Male classical organists

Charles-Valentin Alkan (French: [ʃaʁl valɑ̃tɛ̃ alkɑ̃]; 30 November 1813 – 29 March 1888) was a French composer and virtuoso pianist. At the height of his fame in the 1830s and 1840s he was, alongside his friends and colleagues Frédéric Chopin and Franz Liszt, among the leading pianists in Paris, a city in which he spent virtually his entire life.
Alkan earned many awards at the Conservatoire de Paris, which he entered before he was six. His career in the salons and concert halls of Paris was marked by his occasional long withdrawals from public performance, for personal reasons. Although he had a wide circle of friends and acquaintances in the Parisian artistic world, including Eugène Delacroix and George Sand, from 1848 he began to adopt a reclusive life style, while continuing with his compositions – virtually all of which are for the keyboard. During this period he published, among other works, his collections of large-scale studies in all the major keys (Op. 35) and all the minor keys (Op. 39). The latter includes his Symphony for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 4–7) and Concerto for Solo Piano (Op. 39, nos. 8–10), which are often considered among his masterpieces and are of great musical and technical complexity. Alkan emerged from self-imposed retirement in the 1870s to give a series of recitals that were attended by a new generation of French musicians.
Alkan's attachment to his Jewish origins is displayed both in his life and his work. He was the first composer to incorporate Jewish melodies in art music. Fluent in Hebrew and Greek, he devoted much time to a complete new translation of the Bible into French. This work, like many of his musical compositions, is now lost. Alkan never married, but his presumed son Élie-Miriam Delaborde was, like Alkan, a virtuoso performer on both the piano and the pedal piano, and edited a number of the elder composer's works.
Following his death (which according to persistent but unfounded legend was caused by a falling bookcase), Alkan's music became neglected, supported by only a few musicians including Ferruccio Busoni, Egon Petri and Kaikhosru Sorabji. From the late 1960s onwards, led by Raymond Lewenthal and Ronald Smith, many pianists have recorded his music and brought it back into the repertoire.

Gabriel Urbain Fauré (French: [ɡabʁi.ɛl yʁbɛ̃ foʁe]; 12 May 1845 – 4 November 1924) was a French composer, organist, pianist and teacher. He was one of the foremost French composers of his generation, and his musical style influenced many 20th-century composers. Among his best-known works are his Pavane, Requiem, Sicilienne, nocturnes for piano and the songs "Après un rêve" and "Clair de lune". Although his best-known and most accessible compositions are generally his earlier ones, Fauré composed many of his most highly regarded works in his later years, in a more harmonically and melodically complex style.
Fauré was born into a cultured but not especially musical family. His talent became clear when he was a young boy. At the age of nine, he was sent to the École Niedermeyer music college in Paris, where he was trained to be a church organist and choirmaster. Among his teachers was Camille Saint-Saëns, who became a lifelong friend. After graduating from the college in 1865, Fauré earned a modest living as an organist and teacher, leaving him little time for composition. When he became successful in his middle age, holding the important posts of organist of the Église de la Madeleine and director of the Paris Conservatoire, he still lacked time for composing; he retreated to the countryside in the summer holidays to concentrate on composition. By his last years, he was recognised in France as the leading French composer of his day. An unprecedented national musical tribute was held for him in Paris in 1922, headed by the president of the French Republic. Outside France, Fauré's music took decades to become widely accepted, except in Britain, where he had many admirers during his lifetime.
Fauré's music has been described as linking the end of Romanticism with the modernism of the second quarter of the 20th century. When he was born, Chopin was still composing, and by the time of Fauré's death, jazz and the atonal music of the Second Viennese School were being heard. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, which describes him as the most advanced composer of his generation in France, notes that his harmonic and melodic innovations influenced the teaching of harmony for later generations. During the last twenty years of his life, he suffered from increasing deafness. In contrast with the charm of his earlier music, his works from this period are sometimes elusive and withdrawn in character, and at other times turbulent and impassioned.

César-Auguste-Jean-Guillaume-Hubert Franck (French pronunciation: [sezaʁ oɡyst ʒɑ̃ ɡijom ybɛʁ fʁɑ̃k]; 10 December 1822 – 8 November 1890) was a French Romantic composer, pianist, organist, and music teacher born in present-day Belgium.
He was born in Liège (which at the time of his birth was part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands). He gave his first concerts there in 1834 and studied privately in Paris from 1835, where his teachers included Anton Reicha. After a brief return to Belgium, and a disastrous reception of an early oratorio Ruth, he moved to Paris, where he married and embarked on a career as teacher and organist. He gained a reputation as a formidable musical improviser, and travelled widely within France to demonstrate new instruments built by Aristide Cavaillé-Coll.

In 1858, he became organist at the Basilica of St. Clotilde, Paris, a position he retained for the rest of his life. He became professor at the Paris Conservatoire in 1872; he took French nationality, a requirement of the appointment. After acquiring the professorship, Franck wrote several pieces that have entered the standard classical repertoire, including symphonic, chamber, and keyboard works for pipe organ and piano. As a teacher and composer he had a vast following of composers and other musicians. His pupils included Ernest Chausson, Vincent d'Indy, Henri Duparc, Guillaume Lekeu, Albert Renaud, Charles Tournemire and Louis Vierne.

Willy Julius Reske (September 25, 1897 – September 17, 1991) was a noted organist and composer. He wrote the music to several LDS hymns, two of which are in the current edition of the hymn book of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church).

Édouard Charles Octave Mignan (17 March 1884 - 17 September 1969) was a French organist and composer.
He was born in Orléans and 14 years old he became the organist of église Saint Paterne. He studied organ in Paris with Alexandre Guilmant and Louis Vierne and won the Grand Prix de Rome in 1912. He was organist at Saint-Thomas-d'Aquin from 1917 to 1935. He succeeded Henri Dallier as organist of la Madeleine in 1935 and held that post until 1962.He died in Paris at the age of 85.

Abel-Marie Alexis Decaux (11 February 1869 – 19 March 1943) was a French organist, composer, and pedagogue, best known for his piano suite Clairs de lune, some of the earliest pieces of dodecaphony.
A student of Théodore Dubois, Jules Massenet, and Charles-Marie Widor, among others, he was the titular organist of the grand organ of the Sacré-Cœur basilica. Decaux was more renowned as a player and professor during his lifetime than a composer.
He is popularly known as the "French Schoenberg".

August Gottfried Ritter (25 August 1811 – 26 August 1885) was a German romantic composer and organist.

Richard (or Rijk) Hol (23 July 1825, in Amsterdam – 14 May 1904, in Utrecht) was a Dutch composer and conductor, based for most of his career at Utrecht. His conservative music showed the influence of Ludwig van Beethoven, Felix Mendelssohn, and Robert Schumann and the Leipzig school, though as a conductor he offered Dutch audiences the more revolutionary music of Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner.

Knut Nystedt (3 September 1915 – 8 December 2014) was a Norwegian orchestral and choral composer.

Michel Léon Chapuis (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl ʃapɥi]) (15 January 1930 – 12 November 2017) was a French classical organist and pedagogue. He was especially known as an interpreter of the French and the German Baroque masters and dedicated to historically informed performances.