The Forgotten Queen

As I walk through Germany today and observe where we humans are heading, I notice the churches growing ever emptier, and the organ—once the undisputed Queen of Instruments—slipping into oblivion. I grew up as an orthodox Christian in Serbia and ever since I started living in Germany and then visited many other countries belonging to what we call the global west, I kept wondering about church organs, an instrument entirely missing from Christian orthodox churches.

In the orthodox world, choirs sing and instruments are forbidden. The sound silence and of beautiful voices fills orthodox churches for millennia and during nights, in all orthodox Christian monasteries monks sing in their churches, while most other people are asleep. As orthodox Christians and friends of the orthodox church know, as long as our world exists, monks in monasteries will continue to sing and pray during nights and fill their churches with mesmerising, deeply spiritual sounds.

In the Western part of our world, a different tradition emerged and I keep meeting people who, for the most varied reasons, look after the organs in their parishes, restore them, even have new ones built. To these quiet guardians, to the few organ-builders still working today, and to the organists (women and men alike), I dedicate this text; yet I do not write it for them. I write it for everyone else, for those who have never come close to an organ or its music and have never truly understood it.

There was a time when the organ was the mightiest thing human beings had ever built. No ship, no cathedral, no cannon could rival its complexity or sheer size. Thousands of pipes, dozens of stops, several manuals, a pedalboard that forced the feet to dance, everything set in motion by nothing but air and human breath. When it spoke, the ground trembled. When it fell silent, the silence afterwards was greater than before.

In an age without loudspeakers, without gramophone records, without headphones, without telephones, without video, without the internet—in that age the organ was the only instrument that could truly fill, indeed overwhelm, an entire space. It was humanity’s first surround system, and it almost always stood in a church, beautifully crafted, richly ornamented, often gilded. That was no accident. It had been built to make audible and visible something larger than man himself.

The greatest servant of this queen was a Thuringian in a wig who remained an organist almost his entire life.

Johann Sebastian Bach never ruled an opera house, never bowed and scraped before kings, never wrote a symphony for the concert hall. He tested organs, played organs, composed for organs. A quarter of his surviving œuvre is organ music. He would improvise for hours until the congregation was exhausted and the candles had burned low. He made his feet fly across the pedalboard as if they were fingers, and listeners reported that it sounded as though an entire orchestra were playing.

Then he died in 1750, nearly blind, and was buried quietly. For seventy years almost no one knew what had actually been lost. Only when Mendelssohn dug him up again did Europe gasp: How could we have failed to hear this?

Today the situation is stranger still. We can call up every one of Bach’s notes in a fraction of a second from the internet, in Dolby Atmos, through tiny speakers that fit in a pocket. And precisely for that reason we almost never hear them properly any more.

For organ music cannot be streamed.

It can be recorded, yes. But it cannot be experienced.

You have to sit in the same room with it, preferably in one of the old pews, the organ at your back (for it usually stands high on the west gallery), close your eyes, and simply listen. Then something strange happens: the sound does not come from in front of you like an orchestra, but from everywhere and nowhere. It envelops you, penetrates the body, sets ribs and skull resonating. You feel the deep 32-foot stops in your stomach, the high mixtures like rays of light behind the eyes. And suddenly you are no longer merely a listener; you have become part of the instrument itself.

Many have written for the organ, before Bach and after him: Frescobaldi, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Böhm, Walther, Bruhns, Lübeck, Franck, Reger, Messiaen—good, great, sometimes even genius music.

Yet Bach represents the decisive rupture.

We do not divide music history into before and after Beethoven or before and after Mozart. We divide it into before and after Bach—just as we divide the history of mankind into before and after Jesus Christ.

That is not hyperbole; it is simply the truth that reveals itself to anyone who has once sat for an hour, eyes closed, beneath a properly played Bach fugue.

Then one understands: this is not entertainment music.

This is research carried out in tones.

This is prayer translated into mathematics.

This is philosophy made audible.

This is one solitary human being attempting to make the unsayable speak, to enclose infinity within finite time, to touch the divine with hands and feet.

And the most beautiful thing of all: you need no prior knowledge to listen to it.

You need only be there, close your eyes, and let yourself fall into this sound that is older than electric light and yet able to make everything shine far more brightly.

Do you understand me? I do not wish for a return to the eighteenth century. I wish only for the continuation of wonder.

That more of us, of an evening, walk into a church, take a seat in a pew, close our eyes, and allow one single human being at one single ancient machine of wood, tin, and air to show us what a heartbeat can sound like, how deep a thought can reach, how infinite a single second of silence between two chords can be.

For what we need today is not more screens, but once again an instrument that is larger than ourselves. And for that we need people who dedicate themselves anew to the organ and inspire the rest of us to join them.

As Bach did.

Every Sunday.

All his life.

The organs are waiting. The pipes still stand, the air is still there.

There should be more concerts.

More people should visit them.

Close their eyes.

Open their souls and marvel.