Prefatory Note (JRN)

In the preface to Initiation musicale, a kind of music primer, Widor proclaimed: “This little book contains the program of what is necessary to know in music.” The book's topics include: the ear, sound, harmonics, timbre, wind and stringed instruments, keyboard instruments, scales, harmony (consonant and dissonant), counterpoint, composition, the origins of music, opera, acoustics, and various composers (Handel, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schumann, Wagner). Everything is deliberately simplified and compressed—sometimes naively so: beginning his chapter on counterpoint, Widor casually observed, “Nothing is less complicated.” The following brief exposé on the history of the organ follows the tenor of the whole volume. Some found Widor's offhandedness irritating, but he could not have intended to cover each topic exhaustively in this little book. He simply wrote from his life experience, and from the depth of his knowledge he presented what interested him. Widor's footnotes are designated “CMW” to differentiate them from those by the present author/translator, designated “JRN.” Widor divided the chapter into three subsections: “The Organ Known since Antiquity”; “Progress in Its Construction”; and “Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, Creator of the Modern Organ.”

The Organ Known since Antiquity

Some pipes on an air reservoir, that is essentially what the organ consists of.

It is the principle of the bagpipe (utriculum), an instrument as old as the flute and trumpet. Chaldeans, Assyrians, Phoenicians, and Carthaginians knew that air pressure contained in a goatskin produces on a tube the same effect as the pressure from the lips.

At the Pompeii Museum in Naples, one sees some small instruments with bronze pipes and some syrinxes—types of “salon” Panpipes. Sooner or later, they had to think of combining two principles—joining bagpipes and syrinxes. The mosaics and low-reliefs of Trier, Arles, Constantinople, and quantities of medals represent the organ. The excavations of Révérend Père [Alfred-Louis] Delattre in Carthage have exhumed terra-cottas figured with the organ and organist.

The latter is standing, his head emerging above the pipes; on the side of the instrument are some kinds of barrels (the bellows). Two hundred years before the Christian era, they were already thinking about how to perfect this bellows system. The wind pressure was obtained at that time by the intrusion of water; hence the name hydraulis was given to the organ.