Virgil Keel Fox (born Princeton, Illinois May 3, 1912– died Palm Beach, Florida October 25, 1980) was an American organist, known especially for his flamboyant "Heavy Organ" concerts of the music of Bach. These events appealed to audiences in the 1970s who were more familiar with rock 'n' roll music and were staged complete with light shows. His many recordings made on the RCA Victor and Capitol labels, mostly in the 1950s and 1960s, have been remastered and re-released on compact disc in recent years. They continue to be widely available in mainstream music stores.
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Fox, born in Princeton, Illinois to Miles and Birdie Fox, showed musical talent at an early age. He began playing the organ for church services at the age of ten, and made his concert debut in 1926 before an audience of 2500 at Withrow High School, Cincinnati, Ohio. The program included Mendelssohn's Sonata No. 1 in F minor.
From 1926 to 1930, he studied in Chicago, Illinois under German organist-composer Wilhelm Middelschulte. His other principal teachers were Hugh Price, Louis Robert, and Marcel Dupré. He was an alumnus of the Peabody Institute of Music in Baltimore, Maryland, where he became the first student to complete the course for the Artist's Diploma within a year.[1]
Beginning in 1936, Fox was organist at Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore while teaching at Peabody.[1] During August and September, 1938, he played in Great Britain and Germany; Fox was the first non-German organist to perform publicly in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig — a special occasion, since J.S. Bach served as cantor of the Thomaskirche until his death in 1750 and was reburied in that church in 1950.
During the Second World War, Fox enlisted in the Army Air Force and took a leave of absence from Brown Memorial Presbyterian Church in Baltimore and the Peabody. He was promoted to staff sergeant and played various recitals and services. After having played more than 600 concerts while on duty, he was discharged from the Army Air Force in 1946.
He then served as organist at the famed Riverside Church in New York City, from 1946 to 1965. Under his direction, the organ was expanded to become one of the largest in the world.[2] His extemporaneous hymn accompaniments at Riverside's Sunday services and concert performances were widely acclaimed.[1] Recordings made during this period brought his playing to ever-larger audiences. In 1965, Fox resigned to devote himself to performing full-time and was succeeded at Riverside Church by Frederick Swann.
From 1971 until 1975, Fox performed his famous "Heavy Organ" concerts in auditoriums, popular music concert halls, and other nontraditional organ music venues, touring around the United States with an electronic Rodgers Touring Organ and, later, a custom-designed Allen Organ (1977–80).[1][3]
Virgil Fox was one of the rare organists to perform on nationally televised entertainment programs in the 1960s and 1970s, such as The Mike Douglas Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and CBS Camera Three, bringing organ masterworks to mass audiences as no other organist has done before or since.[1]
His last commercially released recording was made at his farewell Riverside Church concert on May 6, 1979. Fox's 50th year of performing began when he appeared with the Dallas Symphony in September 1980, in what was to be his final public performance. One month later, he died in Palm Beach, Florida of prostate cancer, for which he had undergone unsuccessful surgery in 1976.[1]
Fox stressed pushing the limits of the instruments available to him, rather than requiring that they, or his playing, be authentic to the era of the music. His style (particularly his taste for fast tempos, flashy registrations, and a willingness to indulge in sentimentality) was in contrast to that of his contemporaries, such as E. Power Biggs.
Fox was also famous for his musical memory, and could instantly recall over 250 concert works, playing at double speed or faster in rehearsals (which usually went late into the night). He did not read from written scores at his organ concerts, even when playing alongside an orchestra.
Many organists, however, have strongly criticized Fox for his unconventional interpretations of classical organ music. On his album "Heavy Organ: Bach Live at Winterland," Fox defended his approach to Bach and organ music in general, in the introduction to the ubiquitous Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565, by Johann Sebastian Bach:
| “ | There is current in our land (and several European countries) at this moment a kind of nitpicking worship of historic impotence. They say that Bach must not be interpreted and that he must have no emotion, that his notes speak for themselves. You want to know what that is? Pure unadulterated rot! Bach has the red blood. He has the communion with the people. He has all of this amazing spirit. And imagine that you could put all the music on one side of the agenda with his great interpretation and great feeling and put the greatest man of all right up on top of a dusty shelf underneath some glass case in a museum and say that he must not be interpreted! They're full of you-know-what and they're so untalented that they have to hide behind this thing because they couldn't get in the house of music any other way! | ” |
For once making a similar speech at one of his recitals, music critic Alan Rich called him "the Liberace of the organ loft", and severely took him to task in New York Magazine. [4]
Despite (or perhaps because of) his controversial approach to organ music, Virgil Fox attained a celebrity status not unlike that of Leonard Bernstein, Liberace, and Glenn Gould. The New York Times said of him, twenty years after his death, "Fox could play the pipe organ like nobody's business, but that is not all that made him unforgettable to so many people across the country. He made classical organ music appeal even to audiences that normally wouldn't be expected to sit still for it."[5]
Unusual for a performer (as distinct from a composer), Virgil Fox memorial recitals and concerts continue to be staged, more than a quarter-century after his death.[6]
Fox was a National Patron [7] of Delta Omicron, an international professional music fraternity.
Virgil Fox (The Dish): An Irreverent Biography of the Great American Organist by Marshall Yaeger and Richard Torrence (2001), a compendium of reminiscences by contemporaries of Virgil Fox, included an unpublished autobiography by Ted Alan Worth, a student of his.[1] Worth wrote of Fox's sexual orientation, "To anyone who was gay, there was no question as to what Virgil was."[5] One review of The Dish stated, "Fox’s homosexuality, and its implications on his life, is dealt with in admirably straightforward terms."[8]
Fox lived for many years in a 26-room mansion in Englewood, New Jersey.[9]