Edwin H. Lemare

The following are random excerpts, re-printed with permission, from Nelson Barden’s biography of Edwin H. Lemare published in four parts in the January, March, June, and August, 1986 issues of THE AMERICAN ORGANIST.

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Lemare was a wizard of registration; his technique was legendary. His orchestral realizations, matchlessly rhythmical and finely detailed, created an effect both electrifying and profound.

His grandfather, father, and five uncles were all organists.

His physique was to his advantage; he was remarkably agile, his body fitted the organ console naturally, and he had uncommonly long fingers and thumbs.

He worked at console technique until it was second nature. Lemare developed into an extraordinary executant. His technique was highly polished.

Lemare emphasized musical expression over flawless performance. He said, “I would rather hear a performance full of technical slips, where the player’s individuality and soul shone through it, than one of absolutely flawless technique and mechanical, soulless, and almost ‘monotonous’ correctness.”

He became adept at ‘thumbing’ - the technique of bringing out an extra melody. While his fingers played an upper manual, his thumbs dipped to the keyboard below for a melody on different stops.

W. T. Best had used thumbing to advantage, but Lemare developed it further and achieved completely independent action of his thumbs, accompanying legato thumb melodies with trills and rapid figurations with the fingers. With both hands ranging over three or even four manuals simultaneously and another melody played with the right foot, the effect was of Lemare playing duets with himself.

He said, “There never ought to be the slightest pause or delay when changing stops... the audience should never be aware that there are any stops at all.”

He excelled in the use of highly characteristic and rapidly varied tone color, orchestrating his transcriptions with so many stop changes that his listeners wondered if he had a third hand or pulled stops with his teeth.

He played thumb pistons as freely as he did the notes, producing striking dynamic changes by sliding across the buttons. But the bulk of his stop changing was hand registration. His hands darted to the stop knobs countless times during a single piece with no fuss or loss of rhythm. He advocated practicing stop changing as meticulously as manual and pedal technique. He said, “...use as much ‘phrasing’ with your stops as you do in your music.”

Some of Lemare’s techniques were novel. For instance, wherever possible, he pedaled all naturals with the heels.

He considered the balanced swell pedal an absolute necessity. Using the swell shutters, he often masked the addition of stops and achieved prolonged crescendos. Starting with quiet stops, he built up the power of the instrument to a combination including Swell reeds and the Great foundations without “any sense of a change in the tone quality.”

Lemare produced an endless crescendo that was breath-taking in its intensity. Sometimes he produced dynamics with stop changes only, and left the swell box shut save for an occasional startling accent. He never used the crescendo pedal, for he disliked a preset sequence. Later in life, he insisted that it be blocked off on every organ he played.

Lemare made a specialty of reproducing orchestral velocity, attack and phrasing on the organ, and he cultivated remarkable rhythmic effects. He said, “One of the most ‘life-giving’ effects is the introduction of accents and sforzandi. When the swell shutter mechanism was fast enough, he made sharp accents by snapping the pedal shut just before the beat. Basing his organ playing on an elegant piano technique, he used subtle agogic accents, delicate rubato and a wide variety of precisely controlled wrist and finger staccato touches. Of the latter he said, “the first thing to remember...is that rapid passages must always be clear and distinct, even though the player may have to resort to a greatly exaggerated staccato.” Sometimes he played so fleetingly on heavy registrations that the bass pipes hardly spoke at all. For accent, a slightly more legato touch let all the basses sound, producing a sudden broadening of tone.

Sir Malcolm Sargent exclaimed, “Lemare did something I never thought possible. He made the organ dance.”

Generally speaking his audiences were immense crowds of common people who were largely innocent of musical training. They liked most what they knew best, and it was the communication of human sensations and emotions in music that swayed them.

He played what the crowd liked, and played it with ‘soul’- perfection of rhythm, rubato, and expression. Then he introduced music that was completely unknown to them: the new symphonic literature of Wagner, Brahms, Dvorak, Humperdinck, Saint-Saëns, Elgar, Sullivan, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and many others, in stunning transcriptions from the orchestral scores.

Lemare developed an “extraordinary sense of orchestral coloring and ensemble”. With a “faultless technique, undisturbed rhythm, and a measure of the composer’s intended color rarely achieved by any other organist...his playing of orchestral works, even upon rather impossible instruments, was a revelation.” And never before or since those days has the pipe organ generated such enthusiasm

Lemare had ‘soul’, which was considered the requisite of expressive playing, and he was a ‘masher’ - handsome, well-dressed, charmingly attentive to the ladies.

During the summer of 1894, the Lemares made the long pilgrimage to Bayreuth for the Wagner Festival. There he fell completely under Wagner’s spell. The effect of darkening the houselights during the performance must have impressed him.

On the morning of March 2, 1898, Edwin H. Lemare woke up a famous man, for the newspapers carried at least 19 reviews of his concert the night before. He had obtained permission from Cosima Wagner to present the first act of Parsifal with his 60 voice choir at St. Margaret’s Church in London. The lights were turned out as at Bayreuth, and Lemare played directly from the orchestral score.

Felix Mottl (one of the conductors at Bayreuth) congratulated Lemare saying, “I would not have thought the organ capable of producing in such detail the effects of the full orchestra ...I have nothing to say except beautiful, beautiful”.

Musical Courier pronounced Lemare “unquestionably the greatest organist in England, possessing a technique that is amazing”.

The newspapers dubbed St. Margaret’s a “Mecca for Musicians”. Long before a concert began, dense crowds of concertgoers stretched from the west porch of St. Margaret’s out to the street. Sometimes the congestion was so great that the London police had to make way for Lemare’s carriage to pull up to the church. When the doors opened, the throng surged into the building, filling every seat. London had seldom seen organ recitals so popular or heard the organ played so well.

The way Lemare manipulated Walker’s glorious organ was almost uncanny. Even where, in the Wagner item, the strings divide into about eighteen parts (a passage often weak in performance), the effect came off well, largely due to Lemare’s remarkable swell-pedaling.

At Lemare’s Saturday recitals, a new rector, H. H. Henson (who neither knew much nor cared about music, and thought organists should play softly and maintain a low profile) may well have wondered why the crowds came. Was it to worship God Almighty or Edwin H. Lemare?

The story goes that, on Canon Henson’s first Sunday as rector of St. Margaret’s, he picked the seafarer’s hymn Eternal Father, Strong to Save. Before the last verse, Lemare suddenly changed key and plunged into a long and picturesque nautical improvisation. He launched a fleet of ships, called up a frightful storm, sank several vessels, rescued the survivors, murmured a heartfelt thanksgiving on the Choir Dulciana, and then triumphantly crashed into the last verse of the hymn with Swell reeds ablaze and the 32’ Open Diapason roaring. The choir and congregation knew what to expect and loved it. But the rector, taken by surprise, was furious.

By age 34, Edwin H. Lemare was widely acclaimed as the greatest English organist. Lemare’s presentation of the first act of Parsifal had catapulted him to fame, for it was the first performance allowed by Cosima Wagner outside of Bayreuth.

At this time Lemare’s life fairly exploded with activity. He played organ recitals throughout England, wrote articles, lectured on Wagner, brought out volumes of transcriptions and arrangements, and composed five new organ works including his Opus 35, a 59 page Symphony in G Minor.

Lemare played in New York for the fist time in 1901. The critics were astounded. “Mr. Lemare came unheralded ...he vanquished every technical and manipulative difficulty...” He occupied “the same position among organists that Paderewski holds among pianists...perfect registration...never an uninteresting moment...pleases the most exacting connoisseur...He upsets conventions...sets schools at naught...brushed traditions ruthlessly aside...set up new standards of possibility”. Lemare was “the greatest master of the instrument the American public has heard.”

Musical Age described his playing: “One is impressed with a sense of mastery...it has brilliancy, it has colour, and above all it has accent. However rapid the changes of registration, however subtle the nuances, the parts move together; the impression is that of an articulate whole, and the rhythmical shape of the musical phrase never loses perfect definition.”

On a concert tour to Australia, Lemare told the Sydney newspapers that “an organ of this size is like a big garden; it wants daily attention to keep it in order.”

At a concert in Sydney Town Hall, Lemare used the 64’ (Contra Trombone) in an improvised thunderstorm that proved so realistic that an elderly lady ran from the hall, gasping, “Oh my, this is getting serious!”

Lemare said: “My great aim for the last ten years has been to raise the organ to its proper position as a solo instrument. (By) introducing modern orchestral works in the form of transcriptions for the organ I hoped to get organ programs out of the old ruts.”

The critics said that Lemare’s Bach playing was “perfection itself”. The D Major Prelude and Fugue and the Jig Fugue were performed with a “wonderfully plastic working out of the polyphonic structures...invigorating rhythmic elasticity and pulse” and at a tempo “which if it had not been allied to such clear beauty” would have been “technical witchcraft”. Lemare’s pedalwork was “particularly vigorous and elastic”.

By age 44 (1909), Edwin H. Lemare had reached the pinnacle of the profession. Grove’s Dictionary acclaimed him the leading English organist, and in those days that meant the greatest organist in the world. In 1911, Lemare spent the summer composing and arranging. He had published some 40 original compositions for the organ in the preceding 20 years.

Among Lemare’s many orchestral transcriptions were 10 Brahms items, 12 of Dvorak, and 25 of Wagner. Lemare exercised great ingenuity in transcribing Wagner scores for the organ. With pages of thumbing, extended string tremolandos, harp arpeggios in 32nd notes, and extra melodies for the right foot, these arrangements were some of the most difficult - and effective - organ transcriptions of Wagner’s works ever published.

It was “impossible to tire of listening to Lemare.” Lemare seemed to be able to play on levels, “in multiple fashion”, so to speak. By dint of ingenious thumbing, double pedaling, and an “exceptional span,” he produced music in four tone colors simultaneously. But this phenomenal technique and activity were not the only merits. “Taste and judgment” vitalized the playing, along with the “veracity and vividness” of his tone coloring. But most of all, it was a “strong instinct rare in an organist - for rhythm” and the “rare element of accent”.

If there was a single outstanding feature of Lemare’s playing, it was his felicitous accents and rhythmic effects - the very ones he had first heard from the Strauss Orchestra at the Inventions Exhibition of 1885 when he was 19 years old, and incorporated into his own playing. Under his touch, the organ seemed to leap to life.

Lemare had perfected a “little trick with the swell pedals” by which he imitated perfectly the attack of the woodwinds, and he achieved a remarkable approximation to orchestral string tone. With an “ingenious amalgam” of celestes, gambas, soft reeds, and tremulant, the effect was of a “mass of soaring violins”.

About improvisation, he said, “To ‘lose oneself’ in the inspiration of the moment is the experience of every artist; then and only then does he draw - or hypnotize - his audience into his ‘world of dreams’. In improvisation, more than anything else, does the true artist rise to the height of musical expression...”

In a newspaper interview, Lemare explained his philosophy of using municipal organ concerts to educate the public: "The appeal is fundamentally spiritual, or emotional. The normal listener to music doesn't listen to an organ recital as he listens to an orchestral concert. The latter challenges his attention. The former woos it. There is that in an organ which passeth understanding. It is persuasive, spiritual, and golden. It is never merely pretty. It should be the musical center of the city, because it can be heard by the greatest number at the smallest cost. It must never be played in connection with any affair other than one which is essentially and intrinsically musical. There should surround it, at all times, the suggestion of the spiritual. After all, the organ comes to us from the church. And it makes little difference what church you worship in; the point is to get from the diapasons the deep, fundamental and reverberating suggestion of things divine."