Amanda Mole: Hard-Core Classical Music Program at Spreckels Organ Pavilion August 15

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night my husband Charles and I went to the Organ Pavilion in Balboa Park for the eighth in the series of 11 Monday night concerts, this time featuring a woman organist from New England named Amanda Mole – and yes, her name is pronounced like her rodent namesake. She made the virtually inevitable comment that in her home state of Massachusetts it would be inconceivable to have an outdoor pipe organ at all, let alone one used for Sunday afternoon concerts 52 weeks a year. Mole played a hard-core classical program that heavily referenced Johann Sebastian Bach even though she played nothing actually by Bach until her encore (more on that later). She opened with a transcription by 19th century British organist William Thomas Best of the overture to Felix Mendelssohn’s oratorio St. Paul – or Paulus, as it’s known when it’s performed in the original German. (The Church of England authorities who commissioned Mendelssohn to write St. Paul and his other big oratorio, Elijah, were hoping Mendelssohn would be Handel’s successor in writing huge scores for the British church. Alas, unlike Handel, Mendelssohn didn’t speak English, so he composed his oratorios in German and then they had to be translated so British audiences could understand them.) Mole mentioned that Mendelssohn was a superstar in the British musical world in the 1830’s and frequently gave concerts on the organ. She also said that British organs were considerably smaller than German ones at the time, with fewer manuals (only one or two keyboards instead of the three or four that had become standard in Germany) and pedalboards so underpowered that British organists could do little more than just hold their feet down on one note to create a drone effect.

Mendelssohn’s visits to Britain inspired British chorches to expand their organs to accommodate his music, and William Thomas Best became one of the most famous organists of his time for his exploitation of the new possibilities for the instrument. The piece itself was dark and heavy – even if you didn’t know that from the program you could guess it was inspired by something from the Bible – and got the concert off to a fascinating and beautiful start. Mole also told the print-the-legend version of Mendelssohn’s relation to Bach – that Bach’s music was deemed too old-fashioned and forgotten until Mendelssohn dredged up the St. Matthew Passion and gave it its first performance since Bach’s lifetime (and Wagner, being Wagner, complained that he had cut an hour out of the St. Matthew Passion instead of giving it complete, when he should have been praising Mendelssohn for doing it at all) Then came two quieter pieces, including a “Melodia” by German composer Max Reger (1868-1916) that goes wildly against his reputation for densely textured pieces of incredible length. Mole’s favorite piece by Reger is a Fantasy, Variations and Fugue in F-sharp minor that lasts 43 minutes, but the “Melodia” is well under five minutes and very gentle and soft, something like discovering an acoustic track on a Led Zeppelin album. I hadn't realized it before but Reger was a contemporary of Debussy (whose dates were 1862-1918), and though there are some Regerian dissonances in this piece they are quiet and muted. So much so that one member of our party worried about whether people in the back of the Pavilion could hear it.

Mole went straight into the next piece without a break, except for the inevitable applause: a piece by Robert Schumann for pedal piano (a no-longer-extant 19th century hybrid that combines the keyboard and strings of a piano with foot pedals that sound notes, like an organ’s). The piece, which was No. 4 in a set of works for pedal organ which was Schumann’s Opus 56, was called “Innig,” which means “inwardly,” though not surprisingly given Schumann’s ultimate fate (he was institutionalized for mental illness in 1854 and died in the asylum two years later), Schumann’s inner state as expressed in the piece was quite turbulent and not at all the calm, serent stance most people would thnk of as “inward.” Mole delivered a lecture about the Schumann after she’d played it, and also talked about the final piece on the first-set program, a work by Moazrt called Fantasia in F minor which was written for a so-called “musical clock.” This was essentially a giant music box, fully automated, which took up a whole room in the house of one of Mozart’s well-to-do patrons. Not only are none of these contraptions actually extant, there’s only scattered evidence about what they were and what they looked like.

The first piece Mole played after her intermission was a march called “Sortie in B-flat major” by French organist and composer Louis-James A. Lefébure-Wély that was by far the happiest and most “fun” piece on her program. She followed that with Robert Schaub’s transcription of Franz Liszt’s heart-rending tone poem Orpheus – Schaub was a student of Liszt’s and apparently Liszt himself edited the transcription and made some changes. It was a beautiful piece of music that avoided the darker sides of the Orpheus myth – his failure to bring his late wife Eurydice back from the dead and his own fate, torn to pieces by the Bacchantes. After that Mole played the one piece on her program by a living composer, "I, Salamanca” by Guy Bovet (b. 1942, which means she’s no spring chicken), about a legendary woman who went intio a church, knelt down to pray, couldn’t stop crying and finally the people running the church decided her sins must have been so terrible and extensive they could not absolve her on their own authority. And MNole said that to this day she’s not allowed to play this piece in a Romanb Catholic church. The final piece on Mole’s program was an introduction and passacaglia,the first and fourth movements from the Organ Sonata No. 8 by Josef Rheinberger (1839-1901), who was actually born in Lichtenstein (he might be the most famous native Litchtensteinian of all time!) but served out most of his career in Germany and died in Munich. You’re not likely to have heard of him before unless you’re an organ buff, but music critic J. Weston Nicholl in the 1908 Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians called his organ pieces “undoubtedly the most valuable addition to organ music since the time of Mendelssohn. They are characterized by a happy blending of the modern Romantic spirit with masterly counterpoint and dignified organ style.”

Like Mendelssohn, Brahms and Reger, Rheinberger seemed to be asking himself when he wrote for organ, “What would Bach be writing if he were alive today?” So it was appropriate that after a program of music written under Bach’s shadow, Mole chose as her encore a piece by the real Johann Sebastian Bach, the Toccata movement from the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, BWV 564. It was by far the best and most challenging piece she played all night – even though I’d like to hear what she would do with the other movements sometime. Mole told the story of how Bach allegedly walked up to 250 miles through the German countryside to hear Dietrich Buxtehude play his own organ compositions, and she claimed that his employers at a church in Arnstadt gave him a three-week leave of absence but Bach stayed three months. According to Mole, the church authorities at Arnstadt sent Bach a telegram summoning him back and telling him he’d be fired if he didn’t promptly return – which he did, though the telegraph wasn’t invented until 1844, nearly a century after Bach’s death in 1750. (Most likely they sent a letter by special courier.) That comes under the same tall-tales category as the one about Bach’s music allegedly being forgotten after his death until Mendelssohn started reviving it in the 1830’s. One musician who acknowledged Bach’s greatness in between Bach’s death and Mendelssohn’s rediscovery of him was Beethoven, who said of Bach – doing a pun on his name, which is the German word for “brook” – “He should not have been called Brook, but Ocean!” Old legends die hard and it was unfortunate that Amanda Mole chose to spread some of the usual B.S. about Bach, but the sheer power and authority of her playing makes her historical lapses completely forgivable.