Preston climbed the narrow steps to the organ console, past the great chrome stops and the carved oak, and bent over the small brass plate above the keys. The lights of the cathedral glowed on his young face. He read it in a whisper that carried through the empty nave. “Hildegard Meyer. Cathedral Organist, nineteen sixty six to nineteen eighty eight. First woman to play this instrument.” It was the first name on the list, and it was engraved larger than the rest. I am Hildegard Meyer, eighty years old, and I sat in the front pew with my gold organ pipe pinned to my coat, and the whole cathedral turned to look at me.
In 1966, I was twenty two years old, and a student of the organ from Heidelberg, and I auditioned for the cathedral in a room full of men. The monsignor told me a woman could not manage the pedals. I played the Bach Toccata in D minor in front of him, and he did not speak for a full minute. I was the organist of that cathedral for twenty two years, until the day I married and moved to Wash Park. Afterward, I taught piano to the children of Denver for forty years, and told them only that I once played in a big church.
The old sexton, Anton Brandt, who had rung those bells since 1970, came slowly down the center aisle with his hands folded in front of him. He stopped at the front pew and bowed to me from the waist. “Fraulein Meyer,” he said, softly, in German, and then in English, “I sat in the third row when you played the Easter Mass in nineteen seventy four. I have not heard anything like it since.” The man in the camel coat took off his scarf and held it against his chest. The woman in the mink stole looked, with an expression of dawning wonder, at her husband.
A gold organ pipe on a wool coat gave one retired organist the length of an opening concert to bring a young usher back to the console in Denver.
I gave my terms with my pipe pin gleaming in the candlelight. “Preston, I will not report you to the dean. You are twenty six, you love this music, and you were trying to protect the donors who pay for it. That is not a sin. But I would like three things. Help me up the steps to the console. Let me play the first piece of the concert, before the guest organist, for the sexton and the people in the front pews. And afterward, I would like you to sit on the bench beside me while I show you how the pedals work.”
Preston came down from the console with his eyes wet, and he sat on the end of the pew, still holding his program. “Mrs. Meyer, I wanted to be an organist,” he said. “I studied for four years. I could not afford the last year of conservatory, and I took this job to stay near the instrument.” His voice caught. “I stand in this cathedral every Sunday and listen to the pipes. And I told the woman who built the sound of this place that she did not belong in the front pew. I do not know how to apologize for that.”
But the young man was too mortified to stand still. In an impulsive motion, Preston reached out, unpinned the little gold organ pipe from my coat, and hurried down the aisle toward the sacristy, saying he would check the engraving against the records in the cathedral office. He had gone ten paces when Anton Brandt stepped into the aisle and spread his arms. The man in the camel coat rose from his pew and stood across the opposite side. And the woman in the mink stole, to her own surprise, stepped out and said, “Young man, you will stop right there.”
Preston came to a halt in the center aisle, under the vaulted roof, with the gold pin held tight in his fist. The organ, which had been silent, seemed to breathe in the dark behind him. The sexton said gently, in his heavy German accent, “Junge, you have the first name on the plate in your hand. Put it back.” Preston looked at the tiny pipe, at the year engraved on it. Slowly he walked back to the pew and pressed it into my palm, and then he took off his black jacket and laid it over my shoulders against the chill of the stone.
The consequences were glorious. At half past seven that evening, I climbed the stairs to the console with the help of Preston and Anton, sat down on the bench for the first time in thirty eight years, and played the Bach Toccata in D minor to a cathedral of nine hundred people, who rose, afterward, in a silence that was better than applause. The guest organist from Chicago wept in the wings. Preston turned the pages. The dean announced a scholarship in my name for young organists, and Preston received the first.
In the name of my husband Klaus, who passed in 2016, I started the Klaus Meyer Fund. It pays for organ lessons and conservatory tuition for young musicians and for the repair of old church organs in small towns, in Denver, Jefferson and Arapahoe counties. In the first year we sent eleven students to conservatory and restored four organs. One was a sixteen year old girl from Aurora whose grandmother played the organ in a tiny church, and who sat at the console of a repaired instrument and played her first full hymn with her feet shaking.
On Christmas Eve, the cathedral was lit with a thousand candles, and the choir filed in, singing. I sat in the front pew in my good wool coat, with the gold pipe on the collar. In the gallery, beneath the great silver pipes, a young man in a black suit sat at the console and played the first notes of the processional. He looked down through the glass at me, and I nodded. Preston smiled, pulled out the stops, and the whole cathedral shook with sound, and I closed my eyes and listened to the music I had started so long ago.