I wanted to play the organ and I suppose I wasn't interested in the day‐by‐day routine.” “As a matter of fact, I was fired from my church in London. “I instinctively wanted to come to America,” he said recently. Biggs first came to the United States in 1929, as an accompanist for a Welsh singer. who started him on his career as an organist by asking him to prepare a recital in London's Queen's Hall on two days' notice. His teachers included the conductor Sir Henry Wood. Awarded a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London, he eventually won highest honors in organ, harmony, counterpoint and piano. During his first two years in college, he studied electrical engineering, but then decided that becoming a musician was more important. He was born Edward George PowerBiggs in Westcliff, England, on March 29, 1906. Oh, he had a public‐bedamned attitude, but so do most organists.” Nero played it, which is greatly to his credit. The organ is among the most ancient of instruments. I advise my pupils to mix with other sorts of musicians, never with organists. “The present device cheapens the hall and ruins its image as a place of excellence.”Ībout organists, he once said that they “are often considered to be on the lunatic fringe of musicians, probably because they hang around churches all the time. In discussing just such an instrument that had been installed in Carnegie Hall three years ago, he said. He was very serious, however, in denouncing the encroachment of electronic organs in churches and concert halls. but he was an extremely witty conversationalist, and there was frequently a twinkle in his eye when he made an ironic statement. Biggs outwardly retained a British reserve and dignity all his life. Quincy Porter, Alec Templeton and Benjamin Britten.Įnglish born, Mr. For his broadcasts, he commissioned pieces from Walter Piston, Roy Harris. which he premiered with the Boston Symphony under Serge Koussevitzky in 1938. He had Leo Sowerby, the American composer, write an organ concerto. Biggs was not only a proponent of the works of the old masters. “Wouldn't want to record there, at night,” he added. In some of the churches, he said in an interview, “we had to record at night, because the crowds and motor scooters made so much noise in the daytime.” But he also noted that the Trondheim Cathedral in Norway had a ghost.
He once recalled asking the caretaker of a church in Strasbourg if Mozart had performed there. He sought out the organs that such composers as Bach, Handel and Mozart played on to record their music on those instruments. Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, West and East Germany, Holland, Austria, Italy and Spain. Biggs had been exploring the old organs of Europe, primarily for recording purposes, and he probably knew more about them than anyone else. In time, they were so well known that his name became a household word.
Beginning in 1942, and for the next 16 years, he broadcast weekly recitals on the instrument over a CBS coast‐to‐coast network. The campaign to popularize organ music began in earnest in 1937, when Donald Harrison installed an experimental small organ modeled on classic examples in the Germanic Museum at Harvard. Through his concert tours, weekly recitals over Columbia Broadcasting System's coast‐to‐coast network and recordings-more than 50 are listed in the current Schwann catalogue of records and tapes -he reached millions of listeners, persuading them of the glories of organ music and of its authentic performance. Biggs was a dominant figure in this country in arousing interest in serious organ music and in changing the style of its performance. He was 70 years old.įrom the late 1930's on, Mr. Power Biggs, noted organist, died on Thursday afternoon in Deaconess Hospital, Boston, following an operation for bleeding ulcers.
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