01 March 2012

St Bavo Church II

Choir screen and organ, St Bavo Church, Haarlem

Yesterday I showed you a photo from the exterior of the St Bavo Church. Today I have one of the interior. I took this photo through the choir screen in the direction of the organ.

The church organ you can see on the background was built in the 1730s, by the famous German organ builder Christiaan Müller. At the time, it was the largest church organ in the world. Many famous organists played on it, including Mozart (at the age of ten), Mendelssohn and Händel. It is also the organ that Herman Melville mentioned in Moby Dick, when he talked about the inside of the mouth of a whale: Seeing all these colonnades of bone so methodically ranged about, would you not think you were inside of the great Haarlem organ, and gazing upon its thousand pipes?

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