Edwin Lemare

Jeremy Nicholas celebrates the man who made the organ dance - and "wrote" Moonlight and Roses

Edwin Lemare - somewhat forgotten, but much heard (Photo: Tully Potter Collection)

‘To have a letter printed in The Times is the duty of the distinguished and the ambition of the obscure.’ So wrote the late Bernard Levin. Falling decidedly into the latter category, I finally achieved my ambition with a letter about, of all things, an organist: Edwin Lemare.
A few years earlier, before the Birtian Terror at the BBC and when I was still allowed to make radio programmes for it, I had suggested a feature on Lemare. There were no takers (‘Never heard of him’, ‘An organist? No thanks’ – all the predictable reactions) and so tried another route. Someone told me that one of his daughters, Iris, was still alive and living in the North of England. Surely, someone at Radio 3 or 4 would lend me a tape recorder and let me make a radio feature about her – and her father.

I was too late. Not long afterwards, I read her obituary in The Times. Born in 1902, she died on April 23, 1997 – the first professional female conductor in Britain, the person who gave Britten his first public performance (his Sinfonietta in 1933) and the first woman to conduct the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1936). What caught my eye was the opening of the second paragraph of the obituary: ‘Iris Margaret Elsie Lemare was born in London, the daughter of an organist.’ An organist?! I put pen to paper and wrote in time-honoured fashion to the Editor:

Sir, To describe the father of Iris Lemare as ‘an organist’ is a bit like calling Dr George Carey [the then Archbishop of Canterbury] a member of the Church of England. Miss Lemare’s father, Edwin, was the greatest and most celebrated organist of his day, a composer and the perpetrator of some of the most demanding transcriptions for the instrument that have been written. Recently, his music, long out of fashion, has undergone a revival and has been much recorded; though it must be admitted that he wrote the dullest autobiography I have ever read, wondrously entitled Organs I Have Met.

A few days later, the duty Letters Editor rang. ‘We’ve just read your letter,’ she said in a drawling upmarket voice. ‘We just wanted to check. Is the title of that autobiography genuine?’ ‘Oh yes,’ I replied. ‘I have a copy not two feet from where I’m standing.’ ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘we all think it’s frightfully funny. We’ll publish the letter in a few days’ time.’
Thus it was, thanks entirely to Edwin Lemare, that I finally made it into the hallowed Letters Page – and in the much-prized bottom right hand corner.

But it was to make a serious point about an unjustly forgotten genius. In his day – that’s to say roughly the two decades either side of 1900 – Lemare was a headliner, hailed as the greatest living concert organist. As early as 1893 we find him in the Albert Hall on the same bill as Adelina Patti (the star turn), Charles Santley, Ben Davies and Madame de Pachmann (Vladimir’s wife), being reviewed by George Bernard Shaw: ‘Mr Lemare [...] revelled among the stops of the organ, which are mighty ones and millions, but who does not understand – what organist does? – how very disagreeable are those sudden pianos which are produced by stifling the organ with the swell shutters.’

This was just a year after Lemare had seen the publication of what would be his best known composition, the work by which he is remembered (if at all) today. His Andantino in D flat, written in 1888, was published by Robert Cocks of London in 1892. Lemare was paid a flat fee of three guineas. It sold in its tens of thousands and was requested at every recital he ever gave, the equivalent of Rachmaninov’s C sharp minor Prelude and Paderewski’s ubiquitous Minuet. Its famous melody is played by being ‘thumbed down’, that’s to say while the left hand plays the accompaniment on the swell manual, the fingers of the right hand play the melody on the solo manual while the right hand’s thumb simultaneously stretches down to the great manual to play the melody in parallel sixths. In 1921 two American song writers put words to the Andantino without Lemare’s permission and called it ‘Moonlight and Roses’. It had sold over a million copies by 1925. Only when Lemare threatened legal action did the songwriters reluctantly agree to give the composer a percentage and add his name to the sheet music. And it was only then that Lemare began to make more than the three guineas he had made so far from his ubiquitous composition.