She takes the 21 steps up the narrow staircase to the balcony of Canoga Park Lutheran Church to perform one final song on the pipe organ she’s played almost every Sunday since the church opened in 1960.
Christine Benich is 97 years old, but you’d never know it trying to keep up with her going up those stairs. She moves like a rock star on her way to receiving a Grammy a long time in the coming. Best body of work by a church pipe organist in the last six decades.
She sits at her organ bench, takes off her street shoes and lines them up neatly on a nearby shelf before lacing up her special organ shoes with leather soles and higher heels for better traction working the pedals.
Normally, she would arrange her sheet music on the stand in front of her, but there is none to be arranged anymore because Benich is going blind and can no longer read the notes.
Even extra lighting and the thick books she sat on last year to get closer to see her sheet music can’t help anymore. Her mind is sharp, her body still strong, her faith rock solid, but her eyes …
“You ask yourself why, but you know your time is going to come and this is it for me,” she said. “It’s not easy. I realize I can’t come here anymore and play, can’t put a book in front of me, and read music. I’m sad.”
Her last performance was on Christmas Day when she relied on memory to play a powerful, moving rendition of “God, Rest Ye, Merry Gentleman,” which she repeated for me last Tuesday when we met in the empty church to turn back the years on her remarkable life.
“When my parents came to this country from Hungary during the Great Depression they brought a piece of their culture with them — music,” she said. “It was a gift they gave to me.”
Times were hard and her parents saved what little they could to give their daughter piano lessons that came cheap from teachers just trying to make ends meet themselves.
“When I was 12, my piano teacher found me jobs playing for…
Read the full article here
