Organists and Organ Playing in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium
"Highly recommended ... the story of a remarkable renaissance." -Choice "Orpha Ochse has ... concentrated more on the personalities, the institutions, or the relations between the Church and its employees than on the music itself. The choice is perfectly justifiable, and one simply must recommend this highly coherent and well-illustrated book... --L'Orgue "Even the well-informed reader will find a number of surprises. Who knows, for example, that Fryderyk Chopin played the organ for a funeral service and that Lefebrure-Wely, in turn, played the great pianist and composer's Preludes for his funeral at the Madeleine? The abundance of details, we should add, does nothing to obscure the architectural clarity of this book." --Ton van Eck in La Flute harmonique "Now Ms. Ochse has succeeded in producing still another landmark work... Although the work is extraordinarily well documented, the prose retains a narrative quality througout, at times even taking on the character of good storytelling." --Agnes Armstrong in The American Organist "This book is a success story from beginning to end, both from the point of view of the subject matter ... and in the manner of its presentation." --James B. Hartman in The Diapason " ... in Organists and Organ Playing in Nineteenth-Century France and Belgium, the American musicoligist Orpha Ochse provides not just an authoritative and thorough survey of the period, ... but also shows how the changing fortunes of organists and their newly built instruments relfected the social and political upheavals of the time... an absorbing achievement."--Times Literary Supplement, 26 April, 02