Organ Masterworks with Eddie Zheng
Organ Masterworks recital at the Episcopal Church of the Advent, Cape May, NJ — March 8, 2026, 4:00–5:00 PM
I look forward to being in Cape May in March to play an organ program that includes, among other works, Bach’s chorale Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland and Liszt’s Ad nos, ad salutarem undam.
~Eddie Zheng, organist
Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) – Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, BWV 659–661
During his Weimar years (1708–1717), Bach composed many of his most celebrated organ works, including toccatas, preludes and fugues, chorale preludes, and concerto transcriptions. Some thirty years later, in Leipzig around 1740, he returned to this earlier repertoire 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. BWV 659, based on the Advent chorale Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (“Come now, Savior of the Heathen”), 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, Savior of the gentiles,
recognized as the child of the Virgin,
so that all the world is amazed
God ordained such a birth for him.
BWV 659 is one of Bach’s most poignant works. It opens with a solitary walking bass that hints at the coming melody. Two more voices enter, weaving a contrapuntal tapestry before the ornamented chorale finally appears above. Each note of the chorale is ornamented with turns, suspensions, and runs, folded within elaborate arabesques. Unusually, each chorale phrase is presented clearly about 3/4ths of the way through before the line breaks into a flight of sequences, before finally returning for the final notes of the tune. The piece’s haunting beauty captures the yearning and anticipation of Advent with vocal tenderness.
Franz Liszt (1811–1886) – Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam”
Liszt composed his monumental Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” in Weimar in 1850, a century after Bach’s death. 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.
