Organ and Organist a Duet Meant to Be : Love, Helped by Earthly Luck, Inspired Musician to Save Renowned Instrument

He played it once, in 1964, and never forgot.

So powerful and clear was that organ’s music, and so tantalizingly out of his reach, that it lured George Klump to commit the sin of covetousness.

The problem was that it belonged to the First Baptist Church in Van Nuys and Klump was a peripatetic music teacher. Over the next 25 years, he pined for that glorious instrument while consigned to playing lesser instruments at colleges nationwide.

As if that wasn’t suffering enough, in 1988 Klump took a job as organist at St. Joseph the Worker Catholic Church in Canoga Park. A lovely church, but there he labored on a tired, mediocre electric organ, while just a few miles down Sherman Way the instrument that was becoming his life’s fixation was being played by someone else.

He believes now that it was all part of a divine plan.

For, in a couple of weeks, the last of the organ’s 84 ranks of pipes will be installed at St. Joseph the Worker and, at last, those 4,498 pipes will be at his command--pipes that form what he considers one of the finest instruments in Los Angeles County, if not the West Coast.

“Being a Christian,” he said, he imagines that “the Lord must have had something like that in mind.”

It also took a fair measure of earthly scheming, improbable luck and perseverance through those days when it appeared that the magnificent instrument might be cast upon the musical trash heap.

The tale began almost 30 years ago when Klump and his wife, Barbara, both Fulbright Scholarship winners, returned to Los Angeles from their studies at the Music Academy of Vienna.

The instrument that was to be the West Coast showpiece for the maker, Cassavant Freres of Quebec, was being installed in the First Baptist Church. It was designed by the legendary Lawrence Phelps, leader of America’s Baroque revival, a movement stimulated in part by the complaint of humanitarian and organ scholar Albert Schweitzer that the lusher organ sound popular in the 20th Century was inadequate for the Baroque and Classical repertoire.

Klump played the instrument once, before it was completely installed. He heard it only once again, in 1977, the year he settled in Crescenta Valley after years as music and choir instructor at Winthrop College in South Carolina, Southern Methodist University in Dallas and Dallas Baptist College.

“Other than that, I was going on sound memory from 1964,” he said of his reverence.

A few years later, his thoughts returned to the Cassavant instrument when, as a music instructor at Loyola Marymount University, he heard a rumor that the First Baptist Church planned to move.

“The question was, what will happen to the organ?” he said. “Initially, they were going to take it with them. We were kind of hoping, ‘Maybe they won’t.’ The chances of its being up for grabs would be greater.”

But in 1988, just about the time Klump became organist at St. Joseph the Worker, First Baptist sold its 10-acre site to move to Chatsworth as Shepherd of the Hills, and it was too expensive to bring the organ along, said former Associate Pastor Gordon Freitas.

The Foursquare Gospel Church on the Way bought the 2,000-seat hall in Van Nuys but had no use for the 18-foot pipes on the sanctuary wall.

Through a spokeswoman, Pastor Jack Hayford said the church chose not to invest in restoring the instrument to its full capacity, choosing an electronic organ instead.

The Cassavant was offered for sale, failed to attract a buyer, and sat unused for more than a year. Impatient to continue its remodeling, Church on the Way finally intimated that it might have to break up the organ’s 84 ranks of pipes for smaller instruments that could be sold more easily.

Klump knew he had to do something.

Dismembering Phelps’ finest organ would be like cutting a Michelangelo “Pieta” for bathroom marble, he said.

“This is a historic instrument of not only national importance, but international as well,” he said in the superlatives that flow easily when he speaks of it.

Klump called a friend, Frank G. Kieran, a Laguna Beach organ builder. Kieran approached Church on the Way, asking for a commitment that it would keep the organ intact, make sure it remained in the San Fernando Valley and ensure that it would find a home with proper acoustics for both sacred and community performances. The church proved cooperative, he said.

In the meantime, Klump was working an angle.

St. Joseph, built in 1968, was due for a major renovation. Its rector, Msgr. James Loughnane, had mentioned that it might be time to acquire a proper organ and asked Klump to check some out.

Klump went on the road to inspect several candidates, but reported in due course that there was no organ in America equal to the one just seven miles down the road. Loughnane said he reacted negatively at first, because of the expense--$106,750 for the instrument and $209,980 to have it moved and refurbished--but he agreed to present the idea to the archdiocese.

“They were very favorable,” Loughnane said. “The music department told me how valuable this piece of equipment was and the history. I said, ‘OK, we will give it our best shot.’ I was converted along the way myself.”

The church had to borrow from the archdiocese to buy it, and is still seeking grants to pay off the debt.

After winning the bidding for the installation contract, Kieran began work in 1990 on the organ’s 17 tons of metal, wood and leather. The first of its four divisions--each constituting an organ in its own right--was complete for Mass that Christmas.

In June of last year, with only two of the Cassavant’s divisions installed, the old electric was unplugged for good.

“That organ is so big that any one of those divisions is complete enough to accompany the congregation and fulfill the needs of a complete service,” Kieran said.

But that’s a big step from what it will become by the end of this month, when the fourth division--the pedals--will be finished, Kieran said. That is the one that rumbles at a barely audible pitch “to create a mood for the people, to arouse them while they sit in the pew.”

Other West Coast organ builders commend Klump and Kieran for getting a real bargain, saying it would cost more than $1 million to build a new organ equivalent to the Cassavant.

But ranking it among the great organs of the world is more of a judgment call.

“I wouldn’t compare that organ to the ‘Pieta,’ ” said Los Angeles organ builder Manuel Rosales, who was its tuner for five years. Still, he rates it highly.

“Of the hundreds of organs Larry Phelps designed, the one at First Baptist Church was one of the most successful and was, according to his own words, his favorite. I think it’s a perfectly wonderful organ.”

Rosales, however, is not enamored of Phelps’ organs in general, faulting the foremost designer of his time for pushing his own ideas over the needs of individual halls.

“Those that are cruel would say that his organs played everything equally badly,” Rosales said. “Those that were more objective would say that it took the idea of the all-purpose organ to its height. I’m not going to be the judge or jury.”

Jack Bethards, president and tonal director of Schoenstein & Co. Organ of San Francisco, looks more favorably upon its credentials, though he is not personally familiar with the instrument.

“Every organ builder who is a real artist, who does something from his heart and puts some meaning into it, those organs are universally loved and hated. Somebody who does just a vanilla job, that puts some of everything in it just to please everybody, nobody remembers those organ builders.”

Having saved an instrument that comes from the heart of a great organ-maker, St. Joseph’s now wants to share it.

Father Jim Gehl, who became church rector in May, said he intends to start a concert series soon after the organ is formally dedicated in the fall.

“It is such a fantastic instrument!” Gehl said. “My challenge is going to be to make good use of it.”

And to decide what penance Klump should do for coveting--and winning--his neighbor’s pipe organ.