Further notes on the music of the funeral of Sun Yat-sen, 18 March 1925.

12 June 2025

Prof. Urrows writes:

In Keys to the Kingdom (pp. 212-17) the story of PEK1920, the Kimball theater organ installed in the Auditorium of Peking Union Medical College (PUMC), is told some detail. Once of the most interesting facts about the history of this instrument (finally restored to playing condition in 2021-23) is that it was used at the funeral of Sun Yat-sen (1866-1925), the father of Modern China, and thus holds a special place in the history of the organ in China.

Just what music was heard at the funeral has always been a confused matter due to discrepancies in the sources. In a history of the PUMC published in 1972, the claim was made that the music was directed by Aura Severinghaus (1894-1979), a biology professor at PUMC who was a well-regarded amateur musician in Beijing at the time. Further, that Severinghaus had trained a male choir to sing what he said was Sun Yat-sen’s favorite Christian hymn, “Bringing in the Sheaves.”

I found in a first-hand account of the funeral, by the Anglican professor at Yenching University, Y.Y. Tsu, published in The Chinese Recorder of February 1931 (“The Christian Service at Dr. Sun Yat-Sen’s Funeral, March 18, 1925”), that in fact the congregational hymn was “Jesus, lover of my soul”, presumably sung to the tune Aberystwyth; and that the ‘Funeral March’ from Chopin’s second Piano Sonata, Op. 35, and Mendelssohn’s Lied ohne Worte Op. 30, no. 3 (often called ‘Consolation’), were the organ works played. Tsu did not mention who the organist was, and I have tended to assume that it was PUMC’s resident organist, Vergil F. Bradfield (1895-1953), although the organ did have a roll reproducer which could have been used as well.

Recently I acquired a copy of a 2003 book, Allen Artz Wiant’s A New Song for China. This is a biography (of sorts) of his father, the distinguished missionary composer, arranger, and choral conductor Bliss Wiant (1895-1975), who did so much to develop a tradition of indigenous Chinese hymnody in Protestant churches during his years there (1923-40; 1948-51). In fact, it is made up mostly of one-way letters from its subject, with minimal commentary. From one of these letters, it emerges that Wiant was the organist at the funeral. Wiant wrote that he did in fact play the Chopin Funeral March, followed by a transcription of the second movement of the Eroica symphony of Beethoven (another funeral march) for the Prelude. He, and not Severinghaus, put together a choir of divinity students, and he states that they sang “Sing them over again to me, wonderful words of life” by P.P. Bliss (1838-1876). Bliss Wiant stated that this was Sun’s favorite hymn, and again, nowhere does “Bringing in the Sheaves” appear. He added: “As I played the organ, the faces of many folk, anxious to witness this event, were pressed against the window pane opposite the organ bench. I was much perturbed by this.”

This leaves only the Mendelssohn piece unaccounted for, and so that was probably played as a Recessional, fittingly enough. I hope that this settles once and for all the interesting question of what was played, sung, and by whom, at the landmark event, now 100 years ago.