10,000 Philadelphians gathered to bid the Wanamaker Organ a tearful farewell. Its silence will loom over the city.
You could walk into the Macy's to buy boots and walk out lifted up by Handel, Sibelius, or Sir Arthur Sullivan. That’s art serving its highest purpose.
Snapshots of humanity from Saturday’s all-day “farewell” to the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ:
A couple quietly cradling each other during a transcription of the slow movement from Mozart’s Clarinet Concerto.
The woman who, several minutes after the end of “Great Gate of Kiev” from Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, was still wiping back the tears.
An audience erupting into explosive applause and cheers after a “fantasy” of patriotic tunes that no doubt left many assessing the state of the country.
The musicians and others who put together Saturday’s event at Macy’s on the eve of the store’s closing knew that there was just one thing they needed to do to make the case for the organ as integral to the city’s social fabric: Play it.
Well over 10,000 listeners came out for the string of eight recitals over more than nine hours, an extraordinary outpouring of love. No doubt the motivations for attending varied. There were organ aficionados and department store nostalgists. Many said they didn’t want to miss what they sensed would be a historic event.
But the day was even more than that. It was a rare, beautiful gathering of an incredibly diverse group of people remembering what it feels like to all be in community experiencing the same thing.
The Wanamaker Grand Court once again showed that it’s a civic space in the middle of the city without equal — free, accessible to anyone, and a place where the vast and ornate architecture makes you stand a little taller. The organ provides the emotional fuel.
And now both the Grand Court and its resident musical instrument will prove their worth by their absence. As of this week, Philadelphia has lost its free, nearly daily recitals, and the city won’t be the same until they resume.
It’s true that Philadelphians do not want for great music. The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society and Philadelphia Orchestra have few peers anywhere in terms of quality and ambition, and dozens of other music groups fill out an incredibly lively musicscape. But art palaces like the Kimmel Center and other venues are largely patronized by those who self-identify as arts consumers. There’s an important egalitarian aspect to the Wanamaker Organ recitals; they are a free, aleatory experience, a gift of surprising generosity in parsimonious times (at least, where it involves giving toward the public benefit).
You walk into the store to buy a coffee maker or pair of desert boots, and you walk out a half-hour later lifted up by Handel, Sibelius, or Sir Arthur Sullivan. That’s art serving its highest purpose — not sequestered in a museum or concert hall, but woven into the real world where it can best regulate perceptions of what’s important in life, not to mention spread a little pixie dust of delight.
People swoon over the bigness of the instrument and its superlatives, and rightly so. But the reason for its emotional power is its range of colors and special effects as summoned by skillful hands.
Those hands embraced multitudes Saturday with particular deftness. Each organist chose pieces designed to speak to a different kind of listener.
Carmina Burana, excerpted by organist Jeremy Flood, captured the choral crowd and anyone who has ever heard a car commercial or movie about war.
Some pieces were entrance ramps; I’d never heard Marcel Dupré's mysterious, fairylike Prelude and Fugue in G Minor, but after Mark Bani played it, I left determined to go down the rabbit hole of the composer’s work.
I’m convinced that Peter Richard Conte’s “Love Trio and Finale” from Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier stopped time and space in the store Saturday evening, its harmonic transformations so touching that, at both its most poignant moments and the astonishing climax, nothing else in the world seemed to matter.
And Bach. More Bach, always Bach.
The future of all this is uncertain. New York developer TF Cornerstone has said it plans to keep the instrument in place, though it has not commented on what that means — how often it would be played, or starting when.
But what’s notable about this juncture in the life of our Wanamaker Organ is that it’s not the classic story of an institution in crisis. This is not about obsolescence or irrelevance.
And as Saturday showed, it is not about apathy. All buildings need people and a sense of community and common purpose. The lure of the Wanamaker Grand Court and Organ are a lifeline to the building’s next incarnation for anyone smart enough to recognize it.