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SACRED HEART CHURCH AND THE WALKER ORGAN

The Sacred Heart Church stands on a terrace carved into the slopes of Wimbledon Hill, commanding panoramic views over South London and Surrey. Financed by a wealthy Catholic widow, the building was designed by Frederick Walters in the Late Decorated Gothic style, and constructed in stages between 1886 and 1901. With the church as its focus, this area of Wimbledon soon became a centre of Catholic education and devotion, embracing four large schools and several convents. From the beginning the church was run by the Jesuits, in association with Wimbledon College on an adjacent site up the hill. The College and the Ursuline school for girls nearby, together with their two prep schools, continue to flourish, and their 4000 or so pupils regularly use the church for special services. The parish remains one of the largest in London, with a Sunday Mass attendance of around 2000.

Under the inspirational leadership of Fr John Driscoll (from 1904 to 1939), the Sacred Heart soon became renowned for its music. Until the War it had its own choir school, and the choir of 50-60 performed an encyclopaedic repertoire of music from four centuries. In 1923 they sang in the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Mass at Westminster Cathedral, and attracted rave reviews from the national press: We were particularly struck by the astonishing brilliancy of the unknown choir from Wimbledon. The boys’ voices were singularly beautiful (The Times). Those days are long gone, but we still have an accomplished choir of amateur singers from the parish, who sing a broad range of motets, mass settings and Gregorian chant at the Latin Mass on Sundays. Past Directors of Music include Nicholas Danby, Fernand Laloux, Colin Mawby and Martyn Parry; the post is currently held by Robert Rathbone, who is also Head of Music at the College.

The choir soon outgrew its original home in the chancel, and in 1912 a big choir gallery and a new organ were installed at the west end of the church. No expense was spared, and the organ was designed on a lavish scale. Dedicated in December 1912 on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, this was the last of a succession of major instruments built during the preceding 20 years by J.W. Walker & Sons, and the last important organ built in England in the prosperous, self-confident years before the First World War. Miraculously it has survived through decades of changing fashions with its heroic tonal qualities and intricate pneumatic mechanism virtually intact.  In 1935 an attempt was made to ‘modernise’ the instrument through the addition of five stops to the Choir Organ, and some other minor changes. By the early 1980s the organ had become almost unplayable, and a partial restoration was effected by Manders. They removed the extra Choir stops, restored the Choir and the rest of the instrument to full working order, and returned a 4-ft Flute to the Great. One 1935 stop remains, the Great 4-ft Octave, which is not used in this recording.

Behind the organ’s rather grim facade, the enormous Swell box takes up the whole of the left-hand side of the chamber, with its shutters a few inches behind the frontage pipes. The Great pipework sits beside it on the right, with the small Choir box behind. The four generously-scaled Pedal ranks, with their numerous extensions, are ranged round the back and sides. Whereas most English organs of this period are buried in chancel chambers, the Sacred Heart organ speaks with absolute clarity to every corner of this lofty building. Every stop has the character and presence of an orchestral instrument, and even a whispered pianissimo travels clearly through the church, right down to the chapels behind the high altar. Sadly the organ is now showing its age, and an appeal has been launched for a full restoration, to complete the work begun in 1985. For this recording we have tried to minimise the effects of leaking wind, sluggish mechanism and odd extraneous noises – with reasonable success, we hope. All contributions to the Restoration Appeal will be gratefully received. More details can be found on our website: www.sacredheartmusic.co.uk.

THE MUSIC 

1. The Sacred Heart organ was less than two years old when Europe was plunged into chaos in 1914, and Britain received a flood of refugees from Belgium. Attracted by the large Catholic community, many of them came to Wimbledon; one of these was Guy Weitz, the young Organ Professor from the Conservatory of Liège, and he stayed here for the rest of his life. Although Weitz lived in Wimbledon, it was the sister Jesuit church at Farm St, Mayfair, that became his artistic home: he was organist there for 50 years, from 1917 until his retirement in 1967. For some years in the Thirties Fr. Driscoll directed the music at both Farm St and Wimbledon. The two men must have known each other well, and we suspect that Weitz was the guiding spirit behind the enlargement of the organ in 1935 – a project that was in exact accord with his forward-looking ideas on organ design.

Weitz had studied in Paris with D’Indy, Guilmant and Widor, and his First Organ Symphony of 1932 is very much in the French style. The Symphony’s three movements – Regina Pacis, Mater dolorosa, and Stella Maris - are all inspired by Gregorian themes from Feasts of the Virgin Mary. Regina Pacis is a fantasia on the Ave Maria, and it conjures up a resplendent vision of Mary enthroned as Queen of Heaven and ‘Queen of Peace’. From the majestic opening through the calmer middle section to the thrilling conclusion, this sumptuous music is ideally suited to the Sacred Heart organ; the enormous pedal basses come into their own on the last page.

 

2. At the time this organ was built, transcriptions of orchestral, chamber and vocal music formed a substantial proportion of every organist’s repertoire. The organ was specifically designed to play this kind of music, and there are three transcriptions on this CD. In 1930 the German composer Sigfrid Karg-Elert came to London from Leipzig to attend a Festival of his organ music. His host, Nicholas Choveaux, lived in Wimbledon, and he brought him to the Sacred Heart to see the organ. Fascinated by the three 32-ft stops, the ‘extraordinarily imaginative and eccentric’ composer made such extraordinary noises on the pedals that he was politely asked to leave...

Karg-Elert’s sensitive arrangement of Wagner’s Träume (Dreams) captures much of the sultry romantic atmosphere of the original. This is the fifth of the so-called Wesendonck Lieder which Wagner composed for voice and piano, to texts by his neighbour and lover Mathilde Wesendonck: ‘Ah, what wonderful dreams captivate my soul...’ The song was designated as a study for Tristan and Isolde, and the music also appears in Act 2 of the opera. Karg-Elert expands the magical concluding epilogue onto four staves: the long bass note is held down by a small lead weight, while the hands and feet are occupied elsewhere.

 

 3. Bach’s Chaconne for solo violin is surely the greatest work ever composed for a single string instrument, and when his music was rediscovered in the 19th century, it understandably attracted the attentions of keyboard players too. Brahms made a superb arrangement for piano (left hand) in 1877; ‘The Chaconne,’ he said, ‘is in my opinion one of the most wonderful and most incomprehensible pieces of music. Using the technique adapted to a small instrument the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If one has no supremely great violinist at hand, the most exquisite of joys is probably simply to let it ring in one’s mind. But the piece certainly inspires one to occupy oneself with it somehow...’  Many other pianists also occupied themselves with it, and organists too; the version recorded here is an admirably sober and stylish arrangement by the Victorian organist W.T. Best – one of the hundreds of ‘Arrangements from the Scores of the Great Masters’ which he performed for the entertainment and edification of packed audiences at St. George’s Hall, Liverpool, where he presided as Civic Organist for forty years in the latter part of the 19th century.

Musicologists have found in chaconnes a fertile source of concealed baroque numerology and symbolism: dating from the year in which his first wife died at the age of 35, Bach’s Chaconne has been interpreted as a representation of the Circle of Life and Death, with an unwritten accompaniment of symbolic chorale tunes, rather in the manner of Elgar’s Enigma. While this can be no more than tantalising speculation, the bare text of the music provides sufficient cause for wonder. The four-bar descending bass ostinato generates a sequence of harmonic progressions which is repeated 64 times, with all kinds of subtle modifications, and an inexhaustible variety of surface detail. The initial chordal statement is cast in the stylised dance rhythm of a sarabande. It returns in the same form at the end, and also at the exact mid-point of this perfectly-formed structure, where it heralds a temporary shift from D minor to D major. The Chaconne demonstrates another aspect of the Sacred Heart organ’s big and multi-faceted personality – the majesty of the choruses, the clarity of the diapasons, the clear bell-like sonorities of the upperwork, and the delicacy of the flutes.

 

4. Idealist, mystic, visionary... Charles Tournemire was one of the most original French composers of the early 20th century. Tournemire was organist of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris from 1898 until his death in 1939. Here, taking his inspiration from the ancient repertory of Gregorian chant, he evolved over a period of some 30 years a unique style of rhapsodic liturgical improvisation, in which he crystallised his own uncompromising vision of the organ as “The voice of prayer”. In the late 1920s the vision took concrete form in his great masterpiece L’Orgue Mystique, a collection of 253 organ pieces designed to accompany the celebration of the Mass on each Sunday and Major Feat of the year. In the Mass for Christmas Day, Tournemire contemplates the mystery of the Incarnation in music of luminous spirituality. The Offertory is an ecstatic meditation on the loving omnipotence of God the Father. Fragments of the Offertory chant weave in and out of a shimmering cloud of dense, incense-laden harmonies: ‘The heavens are thine, the earth also... Righteousness and equity are the habitation of thy seat; mercy and truth shall go before thy face’ (Ps 88).

 

 5. The name of Pierre Cochereau will always be synonymous with the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, where he played for 30 years from 1955 until 1984. French organists are all great improvisors, but Cochereau had a unique and special gift; his incredible facility and virtuosity, and the passion, tenderness and humour of his music, put him in a class of his own. Cochereau died suddenly at the age of 59, leaving almost nothing in the way of written compositions. But hundreds of his improvisations had been recorded, both privately and commercially, and in recent years some of the best of these have been transcribed into written notation and published. The improvised Boléro for organ and side-drum was recorded at Notre-Dame by the Philips record company in May 1973, and issued on a commercial LP. A written transcription was made during Cochereau’s lifetime, with his blessing, by his son Jean-Marc, and it was published in 1996.

Cochereau often called on the services of percussionists or brass-players to assist in his improvisations, and here the side-drum reinforces the echoes of Ravel’s orchestral showpiece. But where Ravel deliberately relied on rhythmic, melodic and harmonic repetition to create his inexorable effect, Cochereau’s interpretation of the dance is much more flexible. The rhythm of the drum is steadily maintained throughout 65 repetitions of a four-bar ostinato (though one bar is oddly omitted near the beginning), but the organ part ranges through an amazing variety of melodic and harmonic effects and colourful registrations. There are two themes, one active and rhythmic, the second calm and more lyrical. The opening is hushed and mysterious, but Cochereau steadily increases the volume and winds up the harmonic tension; the music builds up to an overwhelming climax, and then gradually winds downs again until only the hollow beat of the drum remains. On paper our very English, comfortable, Edwardian organ has none of the spicy continental brilliance of Notre-Dame; but this instrument is full of surprises, and it can produce a rich variety of incisive, characterful tone-colours when required...

 

6. In the Classical era of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, the organ fell from the honoured position it had held during the Baroque period, and the closest that these three masters came to organ music was in their compositions for mechanical organ and musical clock. Like Mozart's Fantasias ten years earlier, Beethoven’s Adagio was composed in 1799 for one of the mechanical organs of the Viennese collector and museum-owner Count Joseph Deym-Müller. This beautiful little piece bears a family resemblance to the well-known Romance in F for violin and orchestra (Op. 50), which was written around the same time. It is played here on the organ’s softest and most ethereal flute stops.

 

7. After the death of W.T. Best his reputation as England’s greatest organist was inherited by Edwin Lemare. Lemare was also renowned for his performances of orchestral transcriptions, but coming from a younger generation, he concentrated on more modern music – Dvorak, Elgar, Tchaikovsky, and above all Wagner. In the 1890s Lemare was organist at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and in 1897 Walkers built a large new organ for him there, which in many respects served as a model for the Sacred Heart fifteen years later. In 1900 Lemare moved to the USA, and it was his successor who played the first recital on the Wimbledon organ, in February 1913.

The ‘Angel Scene’ from Humperdinck’s Hansel & Gretel is one of Lemare’s finest arrangements. It was published in 1899, just six years after the opera’s premiere, and it exploits the full range of the organ’s ‘orchestral’ sonorities, from the most delicate strings and solo stops to the majesty of the tutti. Humperdinck was closely associated with Wagner, but this opera has a touchingly naive, poetic atmosphere all its own, which is distilled in this famous excerpt from the end of the Second Act. Hansel and Gretel are lost in the forest at night. The Sandman gently lulls them to sleep (‘Now slumber, children, while angels bring you golden dreams...’); they sing their evening prayer (‘When at night I go to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep...’) and fall asleep. The orchestral interlude that follows is based on two themes – the hymn-like folk-tune of the evening prayer, and the lyrical music of the Sandman’s song. While the music is playing, ‘a bright light pierces the mist, which at once gathers itself into clouds which assume the shape of a staircase… Fourteen angels in shimmering robes descend the cloud-staircase two by two as the light grows steadily brighter, and group themselves around the sleeping children...’ The music builds to a glowing climax, and ‘the angels join hands and dance solemnly in a circle around the children. The whole scene is flooded with bright light. The angels arrange themselves into a motionless, picturesque tableau, and the curtain slowly falls…’

 

8. Joseph Jongen was another of the Belgian musicians who lived in England during the First World War, but in 1919 he returned home and resumed a distinguished career, becoming Director of the Brussels Conservatoire in 1925. Jongen was a prolific composer of richly-coloured, impressionistic orchestral, chamber and piano music, and he was also a fine organist. The rarely-heard Prelude & Fugue was his last major organ work; it was composed in the early 1940s, but never performed during the his lifetime, and not published in a reliable edition until 1998. The Prelude bears no indications of speed, dynamic or pitch, making possible a number of different interpretations. It is interpreted here in the style of a study for cello and piano, with the long-breathed pedal melody played on 8-ft solo stops below the rippling broken chords of the manuals. In striking contrast, the energetic fugue adopts a lively 12/8 jig rhythm; it is more-or-less strictly diatonic until the riotous final pages, where the harmony blossoms into a glorious rainbow of added notes and whole-tones.

 

9. Jehan Alain was one of the most individual talents of his generation; his death in action in the Second World War (at the age of 29) was a tragic loss for French music. Alain had a horror of rhetoric and pretension, of ‘trying to say too much’, and he created an elusive musical language of dreams, of fleeting sensations and emotions. His music, his diaries, and his humorous drawings all bear witness to a uniquely colourful, quirky and profound imagination. The atmospheric Postlude is a souvenir of the monastic Office of Compline in the candelit chapel of the Abbey of Valloires in Picardy, where Alain used to play the organ during family holidays. Fragments of plainsong (... Te lucis ante terminum... In manus tuas... Gloria patri...) float in the evening air, surrounded by a halo of evocative harmonies, pulsing gently in an imperturbable rhythm that defies conventional methods of notation, and ending in a lingering final Amen.

 

David Gammie was born in Sutton in 1952, and educated at Winchester College and Balliol College, Oxford. He began organ lessons at Winchester, and gave his first public recital in London at the age of 16, but it was only after leaving Oxford with a Classics degree that he took up music more seriously, studying with H.A. Bate in London, and then with Peter Hurford in Cambridge. He has recently played concerts in France and Australia, and choral accompaniment has taken him to Belgium, Germany and the USA. He also enjoys writing about music; he provides programme notes for organ concerts all over the country, and has written booklet notes for over fifty CDs. David has lived in Wimbledon for twenty years, and in 2001 he recorded two pieces for an Organ Club Anniversary CD at the Sacred Heart. (Organists’ Review described the organ as ‘ one of London’s best kept secrets’, and his playing as ‘luscious’ and ‘brimming with atmosphere’). The post of Organist and Assistant Director of Music happened to fall vacant just at that time, and he was appointed a few weeks later.  The organ’s increasingly unpredictable mechanism can make public performance a hazardous affair, but David has played several major works at Sacred Heart during the past five years, including Messiaen’s Méditations sur le Mystère de la Sainte Trinité, and two liturgical presentations of Dupré’s Stations of the Cross.

 

Jack Merivale was born in London in 1978. He is a former pupil of Wimbledon College, and his family are active members of the parish. Jack read music at Anglia Ruskin University and has recently completed an MA in Acting at the Mountview Academy of Theatre Arts.

           

Thanks to

  • Fr Gerard Mitchell SJ, Parish Priest, for his help in arranging the recording sessions, and for his enthusiasm for the Organ Appeal.
  • Andrew Scott of Harrison & Harrison, for tuning the organ and working miracles to cure incurable faults in preparation for the recording.
  • Bob Rathbone, for silent page-turning and complex registration assistance in almost every piece, and for an immaculate performance of the five notes for coupure pédale in the Boléro!