In celebration of the 100th birthday, October 27, of Helmut Walcha: Artist-Teacher—Part 2

Part 1 was published in the October 2007 issue of The Diapason.

Full disclosure

As this second section is more personal, the reader may indulge the author’s use of the first person singular. I first heard of Helmut Walcha through another mentor, Tui St. George Tucker, the late composer who not only taught me to play the recorder but was in some ways like a second, or alternate, mother. In my seventeenth summer, which I spent at Camp Catawba in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, where Tui directed the music, she simply instructed me, one day, to listen to recordings by Helmut Walcha, beginning with the six Trio Sonatas by Bach. At first I did not “get it.” Though years before I had been a choirboy and found the organ fascinating, I’d devoted neither systematic nor serious attention to its repertoire. I presumed that the recommended recordings would feature a grand but somewhat opaque, if not “muddy,” sound. It was a surprise, at first more puzzling than edifying, to be confronted with clearly inflected and articulated “chamber music” of a bell-like transparency and played, on historical instruments, in rather dry acoustics (e.g., the Schnitger organ “stored”—forever—in the village church of Cappel, north of Bremerhaven). Tui asked me not to be put off but to persist in listening. The revelation, my sudden epiphany of understanding and profound appreciation, came after the third or fourth try; now, I was hooked—as it turned out, for life.

The next spring, almost a year—and many Bach organ works—later, I wrote a fan letter to the player, asking him if, when next in Europe, I could meet him and hear him in person. Walcha replied that I should come to a Saturday afternoon service of Vespers at the Church of the Three Kings (Dreikönigskirche) in Frankfurt and let him know, in advance, both the date and my choice of two pieces; in my response, citing a date in September 1957, I asked for the chorale-prelude An Wasserflüssen Babylons (in 4 voices, cantus firmus in the tenor) and the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor—and was amazed, of course, when, some months later—and without further correspondence—my father and I walked into this church, just across the Main river from the Frankfurt Cathedral, and found both of these works in prominent positions in the printed order of service!

On the gallery afterwards, he recommended that I continue my piano studies in New York and in about three years come to audition for him at the Hochschule für Musik (State Music Academy) in Frankfurt. Nothing was said about organ lessons—nor were there any. The organist of the church where I was then singing allowed me to practice regularly there, on his Austin, after showing me, “Here are the manuals, here are the stop tabs, here are the pedals—you use toes and heels, both.” Not until after completing memorization of the Orgelbüchlein in the first of my four years of study with Walcha did I confess to him that he was my first organ teacher—a revelation he seemed to take in stride (“I don’t object to capable virgin students”); while I did not have a B.A., most of his foreign students had master’s degrees and many were on Fulbright scholarships.

Subsequently visiting Europe every summer in the decades following 1966, I saw him each year, at home or in his vacation haunts, until 1989 (two years before his death). It is fair to say that we developed a friendship, and after his own retirement he continued to encourage my work and to take a vivid interest in what I told him of the gratifications and frustrations of church and academic life at home in America. Soon after his 70th birthday I rendered an oral translation to him of the first portion of this article, in the form in which it had then been published, and was naturally pleased that he found it (while likely somewhat more systematic than had he himself put pen to paper) a valid summary of his views and pedagogical emphases.

Crucial to this full disclosure are, I think, the years of study and decades of friendship and, perhaps more important (or unusual), the fact that it was not only the music of Bach but also specifically its interpretation by Helmut Walcha that, as it happened, both drew me initially to the pipe organ and, in the end, served to nourish a lifelong interest and commitment to this musical medium. 

The biography

A first biographical study of the organist, entitled Helmut Walcha: Nuit de Lumière, appeared about two years ago (no date is given) in Colmar, France, edited and published by Jérôme Do Bentzinger and authored, in collaboration, by two French organists, Joseph Coppey and Jean-Willy Kunz. To many it may be surprising that theirs should comprise the first available major documentation of so un-Gallic a musician and musical thinker.The book itself offers a list of hundreds of works, by some 30 composers, comprising Walcha’s memorized repertoire, but not one is French nor even from outside of the German cultural sphere. M. Coppey got to know his subject during Walcha’s few trips to France—he visited the cathedral of Poitiers, dedicated the organ at St. Séverin in Paris, and recorded some of the Bach harpsichord music, including the violin sonatas with Henryk Szeryng, in that city, and did his second—stereophonic—round of Bach organ recordings at St. Pierre LeJeune in Strasbourg—while M. Kunz is the son of a deceased friend who had originally intended to collaborate with Coppey in researching and writing this biography. 

The barely 200-page book has some puzzling oddities—it is printed in a font almost as large as that of the New York Times Large-Type Weekly (for the sight-impaired), contains no index, and speaks of Helmut Walcha, along with his wife and some of their friends, mostly on a first-name basis. At the same time, the work leaves nothing to be desired in terms of reverence and affection for its subject. The authors—who speak little English, although one of them knows a good deal of German—did extensive research in Germany, tracking down friends, colleagues, pastors, and students of the master and—especially valuable—some of Walcha’s former chamber music partners, still lucid but now largely “lost” to the world in senior citizens’ centers. They also elicited written testimonials from associates and admirers, including from within the French cultural sphere (e.g., L. Rogg, M. Chapuis, R. Saorgin, M. Schaefer).

Praiseworthy and useful as these efforts and their results are, it can be said that the story told here really covers only the first half of Walcha’s life—the second half, after all, had a lot to do with the United States, via his 50 American students, of whom the evidence provided here is quite spotty. So far as I know, I am the only American student with whom the authors spoke. Among the others, those omitted here, in the published “non-exhaustive” list of students, include Robert Anderson, David Bowman, Edgar Billups, Virginia Banfield Bollinger, Edward Brewer, Larry Cook, Elise Cambon, Paul Davis, Melvin Dickinson (Margaret got in!), Sheila Beck Dietrich, Delbert Disselhorst, Tony Godding, Barbara Harbach, Philipp Isaacson, Gene Janssen, Lorna DaCosta McDaniel, Margaret Mueller (John did make it), David Mulbury, Doris Parr, Edmund Shay, Bob Thompson, and Nancy Walker! It was good to see in print the names of Frankie Cunningham and Betty Steeb (both among the students sent over early on by the late, and great, Arthur Poister), as well as that of Oberlin’s David Boe (who married the second daughter of Walcha’s pastor, Pfarrer Paulus North). 

There is no sign of the three South African students, including composer Jacobus Kloppers (now in Canada) or Elise Feldtmann Liebergen. Among the Germans, Oda Jürgens (long active in Berlin) and Helmut Röhrig (who settled in Cincinnati) are missing—and, although composer Reinhold Finkbeiner did make it onto the list, there is no indication of his having been interviewed, which would quite likely have provided color and special interest in light of his outspoken dissent from aspects of Walcha’s aesthetics and pedagogy. Like Disselhorst, Charles Krigbaum is mentioned once (on page 141), as a contributor to the 70th-birthday Festschrift, but then, 18 pages later, omitted from the list. Yet it has to be said (at least here) that, as the Yale University organist for decades, Krigbaum would appear to have occupied the most prestigious position attained by any of Walcha’s students, anywhere.  

The American and other omissions are particularly egregious inasmuch as Prof. Walcha himself often remarked (but never in France?) that of his best students a considerable number was to be found among the Americans. In addition, although the most intense wonder at Walcha’s prodigious memory and veneration for his interpretation and technique are expressed repeatedly, the biography lacks the sort of detailed analysis and explanation of these factors that readers would be justified in expecting such a book to attempt. In short, another biography—or at least a “Part Two”—will still be needed. The pictorial material in the book—much of it of an “exclusive” nature—is wonderful and, for those interested in acquiring such (even if nary an American be shown therein), probably worth the price of the volume. We are grateful to M. Bentzinger for the samples he has kindly provided for reproduction in these pages.¹

The historical context

The historical context out of which Walcha and his interpretation emerged was that of the “Leipzig School” of the early 20th century. Thomas-Kantor Karl Straube stood at its center. His own life was marked by the transition from the late-19th-century extravagantly Romantic interpretation of pre-Romantic music to a new, disciplined and “ascetic” neo-Classicism that came to pervade certain, even large-scale, compositions by musicians like Stravinsky and Hindemith no less than the seemingly unrelated arts of organ-building and organ-playing. In Germany it was connected with the destructive caesura of World War I and the hopes aroused by formation of a new, Kaiser-less “Weimar Republic.” In any case it was clear that the old, complacent and hyper-bourgeois order was dead and nothing would ever be the same again; all was open to reconsideration. 

In this context, and parallel to his friendships with outstanding late-Romantic musicians like Reger and Leipzig’s own Karg-Elert, Straube opened himself, “midstream,” to the growing interest in early organs and the interpretative concepts seemingly implicit in their structural features (tracker action; Werkprinzip; absence of facile electric playing aids; high mixtures and mutations; etc.). Neglected old instruments like the two Silbermann organs in Rötha, just outside of Leipzig, came to set new standards and, once newly playable and audible, imprinted their sonorities indelibly on the minds of aspiring and up-to-date musicians like the young Helmut Walcha.

In the unique atmosphere of “Weimar’s” creative ferment—soon to yield to the fanaticism of Nazism and the consequent pervasive chaos of the new German racial, foreign and military policies—it seems highly unlikely that Straube and his own finest pupil (and the next Thomas-Kantor) Günther Ramin, who, though only nine years older, became Walcha’s major teacher, could have reached the thorough, “chiselled” and, in time, “settled” concept of virtually every detail of interpretation that came to comprise Walcha’s accomplishment and, at least in terms of the applied interpretative method, his most specific organistic and musical emanation and legacy.

And yet Walcha, who studied theory with Reger’s conservatory successor Karg-Elert but was musically involved with the more neo-classical Leipzig composer Günter Raphael and his pupil Kurt Hessenberg (later Walcha’s beloved Frankfurt friend and colleague), attributed to Straube (under whose cantata-conducting in Bach’s Thomaskirche he sometimes played continuo) and, especially, to Ramin his life’s major organistic inspiration—along with that of Albert Schweitzer, through that scholar’s early study of both historical organs and the theological and pictorial symbolism in Bach’s music. In conversation it was, as Coppey and Kunz have noted, hard to elicit from him the specifics. Detective work, including carefully aimed examination of Straube’s correspondence, writings and editions and of Ramin’s recordings—perhaps leading to a musicologist’s future dissertation—might yet uncover the most critical points of both similarity and difference between Walcha’s concepts and those of his early Leipzig models. Lionel Rogg’s pronouncement of him as “original” implies, I think, that it was not only in Walcha’s sometimes ravishing sonorities that he may—or must—have diverged from his teachers.

In two somewhat ironic ways Helmut Walcha’s productivity was framed and promoted by misfortune. In his personal history, the poor eyesight and subsequent blindness (resulting from the teenager’s smallpox-vaccination calamity) served both to focus and enhance his musical ear and to promote the uniquely “horizontal” and minutely analytical method of learning (i.e., memorizing) polyphony voice by voice. In the history of his times, the need for safety from the World War II bombings of Frankfurt prompted Walcha’s flight to the tranquillity of the countryside, where he was able to learn, undisturbed by any urban distractions, the entire Well-Tempered Clavier, and doubtless to hone and solidify those more general interpretive concepts that would inform all his concerts, recordings and lessons.

Performing and recording

Among those who became familiar with Walcha’s recordings and were also fortunate to hear him in person, many perceived a subtle but unmistakable difference between the two musical experiences. My own observations confirmed the fairly consistent difference and I have, after considerable thought, concluded that it arose from different concepts operative in the artist in the two contexts. For Walcha a recording was foremost a documentation of the score, of the composer’s discernible intentions as objectively as possible—it was not intended to be, any more than could be avoided, a record, for eternity, of a particular moment in a particular performer’s life; not an attempt, that is, to artificially “freeze” such a subjective human moment beyond the composer’s already confirmed success in integrating an original experience, song and form into the enduring work of art. This extrapolation of mine is consonant with Walcha’s attitude toward improvisation; he was not opposed to subjectivity and certainly not to spontaneity—but these were of the moment, not of eternity. For this reason he did not improvise in concerts—i.e., in the “presence” of finalized masterful works—nor did he authorize the recording, the “eternalization,” of any of his thousands of glorious subjective and spontaneous liturgical expressions. Those of us allowed to partake of some of his “greater” ritards or other spontaneous rhythmic “bendings” of the moment, in an inimitable and unrepeatable interaction between him and a particular concert audience, would not ever wish to have missed them—yet nor would most of us desire to have such superimposed upon the documentation he chose to leave behind of his underlying, more objective conception.

In addition to the word Musiker, for musician, the German language includes a special word, Musikant, for the musician—the performer—who feels and transmits the experience of a beguiling spontaneity. Without any part of a doubt, Walcha was a Musikant as well as a Musiker—yet I can imagine him expressing a view that recordings are not an appropriate place for vagaries of Musikantentum. It is quite possible to believe, as many may, that, on the contrary, recordings, like all performance, can justly be about little else. To this premise I presume to venture no comparably axiomatic rejoinder. In departing this field of contention, however, it may be permissible also to pose a question: Is it possible that subjective spontaneous re-interpretations of particular musical passages, such as inevitably emphasize—more than is usual or ultimately justifiable—particular aspects of a work at the expense of others, may, however enchanting at the moment, when frequently reiterated through the objectification of recording, be perceived as grating and finally come to stand, rather than as mediators, as obstacles between the listener and the sensibility—as embodied in the work—of the composer?

The poet-singerСcommunication for the ages

In what I hope is only an apparent paradox, I hasten to affirm that of course the poet-singer in this great artist desired, especially in his work as an interpreter, to communicate with the hearts of fellow humans, both in the moment and across the ages. All the salient features of his performance—the singing, sometimes overlapping legato, interrupted by the “breathing” of the pipes simulating the human lung, the pointed staccato, the gravitas of portato, the nuanced virtuosity of leggiero touches, the accentuated highlighting of syncopations and of other rhythmic as well as harmonic tensions, the clear yet sensuous registrations as well as the illumination of form through their changes, the intriguing simultaneity of different articulations, and the “chiselled” or etched identification and re-identification of motivic structures and relationships—were applied to this end. One may differ about the degree of his success, but no one can properly gainsay Walcha the sincerity and intensity of his work toward two goals—of optimal communication with his listeners, and of endurance of the insights he believed to have achieved especially about the music of Bach and the conditions for its fullest realization.       

This may be the place for three suggestive and all somewhat surprising quotations. It is no German, but René Saorgin, writing in French in his testimonial (on pg. 199) in the book by Messieurs Coppey and Kunz, who declares that “Helmut Walcha was quite certainly the greatest organist of our time.” Lionel Rogg, when I drove him from Kennedy Airport to New Haven some 35 years ago, told me plainly that “Walcha is a great romantic” (I don’t believe he meant it with a capital R, but rather that he was referring to the poetic intensity he felt communicated in Walcha’s renditions). And the late Robert Baker emerged from Walcha’s summer 1963 concert of pre-Bach masters on his then new Karl Schuke church organ to tell me, in considerable excitement, “He’s a colorist—like Clarence Dickinson!” (I don’t believe Bob really meant quite like Clarence Dickinson—but the colors he surely heard.)

Playing!

While seeking to zero in yet further on “what made Walcha Walcha,” it is useful to recall that over the centuries German philosophers—such as Schiller, Nietzsche and H. Marcuse—have repeatedly emphasized the relationship of play, and indeed the playfulness of the child, to the work of the “serious” artist. That art is always, to a significant extent, play, or that the artist’s “work” is, itself, a kind of play, was—contrary to a common false impression—well manifested in our subject. He had no children, but he took a lively interest in them, in particular in the children of his friends (e.g., making reference to them in occasional poems he wrote); he had a ready sense of humor, enjoyed funny stories and sported a hearty and infectious laugh; he identified better than many a musician with the more humorous elements in Baroque music, e.g., fresh, somewhat insolent repeated notes, or certain bold leaps, or fast—and jocular—alternating neighboring tones; he understood the provocative capriciousness of the stylus phantasticus passages in 17th-century music (though the term itself was not yet in common circulation); and he loved and liberally employed the airy playfulness intrinsic to many of the applications of high-pitched, “Baroque” flutes and principals, of mutations such as sundry fifths and thirds, and of bright Zimbel-type mixtures or Tertian combinations. It will be apparent, indeed, that this artist’s playfulness plays right on into our next subject.   

The Walcha organ

Touring throughout Germany, as well as in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, England and France—and recording on historical organs—Walcha came to know an extraordinary number and variety of instruments. He could master, and more quickly so than most sighted musicians (and—also—later recall!), the intricacies of any console—the precise distance between manuals, the instrument’s specifications, and the locations of the stop (and of any combination) mechanisms, and the different structures among the key- and pedal-boards of new and old organs. Most importantly, he could always find, and usually did use—as was said of J. S. Bach—unconventional, hitherto untried combinations of stops, and he thus drew from most instruments sonorities previously unheard and yet uncannily apt for the composition to be realized. He looked always for emotional expression and warmth in addition to the clarity required for following the polyphony, and he certainly displayed no fear of a good tremulant.

By the end of the 1950s, in recognition of his sustained and extraordinary contributions to the cultural life of Frankfurt am Main, the city fathers determined to have built for installation in Helmut Walcha’s church an instrument of his own design and specifications. After Walcha, who had an excellent von Beckerath organ at his disposal in the large recital hall of the Hochschule, and who had enjoyed instruments by Karl Schuke in Berlin and elsewhere, apprised the city government that he would find either of these builders suitable for the Dreikönigskirche, the mayor and councillors arrived at a decision to afford special consideration to the delicate needs of the isolated city of West Berlin—i.e., for ongoing political, moral and financial support from West Germany—and thus, all else being equal, to award the commission to West Berlin’s Schuke (rather than to von Beckerath, of Hamburg in West Germany).

Following its dedication in 1961, and for the rest of his public musical life, this three-manual Schuke was Walcha’s “home” instrument. It is likely that he explored all of his then still current repertoire—notably including many 17th-century works as well as the late(st) works of Bach, including, e.g., the Art of the Fugue and the Musical Offering’s Six-Part Ricercar—with its resources. And of course he exploited it no end in delicious and brilliant free and chorale-related liturgical improvisations. The organ, while ample for the sympathetic room, was never over-aggressive, and featured a rich pedal palette complemented by a deeply resonant, (relatively) foundation-strong Hauptwerk, a lyrical Oberwerk with Krummhorn, and a bright and playful Brustwerk. Interestingly, however, this latter division includes no principal (a 2′ one would have been “normal”) and only a very high mixture, but instead features such (playful!) “gourmet specialties” as a 4′ Quintadena and a 4′ Regal! 

I personally have found an interest in such stops elsewhere only in the work of the late M. Searle Wright, coming from a quite different aesthetic—as in his partial revision of the specifications of an organ Edwin Link had assembled and donated to the old chamber hall of S.U.N.Y. in Binghamton, Searle’s home town. Though I enjoyed (as did Robert Baker) Walcha’s idiosyncratic application of these sonorities in Frankfurt, I would (and recently did, on the Dreikönigs organ in its currently refurbished and very slightly altered condition) not find much use for them for my own musical purposes. 

Yon Brustwerk division—by no means all bad!—does represent a triumph of Helmut Walcha’s playfulness (and his especially playful relationship to some of other composers’ and his own music) over certain organ-structural considerations that, for most other artists, would in the end take precedence . . .  That, at least, is the only way that I can understand it. It was/is his instrument—and did/does he not deserve to have (had) it? A monument to playfulness—how many of those are there? n

This article will be continued.

Parts 1 and 2 were published in the October and November 2007 issues of The Diapason, respectively.

Improvising and composing
Under the rubric of ‘Performing and Recording’ I sought to clarify Walcha’s concept of the relative places of the objective and subjective, the calculated and the spontaneous, the performance for the moment and the recording for the ages. As discussed, these categories pertained mainly to the role of the performer in interpreting and rendering the compositions of other musicians. In contrast, say, to a Paul Hindemith, Walcha’s primary role and, at least for many decades, the main basis of his reputation, was as an interpreter. This emphasis may have meanwhile shifted somewhat, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon worlds of sacred music, where the four volumes of his own Chorale-Preludes, as published by Peters Verlag, have become liturgical staples, recognized for their quality, originality and accessibility even by younger musicians who may never have heard Walcha’s performances as an organist, and in particular his interpretations of Bach, either live or in their recorded embodiments.
It is useful to understand that these compositions grew out of Walcha’s extensive liturgical praxis—for, of the hundreds if not thousands of worship services he played, virtually all included improvisations, and in particular of chorale-preludes in many diverse styles, idioms, textures, durations, and degrees of “modernity” and complexity. Indeed, these publications are the only form in which Walcha allowed his improvisational art to be preserved. At the same time, as he would be the first to concede, there is a clear line between the spontaneity of improvisation and the fixed and calculated structures of written compositions.
His wife Ursula—indispensable assistant in Walcha’s learning of new scores (she played each voice separately as dictation into his memory), in helping to evaluate his registrations (and, when necessary, pulling stops), and in his travels (these three roles cited from among her innumerable contributions to his welfare and success)—was wont to voice her view that her husband’s compositions, fine as they were, did not quite represent the full glory of his improvisations. Still, we are fortunate to have them for their intrinsic values and as a minimal record of this artist’s most personal—and often moving—manner of conveying the meanings of the tunes and texts of hymns, and of his considerable capacities as a musical thinker within as well as outside of the Bachian “box.”

Provocateur for his times
(Walcha and Reger)
Regardless of whatever preoccupations we may nurture with matters of cosmic order, time (eternity) beyond human or even natural history, perennial philosophies and unalterable truths, we are also all children of our own time, embedded in its more or less chaotic history, and subject, with little recourse, to its shifting winds. For Germans the year 1945 marked the “zero hour,” as Hitler and his minions had severely ruptured the integrity of the nation’s spirit and the opposing Allies reduced a large portion of its “physical plant” to rubble—together also leaving virtually no survivors untouched by loss of friends and family. With World War II coming so close on the heels of—and even more destructive than—the earlier “war to end all wars,” the newly traumatized mood was less one of quick fermentations and liberations than of a need to reexamine the bases of one’s existence, to slough off all that was superfluous, and even to seek renewal in a return to long-lost but once well-tried and venerable traditions. This context may help provide the “logic” behind the postwar decisions of most German Protestant church authorities to remove most of the Victorian-era hymns from the books and—in a sense: artificially, by sheer act of will—to replace them with the sorts of older hymns which, e.g., had still been in common use when Bach included settings of them in his Orgelbüchlein (and elsewhere), but which had long since, by the “organic” processes of history and changes of taste, gone out of use (and out of the hymnals).
I describe these aspects of the broad existential and the related ecclesiastical situations also as the context in which Walcha, at the turn of the decade from the 1940s to the 1950s, committed a bold act, which was in some sense to haunt him for the rest of his life. As a responsible and already established artist in his own 40s, he felt self-confident and also—looking at the world around him—somehow impelled to publish an article, in a widely read sacred music journal, about the organ music of Max Reger (who had died, in the midst of the first world-conflagration, in 1916).
In it Walcha made several key points that I recall from my own reading—I had, a decade after its publication, to seek the article out in the library. He dared to express a less than positive evaluation of the pervasive chromaticism, grandiosity and hyper-expressivity of Reger’s idiom—in conversation, at least, I recall a comparison with the overbearing decadence of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations) in Leipzig. More importantly, he claimed that Reger’s organ music was not, in the truest sense, organ music! It wrote out explicitly, in mountains of notes, the very octaves and other overtones that the organ “produces by itself,” by virtue of its tonal structure, e.g., in the mixtures of the principal chorus, in the realization of much simpler, basic notations that indeed have been appropriately reduced, by real organ composers (e.g., Bach), to the bare contrapuntal and harmonic essences of the music. Not only the sound, but even the appearance of Reger’s music, Walcha implied, was overladen and pretentious and tended to hide the presence of ideas, which, once reduced to their essences, might prove to be relatively insignificant.
Not leaving it there, Walcha proceeded, in notational form, to reduce the opening strains of one of Reger’s grandest and most renowned organ opuses to such essences, to their “actual” musical meanings, expressed in plain four-part harmony. Having thus “unmasked” the reality, the professor—he had his naïve side—evidently expected dyed-in-the-wool Romanticists to close the book and go home, now cured of their Reger addiction. Or, he didn’t care . . . And he went on to unmask the late-Romantic master in yet another respect. He quoted lengthy samples of inner voices from fugues by Reger, voices which were, indeed, distinguished by being undistinguished, if not virtually shapeless. He implied that such voices can be retained only on a short-order basis—they lack the kind of identity that would enable them to penetrate to the deeper layers of musical apperception. This demonstrated, too—here, the coup de grâce—that Reger was writing fugues on paper only, fugues that had some visual “earmarks,” but lacked the substance of genuine polyphony. Again, the late gentleman is revealed to have been something of a four-flusher . . .
In a concession, Walcha acknowledged the likelihood that it was not merely ignorance that prompted Reger’s lavishly doubled and tripled notation: it was probably made necessary by the relative lack of overtones in the tonal structure of the organs with which Reger had contact, organs built, self-evidently, before the Orgelbewegung (the neoclassicist reform movement of the 1920s) had succeeded in bringing back the earlier type of instruments with their richer overtone resources. But this too becomes evidence against the continuing credibility—or viable use—of Reger’s organ compositions: designed for organs that required the use of so many fingers all at once, they will sound harsh, if not ridiculous, if applied to our current instruments that have all these overtones already—and properly so—built into their tonal structures! No, Reger—Walcha believed—would be found to have not much going for him in this newly “essential” world of 1950.
And then the consequence. In the light of the foregoing considerations, he said, “I have decided to strike Max Reger from the list of composers whose works students at the Frankfurt Hochschule are required to play.” One might ask: If students here in New Haven in 2007 are not required to play Reger, why should students in Frankfurt in 1950 have been required to? But those were different times, and in a different country. The article occasioned “storms” of professorial protest in endless letters of rebuttal in subsequent issues of the journal. Part of the trauma was due to a conflation of “not required to” with “forbidden to.” Another part was a nervous fear of a creeping return of the kind of authoritarianism and censorship that had characterized German cultural life during the “thousand year empire” from 1933 to 1945. Another element was no doubt simple envy of and dislike for Helmut Walcha, coupled with an outspoken rejection of his opinionated outspokenness. Another may have been a sense that as the duly appointed head of the Frankfurt school’s Church Music Institute, Walcha had the prerogative to make such decisions without enduring such a challenge—but did it have to be with that rationale, and that provocative publicity?!
If not already in that written context, Walcha did eventually offer the additional explanation that while in wartime he was memorizing the 48 W.T.C. Preludes and Fugues in the country retreat, he came to realize that there was not enough room in his mind to accommodate their highest-density substance and still hold on to the discursive Reger organ extravaganzas that he had learned and often played in his younger years; something had to give. A related question cannot be repressed: Is there anyone alive who knows and plays, or was there ever anyone who knew and played—during the same period of life—the entire Well-Tempered Clavier as well as a set of giant Reger organ works, both from memory?
In any case, the occasional determined Frankfurt student did propose Reger for study in the lessons over the ensuing decades and did not necessarily find Walcha unreceptive. There were two possibilities: if the work was to be one that Walcha himself had once played, he might well take it on, and—relearning it quickly from listening—would soon also even be able to demonstrate it again at the console . . . If it were a piece unfamiliar to Walcha, there were other, often quite willing teachers available at the school. [Disclosure: during my own Frankfurt time, Armin Schoof studied Reger’s great F-minor work with Walcha—though it is not specifically included in the Coppey-Kunz repertoire list—while I enjoyed learning the much smaller, but also tellingly “Regerian” Prelude in A Minor from Opus 69 with Prof. Hartmann at the cathedral downtown.]
In wrapping up this episode, which I have narrated in detail because I believe it to be of interest yet perhaps not readily accessible to other American organists, my own feelings are that, despite a number of inherent misunderstandings, it formed a characteristic, if marginal part of the process of cleaning up from the vestigial messiness of some Romanticism along with some forms of potential brutality, which that emotional/artistic nexus had left behind in the political and cultural sphere [the line, say, from Wagner’s to Hitler’s anti-Semitism], and that the controversy engendered by Walcha’s boldness was needed, or useful, in 1950, as a healthy means to help clarify both aesthetic and human rights positions in certain German musical circles—and this even if perhaps there is now no one left who could still agree in all specifics with either Walcha’s or some of his critics’ theses.

Lifestyle, discipline, personal time, hobbies
The Walchas’ personal lifestyle was characterized primarily by modesty and simplicity, an almost vegetarian diet, herbal teas, regular afternoon naps, an occasional glass of wine; after the international success of his recordings—his D Minor Toccata and Fugue recording alone, he once told me, financed his house organ—the couple could have lived in much greater opulence; but they chose not to do so. For one thing, such a change could have impinged on the accustomed quietude and focus requisite for his ongoing musical attainments. His discipline, structured by his sense of time, was extraordinary; on top of all the organ and harpsichord music, and the entire Lutheran hymnal—including the words of hymns with thirteen verses—he also had his datebook in his head. When I once gave him a long-playing album for his birthday in October and a few days later asked if he had heard it, he said, “Oh no, I won’t be able to listen to that until February—it’s scheduled for the 19th, after my afternoon nap.” When at my lesson on February 20th I remembered to inquire if he’d yet had a chance to listen to the album (the early Swingle Singers singing Bach), he responded immediately, “Oh yes, we listened to it yesterday, as planned, right after my nap . . .”
Helmut and Ursula (though I never used those words) made time for quiet social events with the students—often in their home—and with their friends. There was never an impression that they were rushed, under deadline pressures, or had not gotten enough sleep. In the summers they loved to take long walks in the Black Forest—and, after a few explanations, he had the layout of the landscape memorized (just as he knew, and could give you a guided taxi tour of the Frankfurt cityscape). They also managed to attend concerts, of his colleagues, or of students such as myself who might be performing in other media (e.g., he wanted to hear recorder, he wanted to hear counter-tenor; or, if I happened to play an organ concert near where they were vacationing, they might show up unexpectedly and socialize with us afterwards—other students have told similar stories . . .).
In retrospect, it is hard to imagine how all this was possible, especially inasmuch as he could read neither words nor music in Braille. They listened to some radio, and he alluded to their reading entire books (including novels) together, she reading to him regularly in the evenings. He was curious, and the questions he asked of people were meaningful and well formulated; it was a pleasure to try to answer to his satisfaction. His main hobby, I think—as well as a way to practice—was playing his house organ. In his retirement he did so purely for fun, telling me, for instance, how nice it felt to be freed from the compulsion of always playing for note perfection. Though his harpsichord playing seemed not as idiomatic, sensuous, mellifluous as, say, Gustav Leonhardt’s (or as his own organ playing), he did enjoy the East German cembalo he had at home.
In his retirement he turned also to other enjoyments—listening to Wagner (as he had in his youth)—or learning French(!), something he felt he’d missed out on throughout his music studies and professional life. Of course he had to approach this in his own systematic way, starting with the music: from his tutor he wanted first to find out how to pronounce all the nasal word endings, in, en, an, on, un (hard enough to distinguish in context . . . ). “Good luck, Helmut!,” I thought when he told me this. (But if anyone could do it . . . ) This did not of course mean that he was going to start learning to play some French music—there seemed to be an uncrossable line there; yet at least he wished to find out more about the language behind it . . .

Friends, successors
When it came time to think about his successors, at school and church, Walcha, as might be expected, thought judiciously. While there were several of his former students, on both sides of the Atlantic, who he believed would be qualified to succeed him in either or both positions, he also thought it wiser—at least in making suggestions to the school administration—to move outside of “the family.” The Geneva organist and recording artist Lionel Rogg and he admired each other’s playing and had exchanged views in letters; on balance, Rogg seemed a worthy candidate both to carry forth the pedagogical work within a congenial aesthetic tradition and to sustain the prestige of the church music division of the Hochschule. Coming from Geneva, however, Rogg was understandably less than enthusiastic about the contours and ambiance of post-war Frankfurt as a city; while the chance to preside over the Schuke across the river just might have been able to persuade him, Walcha was still yearning for a few more years of unencumbered work at his Dreikönigskirche. In the end, the successor at school was Edgar Krapp, who, it is said, convinced Walcha and the others with an especially cogent rendition of the C-minor Passacaglia and Fugue.
Later, at church, Walcha was succeeded by his recent student Renate Meierjürgen, who had already been directing the choir and was something of an expert on his Chorale-Preludes. This appointment kept matters at the church, literally, in the family for the rest of the Walchas’ lives, inasmuch as Frau Meierjürgen, a single woman, had also agreed to move in with the Walchas on Hasselhorstweg, where she became instrumental in helping both of them to cope with the difficulties of old age and now continues to reside. Her successor at the church became Andreas Köhs, a concert organist and choral-orchestral conductor as well as a music editor with a major publisher. Like most German organists today, given the slow attrition of the churches’ budgets under the continuing system of church financing via state-collected taxes, and with a dwindling congregation as almost everywhere, he faces an ongoing struggle to maintain, if not expand the program—meaning, in this case, to continue Dreikönigs’ traditional contributions to the city’s cultural life in a manner worthy of the memory of the relatively recent tenures, at this institution, of such stellar historical figures as (the conductor and, later, Thomas-Kantor) Kurt Thomas and Helmut Walcha.
The Walchas had several concentric circles of friends, relatives and associates. Among their closest friends in their later years, in addition to Frau Meierjürgen, were the late composer Kurt Hessenberg and his wife Gisela; harpsichordist Maria Jäger-Jung, who died this year; the organist Karl Köhler, formerly in charge of much of the liturgical organ program at the Hochschule and still residing in Frankfurt; the late Berlin painter Gerhard Rechenbach (who painted the portrait of Helmut Walcha that still adorns the living room on Hasselhorstweg), and the loyal Adolf Kirschner, still living in Frankfurt, with whom the friendship dated back to the year 1935. In addition it is clear that they enjoyed a close relationship with Christel North-Wittmann (the oldest daughter of Pastor Paulus North), who at one time directed the church’s choir, and her family, as also with Helmut Walcha’s former assistant Agathe Calvelli-Adorno (a niece of the late eminent philosopher) and her brilliant scientist-husband Rainer Jaenicke. Of course there were important friendships lost to death—I think of the late Erich Thienhaus, who on behalf of Deutsche Grammophon recorded many of Walcha’s early albums, and his companion—a couple to whom, in my recollection, the Walchas referred quite often. Helmut Walcha and many of his former students, on both sides of the ocean, kept in touch with each other, some in more rigorous, some in looser ways. But the affections from and for the Walchas were and are spread around the planet. Nowhere do his work and person continue to be more revered, for instance, than today in Japan.

The organ in the musical world
Our instrument is grandly self-contained and we are, with few exceptions, not required to interact with other musicians in order to enjoy it; in addition, it usually sits, not portable, in church buildings and liturgical contexts a good step or two removed from the venues and concerns of the larger—and secular—musical world. We congregate less with other musicians than among ourselves, and then with clergy and church people for whom music is often one of several means toward approaching religious goals but rarely an end in itself. In these circumstances it may not be surprising that some organists have, over the last seven or eight decades, been drawn to doctrines that advocate simplistic solutions to the problems of musical interpretation—cries of “everything legato except repeated notes!, everything detached!, everything portato except for occasional couplets!, no Romanticism!, no Classicism!, only Eclecticism is American!, organs without tremulants!, no thumbs!, never legato over the bar-line!, no cases!, no swells!, no electric bellows!, no combinations!, no more tracker-action!, choral accompaniment only on British organs!, never play from memory!, always play from memory!, historical temperaments only!, Spanish Renaissance organs to the rescue!”—etc.
Is there a reader who has not heard all of these cries? Is it a problem that none of them ever crossed the lips of Helmut Walcha? It is a problem, for us—I submit—that almost none of them ever crosses the lips of an oboist or a singer or a violinist or a composer or a pianist . . . For any of these people, to advocate such creeds would soon render them dysfunctional as musicians. For them the issue is, and has to be, the virtually endless variety of means available, and required!, for convincing, communicative interpretation of music. How and where have we, do we (through our isolation?), go wrong, become so narrow? Out there, also—scratched beneath the surface—even the Harnoncourts and Hogwoods, Herreweghes and Gardiners would admit that delving ever deeper into the cave of history, to retrieve from its dim light ever greater jewels of truth, of authentic instructions from the dead (instructions then to be enforced by a kind of Early Music Police, analogous to composers’ Avant-garde Music Police of the 1960s), is not actually the way, not the primary way, in which musical interpretation evolves (or “improves”)—among people living in a 21st century.
Helmut Walcha was no more opposed to good historical research than to subjectivity or spontaneity; indeed he knew that, as an intrinsic part of our lives and times, it contributed inevitably and often usefully—or usably, for it needs to be used and not worshipped—to change, via those endless hermeneutic cycles (no matter how often we like to believe an endpoint has been reached . . . ) of reconsiderations and revisions without which life and history are not possible. But the primary focus of his work and teaching was the artist’s obligation to deal responsibly—a path at least as challenging—with the immanent structure and character of each individual work, not by subjecting it to a patented solution, but by minute examination and analysis—of its specific language and being and discernible structure and expressive intentions—by the eyes and intellect and heart and (rather than by theories) via the inner ear informed by these three human faculties and supplemented by such intriguing general stylistic mandates or suggestions as are contemporaneously proffered through the insights or opinions of historians.
I have enjoyed listening to recordings and performances by some of the brilliant young organists entering church and concert life today. Much of their work conveys a fine visceral excitement—passion has not been lost! While the generations may be well advised to eschew directly “interfering” with each other, empathy and respect for the mysteries of new (or old) perceptions and of different internally driven emphases need perhaps not preclude some beneficial reciprocal stimulation and cross-fertilization (as another part, indeed, of the ineluctable historical hermeneutic). While I can—and have tried to—learn from attending to playing-styles informed by the most recent historiography, and even from such seductively looser and more “casual” kinds of musical gestures as seem favored among some of the younger artists, I confess that what I do find largely missing these days is a sense of the deep interpretative responsibility to the essence of each individual work, and the consequent specific and lucid internal organization of each musical rendition, which characterized and was so widely appreciated half a century ago in the work of Helmut Walcha. Perhaps, prompted by his centennial, a broad and detailed reconsideration of the sound recordings of this artist, in conjunction with his educational legacy, could facilitate a reformulation (resolidification?) of our interpretative priorities—within a new hermeneutical cycle of consciousness—and thereby also contribute, in analogy to his work’s earlier direct appeal beyond the confines of the organ world, to bringing our instrument and its repertoire yet a step closer—as most of us desire—toward the center of mainstream contemporary classical music culture.
It is my hope that, by way of encouraging such an undertaking or at least discussion, recollections by others who knew or felt strongly about Helmut Walcha—along with other relevant comments or critiques prompted by this article—will be forthcoming in the pages of The Diapason.■

Paul Jordan has previously written for The Diapason, The American Organist, Musik und Kirche, and The American Recorder. Of his five recordings (two of them double albums), one, though 29 years old, has not yet been published, and three are out of print. The last one, however, the Art of Fugue, is still available at . Paul has also recorded for several radio networks and concertized in more than 100 cities on four continents, most recently again in Germany, and in England. He has graduate degrees from Yale, the Frankfurt State Academy of Music, and the American Conservatory in Chicago. His longest church tenure was at United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, exceeded however by 22 years of teaching at the State University of New York in Binghamton.

Helmut Walcha, the great German organist, may have had the distinction of knowing more keyboard music of Bach by heart than any other individual in history, including quite likely the composer himself. Walcha, who would be 100 years old this year, was born in Leipzig; he became blind at the age of seventeen, and could boast as his innermost possession virtually all the organ works of J. S. Bach, the harpsichord works, including the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations, and the entire Art of the Fugue, which Walcha may have been the only person to have both performed and recorded from memory. The international renown of this organist, who moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1929 and lived there until his death in 1991, was based initially on his comprehensive series of recordings of the Bach organ works, undertaken on historical instruments during the late 1940s and early 1950s and issued under the Archiv label of Deutsche Grammophon. Helmut Walcha was the teacher of some 200 organists—a fourth of these were Americans, many of whom came to occupy important teaching positions in the United States. Following his retirement in the early 1970s from teaching and then from concert life, he could still for some years be heard regularly at Vesper services on Saturday afternoons at the Dreikönigs-kirche in Frankfurt. Walcha’s final recording, a double album of pre-Bach German Baroque compositions, received a Deutscher Schallplattenpreis. The first portion of the following three-part study formed part of a contribution to Bach-Stunden, a Festschrift for Helmut Walcha on the occasion of his 70th birthday, published by Evangelischer Presseverband in Hessen und Nassau, Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

*

The essential principle that students could derive from Walcha, both by observing his life and artistic expressions and by absorbing his articulable methods, attitudes and conclusions, was that of balance. He was not an extremist, but a reconciler and integrator. With sufficient exposure and, of course, receptivity, students could learn from him that he—like indeed most serious organists—subsisted and acted within some fifteen dialectical fields, in relation to which he himself almost invariably came to choose the middle path, the one that bears at least the possibility of comprehensiveness through mediation and synthesis. As with all creative individuals, the overarching dialectic was between openness—a kind of receptivity, which of itself would strive to be infinite—and its counter-pole: narrowed focus, concentration and self-discipline. The following is an attempt—based on Walcha’s conception, artistic accomplishments, and pedagogical activities—to summarize the more specific perspectives that sustain organists’ work and with respect to which their individual orientations may be defined.

1. Song and Form
The fundamental impulse of organ music is vocal in nature; we are dealing, keyboard notwithstanding, with a wind instrument—i.e., with singing, one step removed. Hence, the process of breathing and its palpable projection in the interpretation, though not mechanically required, is musically of the essence, and all the more so in view of the static nature of the organ’s sound—a quality that on the one hand moves the organist’s music-making yet a step further away from the flexibility of the more natural (or “primary”) musical transactions of singers and wind and string instrument players (and even of pianists) but on the other hand provides the basis for many of the specific glories of the medium: e.g., its capacity for objectivity, for religious transcendence, for sharply etched realization of complex polyphony in detail, yet equally for compelling projection of formal architecture on a grand scale. Even though—perhaps in view of its ideological functions in the jargons of Hegelians, Marxists, Freudians, Existentialists, and some theologians—the word dialectic was not one commonly employed by Helmut Walcha, it may be said that the first of the Spannungsfelder or dialectical fields of tension within which the organist must move is that between the poles of subjective expressivity and formal objectivity. Projection of subjective expressivity involves receiving and actively experiencing the primary impulse of the individual musician as emotionally responsive poet-singer and transmitting it via tone production by—albeit in this instance already mechanized—breath or wind. Effective realization, on the other hand, of the calculated objectivity of “abstract” formal and contrapuntal procedures presupposes—in both the act of composition and the performer’s interpretive re-creation—an artisanship of conscious manipulation and fusion of given musical materials, as discrete building-blocks, into artistic “edifices.” Organists’ movements between these poles are inescapably dialectical: they mediate, reconcile, observe, initiate, influence and preside over the poles’ unceasing cycles of interaction, interpenetration and re-differentiation.

2. Polyphony and Virtuosity
At another level, there is a synthesis between what we have just described as the vocal and the formal counter-poles; the early genres of organ composition such as ricercar, canzona, and to a considerable extent even fugue were derived from models of vocal polyphony and may thus be said to represent, within the corpus of organ music, a trend toward formal embodiment of the vocal impulse. To this tendency the counterpart or antithesis, arising from the instrument itself, is the human Spieltrieb—an “itchy” playfulness of the hands, stimulated in a special manner by the specific freedom afforded by the mechanized objectivity inherent in all instruments, and particularly in the keyboard. The possibility of going beyond the voice (in terms especially of velocity with subtleties of touch, non-vocal intervallic leaps, or complexity of texture), once recognized, is inevitably explored, relished and cultivated, and ultimately formalized, e.g., in toccatas and many fantasies and the more instrumentally inspired fugues. In Walcha’s teaching, pieces, sections of pieces, individual voices, and especially the compositions’ basic motivic building-blocks, were carefully examined and analyzed with respect to this differentiation, and interpreted accordingly.

3. Breathing
Returning to the more primary level, that of the original vocal impulse, and the corresponding requirement that the music breathe—that is, that the continuity of the individual line be periodically interrupted—it became evident that, given both the complexity of structure of much organ music and the special exigencies of the instrument’s static sound, the breathing itself could not be left to chance or the vagaries of intuition. Rather, the performer’s musical instinct needed to be supplemented, and indeed illuminated, by the exertion of conscious criteria and intellectual responsibility in arriving at the crucial decisions regarding articulation. Not surprisingly, the four main criteria fall into two pairs, each of which again defines a dialectical field. In the first field the question of articulation must be examined in terms of the individual line or voice, abstracted from its contrapuntal-harmonic environment. Two criteria then define the spectrum of possible decisions: first, the intrinsic shape of the line—that is, its unique motivic components as well as larger-scale shifts of direction, expressive emphases, and so on—as against the requirements of underlying, not necessarily immanent rhythmic structure; that is, the placement of the linear components in relation to the metric pulse and, especially, the possible use of such components to define not only the values of the line but also those of the meter and its subdivisions. Whereas in rendering Renaissance music such decisions—except in the case of dance rhythms—would be made largely on the basis of intrinsic linear shape, in music of the Baroque period the dance rhythms and the meter exert more universal claims of their own, so that there may often be an interpretive tension between these and the more purely linear forces. At the second level, however, the more shape-oriented and the more metric types of articulation are seen as one inasmuch as they relate to the individual (horizontal) line. The respective tentative decisions, which—as shown—often already embody a creative compromise, must now undergo balancing through considerations intrinsic to the vertical dimension. A considerable density of texture, for instance, might prompt an attempt at clarification via still more liberal articulation. In contrast, the intensity of certain kinds of harmonic pulls, such as those surrounding a suspension and its resolution, would in some instances preclude execution of a motivically justifiable caesura in the tension-bearing line or lines.

4. Registration
If articulation thus had the double function of enhancing the organ’s vocal-expressive qualities while at the same time providing for formal, motivic and textural clarity, the mastery of registration—an equally crucial element of Walcha’s pedagogy—required a comparable simultaneous exertion in different directions or in some instances an intermediate balancing of the two. Registration on the one hand is among the organist’s most intimate modes of emotional expression and communication, comparable in one sense to the pianist’s personal touch and thus an indispensable vehicle for such warmth and sensuality as can be brought to the art; but, as with articulation, an objective integrity and aptness of registration are also required for fulfilling the organist’s obligation to the musical text and illumining for the listener the structure and form of the work at hand. The formal-structural level of consideration in turn requires attention to two factors: the transparency of simultaneous vertical occurrences and the chronological-spatial coherence and/or appropriate differentiation of successive formal subdivisions.

5. Tempo and Rhythmic Qualities
Both tempo and Tempogefühl (the latter referring to the feeling or projection of tempo) are experienced as aspects of two spectrums that more closely resemble bordering spheres than contrasting poles. The individual interpreter’s orientation—momentary or general—within this double-spectrum is one of the most delicate and imponderable phenomena in music. The sense and effect of tempo ranges—“from left to right”—from monumentality, through deliberate restraint, to poised serenity—and, on the other side of our “border-line”—from a relaxed “swing,” through a more facile, “surfacy” flow, to a dynamic forward-surge. Reversing direction, the dialectic is akin to that between the virtuosity of abandon and the virtuosity of control, or—for the listener—to being overwhelmed and being illuminated. Walcha’s example and teaching as well as some musicological research suggest that a high proportion of Bach’s music in particular revolves around the double-spectrum’s mid-line, though such an insight does not remove a considerable remaining leeway for differences in individual pulse, interpretation, or concept of variety. Throughout Walcha’s work and teaching, too, that inexorable dialectic between performance-tempo and room acoustics remained an ever-present (if of course at times exasperating) consideration. A further crucial dialectic in the sphere of rhythm and tempo is ever operative between a “purely metronomic” pulse and such nuances of agogic freedom as constitute one of the primary expressive tools of all performers (though to varying degrees) in all musical idioms.

6. Improvisation
No student who attended Saturday Vespers at the Dreikönigskirche in Frankfurt could fail to be impressed, and somehow influenced, by both Walcha’s chorale-related and his free improvisations. These improvisations were of a quality comparable at least to that offered by more renowned practitioners of the art, e.g., in France. Thus in Walcha’s and, inevitably, in many of his students’ lives there has been a threefold dialectic (Wechselwirkung) between pre-structured and (more or less) improvised music: within the traditional repertoire (in analysis and corresponding rendition of the comparably contrasting, more or less “improvisatory” elements contained therein); in one’s varied “utilitarian” or functional church-music (and in some cases also concert) activities; and in original composition.

7. Organ-Building
In the critical sphere of organ-building and its characteristic influence upon the art of organ-playing, there was in Walcha’s career a certain discernible interpenetration of, and moderation between, northern and southern influences. The extremes here could be defined as represented by such instruments as the Clicquot in Poitiers or some of the 17th-and 18th-century Silbermann family’s organs in southern Germany (or Switzerland or Alsace) on the one hand and achievements by mid-20th-century Scandinavian organ builders in Denmark and Sweden on the other. There is yet another polar interaction in the field of organ-building that permeated and in some ways defined Walcha’s work and teaching: that between the artistic essentials of historic organ building—mechanical playing action; classic specifications, scaling and voicing; the Werkprinzip; casework and slider-chests; etc.—and modern accretions and technical conveniences, such as swell mechanisms, but also electric stop-action, combination systems, and the like.

8. The Horizontal and the Vertical
As elsewhere in his oeuvre, J. S. Bach sustained in his keyboard works—which formed the center of Helmut Walcha’s life and work—an historically perhaps unique balance between the energies of the vertical and horizontal dimensions, between the appreciable and conceivable requirements of long- and short-range harmonic coherence on the one hand and those of melodic and contrapuntal integrity on the other. The implications and ramifications of this achievement—not to mention its inexhaustible fascination—pervaded, as did perhaps no other single factor, Helmut Walcha’s entire career, his teaching, his concept of the art of music; one is tempted to say: his very view of the world.

9. To and from Bach
This gave rise to another dialectic, by which none of his students could long remain unaffected: that which becomes operative in applying or attempting to apply what is learned or absorbed from the “Bachian” dialectic, or from its specific type of “ecological balance,” to the understanding and interpretation of music—of both earlier and later periods, and of other national origin—which may embody it in less judicious proportions, or in which it, in turn, appears to be “counter-balanced” by other artistic forces.

10. Correctness and Communication
Of often underestimated significance (yet comparable perhaps to that of registration in its consequences) is a philosophical approach that views the exigencies of musicological correctness, i.e., of “purity,” “historicity,” “authenticity,” and the equally compelling need to communicate with the living audience under greatly altered historical circumstances, as two poles of a spectrum, which—rather than allowing either to lay absolute claim to the interpreter—must be mediated and reconciled in the performer’s practice. While there is room for dispute over the nature of permissible compromises, the premise as such tends to act as a safeguard against fanaticism and dogmatism at one end of the spectrum and untamed artistic libertinism at the other.

11. Life, Faith, Art
While the context of this summary precludes an attempt to present the next two points in any detail, it is clear, and cannot be left unstated, that in addition to the overarching artistic dialectic of openness and discipline, as mentioned at the outset, there are other contexts and relationships of a high order that play a role in the life and productivity of any individual—such as the unending dialogue between the postulates of one’s creed, theology or religion, and one’s daily experience of life. None of Helmut Walcha’s students were unaware that in his case the context was that of a deeply felt Lutheran Christianity, nor could the particular congruence of this factor with the beliefs held by Bach himself escape notice or fail to engender speculation about its implications for Walcha’s artistry and, in particular, his Bach interpretation. The type and extent of influence exerted by such a vivid example of unity and continuity between presupposition and execution will of course vary from case to case and in each instance be filtered through the student’s own particular creedal background.

12. Text and Symbol
Similarly evident in Walcha’s life, again as in Bach’s own, was a constant interaction between musical experience and activity and theology. This lent special force to his detailed elucidation of a related interpretive dialectic, that between implied verbal text and music—crucial to the realization especially of Bach’s chorale-related organ works, some of which may remain relatively impenetrable—i.e., from an exclusively musical point of view—until their verbal or pictorial symbolism has been illuminated and, then, integrated into the interpretation.

13. Performance and Pedagogy
In yet another respect were Walcha’s life and influence characterized by an extraordinary balance of forces: that between artistic creativity and pedagogical mission. The pedagogy was not limited to lessons, but expanded to include the marvelous lectures on the Well-Tempered Clavier at the Hochschule in Frankfurt and—beyond those—the renowned Bach-Stunden held at the university in the years immediately following World War II, and of course innumerable program notes or introductory remarks at selected concerts throughout his active life. In addition, the individual pedagogy was a two-way street; unlike some other artists, Helmut Walcha was not easily bored by studio instruction (nor did he miss lessons), and he clearly took pains to learn and profit from his experience as a teacher.

14. Organ Plus
His work as a performer sustained an interaction and a dialogue between the demands and repertoires of the organ and the harpsichord. Among his students, this duality will often be reflected, if not always identically, then in the dialogue and cross-fertilization of organ and piano, or organ and composition, or—most frequently—organ and conducting.

15. Beyond Speech and Thought
Finally, like all lives, Walcha’s stood under the mysterious interaction of that which can readily be expressed, articulated and imparted, and that which, by contrast, seems prohibitively difficult to communicate (and with regard to which the philosopher Wittgenstein once went so far as to propose a permanent silence). In a moment both rare and characteristic—opening for a revealing instant the door into that realm—Walcha answered a student’s query, at a semester’s-end party of the Church Music Division of the Hochschule, as to the ultimate criterion for a musician’s calling: “What makes you know that you must be a musician are those secret and indescribable moments of transcendent joy which come upon you from time to time—at the keyboard—in the deep absorption of long and lonely hours of practice.”

This article will be continued.

David Rumsey studied organ in Australia, Denmark, France and Austria. He rose to a senior lectureship in the Australian university system from 1969–1998, also pursuing an international teaching, concert and consulting career as an organist. He worked in various cross-disciplinary fields, especially linking broadcasting, drama and music, arranging a number of major presentations and seminars. In 1998, after mounting a 14-hour spectacle on the life of Bach with actors in period dress and musicians playing historic instruments, he left Australia and settled around 2000 in Basel, Switzerland, where he continues to work as an organist and consultant.

    Posterity bestows no laurels upon mimesis. Since the invention of the Welte-Mignon piano and the Welte-Philharmonie organ, this expression has lost its validity for recording musicians. Generations far removed from ours will be able to recognize the masters of our age in their prowess and in the totality of their artistry. By means of technology, impermanence and time have been vanquished, the moment of metaphysical experience has been captured for eternity.

These prophetic words of Montgomery Rufus Karl Siegfried Straube (1873–1950) have never rung truer, although the long road, technological means, and near total loss of all that he was talking about in relation to the Philharmonie, could never have been foreseen—not even by a person of such eloquence, vision and culture as he obviously was. The British do have ways with words, the Germans perhaps more with music. Was it his English mother who lay behind this uncanny ability to express himself so well?
My former teacher in Sydney, Australia, Norman Johnston, used to sagely advise his students: “Always proceed from the known to the unknown.” It was well expressed and has long served as a useful life guide. Norman was a pupil of André Marchal, Marchal in his turn a pupil of Eugène Gigout. Like beauty, musical genealogy is probably mainly in the eye of the beholder, although it has been perpetuated often enough—as in Albert Schweitzer’s biography. It is often associated—as there—with those who want to trace their instructional lineage back to J. S. Bach.
By this token, Gigout is my musical great-grandfather. As a student, I put him into a box labeled “romantic French”. And there he remained for a very long time. It was an accurate enough generalization, but when you spend whole afternoons with him—or his musical ghost—you soon begin to realize that he occupied a rather special place in the romantic French hierarchy. Furthermore, he does not always perform in quite the way a “romantic” tag might lead us to expect.
Until recently I had never heard Gigout play. Hardly surprising: he died 14 years before I was born and made no gramophone records. But now that I am a septuagenarian, some unexpected events have changed all that. With apologies to clairvoyants and occultists, whose hopes will now be dashed, perfectly rational explanations are offered, while Straube’s prophecy is fulfilled.

The Seewen Philharmonie
The advice of my teacher was particularly apt over the past few years, as one of the world’s few remaining full-sized Welte-Philharmonie organs was restored under my supervision. The instrument was originally intended for the ship Britannic and is now the central attraction in the Museum der Musikautomaten at Seewen, Solothurn, Switzerland. Associated with it is a remarkable inventory of roll recordings, most commercially released between 1912 and 1928.
Several stages were needed in this not uncomplicated exercise, each of them representing a transition from the known to the unknown:
• restoring the organ
• dealing with the Britannic connections that were discovered during the restoration
• making the pneumatic roll-player work
• adding computer control
• tweaking the pneumatic roll player, computer and console systems to work optimally together
• scanning the rolls digitally
• developing software to electronically emulate the Welte pneumatic system
• auditioning the scanned and converted roll data played on the organ itself
• making an inventory of the roll collection, who played, what they played, how they played, and the current condition of the rolls.
With such a complex instrument, and old technologies that had slipped well behind the front line for nearly a century, we proceeded from our knowns to our unknowns with a mixture of confidence, trepidation and patience. Fortunately all went well.
But what of the rolls? We knew that playing them back over the Welte tracker bar and pneumatic player was always going to work—with the age-old reservations surrounding these machines and their many vagaries. Yet this, too, was surprisingly easy.

The Welte rolls
So the rolls could be played again pneumatically and the organ played manually—just as always with the Welte Philharmonie (Philharmonic to most of the English-speaking world). Seewen possesses, however, mostly only one roll of each recording. Even with other known collections, there are limited duplicates about in the world. Most original Welte rolls are nearly a century old now and show distinctive signs of being at “5 minutes to midnight.” Even with some potentially available copies, Seewen’s collection can exist nowhere else in the world, for it mainly consists of original “second-master” rolls from which the copies were made. So the physical wear and tear, and real risk of damage, even destruction, from pneumatic machine playing are best avoided whenever possible.
With only around 250 roll titles known to exist in more than one copy at Seewen, we are clearly treading on rather delicate eggshells with all of them. Our answer has been to scan them once with people and machines that treat them kindly, digitize them, preserve the rolls separately, then play them as often as we want from computer files.
So the next unknown became digital scanning and playback. Could we side-step the pneumatic roll-player with complete impunity? The scanning device needed its own custom-written software to produce playable files. The data was then transferred to the organ’s computer, for which more arcane software programs had to be developed. The interface had to operate absolutely non-intrusively with the organ’s playing action, for this was a unique and highly sensitive heritage restoration. There was a rough row to hoe here for a while, dealing with the huge multinomial equations of at least four different roll types, their age, and the weird but wonderful Welte multiplexing system, which might best be described as early 20th-century pneumatic computing. Welte’s technical standards also varied from roll to roll and with the earlier and later developments of their technology.
Success began to arrive by mid-2009. The unknown was relieved by the known. From October of that year for the following six months, a team of three specially trained scanners began the digitizing process. This required “sensitive fingers” to mount and guide the fragile rolls without damage and ensure that the best “geometry” was attained with, ideally, just one pass. By mid-2010 all 1,600 or so rolls had been scanned and digitized, and are thus now preserved in two forms: the original rolls and their digital conversions.
Still there were many unknowns: What was played? Who played? How? Phrasing? Tempo? Registration? Does this unique collection fully validate Karl Straube’s statement above? A Pandora’s box of questions and future research projects was suddenly opened up while myriads of fine historic performance details became available.
The latter represent the performance practices of an entire generation of organists who preceded most of those generally thought to be the first ever to make recordings. In chronologically defined terms: the rare “electrically recorded” 78s, most notably those of Harry Goss-Custard in the mid-1920s, were preceded by effectively no acoustic organ recordings. It was exactly during this period, 1912–1925, that roll-recording was in its heyday.
Welte in particular, among the few firms making recordings at this time, managed to capture the playing of a whole school of 19th-century-trained organists in this important time-window. While they and many other firms made rolls aimed to sell in the “popular” and “transcription” repertoire arenas, Welte stands out for their dedication to recording the great organists and original organ repertoire of their own epoch. This included Harry Goss-Custard, himself, then about 13 years younger than when he recorded his 78s.
The downside to the Welte system may well be the limitations of one organ for all organists and repertoire, and a tricky recording technology and medium, but the upsides are many. For one thing, the playability and intelligibility of most roll recordings is now far better than any disc made before the mid-1940s. Fate has decreed that Seewen is the only Welte Philharmonie left in the world on which we can preserve and play so many of these early roll-recordings, reproducing the original playing and registration, at the highest possible standards allowed by this system.

Playing the rolls digitally
It is late 2010 as this is being written. We are halfway through a survey of the digitized rolls, a process that should be complete by late 2011. The results are very encouraging—about 85% play well on one scan. Inevitably there are some problematic rolls, some that may never play again, some re-scans to do, an odd roll that is wound in reverse (standard practice with Welte’s cinema organ players) or other eventualities, including five marked but not perforated “first-masters”. But the overwhelming majority turned out to play well—and, considering the historical importance of it all, quite breathtakingly so.
There are many advantages to playing rolls digitally. Quick search-and-play of the stored data and no rewinding—with all of that procedure’s dire threat to aging paper—are simple and obvious benefits. Dialogue boxes giving timings or the actual registration being used are extremely useful. The Seewen organ, which knew two main manifestations—1914 and, slightly enlarged, 1920–1937—can also be switched from one form to another, enabling the rolls to be heard as they were recorded, or as Welte themselves pneumatically patched them up to play on a larger organ (specifically this one). Smaller player-organ manifestations are also available.
One of the most important facilities offered is the chance to restore the pedal to the point where the organist originally played it: due to Welte’s multiplexing system, pedal notes were often adjusted by moving them slightly earlier so the pneumatic technology could still work while roll-widths remained manageable. They had valid reasons for this, but digital editing now allows restoration of that aspect of the original performance. Others, including the correction of wrong notes and stops caused by holes or tears from years of damage to or decay of the paper, are also possible.
The computer in the Seewen organ is wired straight to the final windchest magnets, thus playing far more accurately and precisely than passing the whole process through paper and pneumatic systems with all their vagaries and notorious technological temperaments. That includes roll slippage or sticking, and worn, underpowered motors, to say nothing of arch-enemies such as dust, air leakage or damaged, corroding lead tubing. Another big plus for digital playback is that repeated playings do not create more wear and tear on rolls. Tear can all too literally be what happens. Simply rewinding a roll can be an act of vandalism against a unique surviving historic performance—the rewind moves at some speed and shredding is a better description than tearing when it happens.
Many rolls are no longer reliably playable pneumatically, and this situation must inevitably deteriorate further with time. So it was not a moment too soon to digitize them. In fact, both rolls and digitized scans are now the targets of careful preservation under the impenetrable vaults of this impressively-built museum (was “Fort Knox” more prototype than legend?).

Restoration
We were lucky. For such a sensitive heritage restoration, it was a relief that Welte themselves had built or converted its action to electric back in early 20th century. Had this not already been done, computer playback could have been unthinkable now. The consequences would have been pneumatic playing only, maybe only 50% of the rolls functioning properly, and a destructive process repeated for each playing. Further deterioration, with time running on its legendary wings—and no effective means of correction for rolls not running perfectly true—would have been our rather anguished lot.
The happy confluence of musical and computer skills found in Daniel Debrunner not only saw to the computer control of the organ’s action, but also developed the roll-scanner and necessary software to convert the rolls into digital formats. A collaboration now exists with a number of partners in a research program called Wie von Geisterhand, which, in late 2010, was awarded another Swiss Federal Government grant to continue through 2011 and 2012.
The museum under Christoph
Haenggi’s direction, Daniel Debrunner, and I are among the Swiss and international partners in the Geisterhand team. Now that all rolls are scanned, we have set about auditioning them on the organ. Sure, Gigout can be heard playing his own Toccata, Communion, and Festival March on the Welte formerly in Linz-am-Rhein (EMI 5CD set 7243 5 74866 2 0 CD 2); but that organ is a much smaller model than the Welte recording organ was. Seewen’s full-sized Philharmonie has all the stops Gigout used. Important aspects of the registration can be compromised on the smaller models where, for example, some foundation stops on one manual are typically borrowed from another, or the pedal Posaune 16′ “pneumatically patched” to a Bourdon 16′—just not the same thing. The currently available CD-recorded repertoire is in any case minuscule compared to Seewen’s holdings.

Cataloguing the Welte recordings
At present rates it will probably take until late 2011 to complete the auditioning process and finalize a comprehensive database. We are also slowly incorporating whatever further information we can glean about the total Welte organ roll production and its current whereabouts around the globe. So far we have over 3,600 entries representing over 2,600 known rolls and those mentioned in Welte catalogues. This gives over 1,600 separate titles.
Already a wonderland of historic recordings has turned up. The relatively short playing times of 78s (at best about 41⁄2 minutes) compared poorly to over 23 minutes available from rolls. The roll performances are without surface noise, demand no interruptions to “change sides”, and are in the most perfect “hi-fi stereo”.
Actually, we could say this process goes one step further: it nudges up towards “live” performance. Those who have experienced roll recordings frequently report the feeling that the artist is present, actually playing. An anecdote relates that admirers of Busoni’s once played a Welte-Mignon recording of his at his home while his widow was in the next room. The accuracy of reproduction was so true that she burst in, eyes full of tears, calling out “Ferruccio, Ferruccio!” Wie von Geisterhand (“as if by the hand of a ghost”) is a most relevant project name.

The Great Playback
Our computer technology began to reach maturity in the second half of 2009. In October 2009 the systematic scanning process commenced in the Seewen Museum’s library, which was specially re-equipped for this task. Then, from November, we could launch the long program of auditioning the scanned rolls. Tweaking it all has continued through 2010. In general, we took the rolls in the sequence of their Welte catalogue numbers. This led to some observations of the firm’s “commercial logic” in its rarified market: many of the earliest Philharmonie rolls are recuts from orchestrion or piano rolls, modified to make them play on an organ with 150 holes in its tracker bar. Many were punched by hand: most impressive at Seewen are the long operatic, orchestral, and symphonic excerpts—including entire Beethoven symphonies and lengthy Wagner or Verdi opera potpourris—mostly hand-punched, often on rolls of around 15 minutes’ duration.
The sociology of this is a study in itself, but clearly, as with the British “Town Hall Organ” culture, Welte and its organists had to “entertain”. There was great public demand to hear operatic and symphonic music, but a notable lack of orchestras around to play it, especially aboard ships.
The auditioning of the roll-scans fell into my lap almost too naturally. There was a curious life-flashback here—history sometimes repeats itself in wondrous ways and without warning. When I was about eight years old, somebody disposed of an old acoustic wind-up gramophone in our backyard. This may have been thoughtless for the precinct, but it was kind to me. A vast collection of 78s was dumped alongside this machine. In the glorious outdoors of sunny suburban Sydney, I would play these recordings over and over. My great favorite was Wagner. Hapless neighbors were serenaded with unsolicited afternoons of Valkyries, Nibelungen and Flying Dutchmen. The complaints were legion. My skin was thick.
In late 2009—some 62 years later—I found myself listening to precisely this repertoire once again, but at Seewen. At least it was indoors this time—winter in Switzerland by contrast to summer in Sydney. Nobody was seriously disturbed, and the museum staff’s love or hatred of Wagner expanded or contracted commensurately according to their predispositions to this music. A subtle, inoffensive art of opening and closing the doors on me in Seewen’s “Hall of Auditory Arts,” where the organ is located, was tactfully developed. Or is that a residual “Wagner social conscience” now returning to make me utterly paranoid?
An amazing mastery of musical expression is found in the manually punched performances. All manner of nuances were reproduced—crescendi, sforzati, tremolandi, rallentandi, rubati, “orchestral” registrations—all fully expressive and highly convincing. One would scarcely guess that so many of them were laboriously drilled out by technicians rather than played by first-rate musicians. In fact, these technicians were consummate artists themselves, sometimes trained organists in their own right. They knew their repertoire and the performance paradigms of their day exactly, and had the skills and capacity to precisely build them into these rolls. All of this was through the medium of millions upon millions of tiny holes punched into paper. Yet there was nothing particularly new in this—in another lineage from Père Engrammelle through Dom Bédos de Celles, skills had already passed on to musical barrel-makers telling them how to make “mechanical” music expressive in the 18th century. And there had then been a 19th-century-long gestation of this art, through the orchestrion’s heyday, before Michael Welte and his crew applied their skills to Wagner, Brahms and Beethoven for their Philharmonie.
Such transcriptions were not only a much-favored repertoire of the Welte era, but are also one of the musical genres that the Philharmonie was truly “born to play”. In discussions of lost Beethoven traditions around World War I, these rolls at Seewen must have their part to play: they were created by people steeped in these traditions. They also knew their Verdi and Wagner.
Cinema organ music, light classics, and even hymns were also recorded. We have German chorales played by German organists or English hymns played by Harry Goss-Custard in what must have been the Berlin or Liverpool Cathedral traditions of the time. The variety of information that is stored on these rolls is truly breathtaking.

So: what is there?
Seewen is the inheritor of the largest ship’s organ ever built and the most important single collection of roll recordings by fully romantic-tradition organists. Listed here chronologically according to their birth years are just 29 of Welte’s organists—about one-third of the total:

1842–1912 Carl Hofner
1842–1929 Johann Diebold
1844–1925 Eugène Gigout
1851–1937 Clarence Eddy
1853–1934 Franz Joseph Breitenbach
1858–1944 Marie-Joseph Erb
1861–1925 Marco Enrico Bossi
1862–1949 Samuel Atkinson Baldwin
1863–1933 William Faulkes
1865–1931 William Wolstenholme
1865–1934 Edwin Henry Lemare
1865–1942 Alfred Hollins
1868–1925 Paul Hindermann
1869–1929 Herbert Francis Raine Walton
1871–1964 Walter Henry (Harry) Goss-Custard
1872–1931 Walter Fischer
1873–1916 Max Reger
1873–1950 Karl Straube
1877–1956 Reginald Goss-Custard
1878–1942 Alfred Sittard
1878–? J(ohann?) J(akob?) Nater
1882–1938 Paul Mania
1884–1944 Joseph Elie Georges Marie Bonnet
1886–1971 Marcel Dupré
1890–? Kurt Grosse
1893–1969 Joseph Messner
1897–1960 Karl Matthaei
1898–1956 Günter Ramin
fl. 20thc “Thaddä” Hofmiller

Apart from the slightly special cases of Carl Hofner and Johann Diebold, the next earliest-born of Welte’s organists was French: Eugène Gigout. Born in 1844, he was educated directly in his country’s great 19th-century traditions of playing, which he himself helped to create and consolidate.
Judging by evidence on the rolls, the Freiburg recordings were made at least in early 1911. But 1910 must be more likely, since a preview of the Philharmonie was presented to the Leipzig Spring Fair in 1911. The final development—with order books then opened—was at the Turin Exhibition of November that same year. Most rolls were then made and released 1912–26, neatly covering the period up to electrical recording, and briefly overlapping it. During World War I, there was a dramatic reduction in factory output, and after 1926 productivity again slowly tapered off as entertainment changed focus to other media—radio, 78s. Roll production later dribbled away to special wartime releases, re-releases or late releases of earlier recordings. The last recording year found so far is 1938 (Binninger playing Böhm on W2244).
Surveying it all, we get an impression of several waves of players fully immersed in their own traditions, with birth dates—and thus, broadly, traditions of playing—covering a span of over 50 years. From England, the USA, Italy, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, these organists were considered among the best available from anywhere in the early 20th century. While the list above tells many interesting stories, it is primarily a roll-call of Welte-preferred leading organists selected from about 1910 onwards. Others may have been asked and did not record for one reason or another. Those who did record were ones that Welte saw as potentially “best-selling” artists. Let us make no mistake about it: this was a highly commercial enterprise.

Italy: Bossi
Welte’s Italian connection was uniquely through Marco Enrico Bossi. He was the first organist ever to officially record for them (July 1912). Perhaps the link was made when Welte exhibited their prototype Philharmonie at the Turin exhibition of November 1911? Bossi’s son—also a German-trained organist—had just conducted an orchestral concert there in October. The original organ works that Marco Enrico plays are Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 539), Dubois’ In Paradisum, and Franck’s Cantabile. Transcriptions include Henselt’s Ave Maria, op. 5 (arranged by Bossi), Handel’s Organ Concerto No. 10 (second and third movements), and a Schumann March (arranged by Guilmant). The Chopin Funeral March, Debussy’s “Girl with the flaxen hair,” and Haydn’s “Ah! vieni, Flora” (from Quattro Stagioni/Four Seasons) were also recorded—the arrangers are unidentified, but quite possibly Bossi.
Most importantly, he recorded four of his own pieces: Hora mystica, Folksong from Ath, Fatemi la grazia and Noël, op. 94, no. 2. (The titles of pieces given here reflect the Welte catalogue with its sometimes quaint, often inaccurate presentation—where needed they are corrected.)
Bossi’s playing is notable in many ways; for example, the detachment of pedal notes in the Handel, giving the effect of a double-bass playing spiccato. Notable also is his tendency to arpeggiate some cadential chords and detach in counterpoint—an almost constant marcato broken by rarer moments of “targeted legato” in BWV 539 (cf. Hofner and Gigout later: same generation, same idea?). He was clearly a powerful interpreter. Most notable is Fatemi la grazia, which has an entirely variant ending to that in his printed edition. Other organists—his contemporaries—also play works of Bossi on Seewen’s rolls.
A major article by Nicola Cittadin on this topic is soon to be published in an Italian organ journal.

France: Gigout, Bonnet, Dupré, Erb
The French 19th and early 20th century school accounts for four Welte organists. Their training is an interesting chapter: Gigout was principally taught by Saint-Saëns, Bonnet by Guilmant and Vierne, and Dupré by Guilmant, Widor, and Vierne. The Benoist-Saint-Saëns-Gigout and Lemmens-Guilmant-Widor lineages are indeed musical genealogies of significance here.
The other, Erb, was an interesting choice. He was Alsatian; when he was in his early teens, his country became annexed to Germany. The proximity of Straßburg to Welte’s base in Freiburg is noted. The repertoire he plays is interestingly mixed, although the French school is clearly important and predominates.
Ernst/Bach (G-major concerto)
Vivaldi/Bach (Adagio from the A-minor concerto)
Guilmant (Invocation in B-flat Major; Funeral March & Hymn of Seraphs, op. 17; Melodie, op. 45; Grand Choeur in D Major, op. 18; Elevation, op. 25)
Franck (Pastorale, op. 18, no. 4)
Three arrangements/transcriptions: Mendelssohn (A Midsummer Night’s Dream—Wedding March), Debussy (Prélude de l’enfant Prodigué) and Wagner (Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg—Walther’s Preislied).
The freedoms Erb takes are sometimes little short of astonishing by today’s measure, perhaps even questionable—not least in the Franck Pastorale. His playing constantly fringes on what we might now define as poor, including rhythmic oddities and wrong notes. Yet, hear him through, and the lingering impression is that you have at least learned something. It is too easy to spring to quick judgements here—we are seeking a full understanding of a quite different era. Erb’s playing does not conform to what is generally acceptable today, but it at least changes perspectives and questions our paradigms in this digitally edited, “technically perfect performance” era.
Dupré was later to be one of the very few of Welte’s organists well-represented through gramophone recordings. His earlier roll recordings offer important supplementation and enhancements. An Improvisation on a Theme of Schubert (#2047) is of particular note in this connection. It seems to be a hitherto unknown recorded improvisation. Only two copies of the roll are currently known to exist. Both are in Switzerland: one is at the Barnabé Theatre Servion near Thun, the other at Schloss Meggenhorn, near Lucerne. That from Barnabé has been digitized at Seewen and plays well. It is at any rate skilled and entertaining extemporization, well demonstrating his talents when he was around 40, a most useful and important addition to the surviving Dupré heritage.

North America: Eddy, Baldwin (Lemare, Bonnet)
The North American contingent is represented by no lesser personages than Clarence Eddy and Samuel Atkinson Baldwin, with club membership extended fully to Edwin Lemare and partially to Joseph Bonnet. Eddy recorded Clérambault and Couperin, then on through Liszt, Mendelssohn, Saint-Saëns, Bossi, Buck, and Faulkes. Also German-educated at the right time and place for it, Eddy plays the Reger Pastorale in a notably fine interpretation. Transcriptions of Wagner (Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin; Prelude to Lohengrin, Pilgrim’s chorus from Tannhäuser, Isolde’s Liebestod) and one of his own works (“Old 100th” Festival Prelude and Fugue) complete the bigger picture, not to forget his inclusion of From the Land of the Sky-Blue Water by Charles Wakefield Cadman (catalogued confusingly as Wakefield-Gudmann From the land of the sky-blue).
Eddy’s compatriot, Samuel Baldwin, leaves over 20 rolls, including Buck’s Concert Variations on the Star Spangled Banner, op. 23, and Guilmant’s Sonata in D Minor, op. 42 (complete, on 2 rolls).
Eddy and Baldwin are among the most generally significant organists represented here, but Lemare naturally deserves his very special place. The full story of Lemare—luminary in the entertainment tradition—has been well-told by Nelson Barden (The American Organist 1986, vol. 20, nos. 1, 3, 6, 8). Barden has also made CDs of this most extraordinary organist’s rolls. Seewen has almost all of the rolls, including Lemare playing his famous “Moonlight and Roses” (Andantino in D-flat). However, it seems that some additional rolls exist at Seewen that were not available to anybody until recently. They are:
1239*, Dubois, Sylvine
1241*, Mendelssohn, Ruy Blas Overture
1265**, Guilmant, Funeral March & Hymn of the Seraphs
1266*, Lemare, Symphony in D Minor, op. 50: Scherzo
1267*, Lemare, Symphony in D Minor, op. 50: Adagio Patetico
1269*, Wolstenholme, Romance and Allegretto
1270**, Wagner, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg—Präludium
1274***, Gounod, Queen of Saba (Sheba): March and Cortège
With W1286* (Guilmant, Reverie, op. 70), three sources give J. J. Nater as organist, only one Lemare. At present we are ascribing it to Nater.
* = master roll
** = master roll and at least one copy *** = two master rolls held

The British organists: Faulkes, Wolstenholme, Hollins, Walton, Goss-Custard
The British organists of the “Town Hall Organ” era—not to forget that of the Great Exhibitions—were well-represented in the Welte catalogues: six of them. Along with Lemare, they all reacted to their era’s special need for entertaining organ music. This choice of British organists is not surprising when we consider the firm’s exports to England (Salomons’ and Britannic were probably their first, Harrods and many others followed). Not only are some of the most notable recitalists of the era listed, but they also recorded a proportionately large number of rolls. Harry Goss-Custard was Welte’s most prolific organ recording artist, and their catalogue of his rolls overwhelmingly swamps the lists of his disc recordings. Only one work, Lemmens’ Storm, appears to be duplicated on both roll and disk.
The recordings of Faulkes, Wolstenholme, Hollins, Walton, and both Goss-Custards were no doubt made partly to satisfy this British market with so many wealthy industrialists or shipping magnates. The Salomon Welte at Tunbridge Wells is preserved, recently restored, and is a sister—if not a twin—to the Seewen organ. They are the only two of their kind left in the world today on which Welte Philharmonie rolls can be properly played pneumatically, taking the original recording organ’s specification into account. Tunbridge Wells’ capabilities also extend to play Cottage #10 Orchestrion rolls. Its action remains completely pneumatic except for the remote Echo division, which is, and always was, electric.

Germanic territory: Hofner, Diebold, Ramin, Straube, Grosse, Breitenbach, Hindermann,
Hofmiller, Messner, Matthaei
German, Austrian, and Swiss organists account for about half the performers in the above list, and more are represented in our database. Numerically they occupy the most substantial block of historic talent here—their recordings mainly reveal the highly influential Berlin school of around 1900 (Eddy studied there, too). Leipzig, Freiburg, and Rheinberger’s influence in South Germany are also well represented.
Whatever predilection Welte might have had at the outset to use English talent and make good sales to that country, the First World War put a damper on that, although the firm was sleeping with the enemy by releasing Harry Goss-Custard’s rolls well into and through the time-span of this conflict. But they mainly had to concentrate on organists on their own side of enemy lines in the 1914–18 stretch.
The earliest-born of all these seem to have been Carl Hofner (1842–1912) and Johann Diebold (1842–1929). Hofner was educated in Munich, where the Bach tradition is sometimes said to have persisted longer than anywhere else. He was active as organist and teacher around Freiburg/Breisgau from October 1868. Then, appointed as organist at Freiburg Münster, he commenced duties on January 1, 1871. One temptation is to think that Rheinberger was his teacher in Munich. It is possible. But the teacher would have been a mere three years older than the student, and Rheinberger was only appointed professor in 1867, by which time Hofner had been in Metten for some seven years.
In 1878 Hofner settled in Freiburg. There he taught the Swiss organist and pedagogue Joseph Schildknecht, who later wrote an important Organ Method. Hofner features in early organ roll titles: #716, #717, and #722. Of these, the Bach Praeludium and Fugue in C Minor (BWV 549 on #716) is an impressive performance, varying only slightly from the note-readings of modern editions, exhibiting considerable freedom mingled with strong forward drive, and mixing a predominantly detached style of playing with seemingly carefully selected moments of legato. The relationship of this playing style to Bossi’s and Gigout’s might again be noted. The miscellaneous chorale setting of Herzlich tut mich verlangen is on #717, and an improvisation “on a theme” on #722 (not released until 1926).
Hofner died on May 19, 1912, so it was at the very end of his life and slightly before the otherwise earliest known organ recording activity by Welte with Bossi. Thus Hofner seems to have been a kind of early “trial organist” for the company. His may well also be the closest German training we will ever have to Bach’s own era—whatever musical relevance that might or might not have in these circumstances.
Diebold is represented by only one Bach piece—Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (BWV 565)—almost certainly the earliest recording we will ever possess of it. The fugue has notable differences in approach and note-readings from our practices today. Diebold’s rolls were released by Welte between 1912 and 1922. This possibly shunts him marginally later than Hofner, so perhaps he was the later to record. According to the catalogue, Seewen’s holdings and other known Welte collections, including those in the USA, Diebold played the following on Welte rolls:

Organist Johann Diebold
Welte #753* Birn, Weihnachts-Fantasie über Kommet, Ihr Hirten, op. 12
754* Böttcher, Festal Postlude
755* Faulkes, Lied, op. 136, no. 2
756* Mendelssohn, Sonata, op. 65, no. 1 in F Minor
757* Seiffert, Fantasie on a Motiv of Beethoven, op. 10
758* Tinel, Improvisata
774* Jongen, Pastorale in A Major
778* Neuhoff, Andante in E-flat Major
779* Jongen, Pastorale in A Major
780* Guilmant, Communion in A Minor, op. 45
781* Rheinberger, Romanze, op. 142, no. 2
782* Mailly, Finale aus Sonata für Orgel, D dur
783* Bach, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor
* Rolls and their scans now exist at Seewen, mostly in good playable condition.

The recordings of Ramin and Straube, the latter being the auto-prophetic author of the text quoted above, provide illuminating comparisons. The skill of the student, Ramin, at least equaled that of the master, if these rolls are any guide. Kurt Grosse is an interesting enigma—virtually unheard of today, he was one of Welte’s more prolific recording artists, with over 50 roll titles to his credit. This includes some of the epic Reger works (Fantasia on “Wachet auf ruft uns die Stimme,” op. 52, no. 2; Toccata and Fugue d/D; Fantasia and Fugue on B-A-C-H, op. 46). The
B-A-C-H is on a single roll and takes nearly 20 minutes to play; “Wachet auf” takes over 23 minutes (on one roll). Born and trained directly into the first generation of post-Brahms and Reger musicians, Grosse was mainstream Berlin organ school to the core. His playing—including some Brahms Preludes from op. 122—is a fount of challenge, example, and information.
Breitenbach was Swiss. Born in Muri/Aargau, later organist at Lucerne Cathedral, he moved mainly about the southern regions of Germany near Stuttgart. Paul Hindermann was similarly placed—he recorded rolls of Bach, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Franck, Boëllmann, Schumann, Guilmant, Salomé, and Reger. Hindermann was a student of Rheinberger, although he plays none of his master’s works on the rolls surviving at Seewen. Nor is he listed in this connection in any known global resources we have so far seen. Hofmiller is the most prolific single Rheinberger exponent in this collection—he plays five of Seewen’s 14 Rheinberger rolls. No evidence of him playing other Rheinberger rolls has yet been found.
Mention was made above of Messner, the Salzburger. He studied in Innsbruck and Munich. Unfortunately he was not a prolific recording artist—even if some more rolls currently under calligraphic examination do turn out to be his. We certainly have a “Fugal Overture” to “Theophil” Muffat’s Suite for Organ and two works of Reger (Consolation, op. 65, and Romance in A Minor). It is just one of the many side-steps you have to take with this former musical culture when you note Muffat’s first name is given—as he sometimes did himself—as Theophil, a direct translation of Gottlieb. In this connection, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach was still attributed in the Welte catalogues with the Vivaldi/Bach D-minor concerto transcription, now known to have been by his father.
The early days of the Organ Revival can be very well chronicled through some of these rolls. The 1920–37 additions to the Britannic organ also display Organ Revival influences—although it is surprising how gently voiced the two Manual II mutation stops are. Even leaving Bach (over 80 rolls) aside, there is Eddy (playing Clérambault, Couperin), Messner (Muffat), Binninger (Georg Böhm) and others, who present us at least with interesting insights. Buxtehude is played by Ramin, Bonnet (most interestingly, being the only non-German to do so, possibly under known influences of Guilmant or Tournemire), Stark, Landmann, and Straube. William Byrd is played by ten Cate, Paul Mania includes some Couperin, Dupré and Daquin, while Bonnet also plays Frescobaldi (appearing as “Trescobaldi” once in the catalogues).
The Swiss organist Karl Matthaei was already a most remarkable pioneer of early music in the 1920s. Since then, performance of early music has taken on ever greater specialization, and seemingly also performance improvement—although anybody who wants to pass definitive public judgement on that might need to show a modicum of bravery. At any rate, it is remarkable to have Matthaei’s work preserved here. He plays Bach, Buxtehude, Hanff, Pachelbel, Praetorius, Scheidt, and Sweelinck, forming an amazing early-music oasis in this otherwise high-romantic roll collection.

Improvisations
Some of these organists improvised, too. This is again very important musical documentation in its own right, the vast majority of it otherwise unavailable. The Seewen collection lists well over 20 improvisations, including organists Dupré (mentioned above), Grosse, Hofner, Hollins, Lemare, Mania, Ramin, and Wolstenholme. One of particular interest—by Hermann Happel—is a cinema organ improvisation: Nachtstimmung.

The current state of the art and technology in Seewen
There are always caveats in roll-playing technology. For instance, nobody knows the exact speed at which Welte organ rolls actually ran (or even if they all ran at a standard speed). So tempo cannot be pinpointed to three decimal places. Nevertheless, a considerable amount of research into this topic has resulted in what has yielded a reasonably objective basis for our scanning. This checks out well against subjectively-convincing musical results.
We came to a roll transport speed of 50 mm per second over the scanner’s “tracker bar”, taking into account all our knowledge of the subject and the experience of others, including authorities such as Peter Hagmann and Nelson Barden.
After we derived this figure, we did ongoing subjective checks. The resulting playback limits of “acceptably fast or slow” are all fully credible. About 40 musicians have so far had input and have delivered this consensus. Thus, the hand-punched roll of the overture to Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro can scarcely go faster, and Grosse’s Brahms Opus 122 Chorale Preludes seem about as slow as you would normally want them. The overwhelming bulk of the machine-made Beethoven and Wagner rolls are precisely at “tempo expectations”.
The only evidence we have yet seen of different settings being required to the normal position on the organ’s speed lever is confined to a few rolls, such as Lemare’s (#1217 Siegfried-Idyll) or the complete Boëllmann Suite Gothique (on one roll #752) played by Paul Hindermann. Their boxes have a sticker on them: tempo langsam einstellen (set the tempo to slow). No further details. One presumes that means at the left end of Welte’s speed-lever scale—which is about 20% slower than “normal”. Technological problems can result from this, whether the roll is played pneumatically or scanned. Experiments in the 1960s had the Boëllmann roll played twice at differing speeds for some surviving radio recordings—but the whole system is so sensitive that changing the speed changes the registration! The roll does not play properly at the moment, either pneumatically or digitally, slow or fast.
Subjectivity, technical limitations, and variant playing paradigms still leave questions in roll speed equations. Welte’s records are lost or only vaguely defined in their entire Philharmonie heritage. There are timings marked on some roll boxes, and these are generally very close to those resulting from our scan speed of 50mm per second. Whether this is totally reliable evidence remains to be seen—multiple markings on some rolls are significantly at variance with each other. The cinema organ rolls have a high proportion of timings but some just say “4 to 5 minutes”—a 25% tolerance? The timing marked on the box of #955 (Beethoven Symphonie Pastorale IV. Satz) at 10′10″ is clearly around 7% slower than the roll-scan at 9′29″. And 7% is perceptible. So 50 mm/sec is possibly marginally too fast for this. Alternatively, the Beethoven Egmont overture (#956) is given as 8′30″ on the box, and our scan runs at 8′37″—so 50 mm/sec is fractionally too slow?
Comparison with the few acoustic recordings of the same piece by the same artist could also be a guide, but little more. Pianist Grünfeld’s (Schumann) Träumerei performance on organ roll (#516), early adaptions from original piano rolls, is three seconds longer (2′40″) than his acoustic recording (2′37″). If meaningful at all, this could indicate our 50 mm/sec is again a mite too slow? Seven minutes is written on one roll lead-in which takes 9′09″ to play—so here our choice is much too slow. Dominik Hennig (Basel/Lucerne), Daniel Debrunner, and I are currently spearheading further work in this arena. István Mátyás (Vienna) has also become involved.
We have some details of the timings of historic 78 recordings by Alfred Sittard. At the moment, only one looks to be directly comparable with the same artist’s roll recording (#1037, BWV 533, Präludium E moll), and that is 3′23″ (roll-scan) against 3′23″ (78). But the recordings were made about a decade apart, and while they seem to give fullest endorsement, the chances of achieving such split-second timing precision could also be approaching the miraculous rather than yielding scientific plausibility. Direct comparative tests on the existing Welte organ at Meggen, however, very closely endorse our chosen scan speed of 50 mm/sec.
The most likely explanations are, firstly, that Welte could not or did not hold precisely to an exact speed even if they were clearly conscious of this problem, and secondly, that such precision of tempi was simply not seen as a problem in their era.
The organ’s playing action repetition rates come into this. These are among the more objective tests available to us. In fact, these rates can be quite amazing. They are often used by Welte to give rapid orchestral tremolo effects in the big Wagner-style transcriptions (e.g., “Lohengrin selection” #642). But the firm was sometimes up to a degree of trickery here, as fast repetitions are occasionally achieved by alternating between manuals, thus doubling the limit. Even so, with hand-punched rolls they can be faster than humans can play and crisper than what seems to have been attainable from console playing. There remain obvious physical and musical limits—the diameter of holes in the paper, for one. With our current roll scanning speeds, these limits are reached but not exceeded. The geometry of rolls tugged over the tracker bar, from a take-up spool whose effective diameter increased as the music proceeded, also needs compensation from a digitizer that uses a (linear) roll-tracking pulley.
Investigations will probably be ongoing in perpetuity, but so far we seem to have achieved a convincing position. At any rate, speed adjustments and take-up spool diameter compensations in the organ’s computer allow any future, possibly better-authenticated, roll-speed figures to be applied.
It is probably significant that many who worked with these organs in the later 20th century often simply shunted the Welte pneumatic motors out and replaced them with electric motors that could take the loads more reliably. We restored the Welte roll-player pneumatic motor exactly as it was—typically with its power only barely equal to its purpose—but used fully adequate electric-motor systems for the scanner.
Another caveat is that the performances themselves are not always faultless—sometimes it is the organist, sometimes the technology. This leaves a dilemma— if we don’t make corrections, then they could sound poorly when judged solely by the standards that we are accustomed to. There seems to have been a degree of acceptance of wrong notes, variant tempi, inconsistent phrasing, registration errors and compromises, or other expedients—e.g., from playing 3-manual works on a 2-manual organ—that could well be beyond some current tolerances but were completely acceptable at the time.
Of further significance is the fact that these organists played from earlier editions. The editions are sometimes marked on the master-rolls. Notation has been read or misread, or mistakes in playing were more readily accepted. Yet composers were often still alive—or their culture was well recalled in living memory—so some organists could have been playing on a kind of “original authority” not known to us.
Leaving the performances alone, even if they seem faulty to us, is paramount. Perfection tends to be approached rather than achieved in the culture of paper roll recordings—as with CDs today for that matter. Moreover, the recording musicians, and, not least, Welte’s roll-editing staff, were all thoroughly entrenched in their own era’s musical paradigms. So anybody wanting to glean secrets from these performances is duty-bound to sit up and listen, even if—or especially if?—their credulity is stretched by non-conformity to today’s norms. Grosse, for example, five years old when Brahms died, born and trained directly into that and the Reger tradition, does not hold the lengthened notes in the op. 122 Herzlich tut mich erfreuen (#1859) and rather slavishly obeys—even exaggerates—the phrasing slurs. We could lose credibility if we played it like that today, and perhaps Grosse would have lost credibility then, but we emphatically desist from “corrections” of this kind to the scans.
No doubt, the relative perfection attainable from modern recordings and sheer professional competition have produced changes in standards and expectations. No doubt also, inherited traditions, after several generations of variant pedagogical opinion, have some part to play. What the rolls clearly demonstrate is that both playing standards and performance practices have changed. To make a metaphorical mixture out of it: at least some of today’s guru-preachers of authentic romantic organ playing might need to get back to their bibles.
Organists then were not all attuned to today’s slick playing approaches, although some, like Lemare, actually fathered them. It is also evident that varied interpretations and sometimes seemingly inaccurate, even “unrhythmic” playing were accepted. So: was it an epoch of rubato beyond that which we can now tolerate? Such freedoms are different. Or perhaps it was simply fame, justified or not, that sold roll performances, good or bad? Reger’s works seem mostly to fare better when played by others than the composer himself. Gigout, Eddy, Bossi, Lemare, the Goss-Custards, Dupré, Grosse, and Ramin are among those whose playing is particularly fine, although their interpretations are often at variance with today’s expectations.
One hand-punched roll (Welte #429) of Mozart’s well-known “mechanical organ” work, KV 608, gives some neat surprises: it promotes brisk tempi where some modern editions have perpetuated slower suggestions in parenthesis. Some organists have followed the slower option. Perhaps these parentheses were not known when the rolls were punched? Does retention of a faster tempo date back to an earlier practice, closer to Mozart’s intentions? Who put them there, why, and who follows them may be pertinent questions. The piece naturally presents itself on the Seewen organ with romantic tonal qualities, but these are overlaid with some classical performance attributes. At any rate, with apologies to myself and all good colleagues, it comes across like no organist—or two—can or would ever have played it. Thus, in performance paradigms—was this intended? At least this source is a century closer to its origins than we are now. The tempo of the opening (erstwhile “Maestoso”) section is around half note = 60, perkier than that normally heard within my earshot.

The registrations
Roll-recorded registration practices can be quite clever, with often very unexpected choices or later-edited technical manipulations. Guilmant’s “Seraphs” Cortège (#770) is registered with Harfe at the end, and a trick of roll-editing allows the double-pedaling segment on two registrations to be effectively realized. Such roll-editing clearly supported the organist in registrations corrected or enhanced during the post-recording editing processes. Lemare’s quick additions and subtractions of an 8′ in his Study in Accents (op. 64, roll #1181) may have been achieved with intervention—or not, knowing Lemare. His own endorsement given to the post-production master could hint at this: “Correct at last”. Equally his reputation for dexterous stop-manipulation could well be in evidence here.
The tendency of some Welte organists to draw the Vox Coelestis (on its own) and leave it on through all later combinations, including build-ups to plenums, is nowadays surprising. Reger plays the whole of the first section of his own Benedictus entirely on the Vox Coelestis alone—yes, without even another stop to beat with it. Moreover, he couples it to the pedals, but the rank has no sounding bottom octave, so you often hear just a vaguely-pitched Bourdon 16′ humming away in that lowest pedal octave. The Vox Coelestis clarifies the bass dramatically, but only from tenor C upwards—and then beats with it. This would be unacceptable in most organ lofts today. Yet it is the same whether we play the master roll or either of the two copy rolls we possess, whether digitally or pneumatically (#1295).
Reger’s idiosyncracies are legion in this roll collection. One wonders, when he turned up for his recordings, whether he did not adjourn immediately after his session to the local inn rather than stay on to check and edit his performances? Or maybe he had been at the inn before he made them? Quite possibly both. He had apparently not played organ for about five years when he was delivered to the studio around July 26, 1913 in that rather swank Maybach with its white-walled tires and klaxon (photo, p. 29).
Diebold, a pupil of Töpfer (1842–1929), also shares with Hofner and Gigout the honors of the first recordings and, just possibly, some residual Bach playing traditions. He held a major position in Freiburg/Breisgau and plays Mendelssohn’s first sonata complete (on one roll, #756). For the slow (second) movement he uses the Vox coelestis alone for an entire section which, on account of that same missing bottom octave, omits the C “manual-pedal-point” altogether! While that looks like a clear technical fault, we cannot afford to simply switch in a stop of our own choice to correct it. Further investigation is required, and if this is the way he played it, then no corrective action can be taken by us without at least alerts being issued.
The use of what is loosely referred to as “bells”—in fact there are two sets, both on Manual I: Harfe (xylophone) G–a3 and Glocken (tubular bells) C–g0—is also notably far more frequent than most would normally envisage today. As children of organ reform, we would probably almost never use them even if available. Yet it was an important selling-ploy of Welte’s, along with “Vox Humana”, “Tutti”, “Echo” and otherwise-identified rolls that captured the public’s imagination while draining their purses. So there could have been pressure on organists to use these stops. Some did, some did not. Bells are heard, logically enough, in Bonnet’s Angelus du Soir played by Bonnet himself (#1615), Massenet’s Scènes pittoresques: Angelus played by Samuel Baldwin (#1353), Wheeldon’s The Bells played by Goss-Custard (#2015), or the Wagner Bridal Chorus from Lohengrin (hand-punched, #642). Surprises arrive, though, in Ramin’s fine performance of Reger’s op. 129 (Prelude, #1991) or perhaps Bossi playing Dubois’ In Paradisum (#1011). The ocean, bad weather, and funerals seem to conjure up bells—Eddy in Schubert’s Am Meer (#1666) as well as Goss-Custard in William Faulkes’s Barcarole in B-flat major (#2001) or Lemmens’s Storm by Goss-Custard (#1121). And the list continues with Lemare in Saint-Saëns’ Danse Macabre (#1251), Erb in Guilmant’s Funeral March & Hymn of Seraphs, op. 17 (#770), and Eddy in Bossi’s Ave Maria (#1648).
The use of the Vox Humana also surprises at times, both with and without Tremulant—and that seems to be independent of “School”. Grosse playing Brahms’s chorale preludes is one notable instance. It was another Welte selling-point—proud of their rank modelled on “Silbermann”, even if it had zinc resonators. Wolstenholme’s use of it in Rheinberger’s Intermezzo (Sonate op. 119, #1546) is typical and effective. Possibly 50% of these performances use bells and/or Vox Humana at some point or other. The Harfe stop combined with Vox Coelestis is another surprise—yet this is expressly required by Karg-Elert in the printed edition of one of his works.
There is no evidence that coercion was used to force organists to choose favored stops—their use, while sometimes surprising, usually seems appropriate. The Vox Humana is occasionally used as a kind of string stop—doubly enclosed, thus allowing each of two boxes to be opened or closed. It can emit some very charming ppp dynamics down around the sound-levels of an Aeolina when both boxes are closed. It also allows useful, delicate-gritty pitch-definition to be maintained in low chords that don’t merely grumble. Grosse in Brahms’s op. 122 (Herzliebster Jesu, #1858) uses this rank well in such a context. Statistically it seems to have been far more often used then than it would ever be today—even if we still included it in our typical new organs. We seem to be “Vox-humana-clasts”, having all but eliminated one of the few organ registers that existed continuously from Renaissance through Romantic and even into cinema organs relatively unchanged. All of Welte’s organists, and the makers of hand-punched transcriptions, had a veritable field day with it.
Some of Bonnet’s interpretations are quite striking—his rubatos and/or rhythmic freedoms playing his own Berceuse (#1612) single him out. Equally so his use of the swell pedal, in an expressive playing style, at times notable for both speed and degree of dynamic change.
One other interesting example of organists and playing styles here is the much-beloved “crescendo fugue”. Alfred Sittard, a German organist, composer and musical editor, was born April 11, 1878 in Stuttgart. He studied in Cologne, then in 1903 became organist at the Dresden Kreuzkirche. In 1912 he moved to Hamburg Michaeliskirche and, in 1925, became an organ professor in Berlin, where he died on March 31, 1942. As mentioned above, he is important in early recording contexts, making 78s in the 1928–32 era. His roll recordings for Welte are much earlier: he included J. S. Bach, Franck, Händel, Liszt, Reger, Saint-Saëns, and his own Choralstudie: Wenn wir in höchsten Nöten sein. A significant influence in the early days of the organ reform movement, Sittard also edited and published music by Buxtehude, Scheidemann, and Weckmann. On Welte roll #1036 he applies the crescendo-fugue approach to the Bach G-major Fugue (BWV 541ii), working through both prelude and fugue in a little over nine minutes, a steady, unrushed performance. To the fugue he applies a “crescendo-diminuendo-crescendo-plenum” scheme, occasionally soloing voices out on Manual II. There is no associated accelerando.

The afternoons with Eugène Gigout
Singling out just one performer for special attention risks the appearance of sidelining the others, but the Seewen collection is truly massive, and demarcations need to be set for an article such as this. We could as well take Wolstenholme, Lemare, Ramin, Faulkes, Straube or any one of dozens of others.
Gigout was the earliest-born of the group invited by Welte to make the first official recordings. His session began on August 6, 1912, the last of five pioneering recording organists. Bossi, Sittard, Breitenbach, and Erb had preceded him. The next group began with Bonnet on February 6, 1913. As will be clear above, Gigout is “musical family” so my curiosity reigned supreme. As it turns out, my arrogant inverted nepotism quickly led to the humility of some unexpected revelations. What comes out of this has the broadest possible implications to the music of his age, his own music, how it was played, and specifically how he and others played it.
Functioning alongside the Lemmens-Belgian derivative school in Paris, but not being part of it himself, he also kept up good friendships with Franck and Guilmant, who were. It was a somewhat unusual cross-tradition situation. Here teacher-pupil genealogies had significance and were potential minefields. Gigout seems to have transcended the traditional in-fighting and was respected by all. Even his choice of recorded repertoire shows no sign of the polarized French organ politics of this era or later—the inclusion of one Franck and four Lemmens pieces alone is testimony to that.
He was in his “mature prime”—aged 68—when he made these recordings. He died at 81. We presume that, like Reger, he was also chauffered up in the Maybach and given the Welte “red carpet treatment”, so aptly described by Nelson Barden in his articles on Lemare.
This all places Gigout in a very important light historically. In early 2010, I found myself listening to him play—effectively “live”—on what turned out to be a number of unforgettable afternoons. The repertoire that he recorded and which survives in Seewen is listed here.

1079* Bach, Toccata, F dur
1587* Bach, Largo (Trio Sonata V)
1588* Bach, Allegro Moderato (Trio Sonata I)
1080* Bach, Präludium E-flat major
1585* Bach, In dir ist Freude
1586* Bach, O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde’ gross
1081* Boëllmann, Marche réligieuse (op. 16)
1592* Boëllmann, Sortie, C-major (op. 30, no. 5)
1591* Boëllmann, Communion B-flat-major (op. 30, no. 5)
1589* Boëllmann, Offertoire C-major (op. 29, no. 2)
1590* Boëllmann, Elévation, E-flat-major (op. 29, no. 1)
1082* Boëly, Andante con moto (op. 45, no. 7)
1595* Chauvet, Andante con moto no. 6 (arr. Dubois)
1596* Chauvet, Andantino no. 9 (arr.Dubois)
1083* Franck, Andantino G Minor
1598* Gigout, Marche réligieuse
1599* Gigout, Chant (from Suite) (“Lied” in catalogue)
1084* Gigout, Toccata
1085* Gigout, Communion
1086* Gigout, Grand Choeur dialogué
1600* Gigout, Marche de fête (Suite)
1087* Gigout, Minuetto
1597* Gigout, Marche des rogations
1601* Gigout, Fughetta
1602* Gigout, Cantilene
1603* Gigout, Allegretto Grazioso
1604* Lemmens, Scherzo (Symphony concertant)
1606* Lemmens, Fanfare
1607* Lemmens, Cantabile
1605* Lemmens, Prélude E-flat major
1608* Lemmens, Prière (“Gebet” in catalogue)
1088/9* Mendelssohn, Sonata, op. 65, no. 6 complete (on 2 rolls)
1609* Saint-Saëns, Sarabande
* indicates master-rolls.

There are four further Welte rolls known to have been cut by Gigout, but they are neither in Seewen’s possession nor in any collection we yet know of:
1090 Mendelssohn, Prelude, op. 37, no. 2
1191 Schumann, Etude, op. 56, no. 5
1593 listed as “Chauvet-Dubois”: Grand Choeur, no.1, I. livr.
1594 listed as “Chauvet-Dubois”: Andantino, no. 3, I. livr.

Bach
Gigout’s choice of Bach works is significant—with two big preludes and two trio sonata movements, he was not choosing an easy way out. His Bach playing may now be outmoded, but it is instructive: trio registrations, tempo, and general treatment in a “reserved romantic” style that allow the music mostly to be heard without undue fuss. We get the impression that he is always very conscious both of the counterpoint and of the formal structures.
In the Toccata in F (BWV 540—erroneously “E major” in the catalogue!—#1079), whatever questions about his registration there may now be, the organ itself, as always, was a major conditioner of choice. Foundational at the start—all manual flue 8′s and the Fagot 8′ (free reed) coupled—no Vox Coelestis—he makes a quick crescendo to full organ from about one minute before the end. The tempo is sprightly and the work springs to life musically, although he takes some surprising liberties in varying tempi. The ornamentation shows no modern awareness of Bach’s practice, nor is it “purely romantic,” for that matter. There are main-note trill executions and sometimes short, inverted mordents. The duration is 8′57″.
The Trio Sonata slow movement (BWV 529ii, #1587) uses the 16′ Pedal Subbass (coupled to both manuals), while Manual I (RH) consists of Vox Coelestis + Gamba, and Manual II (LH) just the Bordun 8′ + Wienerfloete 8′. He could have used a reed but chose not to—which does align with some modern thought on these matters. He starts with the box tightly shut for a lengthy period of time, then there is a degree of swell pedal manipulation. Again there are some freedoms—instabilities?—in tempo. He takes 5′40″ to play it (and concludes, omitting the short modulatory coda at the very end).
The Trio Sonata first movement (BWV 525i, #1588) is taken at a good “Allegro Moderato”—wherever that indication came from: Forkel 1802 through Griep-enkerl to France? The emphasis with Gigout is on the moderato. Freedoms at the cadential points, and some variant note-readings to today’s editions and performances are part of this item. Registration is Manual I (RH) flutes 8′ and 4′ (coupled to Pedal Subbass 16′ and Cello 8′) against Manual II Oboe 8′ (LH). There is rather a lot of swell pedal used, which could explain the relatively detached playing in the pedal against the more legato manual realizations, questioning modern approaches, which would have articulation strictly identical between manuals and pedals. Duration is 4′40″.
The E-flat major Prelude (BWV 552i, #1080) uses a big, reedy plenum alternating with second-manual flues and Oboe. There is again freedom in the rhythmic interpretation, but a rather noble and “grandiose” basic tempo is chosen. The trills are played as simple “upper mordents”. Like many of these early 20th-century performances, the artists took their time in tempi that were often, but not always, steadier than some today. Duration is 10′51″. There is no known matching roll of the fugue by Gigout.
In dir ist Freude (#1585) takes 3′38″. Both manuals are coupled to the pedals—with foundations 8′ (no 4′ or higher) including Manual I Principal and Manual II Oboe. The swell-box is open, tempo and rhythm are markedly flexible, and there are a few small variant note-readings. The plenum is brought on in a block towards the end, and the trills are then effectively upper-note trills. The roll technology needs some intervention: the pedal advance is at times disturbing. The scan is slated for further checking and possible correction, but this is not expected to change registration, tempo, agogic accent or articulation.
With O Mensch, bewein’ (#1586) we find a slow, but non-dragging tempo. The duration is 5′40″. There are many swell crescendos, the solo is on Manual I Principal + Traversfloete + Vox coelestis; this is accompanied by Manual II Wienerfloete + Aeoline, all 8′s. The pedal Subbass 16′ is coupled to both manuals, giving a very solid bass. This seems intended and occurs elsewhere—perhaps it was because he came from a French tradition of Principal-oriented pedal “Flûtes” where effects like this were more normal? At any rate, it is good fodder for nourishing further thought. The trills are main-note “lower-mordents”—mostly just single mordents. The Adagissimo is scarcely observed—little more than a trace of rallentando (with a brief crescendo and diminuendo from the expression pedal).
These two chorale preludes from the Orgelbüchlein provide some fuel for discussion. Gigout was born 94 years after Bach’s death. Naturally that gives him no open access to styles of playing in Saxony, or even correct editions, but his interpretations are not without distinction, and elements of them could well have some relevance. Similarities to the playing of his German contemporary, Hofner, and the Italian Bossi, have been noted above.

Boëllmann
Gigout, quite apart from being the teacher of Léon Boëllmann, had a close personal relationship with the whole family. This could give added significance to the following recordings.
In the Marche Religieuse (#1081, 7′42″), we have a sensitive performance with some relatively free moments, again especially around cadences. The freedoms are more frequent and crafted differently than those of his Bach: is there a small, but conscious stylistic differentiation being made here? Gigout begins on 8′s, including the Vox Coelestis. He then crosses to Manual II Bordun 8′ + Aeoline 8′ before returning to Manual I (as it was). After the initial change, he proceeds for a time, while the pedal is left coupled to a strong Manual I (Principal, Vox Coelestis, Flutes—all 8′). This again gives unusually solid pedal notes against the Manual II registrations. It all becomes rather grandiose towards the end with a reedy plenum, after which he reduces to (reedless) 16′–2′ foundations (RH on Aeoline alone). The conclusion is also notable for its highly detached articulation in the pedal.
The Sortie (2′43″, #1592) is played strongly and with much energy. The Communion (2′41″, #1591) is appropriately meditative. The Offertoire (3′48″, #1589) and Elevation (3′55″, #1590) originally gave us transposed tracks playing Manual II a semitone higher. This was simple enough to fix unobtrusively, but there remain other small problems with the rolls and consequently their scans. The timings should stand. The rest must wait until the massive logistics of this entire exercise permit.

Boëly
Andante con moto (op. 45, no. 7) is recorded on rolls by both Gigout (#1082) and Bonnet (#1203). The comparisons are instructive: Gigout registers with Vox coelestis and Traversfloete on Manual I, sometimes with Bourdon 16′, and with 8′ Aeoline, Viola and 4′ Blockfloete (RH solo) on Manual II. The second last chord is played on Manual II, but there is no echo passage at the end, at least not as there is with Bonnet. Tone is strengthened for a time towards the middle of the piece by Gigout’s addition of Principal 8′ (Manual I) and the double-bass-like tones of the Violonbass 16′ (Pedal). Bonnet, on the other hand, uses the Traversfloete 8′ and Vox coelestis 8′ on Manual I in a similar manner, but never changes it until he removes the Traversfloete for the echo at the end (leaving the Vox coelestis drawn alone—sic!). On the second manual he draws Viola 8′ and Wienerfloete 8′ and makes a more definite and lengthy closing echo passage—an entire phrase rather than just the final chord or two. No manual couplers are used by either organist and only I/Ped is drawn supplementing the Subbass 16′on the pedals. Bonnet’s 3′23″ contrasts with Gigout’s 2′57″ in a noticeable 12–13% tempo difference. Gigout’s slurring is slightly more conscious and expressive.
These two performances are broadly consistent with each other, but the differences are illuminating. They are both, judged subjectively from today’s vantage point, within fair limits of representing authentic “school” manifestations. What is at least equally important is that they also show how variant interpretations were just as much part of that “school” as conformity to norms ever was.

Chauvet/Dubois
The Dubois transcriptions of Chauvet are a phenomenon of their epoch, apparently rather liked by Guilmant, who included them on his programs. The Andante con moto is played freely by Gigout (#1595, 3′31″), with some quite beautifully shaped phrases, while the Andantino (#1596, 3′51″) is similarly endowed with a sensitive rubato, phrasing, and fine feeling for the melodic lines that characterize this piece. It is all rather clever—you quickly forget they are arrangements. Gigout plays fewer transcriptions than most of the other Welte organists relative to his recorded output.

Franck
Gigout playing Franck—lamentably only the one piece—must be a precious jewel in the entire history of recording. We have many other organists playing his music, but, frankly, none with quite this pedigree. They are barely a generation apart and co-existed in the same school, same city, on good terms with each other for decades; Gigout grew up in Franck’s culture. This puts another aura of special credibility on this recording.
The Andantino in G Minor (#1083) plays very well. Of interest is the eternal articulate or note-commune (or similar) question: “precedence to counterpoint or to harmony”? Here it seems to be harmony, judged by some octave leaps in the left hand to notes that the pedal is already playing. They are not lifted and repeated.
Registration summary: accompaniment commences on Vox Coelestis (alone), solo on Manual II Wienerfloete and Vox Humana (with Man II/Man II Superoctave). Mid-section he adds the Traversfloete to Man I. Here the upper voice is soloed by playing it in octaves—he either achieves an uncanny legato control here or Welte is assisting in the editing processes. At any rate the “solo” and accompaniment on the one manual is very effectively contrived in this way. The Pedal Subbass 16′ is coupled to Man I (again no point in coupling the bottom octave to the Vox Coelestis, but there it is). Next solo section is on same Man I and Pedal registration as first, but Manual II is now Oboe alone and no octave coupler. For the penultimate section he uses Man I and II coupled (giving Travers-
floete + Vox Coelestis + Wienerfloete and Horn—all 8′s). Then the Oboe replaces the Horn. The conclusion is just Aeoline and Vox Coelestis. There is not a lot of swell expression, but what is there is effective and the lack of it at times good contrast. This reminds us of Franck’s Third Choral in the middle section, where at one moment he indicates no “nuances,” only to make a most poignant and beautiful contrast when he does. The tremulant is not once used. Gigout takes 7′42″ to play the Andantino.

Lemmens
Once again we have an unusual authority in these recordings—music of this Belgian founder of the French School being played by a first-generation exponent.
In the Scherzo (“Scherzo Symphony concertant” in the catalogue, #1604, 4′59″) he gives a masterly performance, very expressive, if unhurriedly played. Gigout’s mastery is tangible. His arpeggiation of the chords begins slowly and then moves more quickly, producing a quite striking musical interpretation. A romantically imaginative treatment of the melodic line is also evident, along with freedoms and rubatos that captivate us while still leaving the lingering impression of a vestigial classically disciplined approach.
This tilting to the classical is well illustrated in the Fanfare (#1601 and # 4513). Some might be familiar with Gigout’s playing of it on the Linz-am-Rhein organ from the EMI CDs, but, while the tempo and articulation are in concordance, the registration there is not at all what Gigout heard when he recorded it. While some organists today understandably love to play Lemmens’ Fanfare, it is interesting to compare some performances with Gigout’s. He takes 3′07″, giving it a stately rendition, certainly compared to some who seem to be attempting a speed record for the piece. Gigout’s performance demonstrates ever so clearly how tempo is critical to successful phrasing, and how phrasing, alongside speed, is his key to playing this piece. The more constant legato (or glossed-over legato slurring) of some modern performances—partly enforced by their fast tempi—also conjures up important comparisons: Gigout’s articulation is once again here what we could consider as looking back towards the 18th century. It is mostly quite distinctively detached, but he graces this with an expressive legato in special “purposeful slurring” at clearly-selected moments. His targeting and treatment of these—most notably at cadential points—stems from the music itself but his interpretation is distinctive, structured and precise, part of Gigout’s general style and nowhere better heard than here.
In the Cantabile (#1607, 5′35″) his registration is Manual I Traversfloete, Manual II Bordun and Aeoline 8′ to start with (RH solos). Later the Principal 8′ is added to Manual I. Pedal Subbass 16′is coupled to Manual I throughout. The end returns to the initial registration. He uses much swell expression coupled with some neatly romantic rhythmic freedoms.
For the Prélude in E-flat major (#1605) the registration is: Pedal Subbass 16′, Cello 8′, Man II 8′ Viola and Aeoline, and Manual I Fagott, Prinzipal and Vox Coelestis (all 8′)—Man I/Ped and Man II/I. This is another masterly and strikingly beautiful performance by Gigout. The scanned roll plays remarkably well. Gigout takes 4′42″ to play it.
Prière (#1608, 3′18″): For this erstwhile “Vox Humana en Taille”, his registration is Manual II (LH) Vox Humana 8′ + Aeoline 8′, Manual I (RH) Vox Coelestis 8′(on its own—sic!) with Pedal Subbass 16′ coupled to both manuals. The swell box is open; all is registered without tremulant. Again he employs much expression pedal, sometimes manipulating it rather faster and more dramatically than we might expect. We are reminded here of the few early references to swell manipulation, for instance Handel as reported by J. Hess “struggling with the new device” in London. Broadly speaking, the era of 18th-century nag’s head swells was followed by one of trigger and ratchet devices in the 19th century and balanced swell pedals in the 20th with all their “logarithmic” and “fine-tuning” capabilities as well as allowing the foot to be removed and the set dynamic remain. Although the Welte swell was balanced, there are hints that Gigout might still have manipulated it a little like a 19th-century French ratchet device. Sometimes in these roll recordings, other organists also play in this manner: a little more gross than subtle. It does pose the question as to whether, in an era of historic performance consciousness, we should be differentiating our swell pedal techniques according to delineated 18th, 19th, or 20th century practices. This is just one of the many cans of paradigmatic worms opened up by this world of roll recordings.

Mendelssohn
Sonata op. 65, no. 6 (complete sonata on two rolls #1088 and #1089). This recording was an early Welte release from 1913. As with some others of that vintage, the pedal is advanced to a point of audible discomfort. Accordingly, this is one slated for corrective treatment, after which a better impression of the original performance should be available. That aside, Gigout opens with a reedy combination; then, for the flute and pedal section, he uses his characteristic “expressive articulation”. The swell expression is again a chapter in itself—perhaps a little exaggerated by some modern standards?—but the entire performance is a useful revelation of Mendelssohn interpretation in the immediate post-Mendelssohn era. Gigout, born just three years before the much-traveled Mendelssohn died, was a first-generation inheritor of that musical world.
The arpeggiated chords section (“Allegro molto”) is taken at about half note = 55—slower than the 69 that might be expected from available editions today. The freedom in Gigout’s arpeggiation is again notable, and two curious appoggiaturas are also heard in this section. A few problems linger—possibly from the early development of this technology, possibly uncorrected mistakes, and, just possibly, Gigout’s actual intentions. There are some variant note-readings to today’s norms, e.g., the soprano “A” in bar 43 for example is held right over and only broken just before the last-beat “D” in bar 44; the pedaling from bar 55 is not always exactly as marked.
This was an interesting choice for early release by Welte: French-Gigout playing in the German-Mendelssohn repertoire stream. Object lessons may also be found in his adaptation of this work to an early 20th-century German organ. The chorale solo after the beginning is played on Manual I Traversfloete 8′ + Gamba 8′ + Vox coelestis 8′. It is very effective. The second movement Fuga following really does start “forte”—both Manual II Oboe and Manual I Fagott are included and the swell box is entirely open. At bar 64 an F-sharp instead of F-natural (alto part) is played. The final movements are registered distinctly more reedily than many modern performances—partly occasioned by the organ’s resources, partly by Gigout’s free choice. A fine playing sensitivity in the last movement is well evident.
The complete sonata takes nearly 17 minutes to play. Roll one (1st and 2nd movements) is 10′37″ of music, and roll two (3rd and 4th movements) 6′07″.
Was Welte in something of a hurry to get this roll out? If so, it might also explain the fairly coarse pedal advance and other compromises. Mendelssohn formed a major block in the Welte catalogue and was clearly very important there for his place in German musical culture. Erb had recorded the Midsummer Night’s Dream Wedding March, which was released 1912, and Köhl followed in 1913 with Sonata in C Minor, op. 65, no. 2. But the former was relative trivia and the latter did not represent the truly great interpreter that Gigout offered. Harry Goss-Custard, Clarence Eddy, and Edwin Lemare’s later releases of 1914–16 did much to fan the “Mendelssohn transcription” flames, but very little to represent the sonatas. So it was Gigout, the Frenchman, left to fill this breach with Mendelssohn interpretation until the post-WWI releases. Even then, the offerings mostly included transcriptions and only the odd movement, never again a complete sonata.

Saint-Saëns
Sarabande: this roll (#1609, 3′17″) also gave us a few problems on account of paper movement and distortion, the results of aging, humidity, and other factors, which caused one manual to be transposed a semitone and some small “glitches” of probably little enduring consequence. The transposition fixed, it is evident that this performance also allows interesting comparisons; for, in spite of the classical form—and articulation patterns with 18th-century echoes?—he gives it an overriding romantic treatment endorsing our earlier assessment concerning his stylistic consciousness.

Gigout plays Gigout
Gigout playing his own music is, naturally, of paramount importance. With these rolls we are the fortunate inheritors of much unique material. In general, he seems to move his pieces well along in tempo (of relevance might also be his slightly faster tempo than Bonnet for Boëly’s Andante con moto mentioned above). He shows ties back to 18th-century practices, partly through the repertoire forms he uses (Minuet, Fughetta, March) as well as certain elements of their musical styles. It is evident that his own playing is positioned squarely between “18th-century articulate” and “19th-century legato”—not, however, a general compromise between the two, more a deliberate application of one or other at given moments.

Marche réligieuse (#1598, 4′27″)
He commences on foundations with Manual I Fagott 8′ (a free reed), then crescendos to full organ: the performance fringes nicely on the grandiose and there are some tasteful rhythmic freedoms worthy of observation.

Lied (from Suite) (#1599, 7′39″)
This starts with Manual I 8′s, Vox Coelestis + Traversfloete; he later adds the (manual) 16′ then Principal 8′. The Aeoline 8′ on its own in Manual II accompanies for a time, after which a series of slightly varied foundational registrations follow.
The Manual I Bourdon 16′ was interestingly not available on the original 1909 recording organ, but we know this was modified and some of it reportedly changed under Lemare’s influence. Lemare seems to have first been there, however, after Gigout—although there is prima facie evidence that he might have included this stop in his registration schemes. Either Welte had already included it well before Gigout’s 1912 arrival or there is the possibility of a technical error or an intervention through which the company “re-registered” the piece themselves later. So far there is no significant evidence that the company did this, other than at the behest of the artist, although we know they were perfectly capable of all manner of editing: notes or stops, in or out.

Toccata in b minor (#1084, 2′58″)
This famous work, as played by Gigout himself, is a most interesting exposition of his intentions as well as his flexibility in creative adaption given the resources available. The registration includes Harfe on the main manual (they actually perceptibly sound through in the first section as the pedal is already coupled to Manual I but he plays on Manual II). In fact, the pedal is only used as a manual I and II “pulldown”—just 8′ pitches—until he brings on the Posaune 16′ (alone) for the final chords.
It may eventually be shown that the bells are company intervention or some technical fault that has eluded us. Their presence or absence in the Weil-am-Rhein recording may or may not be of relevance for all sorts of reasons. It has, however, been checked thoroughly by all of us involved—many times—and for the moment we can come to no other conclusion than that they are there as Gigout’s intention or at least with his blessing. Judged in relation to the rest of the collection, this would certainly be the kind of repertoire for which bells might be used. To give a further glimpse into this world of roll-recordings in direct relation to this question, there are some cryptic markings on many of our master rolls—including this one—that are yet to be fully interpreted. These enigmatic details relate to the Harfe, Vox humana, rarely Tremulant and sometimes other stops, occasionally also “Tutti” or “Echo”. They seem to be a check on important aspects of registration, organ models, and appear to endorse the use of some stops which “sold” these organs and their rolls. It is obvious that they were reviewing them for some reason or other in the 1923–1926 era. Similar markings seem to relate to adjustments they did in the crescendos and pedal. On the box of this toccata it gives “Harfe”, on the master-roll lead-in it gives “H ung.f.V.h 23” (Harfe ungeeignet für Vox Humana 23 [Harp unsuitable for Vox Humana 1923]) and “Tutti”. The H is specifically underlined. Make of it all what you will, but all roads seem to lead to the Rome of bells (Harp) being used in this piece quite intentionally. As might be expected from a tradition not so noted for including bells in their specifications, this Toccata is probably a lone example in Gigout’s recordings (although see below Marche des rogations).

Communion (#1085, 4′10″)
Gigout uses the Vox coelestis combined only with the Traversfloete (rather than another string, or Principal).

Grand Choeur dialogué (#1086)
The tempo is relatively sprightly here, with a 5′20″ duration for the entire piece. He takes some notable tempo freedoms and there is no shirking the double-pedaling or any other difficult technical aspects of this work. Gigout plays it as he wrote it except for one moment where the pedal is slightly changed—seemingly either a lapse on his part or editing/technology—and there are elsewhere some slightly variant note readings for whatever reason. But the work is overwhelmingly played intact and true to its published text. The Seewen organ suits it rather well with its strong Trumpet 8′ on the second manual: the manuals are coupled, the second is every bit the equal of the first. Thus the final effect tends to be an addition or subtraction mainly of Manual I foundational weight, aided and abetted by the 16′ Clarinet on Manual II (from tenor G up) when he plays on the main manual. Some subtle but perceptible sound-source shifts from side to side, reflecting the organ’s windchest placements may also be detected, promoting the “dialogué” aspects. It keeps an equality of balance while still offering distinction in tonal effect and sound location. Nevertheless he adds and removes stops, increasing the effect of “dialogué” (actually removing some before the end).
In the pedal he desists from using the Posaune 16′ at all, nor is any form of octave coupling evident (it was available). In fact the piece is dynamically slightly more restrained than it could have been, most notably leaving the main manual Trumpet and the Pedal Posaune off—in other words it is not played with the full tutti available from the organ, showing that Grand Choeur does not necessarily mean absolutely everything.

Marche de fête (from Suite) (#1600, 7′05″)
This is another excellently articulated and finely chiseled performance in Gigout’s more grandiose manner. The rolls account for two of the three works in this Suite.

Minuetto (#1087, 4′53″)
Here he plays the solo on the Clarinet 16′ at the start of the “A”-sections, and uses a purposeful, detached articulation in the pedal along with some notable freedoms that clearly draw this to our attention. The pedal advance is noticeable and needs correction. His rubatos and rallentandos are interesting—sometimes there is a characteristic short pause-and-dwell before launching into a new phrase. Tempo borders on brisk, shattering some slower concepts of “Minuet” perhaps, but the piece moves along convincingly.

Marche des rogations (#1597, 3′51″)
This needed some correction of a transposed track, and the roll-scan is not yet ready to play with full technical certainty, but his articulate performance style is again indisputably evident. Transposed tracks and apparent paper warpage leave questions as to whether his use of bells is really correct. For the moment, however, it seems quite possible and works well since only the Glocken (C–f#0) is drawn, giving a 3-manual effect with Manual I bass + Manual I treble + Man II).

Fughetta (#1601, 2′34″)
This was first published in 1913, the year after he had recorded it for Welte. Another neat Gigout performance, it moves along energetically and displays his characteristic articulation-and-slurring mix using a slightly reedy registration—both Manual I Fagott 8′ and Manual II Oboe 8′ are added to strong foundations at 16′ in pedal and 8′ in manual.

Cantilène (#1602, 4′08″)
A very tasteful, expressive performance. As accompaniment Manual I Traversfloete 8′ + Vox Coelestis 8′, later adding Principal 8′, RH solo on Oboe 8′+ Wienerfloete and Bourdon 8′s. The Pedal Subbass 16′ is coupled to Manual I. He applies almost constant, but tasteful, swell expression, and there are some interesting, not entirely predictable playing freedoms.

Allegretto Grazioso (#1603, 3′34″)
The RH Solo is on the Wienerfloete, sometimes with Oboe and Horn (the latter is a remarkable large-scaled flue rank). The LH accompaniment is on the Traversfloete 8′ + Vox coelestis 8′, with Principal 8′ added for a time. Pedal registration is Bourdon 16′ coupled to Manual I (LH). The interpretation is in a similar style to that of the Cantilène.

•

Most of Welte’s organists play their music relatively “straight”—that is, without a lot of obvious interpretative freedom in tempo, articulation, rhythm, ornamentation, or rubato. With some, it is even as if they were sight-reading and had not considered the formal structures, subtleties, or even cadences, or, if they did, then they don’t appear to want to do much about them. Gigout is one of the more notable exceptions to this. Yet even he had limits that confined his interpretations mostly to relatively conservative boundaries, certainly by some of today’s more exaggerated standards. In the light of recent research, we can probably say that Gigout was not on solid ground with his 18th-century ornamentation. What he does demonstrate, however, is a romantic tradition and a notable variety of approach to styles.
Notwithstanding the caveats, we have here clear insights into Gigout’s entire musical environment and particularly just how he expected his own music and the traditions surrounding him to sound. As ever, we are free to take or leave the evidence of these rolls with impunity, but those looking for direct sources of playing paradigms for this era will welcome these recordings. Interestingly, the Swiss organist Franz Josef Breitenbach (Lucerne Cathedral) and German Thaddäus Hofmiller (Augsburg Cathedral) also recorded one roll each of Gigout’s music for Welte: Breitenbach the Scherzo, Hofmiller the Marche funèbre. These also have distinctive value in the larger Gigout picture available here.

Conclusion
Posterity may well bestow no laurels upon mimesis: but laurels are due to the whole sequence of events and visionary people who, by an extraordinary 20th century cultural-preservation miracle, have safely delivered this full-sized Philharmonie linked with the largest roll collection left in the world today as a symbiotic musical entity into the 21st century. The performances of these organists can once again be heard and studied, and Straube’s “moment of metaphysical experience” is available to us in a more enduring form than ever it was. ■

The Museum at Seewen is committed to making these performances accessible. Already many public and private, national and international, visits, demonstrations, and symposiums for organists, organ societies, organ students, and teachers have taken place. More are planned as well as some CD releases—three in 2011 on the OehmsClassics label—but the volume of material means that not everything can be published, certainly not immediately.
In the meantime, scholars, organists, organ teachers and their classes are very welcome. However, the playing of these performances is not part of the museum’s regular guided tours except for a few selected demonstration pieces. So, visitors hoping to hear these rolls will want to make special arrangements. From now, through 2011–12, anyone with a serious scholarly interest should make initial contact through me at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A>.
From 2011, a major centennial exhibition commemorating the appearance of the Welte Philharmonie at Turin in 1911 will be mounted by the Seewen Museum. Information is posted at <A HREF="http://www.bundesmuseen.ch/musik automaten/presse/00108/00109/index">www.bundesmuseen.ch/musik automaten/presse/00108/00109/index</A>.
html?lang=en>.
This will include symposium-style sessions dedicated to specific organists and aspects of organ playing. Details will be posted.
You can hear examples of
• #1274, Lemare playing Gounod’s Queen of Sheba: March and Cortege
• #1084, Gigout playing his own Toccata in B Minor
• #1106, Goss-Custard playing Elgar Imperial March, op. 32
• #717, Hofner playing the Bach Prelude on Herzlich tut mich verlangen (BWV 727)
at the following web-sites:
<www.david rumsey.ch> or
<www.musikautomaten.ch&gt;

Acknowledgements
Christoph Haenggi, Director of the Seewen (SO/CH) Museum der Musikautomaten
Brett Leighton, Linz (A), who read this through and offered many important enhancements
Nelson Barden, Boston (USA)
Jim Crank, Redwood City, CA (USA)
Marco Brandazza, Lucerne (CH) custodian of the Meggen Welte and its collection of rolls
Gerhard Dangel, Augustiner Museum, Freiburg/Breisgau (D)
Daniel Debrunner, Biel (CH)
David Gräub, Biel (CH)
Dominik Hennig, Basel (CH)
István Mátyás, Vienna (A)
Hans Musch, Freiburg/Breisgau (D)
Lars Nørremark, Denmark (DK)
Jean-Claude Pasché, Theatre Barnabé, Servion (CH)
Christoph Schmider, Direktor Archepiscopal Archives, Freiburg/Breisgau (D)
and to my wife, Elizabeth, and many others, including the entire Geisterhand team, my sincere gratitude for shared expertise, support and ongoing work in this field.

*

An abbreviated history of recording
(with particular reference to the organ)

1870s–1900: Pioneers of acoustic recording; the cylinder
1877: American inventor Thomas A. Edison developed the “talking machine.” As commercially offered, it could both record and reproduce sound using wax cylinders.
1887: Emile Berliner filed a U.S. patent for a “Gramophone” (using discs instead of cylinders.)
1888–1894: Cylinders were sold, e.g., with readings by Tennyson and Browning. Brahms recorded one of his Hungarian rhapsodies. Josef Hofmann and Hans von Bülow recorded piano music.
1890: Magnetic (wire) recording was first explored by Danish engineer Valdemar Poulsen.
1894: Charles and Émile Pathé established a recording business near Paris. They issued cylinders. By 1904 the catalogue contained ca. 12,000 titles. Berliner began manufacturing his gramophones, founding the “Victor” firm. Their recordings (many novelty items) became popular, especially from coin-in-the-slot machines.
1897: The pianola was patented by E.S. Votey—originally a limited form of Vorsetzer.

1900–1910: “78” era; piano roll-recordings
From 1902 a marked rise in public interest occurred, particularly with recordings of Italian tenor, Enrico Caruso. The fortunes of Victor waxed.
1904: The Welte firm perfected and marketed their Vorsetzer, which was integrated into the “Welte-Mignon” piano from 1905. The recording and issue of piano-roll performances now became a good commercial prospect, although more the province of the rich. Early artists included Cortot, Paderewski, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, Rubinstein, Grainger, Gershwin.
By 1910 possibly 85 percent of recorded music was classical.

1910–20: The acoustic boom
Birth of organ roll recordings
With the phonograph an early mass-media phenomenon was created, no longer just the province of the rich. The “78” (78 disc revolutions per minute) recording fully replaced the earlier wax cylinders and became entrenched as standard. Originally made from shellac—later synthetic thermoplastic resins gave better results with less “surface noise”—they came in 10-inch and 12-inch sizes, the largest of which were capable of durations extending to about 41⁄2 minutes.
by 1912: The first roll recordings of organists were made by Welte in Germany—but ownership of player organs was virtually the sole province of highly affluent individuals, institutions, or companies. Some (rare) early gramophone recordings of organists were made in England and the first complete symphonies were recorded in Germany: solo instrumentalists and opera singers followed with excerpts and potpourris.
1914–1919: Phonograph sales quintupled. Original composition also began for player piano, which sometimes attracted leading composers (Stravinsky, Étude for Pianola 1917). Later Hindemith (Toccata for mechanical piano 1926) and others, notably George Antheil (Le Ballet mécanique, 1926) and Conlon Nancarrow continued this genre of recorded music. Only two roll-composed works for mechanical organ are known: the experimental stage piece, Triadischen Ballett by Oskar Schlemmers (1888–1943) was revised by Hindemith in 1927 as Suite für mechanische Orgel but survives only in an early recording (available on CD) and Studie for mechanical organ by Ernst Toch (1887–1964) which appears to have been lost.
1917: The “Victor” label increased its sales with classical releases, especially popular from their collaboration with the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Leopold Stokowski.
All early commercial sound recording and reproduction to this point was achieved solely by acoustical means.

1920s: Electrical recording, broadcasting; roll recordings
From the early 1920s the vacuum-tube (“valve”), invented by Lee De Forest, paved the way for applications such as the amplifier and the record-cutting lathe. Microphones, earphones and loudspeakers now replaced the old needles and acoustical horns, while turntable drives shifted from the wind-up spring to the electric motor. The recording of “classical” music increased greatly but popular music and jazz also established their places. American and German scientists developed Poulsen’s earlier wire recording technology and researched the potential for magnetic tape as an alternative medium to wire.
1923: An optical system of sound recording was invented by De Forest—of special relevance to sound films.
From 1925 electrical recording quickly predominates.
1926: Radio broadcasting is introduced and music becomes far more freely available to all classes of society.
1926–30: After a decade or so of more experimental organ recordings some early organ recordings appear, taking advantage of the newly available electrical technology (Alcock, Darke, Bullock, Palmer, Roper, Marchant, Thalben-Ball—the most notable in England was Harry Goss-Custard who had already recorded on Welte rolls). Edwin Lemare, another Welte player-roll recording artist, later made discs in the USA.
1928 (November): Louis Vierne made 78s at Paris, Notre Dame Cathedral.
Around 1930 in Germany, Walter Fischer made 78s of Rheinberger and Händel organ concertos in an unidentified location, but generally thought to be the Berliner Dom. Alfred Sittard—who had recorded on Welte rolls released from 1913 onwards—made some 78 recordings between 1928–32 in Berlin (Alte Garnisonskirche) and Hamburg (Michaeliskirche). Six of Sittard’s recording titles are duplicated on both roll and disk (two Bach, three Handel, one work of his own).
1930–1: Charles Tournemire made recordings at Paris, Saint Clôtilde.
From 1929 onwards the great economic depression threw the recording industry into serious decline: dance music recordings played on jukeboxes helped sustain a contracted market throughout the 1930s. The vogue of the player piano and player organ began to decline with this and the increasing popularity of the radio and phonograph, although player piano culture survived to a remarkable degree through the mid-20th century.

1945–1970: Microgroove recordings; tape
After World War II, magnetic systems were brought to full technological acceptability (the “tape recorder” era began and the use of wire declined). Similarly constant improvements in optical systems endowed motion pictures with ever higher quality sound.
1948: The “long-playing” record was first introduced (LP 331⁄3 revolutions per minute, for a time also a 45 rpm format); discs made of “vinyl” took over and the “78” quickly disappeared from production. Available maximum playing times increased to 20–25 minutes (about the maximum capacity of some of the rolls from 30 years earlier).
1958: Provision of two separate channels of recorded information in the one groove ushered in the era of “binaural” (stereophonic) recording. This became standard.
The era of “hi-fi” particularly boosted organ disc recordings, which had suffered badly from inadequate technology hitherto. This led to a notable increase in “complete” (e.g., Walcha playing Bach) works and comprehensive anthologies of organ music and organs.
Tape also was used for video recordings.

1970s: Digital
1970s: Digital recording technology displaced analogue and took over the industry (quadraphonic and similar experiments followed but were mostly unsuccessful except in cinemas).
In the late 20th century the player-piano concept was reinvented and applied; e.g., Yamaha’s “Disklavier,” which offered self-recording, and selected performances by artists from Horowitz to Liberace.
1980s: Fully digital compact discs (CDs) were introduced; they dominated the market by the 1990s. Playing time increased to over an hour. Digital editing and mixing techniques also evolved to produce a highly-packaged sound quality.
By the early 21st century, DVDs had also become a factor in sound and video recording as well as mass information storage. Their playing time could now cope with almost any extended musical form, including videos of operas. Recording to computer hard drives and memory sticks recently became an option and seems set to quickly become a new standard.

Recent recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations

Now universally known as the Goldberg Variations, Johann Sebastian Bach’s self-financed 1741 publication of his most extensive set of diverse variants on a simple theme bears this title on its cover: Keyboard Exercise Comprising an Aria and Differing Variations for a Two-Manual Harpsichord, composed for Amateurs by Johann Sebastian Bach, Composer at the Courts of Poland and of the Elector of Saxony, Chapel Master and Choir Master in Leipzig. Published in Nuremberg by Balthasar Schmid (translated from the original German).

Following the 1933 first recording of the complete masterwork by pioneering harpsichordist Wanda Landowska (a weighty 78 rpm recording project that has been reissued in every successive record format) the “Goldbergs” have been consigned to disc by a widely varied list of keyboardists, a tradition that continues, seemingly without any ritardandi. Indeed, while writing this report on recent compact disc releases, I have noted at least two more new recordings advertised for sale.

Just as I look at my extensive collection of books and think about the immense amounts of time and energy that are required for each publication (having been a writer all my adult life), I feel a similar empathy for the effort and dedication required when we consign our musical performances to disc (having done a fair number of these, as well). Thus, I try not to be overly critical in my reviews but rather hope that I may serve primarily as a reporter: one who gives enough information about the new offerings so that a reader may decide to seek more information, or even, perhaps, wish to acquire the item being discussed.

In alphabetical order, I present for your consideration three recent recordings of Bach’s magnum opus as performed by Diego Ares (born 1983) [Harmonia Mundi HMM 902283.84]; Wolfgang Rübsam (born 1946) [Naxos 8.573921]; and, as an archival reissue, a legacy from the renowned German organist and teacher, Helmut Walcha (1907–1991) [the last disc in a boxed set of thirteen compact discs comprising all of the major Bach solo harpsichord works, Warner Classics 0190295849618]. To make matters even more interesting, it so happens that I have had personal connections with each of these three keyboard artists.

Diego Ares

I met this brilliant harpsichordist in November 2009 and was blown away by his virtuoso performance of the Manuel de Falla Concerto for Harpsichord and Five Instruments at the opening event of the Wanda Landowska Exhibition organized by Martin Elste of the Musical Instrument Museum in Berlin, Germany. On my way to offer congratulations to the young artist, he met me halfway, as he wished to speak with me. At that time Diego was a student in Basel, and we both expressed our regrets that he had to return immediately to Switzerland for his semester end examinations, especially since we each had a special interest in contemporary harpsichord music.

We have, however, kept in touch since that brief encounter, and Diego has been generous in sending me his compact discs as they are produced. The immediate predecessor to his Goldberg Variations offering, his 2015 premiere recording of previously unknown Soler harpsichord sonatas (discovered in a manuscript now owned by the Morgan Library in New York City) won international acclaim, garnering both a Diapason d’Or and the German Record Critics’ first prize. I suspect that this latest two-disc set may well do the same.

In eloquent notes to the recording, Ares writes of his daily ritual that begins with a complete play through of the entire set of variations, but also he expresses his feeling for the need of a prelude to precede Bach’s opening statement of the Aria. For this recorded performance, Ares made a clever choice: Bach’s own transcription of an Adagio (BWV 968) based on the composer’s Violin Sonata (BWV 1005). It is indeed a lovely piece, but, since Bach left us only this one movement which cadences in the dominant key, it is a difficult work to program. As the desired prelude it makes a perfectly logical opener, connecting smoothly to the Aria in G Major.

Ares’s performance, with the added prelude, spans 1 hour, 29 minutes. He performs on his two-manual harpsichord by Joel Katzman (2002) based on a Taskin instrument from 1769.

Wolfgang Rübsam

Appointed to succeed the far-too-early-deceased James Tallis as harpsichord and organ professor at Southern Methodist University, I moved to Dallas, Texas, in late August 1970, to join the music faculty of the Meadows School of the Arts. Wolfgang Rübsam was, at that time, a stellar student in Robert T. Anderson’s organ class, and he went on to prove his stature by winning the first prize for interpretation at the 1973 Chartres organ competition. He also played a superb organ recital during the dedication year of SMU’s Fisk Opus 101 installation, and we continue to meet at various organ events throughout the United States.

Following a successful set of Bach recordings on the modern piano, Rübsam has turned his considerable musical insights to performing the Goldberg Variations on an instrument known to have been of interest to J. S. Bach: the lautenwerk or “lute harpsichord” of which a postmortem inventory of Bach’s belongings included two examples. Unfortunately, neither instrument is known to have survived the passage of time.

The proud owner of the fifth such instrument to be built by the highly respected American harpsichord maker Keith Hill, Rübsam provides a totally different sound picture for Bach’s variations. The constant arpeggiation certainly gives a different aura to the work, while the gentler plucked tones produced from this single-manual instrument soothe the ear. To record the entire work on one disc with a total timing of 78 minutes and 24 seconds, the artist confided that he made his own choices as to which of the variations would be played with the indicated repeats and which ones would not. I find his selections well made and actually agree totally that not all of the arbitrary double dots at the conclusion of each section need to be observed in any performance. I especially dislike the carbon-copy reruns of the B sections once one has made that trip from dominant cadencing back to the tonic. Most of the time one traversal is quite enough for my ears.

Amazing as it may seem to those of us who require two manuals as specified by the composer, Glenn Gould, Rübsam, and some other players seem quite able to negotiate the crossing of hands and notes, as well as the general awkwardness of compressing such acrobatics to one keyboard only. Bravo to all involved. 

Helmut Walcha

I first experienced a concert by the legendary professor of organ at the Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst of Frankfurt, Germany, during the unforgettable summer trip that followed my year at the Salzburg Mozarteum as an Oberlin Conservatory junior (1958–1959). In Letters from Salzburg
(Skyline Publications, Eau Claire, Wisconsin, 2006) I mentioned Walcha’s organ recital at the Frankfurt cathedral, with its eight-second reverberation, and noted that the organist was “an inspired player.” While visiting the Hochschule I met its harpsichord teacher, Frau Maria Jäger, and did not realize that Walcha was also a harpsichordist. 

During many summer trips to Europe in the earlier years of an academic career, my German friend and “European manager” Alfred Rosenberger and I often would attend Saturday Vespers at the Dreikönigskirche where Walcha was organist. There we could marvel at his expressive hymn playing and masterful improvisations, while also enjoying both the intimate beauty of the rather sparsely attended afternoon services as well as the post service opportunities to speak with the genial organ master.

Still there was no mention of the harpsichord; so, imagine my surprise when I discovered that the present thirteen-disc set comprising all the major solo harpsichord repertoire of J. S. Bach had been recorded starting in the spring of 1958 in Hamburg, continuing for the next several years, and culminated during March of 1961 with the 75 minutes and 38 seconds of Walcha’s interpretation of Goldberg Variations. And, for one further surprise, the recording engineer for all these sessions was none other than Hugo Distler’s brother-in-law, Erich Thienhaus! 

The two-manual harpsichord used for Walcha’s recording sessions was built at the Ammer Brothers factory located in Eisenberg in the eastern German province of Thuringia. What nostalgia that inspired! My first harpsichord teacher, Isolde Ahlgrimm, made her famous Bach recordings playing an Ammer instrument. My first harpsichord was a small double built at the Passau factory of Kurt Sperrhake, who also provided a larger two-manual model instrument during our Mozarteum year. (Ahlgrimm’s comment: “I’ve slept in smaller rooms than this instrument!”) While I would not want to return to these well-built, but heavy, leather-quilled factory instruments, there is a certain nostalgia for that youthful time of discoveries and the blooming of my first love for the harpsichord.

Would I recommend the Walcha recordings? Perhaps. It is remarkable that he could play absolutely perfectly since he had been struck blind at age nineteen, most likely from a reaction to his vaccination for smallpox. I do not hear any mistakes or smudged notes at all, but I also do not hear much in the way of personality or nuance either. It has somewhat the same effect as reading a dictionary—but as a source for checking the notes as they appear in the original Bach-Gesellschaft Editions there would likely be no deviations from that urtext.

And what a tribute to the human spirit! Every note required for thirteen compact discs full of music was retained in that brilliant memory! One of Walcha’s prize students, my SMU colleague Robert Anderson, told many tales of being summoned to visit his mentor for the purpose of following a score while his teacher played through the complete Art of the Fugue or some other complex set of organ pieces. And, said Bob, “There was hardly ever even one wrong note!”

Larry Palmer’s first article for The Diapason in November 1962 was “Hugo Distler: 20 Years Later.” Appointed Harpsichord Editor in 1969, he continues to write, record, play, and teach: since 1970 as Professor of Harpsichord and Organ in the Meadows School of the Arts, Southern Methodist University, Dallas.

Entartete—“degenerate”—was a derogatory term used in Nazi Germany to characterize art works deemed to be “un-German” or “impure.” The word itself originated as a biological term to describe a plant or animal that has changed so much that it no longer belongs to its species.
In 1937 a large exhibition of entartete paintings and graphic arts was mounted in Munich, birthplace of the National Socialist movement. Works by Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Max Ernst, Oskar Kokoschka, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Emil Nolde and many others were displayed to show the degradation of modern art by artists unacceptable to the regime: Nazi-denounced “Jews, Bolsheviks, persons of color, and perverts.”
As contrast, directly across the plaza, there was another exhibition, many of its pieces chosen by Adolph Hitler himself. This show demonstrated “true German art”—realistic representations of heroic blond Aryan figures by the Führer’s favorite sculptor Arno Breker, and his “court painter” Adolf Ziegler.
That music, too, could be degenerate was a concept put forward as justification for denying performances of works by such contemporary masters as Arnold Schoenberg, Paul Hindemith, and Kurt Weill. For the most part, the creators of these works were forced to flee Hitler’s oppressive totalitarian regime or face incarceration in concentration camps. To find a score by Distler among those deemed modernist and unfit for German ears seems unimaginable to present-day auditors, but such a travesty did occur.
During October of that same year, 1937, a week-long Festival of German Church Music took place in Berlin. Among a plethora of new music, several of Hugo Distler’s compositions were heard. In addition to the choral and organ music that had secured his reputation as one of the most talented composers of his generation, Distler’s secular magnum opus, the Concerto for Harpsichord and Strings, opus 14, was given a prominent place in a Sunday concert at the Philharmonic Concert Hall, with the composer’s Lübeck colleague, Marien-organist Walter Kraft, as soloist. The conductor was none other than Dr. Peter Raabe, president of the Nazi music regulatory board (the Reichsmusikkammer), so one might have expected that the official press would use only superlatives to praise the concert.
Not so! Here is an excerpt from one of the more scathing reviews:

. . . there was the general aggravation of Hugo Distler’s Concerto for Harpsichord, an “in-your-face” example of degenerate art. The delicate domestic harpsichord was utilized in an unnatural way—like a piano. At the Finale the young composer seemed to be driven by the devil! This motoric noisy music chattered endlessly on . . . Listeners could only laugh. Perhaps it would have been better had they whistled and pondered the biblical quotation: He mocked only himself . . .1

An earlier description of the Concerto’s 1936 premiere in Hamburg, read:

Stuttering rhythms, fractured mood and brutal background sounds fulfill the intellectual aspect of the formal side . . . only to a very limited extent. It appears to be difficult for some people to break loose from the idolatry of an outgrown, stereotypical [Kurt] Weill era. Distler must—in our opinion—change a great deal at the human level in order to properly exploit his considerable abilities.2

Distler’s music degenerate, brutal, diabolic? Possibly, perhaps, to ears deafened by militaristic brass bands or the loud general cacophony of the government propaganda, but otherwise, unlikely.
How did church composer Hugo Distler come to write a major composition for harpsichord, a far from ubiquitous keyboard instrument in the 1930s? As Wanda Landowska remarked (about J. S. Bach), to understand the greatness of a master composer, one needs to place it in the context of music by his contemporaries.
Urged by Leipzig professor Hermann Grabner to base his composition studies on music of the past, specifically that of the Baroque, and influenced further by his organ teacher, Günther Ramin, one of Germany’s pioneering harpsichordists during the 1920s,3 Distler was evidently drawn to the instrument. In addition to Ramin’s public performances, there was new music for harpsichord being created during Distler’s student days. In 1927 Carl Orff (who was to become a household name ten years later with his wildly successful choral/orchestral work Carmina Burana) composed a Kleines Konzert nach Lautensätzen for winds, harpsichord, and percussion. Based on lute pieces by Vincentio (Vincenzo) Galilei and Jean-Baptiste Besard, the work is a 13-minute precursor to a similar work by Francis Poulenc, the Suite Française (1935), also based on Renaissance dance music (by Claude Gervaise), and scored for the same instrumental forces.
Forced by economic necessity to leave the conservatory course before completing his degree, Distler auditioned for and won the position of organist at the Jakobikirche in the north German city of Lübeck, a position he assumed on January 1, 1931. There he began a brilliant career as composer of choral and organ music, with the smaller of the church’s two baroque instruments as his special muse and guide.4 Somehow, despite a meager salary, Distler managed to acquire a two-manual Neupert concert harpsichord in November of that same year5 and used it on November 29 for the first performance of his Kleine Adventsmusik, opus 4.6 Through the succeeding years of his tenure at St. Jakobi, Distler frequently employed his harpsichord for a series of vesper concerts, as well as for chamber music in other Lübeck venues.
Distler actually began writing an extended harpsichord concerto during the early 1930s, a fact that went unnoticed until I discovered fair-copy segments of it in a trunk of musical manuscripts recently found and sent from Lübeck, then stored beneath the guest bed at Frau Distler’s post-war home in Bavaria.7 The physical remnants of this work explained a seeming time discrepancy in his letter to Hermann Grabner (dated 17 April 1931): “Work on my harpsichord concerto, which would have soon been finished, was unfortunately interrupted by another task [a Luther Cantata for a Lübeck Reformation Festival] . . .”
In another communication dated 17 August, this one to Gerhard Schwarz, the young composer wrote, “I have also completed a Concerto for Harpsichord and Eleven Solo Instruments that I have given to Professor Ramin to look over; so far as I can tell, he would like to perform it this winter, perhaps even in Berlin. In addition, Frau Mann-Weiss wants to do it in Hamburg for the New Music series, also this winter.”8
However, it was more than additional commissions that prevented the first performance, expected in March of 1933. The presumptive dedicatee and soloist of the Chamber Concerto for Harpsichord and Eleven Solo Instruments, Günther Ramin, did not like the score as it was presented to him, and asked for extensive revisions. In a letter to his fiancée, Waltraut Thienhaus, Distler expressed anger at his former teacher’s request. The work, missing many pages by the time of its rediscovery in 1968, was not performed until 1998. Although it is now available in a performing edition by Michael Töpel, I find it a flawed and unpleasant work.9 Score one for Professor Ramin!
Further annoyance for the young composer may have been triggered by the fact that Ramin DID play a Chamber Concerto for Harpsichord and String Orchestra in the spring of 1933, but it was a work by Distler’s exact contemporary Kurt Hessenberg,10 later to be associated in Frankfurt with another Leipzig fellow student, the blind German organist Helmut Walcha. Although I have not seen a score of Hessenberg’s Concerto, if it holds as much musical charm as several of the Zehn Kleine Präludien für Klavier oder Clavichord, opus 35 (published by Schott in 1949), it may be a work worth searching for.
Hessenberg, too, endured the political idiocy of the 1930s. He recounted,

My Second String Quartet . . . has a special “history”: its premiere by the Lenzewski Quartet was on the program of a concert [sponsored by] the Reichsmusikkammer in Berlin [1937]. However, because I was still very much unknown, the piece was performed before a board from the aforementioned institution in my absence for approval, and provoked the displeasure of that body. So the piece, which in spite of its adherence to tonality reveals the influence of Hindemith, perhaps also of Bartòk, was dropped from the program. This decision was criticized at that time in a music journal, as a result of which more attention was directed toward me than probably would have been the case if a public performance had taken place. The Quartet was premiered soon after in Frankfurt by the Lenzewski Quartet, excellently, and with success, and not much later in an independent concert of this ensemble in Berlin as well.11

Hessenberg apparently had a more sanguine outlook than Distler (whom, he wrote, he had met only twice, despite the fact that both were students at the same time in the same city). Balanced and genial in character as in music, Hessenberg adapted well to pre- and post-war necessities, living until 1984.
Other harpsichord offerings from the Germany of the 1930s include Music for 2 Violins and Cembalo 1932 by Heinrich Kaminski (1886–1946), composed in post-Regerian thick texture by a favorite composer of Thomaskantor Karl Straube, and the appropriately spare 1934 Spinettmusik by Rudolf Wagner-Régeny (1903–1969), composer, pianist and clavichordist of Romanian origin, perhaps historically shunned because he was one of two approved surrogates who wrote pure “Aryan” alternative music to replace the banned Midsummer Night’s Dream music of Felix Mendelssohn (for performance at the 1935 Reichstagung of the Nazi Kulturgemeinde in Düsseldorf).12
Wagner-Régeny’s seven short pieces compare favorably with Distler’s Dreissig Spielstücke of 1938,13 and since Distler, too, joined the Nazi party on May 1, 1933, perhaps one need no longer cast neither aspersions nor stones at either composer for such ancient political miscalculations. At least in Distler’s case, it is evident that he became increasingly unsympathetic with the government authorities, and finally committed the ultimate act of civil disobedience by removing himself from earthly existence altogether.
Unquestionably the compositional high point encountered thus far among examples of Third Reich harpsichord music is Distler’s (Second) Harpsichord Concerto, with its vivacious Stravinskian first movement; hauntingly lovely, lyrical second movement featuring arching solo violin lines above percussive, insistent rhythmic figures from the harpsichord; and culminating with a rollicking third movement based on Samuel Scheidt’s four-part harmonization of the folk song Ei, du feiner Reiter. Distler’s variations on this sturdy German tune certainly display wit and good humor, especially in a solo harpsichord parody of the mechanistic technique-building keyboard exercises of Carl Czerny. Two further keyboard solo variations (six and twelve) show an idiomatic variety of texture. The note C held over by the second violin serves as a breathtaking common tone modulation for the A-flat major return of the theme, set as a phrase by phrase dialog between strings and harpsichord, concluding with a whimsical employment of ever-longer periods of silence, à la Haydn, from which the final expected answer by the harpsichord never occurs at all. This lengthy silence is ended when the exasperated strings plunge, pall-mall, into a repetition of the wildly motoric tenth variation to provide a vigorous finale. Quirky, or even sarcastic, yes, but scarcely degenerate!
At the first performance of this Concerto the work had an additional movement, Allegro spirituoso e scherzando, expanding by more than six minutes a work that already clocked in at more than half an hour! Several critics suggested pruning the composition by deleting this extra movement, and the composer took their advice. Subsequent performances utilized only the three movements described above, and the printed score presents this three-movement version. The additional movement works as a stand-alone piece with strings, the manner in which I played its modern premiere during the 1980 American Guild of Organists national convention in Minneapolis.14
That the composer found the harpsichord to his liking was shown in one further extended work, until recently known only as a reference citation, the Schauspielmusik zu Ritter Blaubart [Theatre Music for Knight Bluebeard]. Parts for this incidental music assembled for a cancelled Berlin production of Ludwig Tieck’s play were among manuscripts turned over to the Bärenreiter-Verlag by Waltraut Distler, a few years after the end of the war. Since there were other items both complete and more marketable to bring into print, the stage music was basically overlooked. Reassembled and organized by Michael Töpel, the score was published, at last, at the turn of the new millennium, and given a first performance in 2002. Now there is a recording (Musicaphon M 56860), issued early in 2008.
Distler recycled quite a lot of his Harpsichord Concerto for this incidental music, with very interesting additions of wind instruments to the original strings. Three short, newly composed vocal insertions have secco harpsichord accompaniments. One movement [War Music] is an orchestral version of two pieces from Distler’s Eleven Piano Pieces, opus 15 [Fanfare; With Drums and Pipes]. Most appealing is the sarabande-like Overture to the Second Act (arranged for harpsichord and strings from the second movement of String Quartet in A minor, opus 20/I), truly one of the loveliest of Distler’s instrumental works. (The recorded performance, however, has the harpsichord consistently anticipating the strings!) A welcome bonus of the recent disc is the digital remastering of the first recording of the opus 14 Concerto, made in 1964 by the superbly musical French harpsichordist Huguette Dreyfus and the Deutsche Bach Solistin, conducted by Martin Stephani.
Concerning his Concerto Distler wrote to a pupil: “It is an angry piece . . . If it is so ‘modern’, then it is not because I wanted to appear really ‘modern’ for once, but because I am such a dislocated puppet.”15 As his last sacred motets demonstrate, he was willing to disregard the government’s strictures against writing new church music. Published after the war as part of his cycle of Sacred Choral Music, opus 12, the two motets conceived as opening and closing choruses for a planned St. John Passion, never to be completed, showed the composer’s increased mastery of form and expanded use of chromatics. (The fugue subject of the last motet, Fürwahr er trug unsere Krankheit [Surely He hath borne our griefs], contains ten of the twelve pitches found in the chromatic scale.)
Five years after the Concerto performance so stigmatized by the Nazi press, the composer’s mounting dread of military conscription fueled his descent into depression, and led him to turn on the gas in the Berlin apartment where he ended his life on November 1, 1942. Ironically, only a few days later his name appeared on the Führerliste—a register of those individuals permanently exempted from the military draft, persons deemed to be more important at home than in the armed forces.
Hitler’s much-vaunted “thousand year Reich” survived Distler by only three years, falling 988 years short of its self-proclaimed longevity. But as we celebrate the composer’s centenary, his music continues increasingly to move and beautify our musical life. Political movements are transient; artistic worth endures.

Hugo Distler’s compositions
for (or with) harpsichord
Opus 4. Kleine Adventsmusik [A Little Advent Music], Breitkopf und Härtel 4967. First performed 28 November 1931, using harpsichord as the keyboard instrument. English edition (Concordia Publishing House).
Opus 6/I. Christ, der du bist der helle Tag [Christ Who Alone Art Light of Day], Bärenreiter 636. First performed 26 Februrary 1933, with harpsichord. English edition (Concordia).
Opus 9/I. An die Natur (1933). First performed 16 August 1933 at the Nationalsozialistischen Musikfest in Bad Pyrmont. Bärenreiter 683.
Opus 11/I. Choralkantate Wo Gott zuhaus nit gibt sein Gunst, harpsichord or organ. Composed 1933, published 1935. Bärenreiter 758.
Opus 14. Konzert für Cembalo und Streichorchester (1935–1936). First performed 29 April 1936, Hamburger Musikhalle, Hugo Distler, harpsichordist, Dr. Hans Hoffmann, conductor. Published October 1936; Bärenreiter 7393. An additional movement, deleted from the original published edition Allegro spirituoso e scherzando is now available as Bärenreiter 7393, edited by Michael Töpfel.
Opus 17. Geistliche Konzerte für eine hohe Singstimme [Three Sacred Concertos for High Voice and Keyboard: Organ, Harpsichord, or Piano]. Composed in 1937, published 1938. Bärenreiter 1231. English edition (Concordia).
Opus 18/I. Dreissig Spielstücke für die Kleinorgel oder andere Tasteninstrumente. 1938. Published June 1938. Bärenreiter 1288.
Opus 21/II. Kleine Sing- und Spielmusik: Variations on “Wo soll ich mich hinkehren?” (Piano or harpsichord). Composed 1941 (doubtful according to Lüdemann), published 1952. Bärenreiter 2046.

Without opus number
Kammerkonzert für Cembalo und elf Soloinstrumente (1932). Mss incomplete. First performed 28 November 1988, Martin Haselböck, harpsichordist and conductor. Published 1988. Bärenreiter 7687.
Ritter Blaubart (1940)—Theatre music for Ludwig Tieck’s play. Chamber orchestra includes harpsichord (prominently). First performed 29 September 2002. Bärenreiter 7711, published 2001.
Vom Himmel hoch, da komm ich her. Kleines Konzert and Choral. Neue Weihnachtsmusik für Klavier, Orgel, und andere Tasteninstrumente. Bärenreiter Collection (1935), edited by Reinhard Baum.

A basic bibliography
Books
Larry Palmer: Hugo Distler and his Church Music. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1967. (Out of print; often available through Amazon.com or Alibris.com).
The most comprehensive (and recent) book on Distler is available only in German, Winfried Lüdemann: Hugo Distler—Eine musikalische Biographie. Augsburg: Wissner-Verlag, 2002 [ISBN 3-89639-353-7]. An exhaustive biography based on all available letters and archival holdings. Complete listing of Distler’s works, analysis of the music; many photographs and musical examples.

Periodical literature in English
Jan Bender: “Hugo Distler and his Organ Music” [An interview conducted by William Bates], The American Organist, December 1982, 42–43.
Mark Bergass: “Hugo Distler’s First Vespers at St. Jakobi in Lübeck,” The American Organist, April 1982, 174–177.
Larry Palmer: “Hugo Distler’s Harpsichord Concerto,” The Diapason, May 1969, 12–13. “Hugo Distler: Some Influences on His Musical Style,” The American Organist, November 2002, 50–51. “Hugo Distler: 60 Years Later,” The Diapason, November 2002, 22.

Discography
The most satisfactory way to “know” Hugo Distler is through his music. The following compact disc recordings are recommended:

Organ works
Complete Organ Works (two discs, also included are works by Bach, Buxtehude, and Scheidt). John Brock plays two Brombaugh organs. Calcante Recordings, Ltd CD022 (1998).
Of historic interest (primarily for the instruments—Distler’s house organ and the Jakobi instruments, all of which have been changed since Distler played them): Complete Organ Works played by Armin Schoof. Thorofon CTH2293 and CTH2294.
Also of “historic” interest: Larry Palmer plays the large partitas and several smaller chorale works: Musical Heritage Society LP 3943 (out of print). Robert Sipe organ of Zumbro Lutheran Congregation, Rochester, MN (1978).

Choral works
Liturgische Sätze (selections from opus 13, opus 5, opus 11, and opus 6/2). Thorofon CTH 2420.
Choralpassion, opus 7. Kammerchor der Universität Dortmund, conducted by Willi Gundlach. Thorofon CTH2185.
Totentanz, opus 12/2 (same choir and conductor), plus Motet and Organ Partita on Wachet auf. Thorofon CTH 2215.
Die Weihnachtsgeschichte, opus 10. Thomanerchor Leipzig, Hans-Joachim Rotzsch. Berlin Classics 0092462BC.
Totentanz und Mottetten, opus 12 (including the opening and closing choruses for the never-completed St. John Passion). Berliner Vokalensemble, conducted by Bernd Stegmann. Cantate C 58007.

Instrumental works
Harpsichord Concerto, opus 14, and Incidental Music to the Play Ritter Blaubart. Musicaphon M 56860 (issued 2008).
Harpsichord Concertos, Martin Haselböck, harpsichord and conductor, with the Wiener Akademie. Both early and late concerti, plus the deleted movement from opus 14. Thorofon CTH 2403.

Special appreciation to my former organ student Simon Menges (Berlin) for sending the Musicaphon compact disc before it became available in the United States.