's Church

Friday 10th of April 5 pm

Titanic

Program

Jeanette Forrest (dates of birth and death unknown)
 The Wreck of the Titanic

Joseph Bonnet (1884–1944)
 In memoriam (Titanic) from 12 Pièces op. 10

Sigfrid Karg-Elert (1877–1933)
 Improvisation über den englischen Choral “Näher, mein Gott, zu dir!”

Program notes

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 going down – and to the deeply personal: individual lives, heroism, fear and consolation. The organ, with its great dynamic range and its capacity to move between intimate prayer and cathedral-like thunder, has become a natural medium for such musical memorials. In this programme, narrative, chorale variation and tonal painting meet in three works that in different ways mirror the same catastrophe.

The sacred song most clearly associated with the 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 background: the ladder between earth and heaven becomes an image of how the suffering human being may nonetheless 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 particularly charged in stories about people literally facing death. Seldom has a hymn lived so many parallel musical lives: in North America it is most often sung to the melody Bethany, composed by Lowell Mason in the 1850s, while British tradition relies largely on John Bacchus Dykes’ Horbury, named after the village where the composer found peace and comfort. To these we may add Arthur Sullivan’s melody Propior Deo, particularly associated with Methodist usage, as well as another of his tunes, St Edmund, meaning that the same text sounds in different melodic garments depending on confessional and geographical context. This very diversity has played a major role both in determining which versions have been linked to the Titanic myth, and in shaping the ways in which later composers have chosen to quote the hymn.

The programme opens with a musical depiction of the shipwreck itself, where the organ takes over the role of storyteller from the popular ballad tradition that quickly grew up after 1912. The title The Wreck of the Titanic alludes to the many songs and ballads that circulated in both Europe and North America, in which the disaster was retold in stanzas, often with a mixture of moral reflection and concrete description. This highly naïve piano piece, composed by Jeanette Forrest, is heard here in an organ version which translates that ballad-like narrative into sound: wave motions in pedals and manuals, contrasts between peaceful night atmosphere and brutal crash chords, and often a distinct sense of forward movement mirroring 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-like sonorities can be sensed behind the dramatic gestures – as if each harmonic shift carried a new turning point in the story.

The French virtuoso Joseph Bonnet, composer of In memoriam – Titanic, was a pupil of Alexandre Guilmant and contemporary of Marcel Dupré, and belongs to the generation that firmly established the great, concertante French organ style in the early twentieth century. His career took off when, in 1906, he became organist of Saint-Eustache in Paris, a position that placed him at the heart of the city’s flourishing musical life, while at the same time he began touring extensively in Britain and the United States before eventually settling in New York during the war years. As a composer he was less interested in strictly liturgical function and more in free, symphonic organ art: his two collections of twelve pieces display a palette where French romanticism, orchestral colour and virtuoso technique are united 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 heroes of the Titanic” and moves stylistically in a borderland where Wagnerian sonorities meet the Anglican hymn tradition. The opening, slowly rising harmony clearly alludes to the prelude of Wagner’s Das Rheingold, where the music grows out of deeply rooted 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 prelude the composer subjects the melody to constant variation: the harmony grows increasingly chromatic and charged, and the tension builds towards a dramatic climax where the first line of the hymn strides forth bombastically in the pedal in octaves, first in its original key, then even more insistently a third higher. After this culminating moment follows a long process of exhaustion – recitative-like passages seem to try to regain strength, but fall back into resignation. Throughout the work the rich resources of the organ are exploited: in one of the most suggestive sections the melody is placed in the very darkest register, like a voice from the ocean floor, before later sounding on vox humana over 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 if the music sinks into rest; it is as if both ship and music disappear beneath the surface, leaving behind a still, but not entirely reconciled, state of silence.

Sigfrid Karg-Elert, who rounds off the programme, spent most of his life in Leipzig, was largely self-taught, and combined an intense theoretical interest with practical virtuosity at the piano and later the organ. He is one of the great renewers of twentieth-century organ repertoire, not least through his extensive cycles of chorale-based works, in which the Lutheran tradition encounters late romantic chromaticism and impressionistic colours. 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 demand advanced registration artistry 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 dispute with the band’s management their paths diverged, and Jochade was employed 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 melodic variant Bethany by Lowell Mason, the version of Nearer, my God, to Thee which, according to many accounts, was played by the ship’s musicians in its 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 broken by a strongly contrasting section where the chorale Aus tiefer Not schrei ich zu dir – “Out of the depths I cry to Thee” – emerges, giving a clear textual and theological resonance to the Titanic theme. After this dramatic outburst the main theme returns in a simpler harmonisation over an ostinato in the pedals, as though the music were trying to formulate a purer, more stripped-down prayer after the storm. The conclusion, marked “ad astra” – “towards the stars” – links “Kyrie eleison” with a slow, upward motion in the high register, where chords on celestes are allowed to resonate in almost unreal long arcs and finally fade into an almost inaudible whisper. Here it feels as though the weight of the catastrophe is, for a brief moment, lifted and transformed into a quiet yet intense gaze directed towards heaven.

— program notes by Johan Hammarström