Henry Willis - The Foremost Victorian Organ Builder

The Foremost Victorian Organ Builder

The Exhibition organ led to the contract for St George's Hall, Liverpool, where the virtuosic playing of W T Best drew large crowds, and also spread the fame of Willis as a builder still further. In a long career stretching to the end of the Nineteenth Century, Willis subsequently built the organs at the Alexandra Palace, the Albert Hall, and St Paul's Cathedral. Of the approximately 1,000 organs he built or re-built, were the cathedral instruments at Truro, Salisbury, Carlisle, Exeter, Canterbury, Lincoln, Durham, Glasgow, Wells, Gloucester, and Hereford. In addition there were a large number of concert and parish church organs of note, including the organ at Windsor Castle. The last major instrument which he personally supervised was at St Bees Priory in 1899, which he voiced himself, although approaching his 80th year.

Read more about this topic:  Henry Willis

Famous quotes containing the words foremost, victorian, organ and/or builder:

    Tallulah [Bankhead] was the foremost naughty girl of her era but, in those days, “naughty” meant piquant, whereas values have so changed that now, in the 1970s, it generally means nauseating.
    Anita Loos (1888–1981)

    Apart from letters, it is the vulgar custom of the moment to deride the thinkers of the Victorian and Edwardian eras; yet there has not been, in all history, another age ... when so much sheer mental energy was directed toward creating a fairer social order.
    Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)

    What we commonly call man, the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself. Him we do not respect, but the soul, whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Nature is a self-made machine, more perfectly automated than any automated machine. To create something in the image of nature is to create a machine, and it was by learning the inner working of nature that man became a builder of machines.
    Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)