The organ at Buckingham Palace was
installed when Queen Victoria
added this enormous space which
she called the 'Ball and Concert Room'
in 1855. But it wasn't a new instrument
at that point.
It had first been commissioned for the
Prince Regent, future George IV, for his
enormous Music Room at Brighton Pavilion
and the original maker, Henry Cephas
Lincoln, one of the greatest makers of
the day, completed it in 1818.
But of course Brighton Pavilion by the
mid-19th century ceased to be used as a
royal palace. Queen Victoria sold the
Pavilion to the Corporation of the Town,
removing all its contents to London. And
it was in a way part of the deal in the
extension of Buckingham Palace that as
much of the Pavilion should be reused
here, a sort of royal recycling.
As part of that, the organ builders
Gray & Davidson installed the organ in a
new and much grander style in a case
designed especially for it by Sir James
Pennethorne here in the Ballroom.
The pipes that you see in front of the
case here were added in the 1850s when
the organ was moved up from Brighton
to London. The interesting thing about
these pipes, however, is that they serve
no purpose other than decorative quality.
Another rather interesting part of this
organ are the bellows of the organ.
So the bellows of the organ are the
organ's lungs. So they're filled from a
pump which, back before electricity, was
hand-pumped in the back of the organ.
Now in the 1990s when William Drake
renovated the organ back to the 1850s
standard, the only addition that he added
was an electric motor to the original pump
I suppose people naturally think of
an organ as something that you'll find in
a church or a cathedral to provide the
music there. But until the 19th century
certainly, all grand houses and certainly
palaces, would be equipped with an organ
to provide not church music but to
accompany chamber music. Certainly here
at Buckingham House in the 18th century
that was the case. And later on, as here
in the Ballroom, a sort of grand
orchestral and choral concerts of the
kind that Queen Victoria and Prince
Albert liked to stage here in their palace.
Lincoln's organ was brought from Brighton
in 56 packing crates in 1847. It was first
of all taken to Kensington Palace for
storage and then rebuilt and installed
here by Gray & Davidson in an entirely new
design and what you see is really the
remains of the design for this room by Sir
James Pennethorne and Ludwig Grüner,
Prince Albert's art adviser. The most
beautiful polychrome style with statues
emblematic of music and noticeably at the
top little gilded medallions of Handel.
Handel, although he died in the mid-18th
century, remains the sort of composer, the
court composer in perpetuity, of the royal
family. So whenever you have an organ it
seems invariably his image is on it.
For Prince Albert, the organ was the one
instrument to turn to, as he put it, 'to
express one's true feelings'. And he did
that in all the royal palaces where he
had instruments specially installed.
So not just this one at Buckingham Palace
but another in his own private apartments
here. I think it was actually called the
Organ Room. Another Gray & Davidson
instrument was installed there. And it
was at that instrument that the famous
interlude took place with Felix
Mendelssohn when he came to the palace
and played with them and listened to the
two of them, Prince Albert playing the
organ of course and Queen Victoria singing
an Aria.
Every organ is different and unique
in its own way. They have their own
different characteristics and their own
sounds. And this is no exception.
Now before me you see three different sets
of keyboards, which are called manuals as
well as these things at the side that we
can pull in and out, which are called stops. And
they are the different sounds that we
hear coming from inside the organ.
And on top of the manuals and the stops
we also have pedals down here which we
play with our feet. So it's very much an
athletic event.
We've got available to us, different
sounds for different manuals that
we can use together. For example,
if I play on the bottom manual we can have
sounds like this
And on the top manual I could have a
completely different sound like this
But the kind of main manual that is played
most often on the organ and is the biggest
is in this case the middle one, called the
'Great'. For example,
A lot of people know the organ as the king
of all instruments because quite a lot of
instruments that exist are present here.
If I was to pull out the trumpet
So you can see there are many different
sounds that an organist can play,
play with and blend together. I always
think of it as an artist painting a picture.
So then if we start combining all the
different sounds together we can have
something really quite stunning.