Charles-Marie Widor Toccata from Symphony No. 5 for Organ & Orchestra

Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata from Organ Symphony No. 5, Op. 42, No. 1
arranged for Organ & Orchestra by Thomas Wilson
Live, September 9, 2018, First United Methodist Church, Colorado Springs, CO
4th Annual Organ Spectacular
Deke Polifka, Organist
contact [email protected] for more information
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Overview: Charles-Marie Widor
Born: February 21, 1844, Lyon, France; died March 12, 1937, Paris, France
Work Composed: 1879
Why It Matters: One of the most famous organ works by a composer not named J. S. Bach, its toccata style influenced a generation of French and Belgian organ composers, including Jongen in his Symphonie Concertante

Widor was the nineteenth century’s most important organist, and among its most important composers of organ music. He was organist at the Church of Saint-Sulpice in Paris – one of the most prestigious organ jobs in France – for nearly 64 years, from 1870 until his retirement in 1933. (Recordings from Saint-Sulpice in 1932, including this Toccata, show the 88-year-old Widor in fine shape.) Beginning in 1890, he also taught at the Paris Conservatory, where his students included many of the next generation’s most important organists, including Marcel Dupré, Louis Vierne, Charles Tournemire, and Albert Schweitzer. Widor will always be linked to Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, the nineteenth century’s most influential organ builder. Cavaillé-Coll was a close friend of Widor’s father, and helped the son with his education. For his part, Widor made full use of Cavaillé-Coll’s innovations, inspired by Saint-Sulpice’s magnificent Cavaillé-Coll organ. Widor ennumerated Cavaillé-Coll’s innovations in his preface to the Organ Symphonies:

It is he [Cavaillé-Coll] who conceived the diverse wind pressures, the divided windchests, the pedal systems and the combination registers; he who applied for the first time Barker's pneumatic motors, created the family of harmonic stops, reformed and perfected the mechanics to such a point that each pipe—low or high, loud or soft—instantly obeys the touch of the finger.… From this result: the possibility of confining an entire division in a sonorous prison—opened or closed at will—the freedom of mixing timbres, the means of intensifying them or gradually tempering them, the freedom of tempos, the sureness of attacks, the balance of contrasts, and, finally, a whole blossoming of wonderful colors—a rich palette of the most diverse shades: harmonic flutes, gambas, bassoons, English horns, trumpets, celestes, flue stops and reed stops of a quality and variety unknown before.
(translation: John Near)

This new wealth of color and dynamic shading made possible Widor’s Organ Symphonies – solo organ works of symphonic scale. He composed ten; this toccata comes from the fifth of them, where it is the fifth and final movement. It is frequently performed as recessional music at Christmas and wedding ceremonies, including the 2011 wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.
The toccata – from the Italian word meaning “to touch” – is an early form that stressed the performer’s virtuosity, usually on a keyboard instrument. Its heyday was the Baroque, when J. S. Bach raised the form to astonishing artistic heights; but it virtually disappeared during the Classical period, and of the few Romantic toccatas before Widor’s, only Schumann’s has found a place in the repertory. Widor’s toccata launched a vogue for the form that lasted several decades, inspiring works by Debussy, Ravel, and Prokofiev, among others.

Audio: John Mitchell
Video: Michael Lascuola
Program Notes: Mark Arnest