02 June 2025
Frédéric Kastner’s singing flames
As a music cataloguer at the British Library, part of my job involves recording the medium of performance for which a score was intended. This can range from string quartet to brass band, solo accordion to symphony orchestra, and even, as was the case recently, pyrophone with piano accompaniment.
This unusual instrumentation was chosen by French composer Théodore Lack (1846-1912) for an arrangement of ‘God save the Queen’, published in Paris in the late 19th century. As it was my first time cataloguing a score for pyrophone, I ended up spending a few hours researching what I could about the origins and history of the instrument.
Invented by Alsatian composer and scientist Frédéric Kastner (1852-1882) in the early 1870s, the pyrophone was an innovation for its time in that it relied on combustion, as opposed to air pressure, to produce notes. Kastner was in turn inspired by Irish chemist Bryan Higgins’ 1777 discovery that a hydrogen flame positioned at the lower end of a glass tube could produce a note. This set Kastner's instrument apart from the traditional pipe organ, which the pyrophone design was based on, leading to the alternate term ‘Fire Organ’.
There are very few scores written for pyrophone at the British Library, so we can assume that the instrument didn’t take off in the way Kastner had hoped. However, a book published in 1876, Le pyrophone : flammes chantantes (British Library 8706.aaaa.1), details Kastner’s activities in promoting his invention. An excerpt from an article in The Times, published on 11 April 1876, prefaces the book. The writer describes a gathering at Kastner’s residence on Rue de Clichy, Paris, where members of the public were invited to hear a demonstration of the instrument and were “deeply moved at hearing those jets sing with extraordinary power, purity, and correctness.” They go on to state the following:
The audience was still more astounded at suddenly hearing the gaseliers placed in the centre of the room, and set in motion by invisible electric wires, execute ‘God save the Queen’ in sonorous and penetrating tones.
‘God save the Queen’ must have been a favourite of Kastner’s, as according to the same preface, he also performed the anthem for the Royal Society of Arts on 17 February 1875. One can imagine Kastner conjuring up a musical combination of fire, light and sound, the perfect setting for a patriotic anthem like ‘God save the Queen’. It’s possible that Theodore Lack, a French pianist and composer, was in attendance at one of these meetings and felt inspired to pen his own arrangement. Either way, Lack was one of very few composers to have written specifically for the pyrophone. His other related works include an arrangement of ‘Ave Maria’ for soprano voice, pyrophone, and piano, and a choral work entitled ‘Prière’, both available at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Elsewhere at the British Library, the only other searchable piece of pyrophone music comes from Miroslaw Koennemann (1826-1890), a German-Bohemian conductor and composer who published Paraphrase sur un vieil air d'église Italien for pyrophone circa 1879 (British Library h.1850.l.(3.)).
Kastner’s 1876 book documents an excited response from the scientific community, including the eminent Irish scientist John Tyndall, who was also experimenting within the field of “singing flames”. It was through technological innovations such as the pyrophone that listeners of the time were able to experience something beyond everyday sounds, inviting them into a more otherworldly, spiritual realm, much like electronic synthesizers were to do in the mid-20th century. An 1875 journal article from Popular Science Monthly, written by Swiss humanitarian Henry Dunant, gives a romantic description of the effects of the pyrophone:
The sound of the pyrophone may truly be said to resemble the sound of a human voice ... like a human and impassioned whisper, as an echo of the inward vibrations of the soul, something mysterious and indefinable; besides, in general, possessing a character of melancholy, which seems characteristic of all natural harmonies...
His words give some idea of how the pyrophone might have first sounded, almost 150 years ago, to listeners who were more accustomed to hearing acoustic instruments.
And what of the modern day pyrophone? The Science Museum houses a version of the instrument, which according to a blog article from 2012 lies in a dark corner of the Museum’s storage facility, unplayed. Elsewhere, on the internet, thanks to the imagination and persistence of a marginal few, Kastner’s legacy lives on.
Gail Tasker, Music Cataloguer