This organ player is determined to perform a stormy, 15-hour piece at a Philly church

Ocean waves of music and brilliant beams of aural light burst out of the organ with stormy unpredictably. So there’s no surprise that the composer of this music, Charles Tournemire, was said to have looked to sea for answers — and eventually met his end there when the options in his life were dwindling.

Tournemire’s L’Orgue Mystique, stretching over 15 hours and 253 movements, is being performed complete at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Chestnut Hill in a six-week series of weekday evening concerts starting Monday.

“It’s very heady, very haunting,” said Doylestown-based organist Richard Spotts, who is performing the entire cycle. “It leaves a chill.” The complete performance is a first for Philadelphia.

Though much of the piece is packed with Biblical narratives, the story behind the strange, often-melancholic Frenchman Tournemire — who wrote the music between 1927 and 1932 and then disappeared in 1939 — is so intriguing that Spotts has written a book that’s now being shopped around to publishers. A screenplay might be more appropriate.

“I never expected this to happen,” he said the other day at St. Paul’s. The freelance organist in the Bucks County/Princeton area first encountered Tournemire as a Westminster Choir College student, and later found that the music was slowly infiltrating his life.

“I pulled out a couple of the pieces over 10 years ago, did a couple noontime recitals around this area,” Spotts, 46, recalled. “Then somebody said, ‘I know you’re working on this project …’ but I didn’t know I was working on a project. And then I thought 'Maybe I should see where else this takes me.’ ”

By 2019, he was playing complete L’Orgue Mystique cycles in Pittsburgh and Solebury.

Tournemire (1870-1939) built the music with rich harmonies and Wagnerian dramatic gestures. It’s often so entrancing that seasoned music lovers might wonder where this piece has been all their lives.

Certainty isn’t part its emotional makeup. Bass lines take unconventional turns like faltering foundations. Any one of the 253 sections might start in one place and land in a distant unexpected destination.

“It’s like a novel rather than a story. It can flow over a long period of time. It pulls in an awful lot of ideas — with side characters," said Spotts. “The music deals with the infinite and ineffability. That’s why it’s kind of frightening and part of its genius.”

The music lends itself to liturgical settings, yet it’s anything but Sunday school. It doesn’t have hymnlike regularity.

Some sections are tone poems: One of them, taken from the Book of Daniel, has Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar sentencing three defiant subjects — Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego — to death by fire, portrayed with any number of graphic musical effects.

Tournemire’s religious absorption makes him a mystic of sorts, though with a belief system that was personal, complicated, even tortured. L’Orgue Mystique’s characters are often shadowy and enigmatic, like figures from a Belgian symbolist play by Maurice Maeterlinck.

Recordings of Tournemire survive, made in the early 1930s at his musical home, Basilica of Saint Clotilde in Paris, and his sometimes-piercing sound decisions suggest this music isn’t supposed to be easy. "Today, he might be classified as bipolar,” Spotts said.

After an idyllic Paris education under the great César Franck, the volatile Tournemire fell into a significant depression in 1920 amid professional setbacks and the death of his wife. Seven years later, the composer was remarried and working on L’Orgue Mystique, employing chants in every section but often symbolically, especially a chant whose words are “I have slept but I have awakened.”

Such optimism was temporary. By 1932 when he finished the piece, Tournemire was considered to be out of step. With money problems and World War II on the horizon, he and his wife retreated to seaside Arcachon south of Bordeaux, where he disappeared for four days and was found by an oyster farmer, drowned.

“He and his wife had quarreled. He also had prostate cancer. It was the anniversary of his marriage to his first wife, whom he really loved," Spotts said. "Some said he had amnesia, the sort of quick amnesia that follows a stroke. His wife said that is what he had and just walked off with that condition … . I believe he committed suicide.” He was buried without a funeral.

Much has conspired to keep Tournemire’s music in obscurity, including how to present it.

For the Pittsburgh concerts, Spotts played on different organs all over that area — concentrated into a shorter period of time. He now says he was spread too thin. That’s one reason why he’ll play the full Chestnut Hill cycle on St. Paul’s well-preserved Aeolian-Skinner organ, built in the 1950s by G. Donald Harrison with 110 ranks of pipes.

Performing L’Orgue Mystique in one fell swoop on any organ would probably not be possible.

Because organs offer players so many sound options, each section requires hours of advance preparation — programming the sounds of the instrument, in effect. But few organs have anything close to the electronic memory for a piece this long.

“Any person attempting to do that would be institutionalized,” Spotts laughed. “Besides, you want to play it right.”

For the Chestnut Hill cycle, he’s broken the piece up into 17 concerts spread over six weeks, to be held at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, 22 E. Chestnut Hill Ave., on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays throughout Lent, always at 7:30 p.m.

The exact dates are: March 2-4, March 9-11, March 16-18, March 23-25, March 30-April 1, and April 6-7.

Tickets are free, but registration is necessary through Eventbrite.com (search for L’Orgue Mystique). The opening and closing concerts are sold out. Information: stpaulschestnuthill.org.