Andrew Unsworth performs Louis Vierne’s “Carillon de Westminster” on the Aeolian-Skinner Organ in the Salt Lake Tabernacle on Temple Square (Salt Lake City, Utah).

Louis Vierne (1870-1937) had learned piano as a child, but experienced something of a creative epiphany when he heard César Franck play the organ. Vierne continued music studies with Franck and also with Charles-Marie Widor, whose “organ symphonies” opened new vistas of musical possibility in organ composition for Vierne.

The organ music of Widor, Vierne, and the other French Romantic organ composers was profoundly influenced by the designs of the renowned French organ builder Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, who created instruments that were able to more easily negotiate changes in sound color and dynamics, like a symphony orchestra. Cavaillé-Coll’s most famous instruments from the middle of the 19th century include the organs installed in Paris’s Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Basilicas of Saint-Denis, Sainte-Clotilde, and Sacré-Cœur, and the Church of Saint-Sulpice (which remained the largest pipe organ in France until the late 20th century). Vierne began his professional organ career as an assistant to Widor at Saint-Sulpice, and in the organ class at the Paris Conservatoire. He was appointed titular organist at Notre-Dame de Paris in 1900, a position he retained until his death (at the organ console) in 1937.

One of Vierne’s best-known works is his “Carillon de Westminster,” a virtuoso organ solo published in 1927 as one of his “Pièces de fantasie,” Op. 54. According to some reports, this piece arose from an improvisation performed by Vierne during a 1924 recital in Westminster Cathedral, London, for which the English organ-builder Henry Willis hummed a familiar theme for the organist: the chime of the famous clock tower at London’s Palace of Westminster. Either Willis (who had installed the organ in Westminster Cathedral) hummed the chime tune for Vierne incorrectly, or Vierne misremembered the chime upon his later return to France, or (more likely), he simply altered this theme to suit his musical purposes. In any case, the second “quarter” of the chime in Vierne’s thrilling “Carillon” differs from the clock-tower version.

The “Carillon de Westminster” is one of the most frequently performed of Vierne’s works for solo organ.

Piping Up! is an online series of concerts and performances by the organists serving on Temple Square in Salt Lake City, Utah, sponsored and presented by The Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square.


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