Organ Masterworks

Eddie Zheng

Eddie will perform on the Classical Cape May 2025-2026 season on November 2 at 4:00pm at the Episcopal Church of the Advent in Cape May. The one-hour concert is free with a reception following to meet the artist. 

Toward the Light: Bach, Wagner, and Liszt at the Edge of the Sacred
By Eddie Zheng

I’m coming to Cape May to play an organ program that explores how three composers—Bach, Wagner, and Liszt—write music of anticipation and yearning for the organ. From the Advent chorales of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland to the operatic finale of Tristan und Isolde, and the vast symphonic vision of Liszt’s Ad nos, ad salutarem undam, each work offers its own vision of light through the organ.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) – Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659–661

In 1740, some thirty years after Bach’s Weimar period—his most fertile time for organ composition, producing the great toccatas, preludes and fugues, chorale preludes, and concerto transcriptions—Bach, now in Leipzig, turned back to these earlier works with renewed mastery. Seeking to refine and preserve his organ legacy, he assembled and reworked eighteen of his finest chorale preludes into a collection later known as the Great Eighteen. Among them, BWV 659–661, all based on the Advent chorale Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (“Come now, Savior of the Heathen”), form a musical triptych that reveals the expressive and theological breadth of his mature style.

Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland,
Der Jungfrauen Kind erkannt!
Dass sich wundre alle Welt,
Gott solch' Geburt ihm bestellt.

Now come, Saviour of the gentiles,
recognised as the child of the Virgin,
so that all the world is amazed
God ordained such a birth for him.

BWV 659, one of Bach’s most poignant works (made especially mainstream through Busoni’s romantic transcription for piano) opens with a solitary walking bass that hints at the coming melody. One by one, two more voices enter, weaving a contrapuntal tapestry before the ornamented chorale finally appears above. Folded within elaborate arabesques—each note of the chorale is ornamented with turns, suspensions, and runs. Unusually, each chorale phrase is presented clearly about 3/4ths of the way before the line breaks into a flight of sequences, finally returning for the final notes of the tune. The piece’s haunting beauty captures the yearning and anticipation of Advent with vocal tenderness.

BWV 660 presents the chorale in a more deliberate, but still ornamented, manner. The tune is more clearly present and supported by two brooding canonic lines in the left hand and pedal that twist and turn against each other in a most interesting texture.

In the rousing and celebratory BWV 661, the hands create toccata like eighth-note motion in full Organo Pleno before the chorale is triumphantly proclaimed in the pedal. This radiant conclusion announces in resounding glory the victory and fulfillment of the arrival of Christ.

Richard Wagner (1813–1833) – Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde (arr. Edwin Lemare, 1865–1934)

Bach’s Nun komm triptych represents one Baroque context of text painting—music shaped by the emotion and imagery of its sacred text. Generations later, Wagner would transform that same expressive aim into an entirely new language. His operas brought an unprecedented command of texture, orchestration, harmonic alchemy, and motivic development through his leitmotiv technique, creating the cohesive Gesamtkunstwerk—a “total work of art.”

Tristan und Isolde (1854) stands as the pinnacle of these techniques. Its opening “Tristan chord” introduces a harmony that never quite resolves, its tension prolonged and transformed over nearly four hours until the final bars. The orchestra itself becomes the true protagonist: no longer mere accompaniment, but the continuous current of drama and emotion. Every transition phrase, every swell of texture carries expressive weight, merging seamlessly with the vocal line. The interplay between orchestra and voice, and the constant evolution of melodic motives (as Bach wove into his chorales), reveal Wagner’s genius for building unceasing waves of sound and psychological depth.

In the finale, the “Love-Death Scene” (Liebestod), Isolde finds the lifeless body of Tristan and becomes entranced by the vision of love fulfilled only through death or transfiguration. The harmony at first refuses closure, surging ever higher, before finally yielding to the luminous B major chord—the long-sought resolution.

Transcribing such a work for organ leaves much room for interpretation. The organ’s sound is inherently three-dimensional: its timbres, like those of an orchestra, lie across a horizontal plane—strings, flutes, reeds, brass—and vertically across pitch, from the lowest 32-foot stops (beneath the double bass) to the highest piccolo tones. Registration—the organist’s choice of stops—thus offers a true three-dimensional palette to match both the timbre and energy of orchestral and vocal forces.

Touring organist, composer, and transcriber Edwin Lemare is remembered today largely through his virtuosic arrangements of Wagner’s operas. An organist using both hands across two or three manuals (often two at once with the thumbs) and the feet for the pedal line can sustain at most a melody, several inner voices, and a bass—far fewer than Wagner’s immense orchestral texture. Lemare’s gift lay in consolidation and hierarchy: distilling what was essential while retaining momentum and emotional scope.

This culture of transcription emerged in early twentieth-century England, when full symphonic performances were rare and recording technology still primitive. The great civic-hall organs of Liverpool, Leeds, and Birmingham became the people’s concert halls, offering audiences orchestral grandeur through master transcriptions like Lemare’s Liebestod.

Franz Liszt (1811–1886) – Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam”

Four years before Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, in Weimar, Liszt—Wagner’s close friend, artistic ally, and lifelong supporter—composed his monumental Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam.”  Saint-Saëns called it “the most extraordinary organ work in existence.” 

Already immersed in developing the symphonic poem, Liszt drew his material from a chorale in Giacomo Meyerbeer’s 1849 opera Le Prophète, in which a humble Dutchman, Jean de Leyde, is manipulated by radical Anabaptists into declaring himself a prophet-king, leading a violent uprising that ends in destruction. The titular chorale, heard at the opera’s opening, declares:

Ad nos, ad salutarem undam, iterum venite miseri, venite peccatores, ad nos, ad salutarem undam — To us, to the saving waters, come again, you wretched ones, come, sinners, to us, to the healing stream.

This searching melody, rising and falling in a symmetrical, wave-like contour, forms the foundation of the entire work and recurs throughout its three vast sections.

The Fantasy begins like an approaching storm, its dark rumblings giving way to a turbulent, improvisatory sequence of fanfares, pedal trills, and sweeping keyboard textures. It subsides into a soliloquy-like Adagio in F-sharp major, a tritone away from the opening C minor, where the theme returns in lyrical, impassioned variations—transformed from a call for redemption into an expression of love and spiritual surrender. A ferocious coda of pedal virtuosity launches the fugue, its subject a sharply angular reshaping of the original theme.

In the final measures, the chorale reappears in C major, blazing in the full sonority of the organ—music that seems to gaze directly into divine light, surrendering the human for the transcendent.

Complete with the pianistic brilliance of Liszt’s solo works, the orchestral scope of his symphonic poems, and the devotional fervor that would lead him to take minor orders fifteen years later, Ad nos reveals Liszt’s vision of the organ as a truly symphonic instrument—one he revered throughout his life.