Edward Rechlin: Paving the Way for Lutheran Organists

This blog post is adapted from Portraits in American Lutheran Sacred Music, 1847–1947, by Benjamin Kolodziej.

During the 1960s and 1970s, American organist Virgil Fox toured the country performing memorized organ concerts while employing psychedelic light shows, engaging commentary, and winsome repertoire to attract young people to the organ. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach formed the core of Fox’s “organ evangelism,” as his dynamic performances of the Leipzig master communicated to new generations the glories of the organ and the music of this great Lutheran composer. These concerts harbored religious aspirations, with one reviewer for The New York Times writing of a Fox concert in 1972 that:

One came away from Virgil Fox’s Carnegie Hall appearance Wednesday night with the distinct feeling that the event should have been reviewed by the religion editor. Certainly the organist’s Bach programs are as much crusades as concerts, the music enveloped in swirling lights, evangelical and inspirational anecdotery that attracts young people in droves and leaves them cheering for more.

Yet Virgil Fox was not the first American organist to concertize extensively, nor was he at the forefront of leveraging Bach’s music for spiritual purposes. Largely forgotten today, Lutheran organist Edward Rechlin (pronounced “rech-LEEN”) established the precedent that Fox would follow.

Edward Rechlin’s Life and Training

Rechlin traveled the country via rail performing memorized organ concerts in which the music of Bach and his Lutheran contemporaries formed the core of each concert program. Rechlin was as likely to play for thousands of youth at a Walther League convention as he was for national Missouri Synod conventions or for the local neighborhood parish. Unlike Fox, who represented a general Protestant culture, Rechlin used the texts of the Lutheran chorales, as conveyed through the organ arrangements of Bach, Krebs, Kittel, Walther, and other Baroque composers, to communicate the Gospel and to reinvigorate the Lutheran worshiper.

Edward Rechlin was born on October 5, 1884, the son of Friedrich and Katherine (née Woelke) Rechlin. Friedrich had been born in 1851 on the isle of Rügen in the Baltic Sea and had come to the United States to attend the Addison seminary in 1867. He subsequently taught at parochial schools in Davenport, Iowa; Albany, New York; and Cleveland, Ohio, where Edward was born. From 1893 until his death in 1915, Friedrich served on the mathematics faculty at the Addison seminary and Concordia Teachers College, River Forest, after the seminary’s move in 1913. Thus it was perhaps unremarkable that both Edward and his older brother Fred would study at the seminary when they came of age.

Rechlin’s College and Post-College Career

Edward studied from 1898 until 1902 in Addison, where he took the prescribed courses of violin, voice, organ, piano, and theory with Professor Albert Kaeppel. Addison was no conservatory, and Lutheran students who wished to hone their musical skills, including organ technique, were often left to the devices of overworked and fraught faculty who themselves presided over decaying facilities, equipment, and organs, all while attempting to maintain discipline in a residential boys’ school. According to Mark Bangert, “Rechlin later had a low opinion of the quality of this institution; he spoke of its ‘12 pianos—all 30 years old, $4 fiddles, everyone playing by ear, and an organ from which the pedals had been removed.’” Upon graduation in 1902, he accepted a call to the venerable Trinity Lutheran Church in St. Louis, where he was to teach school, play organ in rotation with the other teachers, and occasionally direct the choir. …

Rechlin must have realized the limits of his rudimentary organ instruction, as he sought out additional study with Charles Galloway, a student of Alexandre Guilmant and organist at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in St. Louis.

A Ticket to the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair

Rechlin’s study with Galloway culminated during the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, in which he experienced the performances of Alexandre Guilmant at an impressive five-manual Murray Harris organ, flanked by Guilmant’s American students Galloway and William C. Carl. Guilmant’s performance of Bach’s E-flat fugue deeply impressed the twenty-year-old organist for its “masterful phrasing and execution.” Rechlin accompanied the Concordia Seminary Chorus, conducted by J. D. Barthel, for a performance later at the same World’s Fair, a concert that rattled him (he was “paralyzed by fear”) but that also resulted in a job offer from the nearby Presbyterian church, which as a good Lutheran Rechlin politely declined. Yet the World’s Fair certainly opened new musical vistas for the young organist. …

A few months later, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reviewed one of Rechlin’s concerts for their English audience, extolling Rechlin’s musical prowess:

An audience which crowded Trinity Lutheran Church … heard the organ recital given Sunday night by C. [sic] Rechlin, organist of the church. Mr. Rechlin’s long program included difficult compositions of Guilmant, Lemare, Caesar Franck and other eminent composers, and the young organist’s execution was compared favorably by his hearers with that of a number of those who have been heard at Festival Hall this past season. His last number was a rhapsody of his own composition on a theme of Gounod.

[This review] suggests not only the virtuosity of which Rechlin was capable at such a young age, but [it] also mentions one of his own compositions, likely an improvisation. These improvisations would become an indelible hallmark of his later concerts.

Blog post adapted from Portraits in American Lutheran Sacred Music, 1847–1947 © 2025 Benjamin Kolodziej, published by Concordia Publishing House. All rights reserved.

Learn more about 13 influential composers, including Edward Rechlin, who helped shape Lutheran sacred music in America by reading Portraits in American Lutheran Sacred Music, 1847–1947.