Virgil Fox (The Dish)
An Irreverent Biography of the Great American Organist
by Richard Torrence and Marshall Yaeger. based on a Memoir by Ted Alan Worth with 17 contributions. 432pp; paperback: 132mm x 215mm; 65 b&w photos; Commissioned by The Virgil Fox Society, published by Circles International, May 2001. US$30 plus postage. Orders: The Organ Literature Foundation (Karl Henry Baker). or: www.organarts.com. The Virgil Fox Society website: www.virgilfox.com

“I am controversial as hell,” said Virgil Fox in a Time magazine interview in the early 1970s. “My more conservative colleagues regard me as an infidel. They say I’m a showman, and I’m proud to be one.” While most of Fox’s “more conservative colleagues” gave a few recitals a year, Fox performed around eighty. Half of those were usually in a reasonably conservative form, while the rest—from the time following the success of the 1970 “Heavy Organ” concert at Fillmore East in New York—were with a light show usually associated with rock bands and where he frequently played on electronic instruments.

Virgil Fox was born in Illinois in 1912 and was recognised as a child prodigy. At the age of ten he was already an established church organist, playing his first recital at fourteen in Cincinnati. By seventeen he was the unanimous winner of the biennial contest of the National Federation of Music Clubs, the first organist ever chosen.

He studied with Wilhelm Middelschulte, the organist of the Catholic cathedral in Chicago and won a scholarship to the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. At twenty he played five recitals from memory, completed eighteen examinations with the highest marks in his class and became the first one-year student in the history of the conservatory to graduate with Peabody’s highest honour, the Artist’s Diploma, before studying with Marcel Dupré in Paris. Six years later, he returned to Peabody to become head of the Organ Department and to serve as organist of Baltimore’s Brown Memorial Church.

After being discharged from the Army Air Force in 1946, he was appointed organist at New York City’s famed Riverside Church where he served for nineteen years until he resigned in 1965 in order to undertake a full-time concert career. It is here in the early 1950s where Ted Alan Worth’s memoir begins. While at Riverside, Fox had already established himself as a major force on the concert circuit dividing his time between his Sunday responsibilities in New York and performing two or three concerts during the week around the country. Worth is a teenage chorister and organ student of Richard Purvis at Grace Cathedral. On meeting his organ idol during Fox’s preparations for a recital in San Francisco, he immediately establishes a friendship that will develop into a life-long association, taking him to Peabody and then to New York to study with Fox.

The narrative gives insightful glimpses into Fox and his immediate circle of protégés’ (whom he called his “chicks”) private and public worlds. While Fox’s career and Worth’s coming of musical age are intertwined throughout the text, Torrence and Yaeger (who were Fox’s manager and promotional consultant for many years) interpolate Worth’s writing with comments from associates who knew Fox during his life. His Californian physician, Dr Bill Armstrong, assistant organist at Riverside, Frederick Swann, and student Carlo Curley, are among those who expand on Worth’s account and recurrently offer humorous commentary on Fox’s frequently eccentric behaviour and unconventional rehearsal routines.

Of particular interest are the references to the many instruments that Fox played and inaugurated, including several Aeolian-Skinner instruments whose tonal design he oversaw: the huge Riverside organ, the home organ in his Englewood, New Jersey mansion and the 1962 inaugural recital of the four-manual Philharmonic (afterwards Avery Fisher) Hall organ at the Lincoln Centre, New York, that was later injudiciously removed supposedly to improve the venue’s acoustics!

Fox-as-innovator is apparent in the sections covering the tonal design and his championing of electronic instruments including the first Rodgers touring organ “Black Beauty”, his four-manual touring Allen organ and the large five-manual Rodgers in Carnegie Hall. Fox’s death prevented him from hearing the reality of his magnum opus tonal design for the mammoth almost 300-rank Crystal Cathedral hybrid ex-Lincoln Centre Skinner-Ruffatti. This was left for his “artistic heir”, Ted Worth, to complete. The Italian organ building firm Ruffatti emerged as a major builder on the American scene due to Fox and Worth’s endorsement of their work, having many notable installations in the United States including the Catholic cathedrals of San Francisco and Atlanta; The Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California; Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and the large organ for the San Francisco Symphony installed in Davies Symphony Hall.

Fox’s recordings were also trend-setters. From the direct-to-disc, made in the 1930s for RCA Victor and throughout the 40s—60s, he always sought out the most advanced recording techniques. In 1977 he began an historic series of recordings, the first commercial digital tape recordings made in the United States. Despite recuperating from surgery, Fox eagerly undertook the most strenuous of recording projects; direct-to-disc to celebrate his fiftieth consecutive concert season.

In his long and brilliant career, Virgil Fox gave recitals on practically every important organ in the world and always entirely from memory. He was the first non-German artist to perform the works of J S Bach at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. He played recitals at Westminster, Durham and Lincoln cathedrals; King’s College, Cambridge; Notre Dame and Ste. Clothilde, Paris and the Marienkirche in Lubeck. In 1973 he performed a sold-out recital in the 3000-seat Concert Hall of the Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC.

Worth notes that Fox is credited with bringing the music of Bach to many young people with an innovative and exciting style, although he often drew adverse criticism from some of his colleagues in the organ world and from those music critics who found his approach too flamboyant. Fox retorted that musical purists are “barnacles on the ship of music”. At many of his concerts he would commence by stating: “I have something marvellous to share. If you come across, I’ll come across!” and that was so important about Fox—communication is what he lived for, “audiences on their feet screaming for more”. Four of his recordings were best-sellers.

He once said in The New York Times that he didn’t care how Bach played, because we have different sounds in our ears today and have lived different lives. He eschewed the neo-Baroque organ movement calling them “museum piece shriek boxes”, and dismissing their proponents as “tracker backers” and “Baroque boys”. This did not dampen his enthusiasm for Bach or the other composers he highly revered: Franck, Vierne, Liszt, Brahms, Mendelssohn and the French organ composers of the Romantic era.

Fox’s sell-out concerts demonstrated how large an audience could be for the organ when organists who love the instrument and who could impart their love and joy to an audience presented it in an exciting, imaginative way. His dogged fortitude to play a major recital with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra only days before his death from cancer in 1980 is testimony to his will to perform until the very end.

While extremely informative and witty with a style that makes for a good page-turner, this memoir still successfully covers the whole spectrum of emotions. There is pathos and there is triumph, there is the celebration of music made by a prodigious musician, there are the misfortunes in private and business matters and there is the frustration at medical ineptitude. Most of all, there is the sense of an unyielding veneration and a celebration of Fox as mentor and the recognition of a musician who was arguably one of the world’s greatest organists ever.

The text of 432 pages and 65 photographs, plus a comprehensive life history of Fox as an appendix, is an admirable integration of the contributions of other writers into Worth’s narrative. Yaeger and Torrence’s preface and conclusion that frame the account are as poignant as Worth’s text. Yet, it is a credit to the editing that Worth’s voice still dominates from beginning to end, despite Yaeger’s admission that he changed all but ten sentences of the original text.

While the biography leaves little to the imagination, the candid approach gives the reader a deeper insight into the motivating forces behind two enormous lives lived to their fullest. Despite a few small errors (pertaining mainly to English organs and organists), the text faithfully documents major signposts in both Fox and Worth’s lives. There is little information regarding Fox’s early career with very brief references made to his teachers, study in Europe and time as Head of Organ Studies at Peabody, as the focus of the book centres truly on the remarkable interrelationship between Worth and Fox and the tremendous faculties that both brought to music in their different but unique way. In the end. the chronicle documents the foibles and failings of both men. Worth, like Fox, was a great talent who was, in Yaeger’s observation, “reduced to human dimensions by love.”

Considering Fox’s musical influence on the world, Torrence concludes, “Taking the larger view of one of the most remarkable musicians of his time I regret that too many people were offended by a showman when they should have been dazzled by a genius.”

Greg Cunningham