These resources are prodigious.  The compass of the organ far surpasses that of all the instruments of the orchestra.  The violin notes alone reach the same height, but with little carrying power.  As for the lower tones, there is no competitor of the thirty-two-foot pipes, which go two octaves below the violoncello’s low C. Between the pianissimo which almost reaches the limit where sound ceases and silence begins, down to a range of formidable and terrifying power, every degree of intensity can be obtained from this magical instrument.  The variety of its timbre is broad.  There are flute stops of various kinds; tonal stops that approximate the timbre of stringed instruments; stops for effecting changes in which each note, formed from several pipes, bring out simultaneously its fundamental and harmonic sounds; stops which serve to imitate the instruments of the orchestra, such as the trumpet, the clarinet, and the cremona (an obsolete instrument with a timbre peculiar to itself) and the bassoon.  There are celestial voices of several kinds, produced by combinations of two simultaneous stops which are not tuned in perfect unison.  Then we have the famous Vox Humana, a favorite with the public, which is alluring even though it is tremulous and nasal, and we have the innumerable combinations of all these different stops, with the gradations that may be obtained through indefinite commingling of the tones of this marvellous palette.

Add to all this the continual breathing of the monster’s lungs which gives the sounds an incomparable and inimitable steadiness.  Human beings were used for a long time to fill these lungs—­blowers working away with hands and feet.  We do much better now.  The great organ in Albert Hall, London, is supplied with air by steam which assures the organist an inexhaustible supply.  Other instruments use gas engines which are more manageable.  Then, there is the hydraulic system, which is very powerful and easily used, for one has only to pull out a plug to set the bellows in motion.

These mechanical systems, however, are not entirely free from accidents.  I discovered that fact when I was concluding the first part of the Adagio in Liszt’s great Fantaisie in the beautiful Victoria Hall in Geneva.  The pipe which brought in the water burst and the organ was mute.  I have always thought, perhaps wrongly, that malice had something to do with the accident.

This Liszt Fantaisie is the most extraordinary piece for the organ there is.  It lasts forty minutes and the interest is sustained throughout.  Just as Mozart in his Fantaisie et Sonate in C minor foresaw the modern piano, so Liszt, writing this Fantaisie more than half a century ago, appears to have foreseen the instrument of a thousand resources which we have to-day.