Craig R. Whitney, The New York Times’s assistant managing
editor, proves to be a fully-fledged organist and organ
expert. His other books, which include Spy Trader, an
analysis of Cold War espionage, must be enviable indeed if
they match this impeccably researched, humane guide to “the
king of instruments”—Mozart’s phrase—in our grand-
fathers’
America.

Here, organ history centers on two contemporaneous performers: E. Power Biggs
(1906–1977) and Virgil Fox (1912–1980). These gentlemen loathed each other. Fox
accused Biggs of being dead “from the waist down,” not
specifying whether he meant Biggs’s pedaling or erotic life
(Fox, by contrast, was an overt homosexual whose tombstone is pink).

The English-born Biggs was the musicologist: a devotee of
Teutonic organ scholarship’s anti-Romantic, blandly styled
Orgelbewegung (“Organ Movement”). Biggs proselytized for
Baroque instruments, or
copies thereof, and mechanical—not electropneumatic—key and
pedal action. (To a performer
trained via conventional electropneumatic consoles, a
mechanical-action organ feels like life atop a bucking
bronco.) The Illinois-born Fox was the showman: despising
academic purism (“unadulterated rot!”), he was wild, rapturous,
transcendental. And naughty: he treated his honorary
doctorate as a real one, since “Dr. Fox” always attracted
better restaurant and airline service than Mr. Anything
could.

Think of Biggs as the hedgehog and Fox as—ahem—the fox,
or of Biggs as the organ’s Artur Schnabel (though eschewing
Schnabel’s technical mishaps) and Fox as its Vladimir
Horowitz. Yet even Horowitz never essayed Fox’s feats, from
1970 onwards, of big-tent son et lumière. Amid