The Organ

It is quite stinging to profess, in the appendix of a Traité, doctrines in absolute contradiction with the ideas in this Traité. This will not go without some astonishment on the part of the reader.

But, as Beethoven says: “It must be” [es muss sein]. I find myself forced to do it here in this chapter.

Who informed Berlioz? Who was the organist from whom he had the misfortune to ask advice? I have not been able to find out, although I quite often sought to rouse the recollections of Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, even reproaching him for his indifference when being in frequent contact with the maître he would have been able, better than anyone, to bring him up to speed.

Although it is true that the stops of the organ are of three types (foundations, mixtures, and reeds), it is no less true that it's mainly the foundations and mixtures that make up the old, true organ that dates from Guido d'Arezzo, that Bach sanctioned, and whose traditions we must hand down to our successors.

And it is these mixtures that one has not known how to make Berlioz understand.

“Organ builders and organists,” he writes, “agree in finding excellent the effect produced by this multiple resonance that makes several different pitches heard at the same time. It would be unbearable, they say, if one distinguished the two upper tones; but one does not hear them, the lowest pitch absorbs them. It then remains to be understood how that which one does not hear can produce a good effect on the ear.”

At that time, Cavaillé-Coll had not yet constructed the enregistreur-harmonique that demonstrated the role and importance of resultant tones in the composition of its fundamental. This enregistreur of thirty-two pipes makes heard, successively or at the same time, the first thirty-two harmonics of a low A of an 8ʹ stop—our ear being unable to perceive sounds above the thirty-second harmonic.

If, beginning at the highest, you activate little by little all the pipes of the instrument, this synthetic A will grow proportionately until it becomes thirtytwo times more powerful than the A given by the low pipe itself.