In celebration of the 100th birthday, October 27, of Helmut Walcha: Artist-Teacher—Part 1

1. Helmut Walcha: Nuit de Lumière may be ordered directly from the publisher, Jérôme Do Bentzinger, 8, Rue Roesselmann, F-68000 Colmar, France; Tel: 03 89 24 19 74; Fax: 03 89 41 09 57; E-mail: <[email protected]>.

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-singer—communication 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?■
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.■

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.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at <A HREF="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</A&gt;.

Counterpoint IV
A student who has worked on a piece of contrapuntal keyboard music in the ways outlined in my last few columns will be able to play the piece with great security, accuracy, and confidence. The student’s performance of that piece will project a strong sense of the contrapuntal lines as individual, autonomous melodies with shape and direction. This result is as close to being certain as anything in the realm of human endeavor ever is: this systematic working out of separate voices is an extremely powerful tool.
However, nothing in that method deals directly either with interpretive questions as such or with aspects of performance that might arise out of motivic or harmonic analysis. The method can work with many different interpretive stances as regards tempo, articulation, phrasing, registration, rubato (or lack thereof), agogic accentuation, etc., and many philosophies regarding memorization, concert programming, authenticity (or, again, lack thereof), fingering, pedaling, posture, etc. In this column I will discuss questions involving form and structure, and suggest an approach to motivic analysis—I prefer to call it motivic awareness—that I believe is useful and flexible, and that arises naturally out of the learning and practicing approach outlined in the last few columns.
Almost every piece of music deals in some way with issues of sameness and change. In some types of pieces, the way in which those opposite poles are presented is very clear. For example, in a chaconne or passacaglia, the repeated harmonic pattern provides sameness or continuity, while the various melodies, rhythms, and textures that unfold over that harmonic pattern provide change. In a rondo, the ritornello represents continuity and everything else represents change or development. In sonata-allegro form, on one level continuity is represented by a recapitulation, and change by the development section. However, the balance (or tension) between sameness and difference may also be manifested in other, more subtle ways, such as having two principal themes that are very different from one another. In general, in tonal music change is represented by departures from the tonic and continuity by the return to it.
In pieces that are largely or entirely contrapuntal—built up of melodies happening in different voices—questions of overall structure, including the handling of continuity and change, are dealt with in large part through recurring melodic themes or motives, and through the patterns of recurrence of those motives. A motive is a recognizable bit of melody, and when it recurs, it is recognizably the same, or close enough to being the same that a listener’s ears and mind will accept it as being the same. In some types of pieces, some recurrences of themes will be at least somewhat predictable. In a fugue, the beginning of the piece will be shaped by each voice entering in turn with the same theme—the fugue subject—and the end section of the piece will involve the return of that theme in some or all of the voices. In between there will almost always be passages—sometimes long, sometimes short—during which the fugue subject is more or less absent. A chorale-based contrapuntal piece will often have one or more recurring motives derived directly from the chorale melody. In a piece that is canonic, the different voices will present the same melodic material at different times.
(Notice that at least some of the reasoning in the above paragraph is circular. I wrote that “in a fugue” such-and-such will happen. I could just as well have written that if such-and-such happens, we will call it a fugue.)
In principle, a piece could be fully or partly contrapuntal without having very much—or indeed any—recurrence of themes. A piece could be written in three or four or more voices, and the voices could share no thematic material at all, and each voice itself could fail to repeat any recognizable themes. However, this essentially never happens. There are pieces—for example, several of the Orgelbüchlein chorales—in which motives are shared by only two out of the four voices (Puer natus, Heut’ triumphieret Gottes Sohn) or in which the voices share little or no thematic material from one to another, but do each repeat and develop motives as they go along (Ich ruf’ zu dir). But a piece that is worked out rigorously in voices and in which melodic motives play no role is a rarity, to say the least. There seems to be, and to have been over the centuries, a strong consensus that a voice-based texture and a motive-based rhetorical structure go together.
This makes it natural to assume that the first goal in interpreting such pieces is to bring out the theme(s), (subject(s), motive(s). I have often had students who were pianists new to organ and harpsichord ask me how it could be plausible to play a fugue, for example, on those instruments, since they do not permit the player to use dynamics to make the fugue subject stand out from the rest of the texture. Of course it’s possible to do this occasionally, when the logistics of the notes and the fingering happen to line up just right, but it can not be done in a thoroughgoing way. However, sometimes students assume that there must indeed be a way to do this, and that it must be in fact the hidden art—the secret!—of playing counterpoint on harpsichord and organ. At first glance this seems to make sense: if themes and motives are important, even crucial, to contrapuntal keyboard music, then surely it is important or crucial that listeners be able to hear those themes.
However, this idea bumps up against an interesting historical reality. It was precisely during the time when the only keyboard instruments available for performance were those instruments on which the player cannot bring themes out explicitly that the writing of contrapuntal music for the keyboard most flourished. The decline in the predominance of rigorously contrapuntal music in the (newly written) repertoire after the Baroque period corresponded exactly to the rise of the piano and the replacement of the harpsichord with the piano in everyday use. So apparently composers have seen the piano’s ability to use dynamics to highlight particular parts of the texture to be inconsistent with, or at least not conducive to, the writing of counterpoint. Instruments on which the changing timbre up and down the keyboard helps to make individual voices clear and autonomous, but on which individual motives cannot be brought out have been seen by composers as most conducive to writing counterpoint for the keyboard.
This, in turn, seems to me to point to perhaps the most important concept for a student, or any performer, to bear in mind when thinking about shaping performances of contrapuntal pieces on a keyboard instrument. On the one hand, the music is at its very essence made up of motives or themes, not just notes. These motives are the philosophical and rhetorical building blocks of contrapuntal music. They are the words and phrases, while the individual notes are the phonemes. But, on the other hand, there is no reason to consider any one theme or motive or subject within a given piece to be more important than any of the others.
In the course of working on the separate voices of a contrapuntal keyboard piece, any student—even one who is not yet very experienced with this kind of music—will become, perhaps unwittingly, a real expert on the motivic content of that piece. Simply as a result of having listened a lot to each voice and, by definition, to all of that voice’s melodies, themes, motives, or subjects, that student will have become perhaps the world’s leading expert on what is going on melodically in that line. This expertise may well be largely subconscious. I believe that the best way to point a student towards making that awareness of the motivic content of contrapuntal voices explicit, and thus heighten its ability to help enliven the music, is to ask the student simply to try to notice anything and everything that happens more than once.
This is a deliberately simple, colloquial, almost naïve way of looking at themes in contrapuntal voices. One purpose of starting out by looking at voices this way is to avoid a prejudice in favor of motivic ideas that have what might be called a professionally sanctioned importance, such as fugue subjects, countersubjects, or motives derived from a chorale. If these things are present, then a neutral search for anything that happens more than once will certainly find them. If, in a particular piece, such themes really are the most important thing about the motivic structure of the piece, then that will become apparent, because those themes will occur more, and/or in more important contexts, than other recurring events that the student may find. But again, even themes that recur more frequently are not more important in performance than themes that recur less often. That is, there is no reason to treat them differently in performance than other motives. It is a good working assumption that anything that a composer took the trouble to do more than once should be treated as rhetorically important.
The question arises of how we know—how a student can tell—what actually constitutes something that happens more than once. In principle, what we are looking for is simple: intervals, melodic shapes, and rhythms that are the same one place in a voice as they are somewhere else (in that voice or in another voice). Some points to remember in looking for such things—or in helping a student to do so—are as follows:
1) It can be useful to make copies of a piece and use different copies to highlight different themes or other recurring events.
2) It makes sense to notice and highlight first of all anything that jumps out as being obvious. This will often include—but not be limited to—“official” motives such as fugue subjects or chorale phrases. Longer motives are the easiest to notice right off the bat.
3) It then makes sense to scan any as-yet unhighlighted sections of each voice looking first for rhythmic patterns that recur, since those are often easiest to spot, and then for intervals or melodic patterns that recur.
4) There is no harm in identifying something as a recurring theme when, according to someone else’s analysis, it might not be. It is more interesting to notice more similarities than to notice fewer. If something seems far-fetched (“there is a major sixth here in m. 4, and another one there in m. 7” or “the note A occurs in each of these three measures”) then it might be far-fetched—in which case it will probably melt away upon further consideration—or it might turn out to be real. If on reflection it seems real, then it might lead to some insight about the piece or to a more rhetorically convincing playing of the piece or of that part of it. It would be a shame to miss out on this.
5) At the same time, it is not necessary to expect to find everything the first time through. The act of looking through voices hoping to find recurring motives will almost certainly lead to playing all of the notes more meaningfully—more like words and phrases and not just phonemes—regardless of whether you do or don’t find all of the plausible recurring motives.

I have recently done (actually re-done) a quick analysis of two very basic Bach contrapuntal works, the first Two-Part Invention and the first fugue of the Well-Tempered Clavier. In the former I have found that one half-measure in both voices together (m. 6, second half), one measure in the upper voice (m. 13, third beat through m. 14 second beat), and a further half measure in the upper voice (m. 21, second half) consist of material that is not part of any motive that recurs. That’s all: ten beats out of a total of 176 in the piece. Of those ten beats, six occur in cadences. In a cadence the relative importance of harmony goes up and the relative importance of counterpoint goes down. (Cadences express sameness or togetherness rather than diversity or change.)
In the fugue, there are 432 beats of voice-writing (27 measures, four beats per measure, four voices). Of these, no more than about 40 beats are constructed out of thematic material that does not recur, and there is no moment in the piece when there is not at least one voice presenting recurring material. The fugue subject occurs officially 23 times. However, part of the recurring material consists of fragments of the fugue subject. The analytic approach being described here makes it unnecessary to consider those notes anomalous or fragmentary, but still permits an understanding of how they relate to the rest of what is going on.
In both of these pieces I have now found more notes that seem to me to belong to recurring melodic ideas—i.e., more things that happen more than once—than I did the last time I looked them over some years ago. Our ability to notice should grow with experience.
Sometimes looking for anything that happens more than once can be revealing in unexpected ways. Years ago when I first studied the Praeludium in E Major, BuxWV 141, by Dietrich Buxtehude, I happened to notice that the opening four notes—the rising tetrachord b-c#-d#-e—recurred at least a time or two. I decided to look for this motive wherever I could find it in the piece. The recurrence of that simple, almost throwaway bit of melody turned out to provide a structural roadmap of the whole work. It occurs in one form or another at all of the important transition points in the piece, and actually serves as a guideline to the affect of the different sections. It would never, however, be identified as any kind of subject that is developed contrapuntally in the work.
(Since there is not space here to delve into the details of these three examples, I have posted them on the Princeton Early Keyboard Center website, <A HREF="http:www.pekc.org">www.pekc.org</A&gt;, with highlighting in several colors, and thorough commentary. I have also posted some expanded discussion of the relationship between this kind of contrapuntal learning and various aspects of interpretation, including a perspective or two other than, and different from, my own.)
In essence, this approach is very simple, as simple as it sounds: notice everything that happens more than once; notice as much as you can, but don’t worry about noticing everything; let your awareness of musical words and phrases enliven your playing of the music.
Next month I will turn to the interesting and sometimes vexing—but comparatively circumscribed!—subject of the playing of repeated notes.

David McKinney, DMA is Adjunct Professor of Music at Santa Fe College in Florida. He studied the organ works of Hugo Distler with Rolf Schönstedt in 2003–2004 in Herford, Germany as a Doctoral Fulbright Fellow.

This article celebrates the 100th anniversary of Distler’s birth year. It enhances understanding of Distler as a composer and examines performance aspects of his organ works. Relevant biographical information introduces us to Distler’s socio-historical environment. The physical influences of Lübeck’s organs and Distler’s house organ explain Distler’s compositional output in terms of compositional style and playing requirements. Information about playing Distler’s organ music follows.

“A heart ablaze, which in giving of itself, burns out.”1
“I want to break away from contemporary confinements and venture into the realm of the supreme.”2 Here, Hugo Distler (1908–1942) expresses the typical dream of youth to change the world. “I feel an indescribable loneliness, a sense of being separated from everyone and everything.”3 This statement seems the sentiment of someone aged who failed to achieve anything. Distler’s world was fraught with such dichotomies. He thought he lived a life of failure. One hundred years after his birth, we see it was full of successes.
As an organ composer, Distler broke ground and became the first to compose pieces in a modern style that suited the sound of a Baroque organ. Clarity in Distler’s works is of utmost importance. This, above all else, dictates a performer’s interpretive choices. Registration, tempi, and articulation must serve the composition’s ideas. “His entire output is marked with an indispensable truth, clarity, and sincerity of expression.”4

Biography

Nuremberg (1908–1927)
Distler’s short life is divided into different periods according to the cities in which he lived. Hugo Distler was born out of wedlock in Nuremberg on June 24, 1908. Such an event was scandalous back then, and his mother never actually wanted to have him. In 1912, she married a German-American and moved to Chicago. Her abandonment affected him his entire life.5
He grew up with his maternal grandparents, who owned and operated a successful butcher shop and were relatively well off. They gave him a first-rate education at the Nuremberg Gymnasium and an early musical education at the Dupont Music School. After graduation from the Gymnasium in 1927, thrice he tried to gain admission to the local conservatory; thrice he was denied. They claimed he lacked talent, but Distler knew the real reason was his unusual home situation. The conservatory considered such familial backgrounds incapable of providing for regular and timely completion of courses of study.6 Distler again felt rejected and unwanted, and his feelings of unworthiness escalated.

Leipzig education (1927–1931)
Because he failed to gain admittance in Nuremberg, Distler chose to study at the world-famous Leipzig Conservatory. The city’s variety of activities enriched Distler’s education and artistic development. The best artists and pedagogues worked in Leipzig, and opportunities to attend concerts at the Thomaskirche, the Gewandhaus, and the famous Leipzig Opera House were plenty.
His teachers soon discovered his unusual gift for composition. They advised him to study composition and organ, and he entered Günther Ramin’s organ studio. Dr. Hermann Grabner, counterpoint professor, influenced the young, hard-working Distler. Most importantly, he cared for the insecure young man in a very loving and fatherly way. He became a lifelong mentor and friend to Distler; and Distler placed a lot of worth in his judgment and advice.
In 1930 Breitkopf & Härtel published two of his works. Everything went well for Distler until his step-grandfather, who financed Distler’s education, died. Distler was forced to quit his studies because he could not afford them. At Ramin’s advice, Distler applied as organist at St. Jakobi-Kirche in Lübeck. The church leaders debated over two applicants. In the end, they cast a lot, and it fell to Distler!

Lübeck (1931–1937)
Thus, the famous Hansestadt Lübeck and its Mariners’ church, St. Jakobi, where Dietrich Buxtehude once worked, became Hugo Distler’s home. At first, he found circumstances agreeable. A young pastor supported musical activity within the parish, and Distler befriended Bruno Grusnick, the cantor at St. Jakobi. The Lübeck Sing- und Spielkreis,7 under Grusnick’s baton, premiered nearly all of Distler’s choral compositions. Finally, the historical organs of St. Jakobi provided Distler with the inspiration for his first organ compositions. What began as a simple, half-time church music post soon became a fertile creative font.
Distler restored the Vesper series and brought its reputation back to the level when Buxtehude worked in Lübeck. After just four months, Distler also took over the cantor position at St. Jakobi. He became a sought-after virtuoso organist, and he created almost all his entire life’s output here, including two large organ partitas (see Figures 1 and 2).
The organ position, merely half-time, paid only RM70 monthly.8 But the Lübeck State Conservatory opened in 1932, and Distler assumed direction of the church music department. The organist position at St. Jakobi then became a full-time position, and the following year, Distler married Waltraut Thienhaus. He saw the birth of his first daughter, Barbara, in 1934.
Unfortunately, the good times did not last. Distler experienced a total nervous breakdown in 1934. Afterwards, his life and works became overshadowed by the ruling Hitler regime. Despite joining the NSDAP9 in May of 1933,10 things did not improve for Distler. In 1934, the state decreed that new church music must serve the Nazi cause. They forbade performances of Jewish artists and works by Jewish composers. Though he was not Jewish, they condemned Distler’s second harpsichord concerto as Bolshevistic.11 Moreover, the Nazis and Hitlerjugend limited Distler’s own performances. All this became extremely difficult for him to endure, and he decided to leave Lübeck.

Stuttgart (1937–1940)
He began work at the Stuttgart Musikhochschule in 1937 and found great support from his colleagues. The Stuttgart years were generally happy ones for Distler, and his professional career skyrocketed. He assumed direction of the Esslingen Singakademie, taught choral conducting courses, participated in various Singwochen and Musiktagen, and had an active concert career. In addition, he dedicated himself once again to the composition of sacred works, and his fame grew. Several works were performed in Berlin in October of 1937 at the Fest der deutschen Kirchenmusik (see Figure 2). In 1938, the state bestowed the title Professor upon Distler.
Unfortunately, he also soon experienced Nazi opposition here from a student group, Die Fachschaft. Attacks were directed against Distler’s church ties and his clear intentions to foster church music. Alas, the overall political situation soon ruined Distler’s good fortunes. The violent overtaking of Austria and the occupation of the German lands with troops in 1938 indicated an imminent European war, which began on September 1, 1939.
Distler awaited events with deep angst. His mood fluctuated between “confidence and deep melancholy.”12 In the midst of chaos, he wrote and published an important theory text, Funktionelle Harmonielehre. One particularly moving experience for him during this time was a highly acclaimed concert on the large organ in the St. Lorenz-Kirche in Nuremberg. He finally proved his exceptional artistic qualities to the town that had left him embittered.

Berlin (1940–1942)
The final chapter of Distler’s life in the capital city of Berlin brought him further advancements in his career. He was instated as full professor in Berlin, one of only a few, at the state-supported Conservatory for Music in Berlin-Charlottenburg. Distler quickly became acclimated to his new job, and he pursued his passion for choral conducting with vehemence. In addition to his duties with the Conservatory Cantors, he also oversaw the large Conservatory Choir. Even though Distler was already overtaxed due to his duties at the Conservatory, he accepted the position of Director of the Berlin State and Cathedral Choirs on April 1, 1942 and attained his highest goal in life.
Reviews of his concerts were always favorable. For example, in a performance of St. John’s Passion, it appeared as if Distler “had to endure the pain and death of the Savior himself. His rendering of this work was completely convincing.”13
Alas, the ruling political faction disapproved of Distler’s renewed connection with the church. This caused him much mental anguish. Despite his NSDAP membership and his professorial status, the Hitler-Jugend’s repression and threats to his personal freedom left Distler glum. In a fit of unshakable depression, he wrote the following words to his wife fourteen days before his suicide: he felt “an indescribable loneliness, a sense of being separated from everyone and everything.”14
He spent his entire life fleeing from city to city in order to escape trouble. His deep world angst, continual inner unrest, ongoing feelings of worthlessness and rejection since childhood, and feelings of being overworked proved to be too much in the end. In a final state of total spiritual and physical exhaustion, he planned his escape with meticulous detail (see Distler’s suicide letter).
Thus, Hugo Distler prematurely ended his life on All Saints Day, Sunday, November 1, 1942. Hugo Distler was laid to rest in the forest cemetery in Stahnsdorf. A favorite New Testament quote of Distler, one he used in a motet and that likewise stands as the motto for his life and death, was engraved upon the wooden cross: “In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”15

Organs influence compositions
The Orgelbewegung, Distler’s teachers, and the Zeitgeist of the early 20th century influenced Distler’s compositional output. But nothing influenced Distler’s organ music as prominently as the instruments themselves. Distler wrote his works for two main organs: a historical Stellwagen instrument in Lübeck’s St. Jakobi-Kirche and his own house organ in Stuttgart, built by Paul Ott.

Stellwagen organ
Armin Schoof claims Distler’s fascination with historical organs was made so intense because of his job at St. Jakobi in Lübeck. There, Distler presided over the kleine Orgel. Although instantly taken by the sound of this organ, Distler was dissatisfied because of its limitations with the organ literature of Bach and later composers. In a report on the renovation of the St. Jakobi organs from 1935, Distler describes it as follows:

[B]y looking at the disposition, a characteristic sound of each manual, is very strongly heard. Above all stands the Hauptwerk, with its Renaissance-like, strict principal chorus. The noble Mixture and the (unfortunately dampened) Trommet unite to a plenum of celebratory, unapproachable splendor. The Rückpositiv has a powerful principal chorus of steely clarity, and it can also be used as a solo manual with its inimitably beautiful flute voices and the silky, tender Krummhorn. A Scharf and a clarinet-like Trechterregal provide the necessary, complementary, equalizing force to the Hauptwerk. Lastly, the Brustwerk possesses a plenum with an almost bawling ferocity—a deadly scream. Its elementary allure, first obvious to one only after he has freed himself from any ideal of sound, landed here in bacchanal self-sufficiency at the turn of the century.16
Due to these limitations, Distler intently studied music by early Baroque composers, became fascinated with the keyboard works of Samuel Scheidt and Dietrich Buxtehude, and began to write his own organ pieces with modern harmonies, but which were fit for this historical instrument. Thus, this organ inspired him to write his first large-scale organ composition, the partita on Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, Op. 8/I.17
In a foreword to Opus 8/I, Distler pays tribute to the kleine Orgel in St. Jakobi. He says that the partita’s genesis, principles of design, and existence are due to his memorable years of experience with the organ. He also states that performers should strive to replicate the “old sound” when playing his works on modern instruments. While registrations of his performance of this work on the kleine Orgel are published in the partita, Distler maintains in the foreword that they should not be made into the standard, as the Jakobi organ was “far from being balanced in its specifications. Most of all, the weak pedal disallow[s] a suitable registration.”18
In his second partita, Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, Op. 8/II, he only gives general descriptions of the type of sound he wants because the organ was under renovation. However, after renovations were completed in 1935, he once again gives detailed stoplists and registrations in the Kleine Orgelchoral-Bearbeitungen, Op. 8/III. These reflect the changes made to the organ. They are noticeable in the comparison of the printed organ specifications (see Figures 3 and 4). Note how detailed Distler was in his original listing of the specifications. He even lists dynamics of each stop, so desirous was he to emphasize the type of sound he envisioned. Today, the Stellwagen organ is the only remaining organ in Lübeck from the 16th and 17th centuries; it is one of the oldest playable historical instruments altogether (see Figure 5).19

Ott house organ
The house organ built by Paul Ott in 1938 (or rather the idea of it) inspired Distler to compose the two works of Op. 18. As outlined in correspondence between Bornefeld and Distler, the collection of 30 Pieces (Op. 18/I) was originally conceived with the idea that they could be played on a small positive organ. Bornefeld offered to write the preface, and Distler was very much excited about the possibilities. For reasons unknown, this original plan was never realized, and the information published in the collection contrasts with this inside information. Furthermore, as the organ was not actually completed and delivered until after the publication of 30 Pieces, it could only have been the idea of the house organ, rather than the actual instrument itself, which provided inspiration.20 Nevertheless, Distler’s Op. 18 was written to be performed on small organs that call to mind an ideal, early Baroque sound.
The house organ concept originated because Distler accepted an instructor post at the Stuttgart Musikhochschüle in 1937. The ever-increasing political difficulties forced Distler to shift his focus of composition from sacred to secular music;21 but he greatly missed his precious instrument at St. Jakobi. Thus, he began to make plans for a house organ. The specifications and scalings (see Figure 6) were given to organ builder Paul Ott of Göttingen. In order to help finance the construction costs (a sum of 8,000 Marks),22 Distler sold his harpsichord.23
Paul Ott, a pioneer in the field of Baroque organ construction principles and the first organ builder to assiduously work according to the precepts of the Orgelbewegung, completed his examination of Master in Organ Building and Cabinet Making in 1937, and he delivered Distler’s organ in September 1938. Despite careful calculations, the instrument displayed flaws upon arrival. Low wind pressure and low-placed mouths of the pipes caused uneven voicing, and the pedal reeds were thin. However, all in all, the instrument was a successful union of Distler’s style with Ott’s concept of sound, as well as a successful realization of Distler’s vision of the purpose of a small house organ.24
One oddity about the house organ, which is important for the performance of Distler’s Opus 18: the width of the keys was narrower than normal. Each octave was only 161 mm. This width, three mm narrower than usual, may at first seem insignificant. It does, nevertheless, make a meaningful difference: it eases phrasing, namely making it cleaner.25 This fact is worth emphasizing because it relates to Distler’s overall compositional philosophy: transparency.
As noted above, the organ displayed certain problems upon arrival to Distler’s home. He must have ordered some alterations to be made because in his epilogue to the 30 Pieces, the specifications differ from those listed in Thienhaus (compare Figures 6 and 7).
The new house organ’s influence, as well as that of the Nazi regime, upon Distler is evident in his statements within the epilogue to his 30 Pieces. The works composed during the Stuttgart period were not written for a sacred purpose. 30 Pieces for House Organ or Other Small Keyboard Instruments was composed to “encourage the re-institution of the organ as a household instrument. . . [and] to inspire joyful music-making at home.”26
However, Distler’s religious ties and biases are still more than present in other comments. For instance, he says the organ is particularly suited to helping make home music-making more “holy.” Also, despite the fact that the collection consists mainly of untitled works or of variations on secular tunes, Distler ends the collection with variations based on the chorale, “Wo Gott zu Haus nit gibt sein Gunst,” which he had previously included in his choral collection, Der Jahrkreis, Op 5.27

Performance Aspects

Distler’s own playing: written records
To understand the spirit of performance in Distler’s works, I consulted reviews by contemporaries of Distler’s playing. All accounts agree: Distler did not merely play his works, he brought them to life.

[Distler’s] composition and playing were here fully ‘in uno.’ Since then, I have never heard such a oneness of interpretation of Distler’s works; his playing was appropriate for his works. They were of kindred spirits—which is not always the case with composers.28
Fred Hamel critiqued Distler’s Bach playing on May 5, 1940 as follows:

How Distler frees these inner powers, how he seizes the polyphonic logic, the energy of movement, the rhythmical tension and the phrasing: this is a unique and likewise a conquering art . . . In this relentless, considerable, concentrated, fanatic, and shaping power, even the most famous of Bach’s organ works become new.29
Erich Rhode wrote a review of the important concert Distler gave in Nuremberg in 1940:

Of Distler’s own works, we experienced the partita on Jesus Christus, unser Heiland—the liveliness of the filigree technique in its interesting “Bicinium” won a special cachet—and the trio sonata, whose melodic sprightliness is unmistakable . . . Distler’s technical ability on both the positive organ and the main organ elevated his congenial composer-personality. He showed his amazing ability equally on both. . . . Prof. Distler is a virtuoso of passionate temperament and a Bach specialist of the highest caliber.30

The following philosophy of Distler is important to highlight: the technically demanding performances of Bach’s and Distler’s pieces should not serve to show off one’s virtuosic technical capacity, as is the case with Reger et al. Rather, one’s playing should strive to portray the spirit of the compositions, indeed, even the personalities of the composers. These things interested Distler, and he conveyed them in performances: precision, control, musicality, the spirit of the Baroque, clarity, and transparency.

Distler’s own playing: aural records
Lastly, the recording of Hugo Distler playing works by Praetorius, Frescobaldi, and Pachelbel on the historic organ in Kiedrich, Germany, provides an important primary source for understanding Distler’s performance practice. No written record of registrations exist, but a disposition of the organ is available (see Figure 8).
Distler played works from the Renaissance and early Baroque on a restored Gothic organ. The first selection is an organ chorale by Michael Praetorius (1571–1621) on the hymn “O lux beator trinitas.” The interpretation clearly intends for the listener to be able to hear all lines clearly and evenly, as it is quite simple, straightforward, and without agogic emphasis or exaggerated mannerisms. The sound heard in this recording is in keeping with the style of the registration given for the initial chorale statement in Distler’s Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland. Each line is fairly neutral in color, the cantus firmus takes precedence, yet the other lines are transparent and obvious.
The second piece is one of Girolamo Frescobaldi’s (1583–1643) many canzonas for organ. Once again, Distler wishes to convey clarity of line to the listener. Similarities to the registration indications in Distler’s partita Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme are easy to hear.
The third piece on the recording is the Fantasie in G-dur for organ by Johann Pachelbel (1653–1706). The texture is similar to the opening toccata of his Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland.
Thus, it is most apparent that in Distler’s compositions, one must strive for absolute clarity of line above all else, for this is what Distler brought to early Baroque organ music. His understanding of form, line, counterpoint, articulation, tempo, and registration of Baroque music is exactly the same as required in his own organ works.

Regarding registration
The clarity and transparency of Distler’s works are also present in his registration technique. Distler details exactly which stops he uses in Op. 8/I and III. Schoof claims that Distler’s works are not playable on every organ because they are meant to be performed on a Baroque style organ.31 The general character of his given registrations, indeed, is best realized on an early Baroque or neo-Baroque organ. However, Distler said that pre-Bach music adapts easily enough to a modern orchestral organ, as these pieces are characterized by their colorful solo voices with many contrasting sections. He further maintains that this effect can easily be achieved on the modern orchestral organs if one bears in mind the construction of the composition and tries to imitate the intended character of the piece.32
Because Distler’s works are based on models of Baroque masters, it follows that Distler’s own compositions should be adaptable to a modern orchestral organ. Distler even says that his registrations in Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland should not be made into the standard, as he imagined a much stronger pedal division.33 Thus, it is obvious: Distler may have prescribed a certain registration, yet posterity only need adhere to the spirit of the listed specifications.
Op. 8/II, the partita on Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme, contains no specific registration guidelines. At the time Distler composed this piece, the kleine Stellwagen organ was undergoing reconstruction. Thus, Distler writes only general guidelines to follow. In following these guidelines, however, one must keep in mind Distler’s thoughts on the registration techniques of Bach’s works. In one of his essays, Distler notes that the plenum should be strong and full, the individual manuals should sound as contrasting as possible, and usually they should be independent and uncoupled. The manual changes and compositional structure within the piece provide the necessary variety to hold the interest of the listener.
Deciding upon an appropriate registration for the works in Distler’s Op. 18/I and II proves more problematic for organists in the U.S. today. Modern organists generally do not have contact with exemplars of small positive organs, which Distler had in mind when he wrote these pieces. Furthermore, the organ is now rarely used for home use or in chamber works. These pieces were neither intended for the concert halls, nor to be played in church. In the U.S., however, there are seldom other options. Thus, if Distler’s chamber works are to be performed in the U.S., a compromise has to be made.
Helpful comments regarding registration on the compositions in Op. 18/I and II, 30 Pieces and the Orgelsonate, are found in the epilogue to 30 Pieces and in the performance notes to the Orgelsonate. These guidelines assist in preserving the spirit of Distler’s intimate pieces. These pieces are akin to Baroque forms, and because they are to be performed on a small house instrument, the registration should be based on 4? instead of 8? tones, few voices (yet characteristic ones) should be employed, old positive-style registrations combined with mutations can be used in movements with arpeggios and unison writing, and reed stops should be used sparingly as solo voices or in the full chorus. Concerning the pedals, if they are available, they are to be used ad libitum.34
Above all else, when registering Distler’s organ works, recall that Distler strove for clarity and transparency. This should dictate one’s choice of registration in all his pieces, on all organs, and in all settings. Schoof’s summary further emphasizes this point:

One idea unites all of Distler’s compositions, his endeavor for clarity. This is made apparent even in his manuscripts, which are written in a thin, sensitive, and clear hand. This is all the more appropriate because, as a composer, he did not allow for foggy emotions. He composed in a style of “elective affinity for generations and centuries past:” strictly motivic, thematic, and contrapuntal.35

By following these guidelines, a performer may still in good conscience perform the smaller, intimate organ works of Distler in the venues available today. Distler strove to embody the spirit of his and Bach’s works in performances. He did not refuse to perform Baroque works on orchestral instruments simply because of registration problems. Rather, he chose from available stops and made the piece fit the room. Indeed, we should as well.

Articulation instructions
The touch Distler used in his organ works is the same as that which he employed when playing works by Buxtehude, Scheidt, Bach, and others. In his essay on playing Bach’s Dorian Toccata and Fugue, he says that articulation is to be martellato, not legato.
In many instances throughout Distler’s pieces, he dictates a desired articulation. Often, he requests varying articulations simultaneously. The bicinium of variation one in Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland is a prime example. In certain instances, three different articulations must be played together, e.g., variation five of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland. Here, the right hand on the Hauptwerk uses a leggiero touch, Distler suggests a legato touch with the slurs and phrase markings of the left hand on the Brustwerk, and the pedal is clearly separated by a sharp marcato (notated by markings typically found in brass music) to set apart the ascending quartal harmonies. Rolf Schönstedt maintains that Distler is the first composer since Bach to require this technically demanding aspect in the organ literature.36
Distler, furthermore, clearly states in the Spielanweisung to the Orgelsonate that the desired articulation is an easy-going non legato to martellato, excepting the ben legato of the peaceful middle movement. Thus, one should assume at least a clear leggiero in all of Distler’s works, unless otherwise designated by Distler.

Tempi, ornaments, etc.
Distler gives specific metronome markings in each piece from Op. 8/I and II, and general tempo descriptions in the remaining organ works. One should realize, however, that Distler’s metronome markings were determined as he composed at home. Jan Bender says Distler always performed his pieces slower than the metronome marking specified when in church because of the acoustics.37 He also states that Distler strove for clarity, above all, which meant modifying tempi, registration, and articulation according to the requirements of the room.
Regarding ornamentation in the organ works of Distler, Bender maintains that Distler adopted the “Baroque manner” of executing ornaments as taught at the Leipzig Conservatory. They were played on the beat, excepting certain grace notes which required a pre-beat interpretation because of the musical context. The mordant was played main note, lower auxiliary, main note, and the praller was executed in the opposite manner. Trills usually began on the principal note rather than on the upper auxiliary, which is opposite from the current understanding of Baroque trill execution.
Bender, furthermore, gives certain miscellaneous details regarding the performance of Distler’s organ works. For example, Distler played pedals almost exclusively with his toes, often crossing his feet. Also, Distler never played the second statement of the Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland toccata when performing the entire work, and he forbade his students to do so as well. He even regretted that it was so published. Furthermore, as has already been established, Distler did not consider his registration suggestions immutable. They merely represented his ideal: clarity of line. In the toccata of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, Distler removed the 16? Posaune at the end of the pedal solo, even though this is not indicated in the score, in order to make the manual figurations more distinctly heard.

Conclusions
The historical study of composers’ biographies helps provide a degree of humanity to otherwise untouchable musical geniuses and their creations. At times, this study can be intriguing and perplexing. At other times, it is nothing more than routine and mundane. In the case of Hugo Distler, it is inspiring and disturbing, awing and disheartening, exciting and depressing. In studying Distler, one discovers the life of a genius filled with a multitude of the lowest lows and the highest highs—a roller coaster of emotion and experiences.
While Distler’s life experiences, dealings with the Nazi party, and death were dramatic, his musical accomplishments were no less noticeable. He successfully melded all the neoclassical elements of composition with old compositional practices and forms. During his short life, he achieved fame as a church musician, conductor, and virtuoso performer of Bach’s works and of his own compositions. His contributions to the organ repertoire were the very first to use modern harmonies and alternative scales while being best suited for the unique sound of Baroque organs. His works, though seldom performed due to their technical difficulty, remain staples in modern organ repertoire, a mark of their significance.
The ideology of clarity in Distler’s works is of utmost importance. It should be apparent that this dictates the performer’s choices regarding how to interpret them. Registration, tempi, and articulation are servants to the composition, which strives for transparency of line and clarity of expression. In his closing statements, Bender emphasizes this aspect of clarity with the following advice for aspiring composers of organ music:

Write music that is absolutely clear and transparent, music in which every note can be explained theoretically. . . . “There is no such thing as music that is beautiful or ugly, just music that is correct or incorrect.”38

The same can be said of a performance. If what one does is not clear, it is probably incorrect. However, if one realizes the spirit of Distler’s works and makes choices guided by the simple principle of clarity, even on modern organs, then it is likely that Distler would approve.
It is my observation that Distler remains more popular in Germany and Europe than in the United States even today. I imagine this is due to the unwillingness of Americans to perform neoclassical works on modern instruments. It is my hope that the insights gained here will encourage and enable more American performers to program Distler’s organ works in more venues.

Acknowledgments: The author thanks the Fulbright Commissions of Germany and the U.S. for funding this research.

Olga Savitskaya was born in Minsk (Belarus) and earned a Ph.D. with a specialty in musicology at the Belarusian State Conservatory, where she is now assistant professor and music theory chair. A member of the Belarusian Union of Composers, she lectures on harmony, form and analysis, and polyphony. Her research interests include instrumental music of baroque period, Belarusian symphonic music, and modern composition techniques. Her publications include many books and articles.

The end of the 17th century through the beginning of the 18th century was a period of development for the trio sonata and its two varieties: sonata da chiesa and sonata da camera. Being formed in the works of Corelli, “the typical form of a church sonata of four contrasting parts: Grave (homophonic or imitative, C), Allegro (treated fugally, C), Adagio (homophonic, 3/2), Allegro or Presto (treated fugally or homophonic, C or 3/2)”1 appeared to be one of the most universal and flexible formulas of musical-logical development of the large instrumental concept in the baroque period. Influenced by the principles of the cyclic organization of the church sonata, the structure of the violin solo sonata and the concerto grosso evolved. Thus, the musical-historical phenomenon of the church sonata appears in the combination of two aspects: 1) as a genre during the 17th and early 18th centuries, moving from the bounds of church music into the sphere of secular concert music; 2) as a type of the baroque large instrumental form whose organizational principles (primarily crystallized in the genre of a church trio sonata) were adapted and developed at the end of the 17th century through the first half of the 18th century.
The highest achievements in this sonata form are connected to the prominent masters—Corelli, Purcell, Couperin, Biber, Buxtehude, Bach, and Handel, etc.—whose works in many aspects have defined both the character of the baroque era as a whole, and the national and regional schools that developed in this period. The Italian sonata, embodied in the sonatas of Corelli, undoubtedly had a great influence on composers throughout Europe. But much more notable is finding the “national appearance” of the sonata in England, France, and Germany.
One of the high points in the history of this genre is seen in the 14 trio sonatas for violin, viola da gamba and harpsichord of Dieterich Buxtehude, which were quite original when they were published in 1696.
The main features of Buxtehude’s sonatas are their general structure and non-specific number of movements, from three to seven. The sonata movements are mainly differentiated by tempo, style and degree of independence. The fantasy style of composition abounds in unexpected changes of rhythm, contrasted with strict fugues, improvisational interludes, and juxtapositions of different manners of writing. And though the contrast of polyphony and homophony as one of the basic traits of the sonata da chiesa retains its significance, fugues do not always take the central place. All this testifies to the fact that trio sonatas by Buxtehude are oriented not so much to the Corelli pattern, but to the German tradition of violin writing, where the principle of free thematic development and improvisational character of performing fuses with compositional techniques.
The fugues included in each of Buxtehude’s 14 sonatas are very different, ingenious, and exhibit the individual style of the composer, as well as a definite stage of evolution of this polyphonic form prior to the art of Bach.
The instrumental ensemble fugues reveal one of the bright sides of the complex, many-sided Buxtehude fugal style, which includes also his organ and vocal compositions. As V. Protopopov noted, their typical features are “vividness of themes, ease of motion, and a lack of concentrated philosophical musical images . . .”2 As a rule, the fugal subjects of trio sonatas are rather extensive, intonationally expressive, and based on the structure of core-development. The elements of dance music and style-intonation figures representing performing technique of stringed instruments give a special shape to them.
Two-voice fugues predominate, where the theme is expressed by solo instruments; the basso continuo functions as accompaniment (op. 1: no. 1 Presto, no. 3 Allegro, no. 5 Vivace, no. 6 Allegro; op. 2: no. 2 Allegro, no. 4 Allegro I, no. 5 Allegro I). However, three-voice fugues in which the harpsichord participates in concertante alongside the two soloists (op. 1: no. 1 Allegro; op. 2: no. 2 Vivace, no. 6 Vivace, Poco Presto, no. 7 Allegro) are also frequently used. In some cases three-voice fugues are used only in the exposition, subsequently replaced by two-voice fugues with accompaniment (op. 2: no. 1 Allegro).
According to the tradition of pre-Bach fugues, in Buxtehude’s trio sonatas the tonic-dominant alternation of subjects is mainly a result of the interchange of expositions and counter-expositions that becomes the basic structural characteristic. However, even in rather small and “simple” fugues, expansion of the texture and attention to the architectonical aspect of composition is obvious. An essential role belongs to episodes.
As an example we shall give the scheme of the three-voice fugue of the Sonata in F Major, op. 2, no. 7, Allegro I (Example 1). At the same time in trio sonatas of Buxtehude, fugues having two or three parts are also frequent. Such are the two-voice fugues of sonatas in C Major (op. 1, no. 5), E Minor (op. 1, no. 7), and A Minor (op. 1, no. 3).
All these examples show a definite development: from a fugue as the combination of expositions and counter-expositions by means of episodes to three-part fugue with functional differentiation of sections and exceeding the limits of tonic-dominant relations through modulation. Such development, which looks forward toward Bach’s fugues (especially chamber-instrumental), is not, however, the single one for Buxtehude.
The unrestrained imagination of the baroque artist and the aspiration to the new and unusual are manifested also in the interpretation of a fugue, resulting in expansion and complication of its structure and assimilation of the elements of other genres and forms. The structure and organizational logic of these Buxtehude fugues are not repeated, but as a whole one can see a similarity to his organ works, the successive line from which leads to grandiose Bach organ fugues. Let us examine specific examples.

Sonata in G Major (op. 1, no. 2)
Its structure emphasizes a cyclic three-part form, while the weakened role of polyphony and significant role of dance themes testify to the effect of an instrumental concerto. The principle of composition “in mixto genere” (in a mixed form) is in part I, the result of synthesis of two forms: a complex double fugue with a joint exposition and the concerto form.
Lively dance themes do not contrast but supplement each other in free development when complementary rhythms underline the linear independence of the voices, with homophonic duplication of the melodic motives in tenths and thirds. Development of themes in exposition and counter-exposition, which constitute a fugue itself, is divided by the episodes based on the new material in the manner of the homophonic ritornellos of the violin concerto. (Example 2)
In essence, in this work, and in the entire cycle, not only interaction of various musical forms takes place but also the more complicated synthesis of “the old” and “the new” genres: the church sonata, which has reached its full maturity, and the young instrumental concerto, which rapidly developed in Europe at the end of the 17th century.

Sonata in B Major (op. 1, no. 4)
Another combination features the interaction of a fugue and basso ostinato. In the Sonata in B Major (op. 1, no. 4) the element of ostinato seems “to be splashed out” outside of 32 variations of part I by subordinating a final fugue. In its middle section Buxtehude, being the master of musical rhetoric, specially combines two principles of organization—fugue and ostinato. At first the brief fugal subject is stated by the solo instruments. Then it dissolves in figurations, and its function in the thematic process temporarily transfers to the basso ostinato. The final section again affirms the fugue, but a reminiscence of the basso ostinato returns in the last bars of the coda.
The ostinato principle takes a special place in Buxtehude’s compositional technique. The German master’s adherence to ostinato seems to be consistent even against the background of its pervasive occurrence in music of the 17th century (perhaps only Purcell can be compared with him in this respect). Buxtehude makes use of basso ostinato in organ compositions: Chaconnes in C Minor (BuxWV 159), E Minor (BuxWV 160), Passacaglia in D Minor (BuxWV 161), Preludes in C Major (BuxWV 137) and G Minor (BuxWV 149); and in the cantatas Jesu dulcis memoria (BuxWV 57), Laudate pueri (BuxWV 69), Liebster, meine Seele saget (BuxWV 70), etc.
In the 14 trio sonatas, basso ostinato is almost as necessary as fugue (the ostinato is absent only in two sonatas). Its various forms can be divided into two groups—the less numerous so-called arias for basso-ostinato (Strophenbas arie), and the basic group, consisting of basso-ostinato forms of passacaglia type.
Basso ostinato is employed in lively (op. 2, no. 3 Vivace) and slow (op. 2, no. 3 Andante), outside (op. 2, no. 6 Allegro) and middle (op. 1, no. 1 Andante) movements. In some sonatas (op. 1, no. 4; op. 2, no. 5), the basso ostinato principle appears to be the predominant compositional idea and is implemented under different tempo and texture conditions.
A variety of basso ostinato uses derives from the character and structure of ostinato themes and the whole ostinato layer of basso continuo, thematic peculiarities of the high voices, structural-semantic interaction of the ostinato and upper voices, and, lastly, inclination to this or that type of composition—closed, precisely structured or free, and contrasting-compound.
At the same time all of these serve as the concentrated expression of the musical thinking of the composer. Thus, a fugue and a basso ostinato are the dominant constants of Buxtehude’s trio sonatas. The presence of a fugue is proof of observance of the major genre standards of sonata da chiesa, whereas the constancy and skilfulness of use of basso ostinato in the greater extent reflect the individual principles typical of Buxtehude’s style, which was based on the North-German tradition.

Other elements in Buxtehude’s trio sonatas
Other movements illustrate an extremely wide spectrum of genre, composition, and textural-timbral combinations. It is difficult and hardly reasonable to generalize the principles of cyclic organization in Buxtehude’s sonatas. The architectonics of any of them do not repeat exactly in any other, and each composition demands analysis of its individual logic. Besides a fugue and ostinato variations, these are small, without reprise, strophic, general and mixed forms. Among genre prototypes and patterns one finds the jig, chaconne, “echo,” chorale prelude, dialogue, toccata, “signal trumpet,” etc. The “formulas of imagination” acquire special significance, these indispensable attributes of improvisational style—passages, recitatives, arpeggio—creating, according to M. Lobanova, the “illusory, imaginary disorder” or the “intense pathetic development.”3 The sonatas combine genres, styles, affects and rhetorical figures.
In this “game of senses” the important role belongs to the thematic ties within the cycle. Strictly speaking, such ties characterize the sonata da chiesa, with its origins in the mono-thematic, multi-part canzona. But that sequence and ingenuity with which the thematic unity is realized in the sonatas of Buxtehude testifies that its role by no means is restricted to ensuring formal compositional integrity but acquires a distinct symbolic sense. Here it is reasonable to appeal to one of the central concepts of the baroque poetics being defined as the “witty conception.” The delicate, veiled differentiation of the themes in different parts of the cycle acts as a manifestation of baroque “wit,” whose purpose seems to display the obvious or hidden similarity, in what seemed to be on the surface, completely unrelated.

Sonata in C Major (op. 1, no. 5)
One of the instances is the Sonata in C Major, op. 1, no. 5. In this four-part cycle the first and the final fugues symmetrically frame the contrasting middle parts—an aria of a solo violin with a bass, and an ensemble jig (Vivace–Violino Solo; Allegro–Largo; Allegro–Adagio; Allegro).
Fugues are connected tonally. The source of their common material is the initial subject. Their motives and submotives, like the elements of a mosaic, are easily combined and rearranged to form new thematic configurations. The initial sections and the end of the final fugue are especially distinguished, serving to express a rhetorical idea of “connection,” the “concatenation” known under the name of symploce, or repetition (see Example 3).
The middle parts are also connected thematically: the motive of the second strophe of the aria with bass is unexpectedly “recalled” in the theme Allegro (Example 4). Finally, all thematic material of the sonata reveals as its basis a uniform intonational pulse, active, exclamatory (exclamatio) fourth (fifth) interval motion, a sort of the “intonational monad” as an indivisible core encompassing the whole world in it.

Sonata in A Minor (op. 1, no. 3)
The other example of thematic ties is found in the Sonata in A minor, op. 1, no. 3. The general idea is disclosed gradually, from movement to movement, revealing a semantic potential concealed within it.
In the melodic lines of the Adagio gradual downward motion (f-e-d-c-b-a-g#-a) covering a diatonic hexachord with adjoining introductory material is “summarized” by compact expressive formula saltus duriusculus (f-g#-a) (see Example 5a). Both elements are marked also in the themes of the Allegro: in the capacity of one of the motives of the fugue subject (hexachord by parallel sixths) and as the hidden voice of counter-subject (f-e-d-c-g#-a) (Example 5b). Further, the diatonic hexachord (including that which has been expressed by parallel sixths) becomes the thematic basis of the Vivace. Supplemented up to heptatonic, it is continuously exhibited in different voices, like a migrating cantus firmus in a chorale prelude (similar to its textual coincidence with the final phrase of Buxtehude’s organ chorale variations Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern, BuxWV 223) (Example 5c). Descending scale-like motion is retained in the finale (Presto), but already against a background, not in the parts of melodic instruments but in the basso continuo. The most characteristic baroque style figure—passus duriusculus, appearing in slow modulation binding sections (Lento, Largo) as ascending and descending pieces of a chromatic scale—is brought to the forefront. Only in the final Lento is the semantic orientation of the general thematic process “explained.” The descending chromatic motion, trebled by imitations that embrace all verticals of the ensemble compass and saturated with rhetorical figures of grief (catabasis, passus duriusculus, catachresis, parrhesia), closes the sonata. (Example 5d)

Conclusion
Dieterich Buxtehude’s trio sonatas are among the high points in the history of the genre. Standing out against the background of the rich tradition of ensemble music at the end of the 17th–beginning of the 18th century, they testify to the exclusive originality of the North German model of the baroque sonata. Created in the period of, probably, the greatest “purity” of the style, the sonatas of Buxtehude embody the baroque world image itself—which has lost its Renaissance integrity, being woven of “incongruous combinations” of contrasts opening into infinity by the kaleidoscopic unsteadiness of existence and at the same time blessed by the supreme harmony of all-reconciling unanimity. ■