Pipe organ making a come back for young people
By Uwe Siemon-Netto, 2001, United Press International, April 20, 2001
WASHINGTON – A young German wunderkind named Hell is a combatant of sorts in a worship war that is raging in America’s churches.
At issue is: How do you best laud the Lord? With “praise bands”? Or with heavymetal clamor? Would polkas be appropriate in a church? Should there be inane cowboy services, where the ushers are costumed as cattle herders and the congregation emits appropriate howls?
Or would it make more sense to stick to the familiar roar of the mighty pipe organ? Felix Hell thinks it would. Hell is only 15, but his mastery of the King of Instruments has been astounding audiences from coast to coast for three years.
On one side of this conflict, you have the church-growth movement whose adherents in assorted denominations have been busy ripping the organs out of their sanctuaries as they transformed them into multipurpose halls.
“These are the folks who have been floating the lie that everybody hates the organ,” Paul Westermeyer, professor of music at Luther Seminary in St. Paul, Minn., told United Press International.
“They and the new mega-churches claim that the organ represents the old order and has to go. They are working on the presupposition that Christianity sells best with the help of a commercial musical style,” he said.
By his very youth, Felix Hell is proving them wrong. He reinforces the other side of the divide by turning teens into enthusiasts of the pipe organ, an instrument invented some 2,300 years ago by the Alexandrian Greek Ctesibius.
Organ enthusiasts hold “that worship should not be an entertainment evangelism, in which the congregation does not participate,” Westermeyer explained. “They view church music in the tradition of Luther and Bach. It should not be entertainment but played and sung soli Deo gloria (to give God glory alone) for the edification of humanity.”
In the traditional form of church music, the congregants sing, accompanied by the organ. Their hymns and chorales are designed as theologically sound responses to the message from the pulpit.
And guess what? The pipe organ lovers are doing surprisingly well. They are busy rescuing instruments the church-growth wing is throwing out. The leading force on this side of the worship war is the 20,000-member American Guild of Organists.
Because of the efforts of this guild and allied organizations, “we are now witnessing a pipe organ renaissance,” its executive director, James Thomashower, said in a telephone interview. “Aided by the booming economy in the last eight years, there are now long-waiting lists for churches wanting to buy new organs. If you placed your order today, you’d get the instrument installed in five or six years time,” said Thomashower.
So there appears to be hope in a seemingly catastrophic situation where “the commercial culture has snared us into perpetual adolescent and a faulty anti-historical bias,” as Prof. Westermeyer has put it.
Into this standoff stepped Hell, a cheerful German adolescent whose name gives Anglo-Saxon Christians cause for a chuckle. It may have a sinister ring to them; but in Germany, of course, the word “hell” has another meaning. It signifies bright or light. Hell loves it: “It’s a name nobody forgets.”
It is also a fitting description for this boy genius who first came to the United States three years ago, astounding audiences with his mastery of the instrument deemed outdated by the praise-band adulators.
When he tours the country playing Bach or Cesar Franck, kids treat him like a rock star. “They throw stuffed animals at me. They find out where I am staying and then call my room,” he said in an interview in New York where he pursues a bachelor’s degree in music at the prestigious Juilliard School.
So how does he fit into America’s worship war? Well, he sometimes serves as bait for a winning program designed to elicit in teen-agers an interest in learning to play the organ. Here he is, a real boy with a love for roller blades and Harley Davidson motorbikes, jesting, playing, partying with 13- to 18-year olds who are attending intensive weeklong summer seminars called Pipe Organ Encounter, or POE.
Five times a year, Thomashowers Guild organizes these encounters on different colleges in the U.S. and Canada. Outstanding organists introduce anywhere from 25 to 40 young participants, all of whom have already had piano lessons, to their instrument.
There are guest recitals. There is a hymn festival, there’s a tour of an organ factory, and there are ice cream specials. Felix Hell said he had a great time eating pizza with prospects for his art in Rochester, Minn., although, unlike them, he was bone-tired.
“I had rehearsed all night prior to my performance,” he remembered. “I had pumped myself full of caffeine and Mountain Dew, and when I stopped to rest for a while, I heard my father snore somewhere in a pew in that empty church. So I played again to drown him out. My father may be a snorer, but I am louder.”
Hans-Friedrich Hell, 58, a mechanical engineer from Frankenthal in the Palatinate, crisscrosses the Atlantic constantly to act as his son’s agent while still pursuing his own career. He had discovered Felix’s talent when the boy was seven. With the greatest ease, Felix learned to play the piano. “When my father took me to an organ recital, I knew: that was MY instrument.” Four years and three teachers later, Felix was invited to play at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York City, a mid-town sanctuary famous for both its jazz ministry and its annual Basically Bach series. “The next year I was invited back to New York, and then I won a scholarship from Juilliard,” the prestigious music school.
At 14, Felix Hell was a New Yorker, a student simultaneously at Juilliard and the Professional Children’s School, a private institution with small classes that specializes in teaching gifted young people like Felix.
At the same time he is an organ intern at Saint Peter’s Church where he was confirmed and where after most Sunday services he responds with a beaming grin to the uproarious applause after his postludes.
“I love this applause,” he said, “It keeps me going. Sometimes I do wonder, though, how I manage. I am rehearsing at least four hours every day and eight or more before a concert. I give 50 recitals per year all over America, and in Germany and even Russia; my mother is Russian.”
He has played America’s most important organs already, including the one in the world’s biggest church, the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in New York. “It wasn’t the best of instruments, mind you, it had bats and water in its pipes.”
At his high school, Felix is an A student. Still, he finds time to play. “I am now working on my pilot’s license. I think I’ll have it by the end of the summer.”
Does he have time for a girlfriend, too? “I did. She lives in Pennsylvania. But then she became a Lacrosse champion and had to train all the time, and I always have to rehearse. So we have had to break up for the time being.”
This fall, Felix Hell will move to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where there are never more than four students per organ class. There he will continue to study under John Weaver, one of the world’s most important organists, who has been teaching him until now at Juilliard.
Two years from now, Felix Hell, who has already recorded four CDs, will receive his bachelor’s degree simultaneously with his high school diploma. “Then I’ll go for my master’s and after that for my doctorate,” he said.
What is driving him? “Playing the organ gives you a wonderful feeling of power. I become an entirely different person when I sit down at that console. I feel as if I were on fire, I feel totally free.
“This is a gift from God, and it is my duty to eventually teach others that they also have gifts from God and should acknowledge them.”
So friends of praise bands watch out: In America’s worship war, there is a wunderkind named Hell determined to show you the light.