Venues & stages
Église anglicane St. John’s
- Type
- Anglican church
- Address
- Avenue de la Riviera, Territet, 1820 Montreux
A stone’s throw from the Parc des Roses, the Anglican church of St John’s was built for the large British colony that wintered in Territet at the end of the nineteenth century. Behind its neo-Gothic walls it houses a great organ whose history, begun in 1877, has mingled German, English and Swiss builders through successive enlargements. The church regularly hosts concerts today.
The St John’s organ, from Walcker to Jurine
An organ born in 1877, endlessly enlarged
For the newly inaugurated church, the German firm E. F. Walcker, of Ludwigsburg near Stuttgart, delivered in 1877 a first organ of eight stops on two manuals and pedal. In 1885 the English builder William Hill, of London, moved it from the west gallery to a space created near the choir and added two stops.
The church’s enlargements soon called for a larger instrument: from 1895 the Londoner James Chapman Bishop designed an organ of three manuals and pedal, reusing the Walcker and Hill stops. Already suffering serious faults, the instrument was entirely rebuilt in 1906 by the Goll & Cie firm of Lucerne (opus 301), which gave it pneumatic action and a new console.
John Lomas, an organist for life
The organist John Lomas was at the keyboards of St John’s from 1885, the year the organ was moved near the choir and enlarged: it was he who supervised the work. An accomplished musician born in Yorkshire, he held the instrument almost without a break until his death on 1 March 1927. The Feuille d’avis de Montreux then hailed him as the doyen of the English colony.
Lomas also chaired the Territet-Glion funicular, whose line runs to the east of the church. In 1928, the year after his death, the apse was taken down and rebuilt a few metres further on, towards the funicular, in his honour. The organ he played for more than forty years is today being rebuilt (St Peter’s, after the Feuille d’avis de Montreux and Dave Lüthi’s study, 2003).
Marcel Dupré, then a long restoration
On 5 May 1924, Marcel Dupré, the future organist of Saint-Sulpice in Paris, gave a concert on the instrument during one of his Swiss tours: on the programme, Bach, Clérambault, Schumann, Franck and Dupré, before a closing improvisation. Through the twentieth century the organ was maintained by several Vaud builders, until it counted twenty-seven stops on three manuals and pedal.
In 2016 a tender entrusted its restoration to the French builder Michel Jurine, whose project values the historic material while unifying the action and reorganising the instrument’s interior to improve its sound projection. The work is due to be completed in 2027, the very year the church will celebrate its hundred and fiftieth anniversary in May.