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

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.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center

Hard pieces and 

recalcitrant passages

This month I am writing about the phenomenon of pieces being difficult and the related phenomenon of specific passages being hard to learn: either difficult by any standard or surprisingly difficult—for reasons that may seem elusive—for a particular student. This is not a very systematic or methodological discussion: just a few ideas—almost just random thoughts—that I think are interesting or that may help some students or teachers. 

We all believe that some pieces are harder to learn or to perform than other pieces. This—just as a basic fact—is probably as close to uncontroversial as anything gets in the field of music and music teaching in general, or of organ-playing and organ teaching in particular. We don’t necessarily all agree as to which pieces are more difficult and which less so. Most of us, from our own experiences as players and from what we have seen with our own students or other performers, know that different pieces or sorts of pieces are more or less difficult for different players, and at different times in one player’s career.

Repertoire in order of difficulty

When I first acquired copies of one or two volumes of the Peters edition of the Bach organ music—in about 1971, at the age of about fourteen—I noticed that the separately bound Preface included a listing of all of the (non-chorale based) pieces arranged according to difficulty. I was excited about this, since it seemed both useful and authoritative. I allowed it to influence what pieces I chose to work on—though not in a logical or consistent way. Sometimes I would choose a piece because I thought it was easy enough to be within my grasp, sometimes I would spurn and reject pieces that were described as being “easy,” because I thought that working on them would be sort of embarrassing, classifying me as “not very good.” Needless to say, this was all rather silly. 

I did continue for a long time—after my studying had become at least a bit more systematic and effective—to cast sneaky glances at the list out of the corner of my eye. I would pat myself on the back just a little a bit whenever I put in some work on a piece in the top half or so of the difficulty scale. I pretty much stopped doing this when Eugene Roan, with whom I had by then started taking lessons, mentioned casually to me one day that an eminent recitalist he know thought that piece x was much more difficult than piece y—the opposite order from the Peters list. This introduced me to the idea that this whole difficulty thing could be relative, though at that point in my career I couldn’t have said how or why this might be so. 

Reger and Straube

Another way that the concept of difficulty as a kind of independent variable in pieces of music came to my attention when I was first getting interested in organ was through hearing the story of Max Reger and Karl Straube. The idea was that Reger had made his organ pieces more and more difficult in the hope of writing something that Straube, his good friend who was also the leading German organ virtuoso of the time, would be unable to play. It was also said that he never succeeded: that Straube “won.” There are a couple of interesting things about this. One is that, of course, it is trivially easy to write a piece that is unplayable, if that is really all that you want to do. All that you need to do is to write notes that are too far apart in compass to reach.  The music does not have to be particularly complex or intricate or fast. However, a piece that is really unplayable will, in fact, not be played. That is never in any composer’s interest. Not surprisingly, composers—whether they are writing for Karl Straube or not—tend to approach daringly close to that “unplayable” line, and then to decide not to cross it. This is as true of a composer like Beethoven, who stated bluntly that he didn’t care what performers could or couldn’t do, as it is of composers like Bach or Franck, whose keyboard compositions arose out of their own work as performers and improvisers. 

It is also interesting that Straube—as a student, before he had met Reger in person—was in fact drawn to Reger’s music in part because it was first presented to him as being too difficult to play. Straube’s teacher Heinrich Reimann showed him Reger’s then very recently published Suite in E Minor, op. 16, telling him that it was unplayable. This seems to have motivated Straube to learn it, which may or may not have been Reimann’s intention all along. I myself, when I was still more-or-less a student, occasionally started to work on a piece because someone had said to me that I could not learn it. (This was never, in my case, one of my own teachers.) I always learned something valuable from the attempt, although it did not necessarily result in my mastering the piece in question at that time.

Aspects of difficulty 

When we talk about a piece’s being very difficult, we are almost always talking about the learning and reliable playing of the notes: the right notes, in the right order, at a suitable tempo. That is not to say that anyone denies that other aspects of playing a piece can be difficult. In fact, performing even a simple piece in such a way that it is extraordinarily compelling, beautiful, interesting, thought-provoking, disturbing, whatever we want it to be, is probably as hard and (at least) as rarely achieved as playing a difficult piece competently. However, that is indeed a different thing. When students ask whether the Goldberg Variations or the Dupré Prelude and Fugue in G Minor is too hard for them, they are rarely inquiring about whether the teacher thinks that they can project the deepest meaning of the piece effectively. Of course, there is always this relationship between what might for the sake of simplicity be called the two types of difficulty: that the better-learned the notes of a piece can become for a given player—the closer the piece can come to feeling easy once it has been learned—the more of a chance there is that a performance can also be musically effective.

The piece that I happen to have been practicing the most in the week or so before I sat down to write this column is the “In Nomine” by John Bull that is found in volume 1 of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The makers of a list like the Peters Bach organ repertoire list would probably put this piece at the easy end of “moderate” or the somewhat high end of “easy.” It is in three voices throughout, but none of the voices is very busy or intricate. For much of the piece the middle voice lies in such a way that it could be taken by either hand, so there is a fair amount of fingering flexibility. It is (though this is obviously subjective) not a piece that many people would think should go very fast: certainly not fast enough to make playing it into an athletic challenge—which some of Bull’s pieces are. This is a piece that I used to play a lot and, as best I can remember, I did indeed initially choose it because it was not too athletic. Bull’s Walsingham or King’s Hunt would have seemed beyond me many years ago. However, it occurs to me that this piece is a good illustration of the relationship between note-learning difficulty and tempo. There is—literally—a set of tempos at which this short Bull piece would be harder to play than the Reger Opus 16: that is, a mind-bendingly fast tempo for the Bull and a glacial tempo for the Reger. In order to achieve my inverting of the difficulty of these two pieces, the tempos would have to be so extreme that they would both be well outside what anyone would ever do. However, within a more realistic range of performance tempos, the Bull can become a virtuoso challenge of its own, and the Reger can move from the “impossible” all the way down to the “very hard.”

Difficult passages

Many pieces that have a reputation for being very hard are as difficult as their reputations suggest only in spots. For example, the Bach F-major Toccata is considered one of his hardest organ pieces. It earned a very high place on “the list”—maybe at the very top, certainly close. However, long stretches of the piece are really not hard at all. The opening has nothing going on in the pedal, and the two manual lines are somewhat intricate, but not remotely beyond the bounds of the “intermediate” for anyone. Then there is a pedal solo, which is also quite learnable. The following two pages are essentially a recap of this opening: carefully designed by the always pedagogically aware composer to be a bit longer and a bit trickier than the opening itself, but similar in nature. Then, beginning at about the fifth page, the hands and feet start moving together, and things get more complex. Still, however, the notes fall into place quite naturally. Most players I know who have worked on this piece report that this section yields nicely to practicing and is not more difficult than other Bach prelude-type pieces. It is the three brief passages that involve the return of the opening motif of the piece, this time in manuals and pedal together, that seem really hair-raising to many of those who work on the piece. This is not everyone’s experience, but it is a common one. Other very difficult pieces can be analyzed this way as well: perhaps most of them. In the Goldberg Variations, for another example, probably about eighty percent of the writing is no more difficult than the average for The Well-tempered Clavier or Handel harpsichord suites. That is not, by any standards, “easy.” But it is the remaining fifth or so of the work that gives it its reputation as “only for advanced players.”

One source of difficulty in working on pieces of music is unfamiliarity with a particular style or the technical tendencies of a particular type of music. Ralph Kirkpatrick, in his preface to his edition of sixty Scarlatti sonatas, first outlines a set of rigorous ideas about how to work on the sonatas, both as to analysis and as to practicing. Then he says that if a student approaches six sonatas this thoroughly he or she will not have to do the same with the next sonata or later ones. The particular shapes of a given kind of music become ingrained. I myself, as a player who has worked more on Baroque music than on anything else, find it much easier both to sight-read and to learn Baroque pieces—even complex and difficult ones—than music from a later era. To me this suggests patience. If a student is working on his or her first piece from a particular genre or style or time period, then that piece is going to be harder than the next one will be. That should not be surprising.

Practice strategies

If a student is interested in working on a piece that seems too hard, I am extremely committed to letting him or her do so and to making it work. The first step for me is to try to figure out whether the difficulty is found in a few spots or more or less throughout. This affects learning strategy. In the first instance, I will suggest to the student that we break the piece up and completely abandon any thought that it is one unified piece—just for the time being of course, but with a lack of impatience as to how long that time will be. Then the easier—more “normal”—parts can be practiced and learned in a “normal” way, systematically and carefully, along the lines that I have written about before. The extremely hard passages can be treated as intensive exercises: analyzed, taken apart, put back together and practiced to within an inch of their lives. 

A piece that is quite difficult—perhaps too difficult for the student—and of much the same difficulty throughout simply needs to be taken apart and practiced well. The key here is to make sure that the student understands what the process will feel like. Anyone can practice anything effectively if it is kept slow enough. In this context, the meaning of a piece’s being “too hard” is simply that working on it correctly will take a long time. Would the student rather work on this piece for a very long time, or postpone it, work on other pieces in the meantime, and wait to work on the proposed piece later? This is simply a matter of what the student prefers: either approach is fine for helping him or her to become a more accomplished player. 

In fact, it can be perfectly useful and helpful for a student to work on a challenging piece even if he or she never really learns it—assuming that the failure to learn it is of the right sort. If the goal is to perform a piece then, by definition, that piece must be practiced until it is learned and secure and ready to go. However, if the goal is to use the process of working on a piece to become a better player in the long run, then it doesn’t matter whether the time put in practicing that piece is followed by more time with that same piece (eventually leading to its being learned) or by practicing a new piece. The choice to practice a hard piece up to a certain point and then let it go is perfectly acceptable, assuming that the student is happy with it, and understands that it is a process, not a failure. And of course, that same piece will be there for the student to come back to later. In fact, the first round of work on the piece will leave that piece in very good shape to be picked up again later: it will probably even get better during any time that the student takes off from it. It will be sinking into the subconscious mind. The only technical requirement for this approach to be fruitful is that the work done on the piece—or any section of it—be accurate and technically sound, but below tempo. If the piece is put aside in this way, it should be put aside at a slow tempo but otherwise exactly as it should be.

Gavin Black is director of the Princeton Early Keyboard Center. He can be reached by e-mail at [email protected]. A selection of Gavin Black’s organ performances can now be heard on YouTube by searching on his name at the YouTube website.

Joseph E. Robinson received his B.A. from California State University at Long Beach and his M.A. from Occidental College in Los Angeles. He studied piano with Charles Shepherd, and organ with Clarence Mader, Paul Stroud, and Robert Prichard. He studied choral conducting with Frank Pooler and Howard Swan. During 1970–71 he was an organbuilding apprentice with the Schlicker Organ Co. under the direction of Herman Schlicker. He was organist at the University United Methodist Church in Buffalo, New York, and later St. James’ United Methodist Church in Pasadena, California. Now a retired business systems analyst, he is currently organist for the Mission Lake Ward, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. His interest in pipe organs and their music was sparked years ago when, as a sixth grade student, his class was taken on a field trip to a recital on the Mormon Tabernacle Organ. He has been married 35 years to his wife Pat, who has given her support for the large pipe organ in their home. One day during construction Pat said, “You need help, and I have found just the help you need—G. Donald Harrison.” She had found a golden retriever named Harrison on a rescue site. Harrison is now a happy member of the family.

I meet Herman Schlicker  

After completing a master’s degree, I talked over options with my teacher, Robert Prichard. Since I was very interested in all things related to pipe organs, a career in organbuilding looked promising. Mr. Prichard was well acquainted with Herman Schlicker, and broached the subject of my joining his firm as an apprentice. Schlicker was not interested. He said that the best apprentices come right out of high school and he had bad luck with those who had master’s degrees.   

Herr Schlicker flew to Southern California on business, and so it was arranged that while he was here I would be his chauffeur. One stop that I remember was at what is now the Crystal Cathedral. Their first building contained a small Wicks organ, which was to be replaced with a substantial instrument. Schlicker was among the contenders. At another stop, I was disgusted with the way they treated Mr. Schlicker—didn’t they realize they were talking with a great man?

After our final stop, Schlicker said to come on to Buffalo, and I would be their newest apprentice. I drove my red Corvair across the country and rented a room from Mrs. Herbst, who had rented to many a Schlicker apprentice. She asked us to keep our stereo playing of organ music down—it reminded her of her husband’s funeral. 

The factory

The factory is described in sales literature from the late 1960s:

From a modest beginning, the company has expanded to include 65 persons at the Buffalo factory-office, as well as sales and service representatives throughout the United States. The construction of the present modern factory was begun in 1947, and since that time six additions have been made to the building, giving a total working area of over 36,000 square feet, and including a spacious erecting room. 

That there was no master plan for this expansion from the beginning was obvious. For example, there was a large room devoted to lumber, that in most respects functioned well. However, there was no loading dock, or even a door to the outside. When a lumber truck came, Herr Friedrich (foreman) would announce “LUMBER!” and we would all drop what we were doing and rush to the truck to unload the lumber piece by piece and feed them through a window in the lumber room. On a cold winter day, that was a very unpleasant task.

Factory tours

Occasionally music committees or groups of organists would tour the factory. I was among those selected to conduct the tours. At first I would meet visitors at the door and then physically take them through the building, saying this is where we do this, and this is where we do that. Then I witnessed a tour led by Manuel Rosales, who was then at Schlicker Organ Co. He started at the melting pot in the pipe shop, went step by step in the construction of an organ, ending in the erecting room. Even though there was some crisscrossing in that method, it explained the organbuilding process better, and I changed my approach accordingly.  

Organization chart

When Schlicker described the apprentice position to me, he said that I would work in all aspects of organbuilding and eventually be able to do any task. In fact, his factory was full of workers that could do any task. He was proud of that. So, organization was simple: Herman Schlicker, President; Ken List, Vice President; Herr Friedrich, Foreman; organ builders, and apprentice, with a few exceptions such as the accountant. In practice, however, people would tend to gravitate to that which they did best. Take Don Bohall, for example. In many organizations, he would be referred to as Service Manager. He could quickly diagnose and fix problems, clearly the best man to call if an organ under the ten-year warranty experienced an unexpected malfunction. I asked Don how he managed to be exempt from the lumber calls. He told me that after I had been there a few years and made myself valuable in a particular operation I could announce that I was no longer going to do lumber. But I would have to be sure I was valuable enough. Some who tried that too soon were no longer doing lumber or anything else at the firm.  

Apprentice duties

The apprentice program at Schlicker’s was more typical of the German apprentice system than what we are used to in the USA. The view at the Schlicker Organ Company was: we pay you for this time and so you do whatever we ask of you, be it sweeping, cleaning messes, painting walls, or shoveling snow! So this, I thought, is why people who have worked so hard for a master’s degree don’t like it here. I was told a story of one such, who after driving from California worked one day, got in his car and drove back home. One unhappy apprentice had given the place a nickname “Stalag 15-30” [the address was 1530 Military Road]. Stories of this nature were a kind of unofficial initiation exam. 

Information on a need-to-know basis

At graduate school, you are filled with information and encouraged to ask questions and find answers. There were many things I wanted to know. For example, on most three-manual Schlicker organs, the pedal contains a unit 16–8 principal rank, but the 16 and 8-foot stopped flutes are always separate ranks. How come? I learned that awhile before my arrival, some former employees had stolen plans, records, scalings, and materials—everything they needed to make copies of Schlicker organs. So Mr. Schlicker was now cautious in sharing information, and an apprentice is at the bottom of the totem pole in need-to-know. 

I got my lecture in Schlicker organ design in a most unexpected way. One holiday season, there was in the factory a 32′ Bombarde, which was to be placed in an organ previously finished with that stop prepared for. Schlicker had placed a small two-rank unit organ in a Buffalo bank for publicity purposes. Since I could play, I was assigned to play Christmas music on the little organ while the bank was open. One day after the bank closed, I returned to the factory, where I was greeted by Ken List. Ken said, “So how is Merry Christmas on the Gedeckt?” I responded, “Well, it’s OK, but that little organ really lacks a proper foundation. Too bad we could not have hooked up that 32′ Bombarde with it.”  

Schlicker overheard the conversation, and while I thought anyone would recognize that I was being outlandishly facetious, Schlicker thought I was serious that the third rank in an organ should be a 32′ Bombarde. “You are there representing the Schlicker Organ Company,” he said. “You know nothing. A lot has to happen in an organ before you include a 32′ Bombarde.” So I heard all about small to medium to large organs in a very informative lecture, though I could have done without the frequent “You know nothing” comments.  

A wiring error

An electro-pneumatic organ was being set up for testing. There was a testing wiring harness used for such purposes. I said, “I have never done this before; there are surely a lot of wires here.” I was told, “There is nothing to it, just start here at the end, and take each wire in sequence.” So I did, but it was the wrong end. Final result was that low C sounded from the highest note on the keyboard and vice versa. I started to play a hymn. “What on earth are you doing?” “I thought I might never again have the opportunity to hear music inverted and wanted to see what it sounds like.” “You idiot, why don’t you just broadcast to the world what a fool you are!” So I stopped abruptly. Fortunately this was the testing wiring harness and not the organ’s permanent wiring.

A bright and dim bulb

Sometimes my education was of use. When something unusual came along, such as “What the heck is an 8/9 None?,” I would know the answer. There was a fine older gentleman, whose name I unfortunately no longer remember, who was in charge of Schlicker consoles. He would review with me console layouts, controls, order of stops, etc. He said, “You know much more than those guys. You should be recognized for your knowledge and taken off the lumber run.” Obviously I liked him. On the other hand, as the wiring example shows, in construction matters I was a rookie. One day I was assigned to a task and heard rumblings, “I don’t know why they assigned HIM this task. HE doesn’t even know how to use a HAM-MER.” The speaker usually got this task. Since in this case it was an overtime task, I was robbing him of time-and-a-half pay. Welcome to the world of office politics. I did not like it, and was a rookie there as well. Fortunately for future employment I learned 1) never be cruel to someone and 2) never be the company scapegoat. 

Organ pipes

Most flue pipes were manufactured in the pipe shop. Reed pipes built to Schlicker specifications were imported from Europe. For flue pipes it was considered that for the vast majority of cases, such things as tuning scrolls, pipe slotting, and tuning collars were detrimental. Take tuning collars, for example. A tuning collar means that at the top of the pipe there is a sudden increase in scale. On bass pipes that were nearly cut to length, the effect is minimal. But on treble pipes, the distortion of pipe shape is considerable. Thus Schlicker organs had pipes cut to length and were cone tuned. This practice was one reason why Schlicker mixtures had outstanding cohesion with the principal chorus.  

The Schlicker sound

Open-toe voicing, low wind pressure, low cutups, etc. are only part of the story. It is well known that some Aeolian-Skinner contracts, such as the Mormon Tabernacle and Grace Cathedral, specified that G. Donald Harrison do the final voicing. It is the artist who does the finishing that gives an organ its distinctive sound; thus organs of the same manufacturer may sound different depending upon who does the finishing. At the Schlicker Company, we had two superb voicers who finished at least the more important instruments. Wally Guzowski voiced with a bold, fresh, exciting sound. I decided that someday I would like him to voice my residence organ when I could afford such. Louis Rothenberger Jr. had a more elegant, refined sound. [We always specified the Jr. because LR senior had also been a voicer.] 

They were aware that their styles were different, and Wally told me that they worked together to try and make a uniform result. There should be a specific sound quality associated with the brand. These men produced some instruments of distinction. As voicers, they would physically adjust pipes. As finishers in the final location, they would sit at the console, playing through a rank of pipes, pick a note and shout a command to someone like me in the pipes: “Lower the languid,” “Pull the upper lip forward,” “Narrow the windway,” “Increase the cutup,” and so forth.

Deterioration of the Schlicker sound 

As years have passed, I have noticed that some of my favorite instruments no longer have the magic they possessed when they were new. More is involved than just my ears getting older; recordings of the original instruments captured the magic. Here is what I think may have happened. Schlicker instruments were cone tuned and were very stable in tuning within themselves, but the whole instrument goes flat in winter and sharp in summer.

Take a fictitious organ service man Sam Cifodelance, for example. Sam gets a customer who has a Schlicker organ. He orders some tuning cones from a supply house. In winter, when the organ goes flat, he pounds the pipes with the pointed end of the tuning cones to bring the pitch up to A440. In summer, he pounds the pipes with the other end to bring the pipes down to A440. Over time this attention alters pipe mouth dimensions slightly, and what was an outstanding sound becomes an ordinary sound. 

This theory is an educated guess, but I do know that who does the servicing makes a huge difference, is a concern of organbuilders, and improper servicing deteriorates an organ’s sound. It saddens me that some of my favorite instruments have deteriorated. 

Schlicker’s bias

Bad for Aeolian-Skinner, but providential for Herman Schlicker was the rise in popularity of the Orgelbewegung. With his strong German accent and experience in German organbuilding, he was in an ideal place to be the foremost American builder in that style. I discussed with Schlicker a trip to Europe I was going to take. We went through the German instruments I was going to see. “Yah, you must see that,” he would say. For Holland, “There are some good things there.” For France, “A waste of time.”  

The good consultants

One of the first things you do as an apprentice is to rack pipes on a windchest. Here were some pipes that looked like a double row of little milk cans with their lids soldered on top. This experimental rank had been specified by Paul Manz. Louie Rothenberger Jr. was having a very difficult time getting the pipes to speak at all. I made the comment, “I don’t see why we need organ consultants at all. A church should just choose a builder and let their expertise do the job.” Louie responded, “You are new here. You will eventually have the opportunity to visit many organs. When you do, compare those that were built under consultants such as Paul Manz, your teacher Clarence Mader, Paul Bunjes, E. Power Biggs and so forth, with those that had no consultant. I think you will find that our best organs had consultants such as these.” He was right!

When I was at Occidental College, I played among other things French Romantic organ music that I liked. I commented to my teacher Clarence Mader how well the Schlicker played that music. He replied, “Yes, you need French reeds to play that music and I requested that Schlicker include them in the Swell One division.” I bring this up because on his own, Herman Schlicker would not have given the Swell One division a French flavor. Somehow they managed to do that and yet have it integrate beautifully with the rest of the instrument, resulting in far greater versatility. The very best instruments somehow achieved a result of being more than the sum of their parts, a joy to play and to hear. 

The not-so-good consultants

These are the ones who think they know more about organbuilding than the organbuilder, specifying scales, wind pressures, mouth widths, voicing techniques and so forth. One such organ had so many conditions that the final result did not have the distinctive Schlicker sound. Herman Schlicker summed it up thus: “It might as well have been built by ———.” [I don’t know if ——— would want to claim it either.]

In finishing an organ, Wally Guzowski explained to me, “You have to be very diplomatic with the organists. When they tell you what they want, smile and nod your head like you agree with them.  When they are gone, disregard everything they said. Organists know nothing about organ finishing.” A quite common occurrence in finishing an organ would be the arrival of the organist with some last requests for what was going to be his instrument. At that time, it is too late. A successful finishing process brings out the maximum beauty a pipe was designed to give. An organist’s request to now make a German Principal more like a French Montre, for example, robs the instrument of its potential. That decision should have been made long before.¹

Insubordination

I was given two rules, which probably came about due to prior difficulties with employees who were also organists: 1) When you are on an assignment do not play the organ, even during a break or after you are done. Customers are charged by the hour and we don’t want them to think they are paying for you to play the organ. 2) Because you may be called at any time to travel, do not accept a church organist position. It is not fair to the company, the church, or yourself. Rule 1 was difficult to manage; we worked on some beautiful instruments. But I did manage this rule in spite of working on some instruments I longed to play. 

 After arriving in Buffalo, each Sunday I visited various churches to see and hear organs and get a feeling of that particular church. One Sunday, I visited the University United Methodist Church. While certainly not the finest organ in town, the people were very friendly and when they discovered that I was from California and knew no one in town, they invited me to meals and made me feel at home and said, “You have friends here.” Shortly thereafter their organist moved away. “Do you play, Joe? Would you mind substituting for a while till we find a permanent organist?” A few Sundays later, “We want you to be our organist.” “Impossible—I can be called out of town at any time without notice.” “We can have someone fill in on the piano when that happens. Please be our organist.” It seemed like this would work; they knew I would leave without notice when Schlicker called. I would fulfill my obligation to him, and what he did not know would not hurt anyone. This happy arrangement continued for many months. 

I have a couple theories of how Ken List found out about this arrangement. “Joe, you have to tell Schlicker.” I dreaded that conversation, but I was caught, so I set up a time to meet with him. Schlicker told me he understood after all the time I had put into learning to play the organ that I would not want to just let the talent die. So he instructed me to resign and he would arrange for me to have practice time at his church, which had a very nice organ. As a naive young person, I thought as long as I can do my job, he has no business telling me what I can and can’t do on my own time. And there were many around me who encouraged that thinking. Perhaps more than the mundane tasks, this kind of thing is the reason Schlicker had trouble with master’s degree organists. In subsequent employment ‘my own time’ would be redefined by being on call 24/7 with aids such as beepers and later, cell phones. One boss would even follow me into a restroom stall. So now I see that Schlicker was at least trying to meet me half way. 

Money

Perhaps because organs are very expensive instruments, money is a problem in organbuilding. Herman Schlicker was a master of finance. We did not look forward to his daily rounds at the factory. “Robinson, why don’t you gold-plate it while you are at it?” That comment translates to the work is very good, but your progress is too slow and we can’t afford it. So I would speed up. Then, “Robinson, what is this? It will never do! The Schlicker organ is a quality instrument.” While making us employees stressed out during his rounds, he did achieve the right balance, getting us to do good work with enough production speed to be cost effective and keep the firm in business. After he died, that balance was lost and the firm eventually went bankrupt, as have far too many organbuilding firms.²

As an apprentice I made very little. One day I got an unexpected raise. Congress had just passed an increase in the minimum wage, and the salary I was making was below the new minimum. Schlicker added an extra five cents an hour because he did not want to be seen as paying minimum wage. As an apprentice, I rented a room. Most full-fledged organbuilders lived in apartments. I wanted to live in a house in the suburbs and I did not see that happening at any time in the future if I stayed on my current path. Many things I loved about organbuilding—your part in making a thing of beauty. But there were other important things to me that were either denied or out of reach. So my house in the suburbs was financed by leaving organbuilding and becoming a business systems analyst. And I am quite happy with my self-built 22-rank residence organ. Unfortunately, lack of space in my residence made it impossible for the third rank to be a 32′ Bombarde.

The author wishes to thank Justin Matters for permission to use the photographs of Schlicker organs.

Recent recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations

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

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

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

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

Diego Ares

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

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

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

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

Wolfgang Rübsam

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

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

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

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

Helmut Walcha

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oswald G. Ragatz served as professor of organ and chairman of the organ department at the School of Music at Indiana University from 1942–1983. Sadly, Mrs. Ragatz passed away after a long illness in 1998. When the Positive division was added to the organ at First Christian Church, where Mary so lovingly played for so many years, the Reuter organ was dedicated in her memory. Dr. Ragatz can be reached by contacting him at Meadowood Retirement Center in Bloomington, Indiana. David K. Lamb is currently the organist/choir director at First United Methodist Church in Columbus, Indiana. Graduating from IU in 1983, the year Ragatz retired, he completed the Doctor of Music degree at Indiana University in 2000. Dr. Lamb was recently appointed the District Convener for the State of Indiana by the American Guild of Organists.

Introduction by David K. Lamb

For more than 40 years, Oswald Gleason Ragatz served as chairman of the Organ Department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University. On October 30, 2007, “Ozzie” celebrated his 90th birthday. Witnessing many changes through those years at Indiana University, Dr. Ragatz has also seen many changes in the organ world and in church music practices in the years since his retirement from IU in 1983.

I recently enjoyed the chance to visit with Dr. Ragatz in his home at Meadowood in Bloomington. Full of stories and anecdotes, as always, he was ready to recount his years at IU in full detail. What a joy it was listening to those reflections as Dr. Ragatz revisited the events in his early life that led him to his 40-year teaching position at Indiana University. 

“Guardian Angel” is a wonderful exposé by Dr. Ragatz, detailing the sequence of events that made up the path leading him to Indiana University in 1942. In the words of Oswald Ragatz, please prepare to travel with him on this journey to Indiana University.

•

During my 25-year employment as organist-choirmaster in Presbyterian churches, I never heard the term predestination mentioned from the pulpit. But I understand that belief in predestination is one of the tenets of the Presbyterian faith. My Unitarian and agnostic friends shake their heads in patronizing dismay, when, instead of attributing some event to predestination or to sheer luck, I refer to my “Guardian Angel.” Probably influenced by all those charming angels in Renaissance paintings and those lovely little winged cherubs in the rococo churches in Europe, I personally would rather attribute the chain of events that greatly determined my life to an angel than to luck or to predestination. Luck never did me any good in those very brief encounters with the slots in the casinos in Las Vegas, and of course no serious angel would look after anyone foolish enough to wager hard-earned cash on those automated bandits. And I’m not a Presbyterian. But let me recount those events that directed my life, and the reader or listener can decide, Guardian Angel, Lady Luck, predestination, or whatever.

I guess I must start way back in the midst of the Great Depression and the Democratic landslide of 1932 that brought Franklin Roosevelt into the presidency, and that cleaned out all of the Republican county office holders in Logan County, Colorado, including my dad. The ensuing years found the Ragatz family trying to make a meager living from a small, 40-acre farm at the edge of my hometown, Sterling, Colorado. Farm labor, dust storms, locust plagues, and fundamentalist, straight-laced parents contributed nothing to the wished-for joie de vivre of high school student Oswald Ragatz. It must have been about then that Guardian Angel was assigned to look out for this puny kid, whose interests were music and architecture, thus contributing to the general scorn of his macho classmates.

High school days

The angel first appeared in the guise of a high school math teacher, Miss Smith. It was she who set me on the path that would lead to my escape from the dead-end existence of life on the dreary eastern plains of Colorado. It was Miss Smith who asked me to stay after algebra class so that she could talk to me, as she had some very exciting information to impart. My grade average was one-half point above that of one Verda Guenzi, and Verda and I had the highest grade average of our class. I probably should at this point give credit to the newly hired empathetic gym teacher, who had taken me in hand and had introduced me to gymnastics. This had had a marvelous effect on me. I was no longer the class wimp with C and D grades in gym. I now got an A in gym, which got me that one-half grade point above Verda Guenzi. (Was possibly Mr. Durfee the gym instructor an assistant Guardian Angel? Whatever.)

At any rate, Miss Smith pointed out that the University of Denver gave a four-year, full-tuition scholarship to the graduating senior valedictorian in the six largest high schools in the state. If I maintained a straight A average for the remaining years in Sterling High School, I would be able to go to college at the prestigious university in Denver, a city where there could also be numerous musical opportunities. That put on hold my interest in architecture; the nearest school offering architecture was Kansas U., which of course was out of the question. And anyway, no one was employing architects during the Depression.

My parents were elated by this news, and my mother, who was your basic taskmistress, went into a full cry. For the next two and half years, I became no longer the class wimp but now the class grind, the resident ant being held in some awe by the grasshoppers, my classmates. Verda Guenzi didn’t have a chance, poor girl.

Off to the University of Denver

Now things were getting under way in this chain of events. My dad’s brother lived in Denver and was married to a professional musician, a singer of some note in the city. They suggested that I live with them while attending the University of Denver. Their four sons were grown and out of college. I could pay for my room by accompanying students in my aunt’s studio and eventually accompanying her on singing engagements. There would be other duties—in-house chore boy, chauffeur for Aunt Ruth on occasions, etc.

Sterling, a town of less than 8,000, had a remarkable music program in the schools; the high school band and orchestra perennially won first place in the state competitions. I had begun playing oboe when just out of the sixth grade, and in six years had become quite proficient. In 1938 a symphony orchestra was formed in Sterling to accommodate the sizable number of graduates of the school’s music program who still lived in town and who wanted an outlet for their talent. Though still in high school, I was playing oboe in this symphony that had been organized during my senior year. 

Guest conductors were brought in for the three concerts that we played. The most important of these guests was Horace Tureman, director of the Denver Symphony. I don’t remember what we played, but there must have been an important oboe part. At any rate, when I enrolled in music theory the first semester at the university, who should be the teacher but Horace Tureman! And wonder of wonders, he recognized me. After class, he asked to talk to me, saying that he remembered me from the orchestra concert he had conducted in Sterling, and would I like to fill the opening in the Denver Civic Symphony for the second chair oboe? The pay was not great, but it enabled me to pay my uncle for my board. Did my Guardian Angel arrange for all this? But I continue.

I had played piano since I was six years old, my mother being a piano teacher. And I had my first organ lessons the summer after the eighth grade, and became the organist at the Methodist church that fall. During my last year in high school, my parents managed to scrape up enough cash to enable me to drive the 140 miles up to Denver once a month for oboe lessons and organ lessons with the organist-choirmaster of St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral. Now, living in Denver, I hoped to be able to continue organ lessons, although payment for same would be a problem. But not to worry, said my teacher. There was an opening for an organist at Broadway Baptist Church. He told me to try out for the job; I did and got the job. Those four years of playing for First Methodist in Sterling for little more than a Christmas remuneration had prepared me for the paying job in Denver.

So now I had enough monthly income to pay for organ lessons, textbooks, and music. I had been pretty burned out by the tension of making straight A’s during high school, so now I had decided to slack off a bit in college. However, shortly after the first semester had begun, I received a nice letter from the University Chancellor congratulating me on having won the scholarship and indicating that academic excellence would be expected of me. Furthermore, he indicated that since scholarship students were expected to give some services to the university, and in view of my experience as an organist, I would be expected to play the organ for university functions as needed—before lecture in the chapel, for example. 

This was OK by me. It gave me unlimited access to the chapel organ for practice and resulted in my being asked by the Dean of Women to furnish background music on the Hammond electric organ in the posh Renaissance room in the library where teas were the style in those days. For each of these events I was paid $3 and engendered a high profile among the female elite of the student body who were wanting to go to the teas—the girls of the Pan Hellenic Society, the Associated Women’s Students, etc.

So my fingers (on the ivories) were doing the walking—well, the earning, and my parents did not have to fork over that first dollar for my undergraduate training, just an occasional dressed chicken sent by my mother to Aunt Ruth, but that was it. I felt that I was independent, I was living in a sophisticated environment at my uncle’s, and I no longer felt inhibited by my strict parents’ restrictions—and I had a ball! I was pretty naïve and thoughtless though; things had worked out so well for me, so why worry about the future? Incidentally, I did graduate eighth from the top in my class, due to the chancellor’s veiled admonitions four years earlier. But I must continue.

Clarence who?

I am not quite finished with undergraduate years. The next vignette may seem inconsequential, but keep in mind, it turned out to be very significant. The setting: a picnic in the mountains. Who was there? I don’t remember, just a bunch of college students. What? I was sitting on a big rock eating a hot dog when a blonde girl I didn’t know joined me and initiated conversation. She was quite hep, and shortly had me telling her about my interest in organ playing. At that point, she became very excited and said that I must meet her uncle from New York, Clarence Dickinson, who would be in Denver in a couple of weeks. Her enthusiasm caused me to think that Uncle must be a man of some importance. And indeed the name was familiar to me: Dickinson was the author of the organ method text given to me by my cousin, my first organ teacher, that summer after my eighth grade. 

I was only mildly impressed, however, but I did mention this information to my organ teacher at my next lesson. Well, his reaction let me know that Clarence Dickinson was indeed a person of importance, being the head of the School of Sacred Music at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. So, a week later, I was playing two of my biggest pieces at St. John’s Cathedral for Dr. Dickinson, my teacher having somehow made contact with him in Denver. Tall, dignified, with white hair and mustache, Dr. Dickinson was cordial, and, I thought, politely complimentary. But I was still only mildly interested; I was probably preoccupied thinking about the impending fall Pan Hellenic formal. By the way, I never encountered the blonde niece on campus again. Was she my Guardian Angel in disguise? If so, she must have been pretty bored by my lackadaisical lack of enthusiasm. But guardian angels must be patient, and fortunately Guardian Angel didn’t forsake me, as will soon become evident. She just became a bit more devious. So I continue.

Aunt Ruth: gateway to Eastman

I have mentioned my Aunt Ruth previously. There is no doubt that she was my mentor if indeed not my Guardian Angel. She introduced me to the facets of the professional musical world, and she and Uncle Arthur took considerable pains to civilize their shy and unhep nephew from Sterling. By my senior year, Aunt Ruth had sensed my lack of a clear picture of what I was going to do the next year after graduation. My Bachelor’s degree in Social Sciences had presumably prepared me for getting a job in some small-town high school teaching history or social studies. But it was obvious that my interest and talents lay elsewhere—in music, of course. 

Aunt Ruth had a former voice student who had gone to the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, and had high praise for the school. It sort of became understood during my senior year that I should go to graduate school the year after graduation from Denver. So I applied to Eastman and was accepted. However, I don’t remember now that I was particularly concerned about the financial requirements this expensive school would entail. I guess that I naïvely assumed that it would work out some way. It always had, hadn’t it? Of course, if there were sounds of fluttering angel wings, I didn’t notice.

I taught some organ students during the summer and played oboe in the Sterling summer band. So I had a little money in my pocket when I started out for New York with my two friends in the model A Ford. We traveled economy class, camping out, cooking our own food, and cheating on entrance fees at places like Mount Vernon. After two weeks of travel and visiting the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, we arrived in Rochester. The semester had not yet started, but I went into the Eastman office to see what a student did about housing. There was no men’s dormitory, but I was given a sizeable list of rooming houses near the school that catered to Eastman students. The person I talked to about this looked at a register of entering students (probably to see if I were indeed a legitimate entrant), and seeing that I was to be an organ student she immediately told me that an organ job was open and would I like to try out for it? 

And OK, yes, a lady had called for an organ student to come to her home and play her pipe organ during tea that she was hosting. It was intimidating that in view of the address this would undoubtedly be in one of the mansions out on East Avenue where the old elite of Rochester held forth. Well, I had brought with me my “tea time” music, thanks to those $3 gigs I’d played for at the University of Denver—I’d “been there, done that.” This gig was indeed in a mansion on East Avenue and was on an Aeolian pipe organ, the instrument of choice in those days for those who could afford such a pipe organ in their home. And needless to say, the pay was considerably more than $3. And, when I had my audition at Emanuel Lutheran Church, I got that job. So I had money to pay for my room and board—board by eating on $1 a day at a cafeteria across the street from the school.

Did Guardian Angel arrange it that I got to Eastman several days before the other students arrived, so I had no competition for these jobs and the opportunities to make some money?

By this time things had improved for my parents. Sterling was having a modest oil boom, and new houses were being built. Three blocks of our farm abutted on a subdivision, and it became possible to sell some of our property for city lots. I felt able to ask for tuition money, since I’d cost my parents nothing for my undergraduate education.

Life at Eastman

I found life at Eastman a far cry from my Denver experience. As an undergraduate in Denver, I had played an organ concerto with the Denver Junior Symphony, the Grieg piano concerto with the University Orchestra, and the organ part to the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony with the Denver Civic Symphony. Big deals!!! Big toad in what I now found out had been a fairly little puddle. My uncle, who was somewhat of a VIP in some circles in the city, reported stiffly one evening at dinner that when he had that day been introduced to someone, he was asked, “By any chance are you related to Oswald Ragatz that young organist?” May I say, that that “made my day.” Country nephew, indeed!

But things now were different in Rochester. I was just a new student in one of the top professional music schools in the country. And believe me, there is no place more competitive than a big music school. Nearly all of my fellow graduate students had undergraduate degrees in music, many from Eastman itself. During my time at Eastman I learned discipline, humility, and respect for what the music profession really was like.

My Guardian Angel was no doubt cheering a bit seeing her/his protégé getting his comeuppance. But I was not being crossed off the list that year. Oh no! So I must continue this saga.

About the Lutheran church: it had an organ the likes of which I had not encountered. At that point, the organ world in the United States was just beginning to become aware of a renaissance in organ tonal design that had begun in the middle of the 20th century. The new instruments that were being built by many European builders and by a few avant garde builders in the United States were referred to as Baroque organs because the builders were attempting to design their organs on the tonal principles of the great old European organs of the 17th and 18th centuries. The organ at my church was a newly built instrument by the Walter Holtkamp Company, one of the first of these avant garde American builders. After a year with this organ at Emanuel Lutheran, I understood how to use it. This experience became very valuable for me, as will be noted later on.

The choir director at church was a talented young man who was the choral person in one of the big Rochester high schools, and his church choir was made up almost entirely of high-school age singers. I was getting some very good experience in choral techniques by observing how Ernie Ahern worked with the choir. I had had no training in choral work up to this point. The second year in Rochester, I actually did some private coaching with Mr. Ahern, and what I learned became the basis of my career as choirmaster through all my life.

One other facet of the Rochester experience must now be mentioned to make clear how the chain of events developed. If one link in the chain had not been there, there would have been no chain. When I obtained the list of rooming houses suitable for an Eastman student, my choice was purely arbitrary (or was Guardian Angel getting into the act again?). The first place I investigated was a big, old, three-story Victorian home, housing a dozen or so men, half of whom were students, the others single professional men. The maiden lady that ran the establishment had a nice vacant room (due, I presume, to the fact that I had gotten there before other students had arrived in the city). It was a congenial bunch of fellows, who all seemed to be on a tight budget, so we frequently ate supper en masse (I could hardly honor the meal as dinner) at the aforementioned cafeteria. 

Wilson College

One of the students, a fine violinist, and I became very good friends. It turned out that John’s father was the head of the music department of Wilson College, an undergraduate woman’s college in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. When John came back from Christmas holidays, he told me that the organ teacher at Wilson College was going on sabbatical the second semester the next year, and his father, Prof. Golz, thought I might want the job as substitute for a semester. Of course I was most interested, and as a matter of fact I went down to Chambersburg with John during spring break to be interviewed. I played for Prof. Golz, and he seemed pleased and offered me the job. A real teaching job with a salary—$850 for the semester as I remember it! But that was 1940, and remember, I was eating on a dollar a day, so that seemed like a gold mine. I was just beginning to cope with the competitive stress of Eastman and the demanding teaching of Harold Gleason, my organ professor, so I was very glad to stay on at Eastman for the summer and fall semesters, which enabled me to get a second major, namely in music theory. Then in January of 1941, I arrived at Wilson College, with its faculty comprising chiefly elderly ladies. Now that was an interesting experience for a 23-year-old kid hardly dry behind the ears. It could furnish material for another different document, but that would have no relevance in this tale, except for two non-Wilson people with whom I made friends.

There was a young lawyer in Chambersburg who was very interested in music, and since there were not many opportunities for social contacts with people in their twenties, he immediately contacted me, and we became lifelong friends. He lived with his mother in Chambersburg, and they were frequently visited by his sister Selma, a music teacher in Baltimore and a graduate of N.Y.U. Selma was about my age, and we became good friends also—we dated in fact.

The semester at Wilson College was all too short, and I was having to face a very uncertain future. World War II was in full cry, and I had registered for the draft while in Rochester. So that dark cloud was hovering over my head. But I had had no word from Uncle Sam, so in the meantime I had to hunt for a job. I registered membership with a teacher’s placement agency in Chicago—Clark Brewer. And in May I went to New York to interview with a couple of agencies there. But they wouldn’t even take my registration. Colleges were retrenching because of the war and were hiring no new faculty. 

That was a very low moment in my life. For the first time I was faced with having no idea what to do next. I was suddenly out in the big world. I started walking aimlessly up town on Fifth Avenue, my mind swirling. I may even have contemplated how near the Hudson River was and how long would it take one to drown oneself. But maybe I wasn’t that far down or that stupid. At any rate, by the time I’d walked from the ’40s where the agencies’ offices were and reached 59th Street and the beginning of Central Park, my befuddled mind began to remember that Selma, who of course had lived in New York City while attending N.Y.U., had at some point asked me why didn’t I look into Union Theological Seminary. That had seemed like a dumb statement. A seminary? I didn’t want to be a preacher! Far from it!

Oh, that Clarence

But now my tiny memory began to function, and by the time I got up to the Metropolitan Museum, I thought of the blonde at that picnic in the mountains years ago, and her uncle, Clarence Dickinson, who was the head of the School of Sacred Music at—yes—Union Seminary in New York City. With a quick visit to a phone booth, where wonder of wonders there was a phone directory, I determined that Union Seminary was at 120th Street and Broadway. The next 50 or so blocks were covered with considerable resolution, and crossing over west to Broadway, past the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and Columbia University, I found the Gothic towers of Union Seminary and its quadrangle, which occupied two city blocks. 

Hot, tired, still dispirited and thinking that this was totally mad, I entered the main entrance and located the offices of the Music School. When I made it known to the secretary that I might be interested in becoming a student there, things began to move very rapidly. I was ushered into Dr. Dickinson’s office, where I was warmly greeted by Dr. Dickinson and then was introduced to Mrs. Dickinson, who, it developed, actually seemed to manage the business end of the school. The introductions were barely over when Dr. Dickinson said he remembered my playing for him in Denver, and that I had played very well. Where had I been since then? Eastman? Teaching at Wilson College? Interesting. Well, of course they would be delighted to accept me as a student working on the two-year curriculum leading to the Master of Sacred Music degree.

I had no money? No problem! The dormitory had two-room suites for students at $10 a month, and I could work a shift in the refectory for all my meals. And all of their students were placed in churches in Manhattan and in communities around New York City—on Long Island, in Westchester County, in Connecticut or over in New Jersey. Auditions for a job would be set up for me during the next month.

I could hardly believe all this. An hour earlier I was plodding the streets of New York wondering if I should be heading for the Hudson River. And had I listened, I might have heard Guardian Angel wildly flapping wings and snarling, “Oh ye of little faith, you silly twit. Why do you think I had that blonde girl join you on that rock that afternoon in the Rocky Mountains? And all of that other stuff we went through to get you this far!” Of course I wasn’t listening, but I do hope that I had the good grace to think that too many good coincidences were beginning to occur. My parents once had told me that the German name Oswald meant “Chosen of God.” What’s in a name? Maybe I should have paused to think. But of course, pausing and thinking were two things I’d not yet learned to do.

So I was set for two more years, Uncle Sam willing. I went back to Rochester for the summer to finish my master’s thesis. I had enough money saved up from that great salary at Wilson College to pay for a room at the Y, eat at the cheap cafeteria, and pay train fare to New York City twice for auditions.

The second audition was at Hitchcock Memorial Presbyterian Church in Scarsdale, a posh suburb in Westchester County. As it turned out, this was one of the prime jobs the Union students had. I would be replacing Robert Baker, a doctoral candidate at Union, who had just been hired at First Presbyterian in Brooklyn, a real, full-time professional position. I felt the audition went well, but nothing definite was said at the conclusion of my playing and answering questions. I would have a junior choir, a choir of twelve high school girls, and a professional quartet—VERY professional. The soprano had just sung a solo recital at Town Hall and the contralto was singing at the Metropolitan Opera a couple of years later, and several years later I read a rave review of her Carmen sung in Vienna. 

This would not be the first time I was faced with a task for which I was not really prepared. But I will say, without professing any modesty, that I never ducked. I learned how to conduct from the console by doing it—not that that quartet needed as much conducting as I thought I should be doing. At the end of the interview the chairwoman, an elegant middle-aged lady, said she would like to take me to dinner at the Scarsdale Country Club. That didn’t scare me: my aunt and uncle had seen to it that I knew how to behave at dinner, hold the chair for the lady, use the flatware from the outside in, etc. I seemed to pass muster with my hostess, since she informed me at the conclusion of the evening that I was hired. Eureka! Not only was the salary quite sufficient to pay for the organ lessons (which were outrageously high even for those times), tuition, and incidental living expenses, but even for a concert and opera now and then and a few heady evenings taking a date dancing to big name bands on the Astor roof.

Life in New York City

Guardian Angel now left me for a time as I devoured the life in New York. Our church jobs only required our presence at Sunday morning services, so a number of very compatible friends from Union would rush back to Manhattan by 3 o’clock, meeting at one of the big churches that had afternoon vesper services, oratorios, etc. A typical Sunday afternoon would be St. Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue at 3, where the 60-voice choir sang an oratorio every Sunday with a stunning organist on an enormous triple organ—chancel, rear gallery, and dome, playable from a single console in the chancel. Then over to St. Thomas on Fifth Avenue to hear a fine boy’s choir sing the 5 o’clock vesper Evensong. Then after a quick snack at our favorite bar, Tops, it was to St. Mary the Virgin Church on 46th Street, where the young avant garde organist, Ernest White, presided over a high-church late Evensong service. When I heard Mr. White play, I knew that I would have to study with him someday—which I did one summer after I had been at I.U. for a couple of years. These experiences taught me more than all the courses at the School of Sacred Music about what music could be in an enlightened church—with money. I HAD A BALL, needless to say.

It was the summer after the first year in New York, and I had had a very lucrative June playing for eight or more fashionable Scarsdale weddings. I was set indefinitely at the Scarsdale church and at Union, and after the M.S.M. degree I could continue working on a doctoral degree at Union, as had my friend, Robert Baker. I had dreams of eventually also moving on to some big Manhattan church. But this had to wait for a few decades for one of my students, who now is at the First Presbyterian Church in New York and is a big name there. Guardian Angel had other plans.

Hoosier holiday

Mail time was always a time of anxiety. Several of my friends had been drafted, but there was no message from the government for me. BUT, there was a letter from Clark Brewer Teachers’ Agency in Chicago telling me that there was an opening for an organ teacher at Indiana University. INDIANA? That was just a state to quickly get through when one was en route from Colorado to New York (with the exception of that adventure at Spring Mill Park in 1939). But I could get my expenses paid to Bloomington, and—always on the lookout for a deal—I figured I’d go to Indiana and then on to Colorado to visit my parents. I hadn’t been home for two years. I would go by train and stop off in Rochester to take my orals on my master’s thesis. Sneaky. Smart. I wasn’t even remotely interested in a job in Indiana.

So that is what I did, and after a night sitting up on a train from Rochester to Indianapolis, and then a bus to this village in the wilderness, I was even less inclined to take it seriously. After a night in a hot room in the Graham Hotel, I wandered out to the campus, past yellow clay around the old business school and the auditorium, both of which had just been completed. With the help of a kind lady who thought I was a new student (my ears were slow to dry), I found the new music building. First I was interviewed by Dean Sanders, a smooth, formidable, sophisticated young man, and then by the chairman of the theory department. Then I was taken up to a small practice room where the only organ on the campus existed. And guess what? The instrument was a Holtkamp almost identical to the one I’d had in Emanuel Lutheran in Rochester. And of course I knew how to handle it. (Did Guardian Angel snicker smugly?) 

So I played a couple of big pieces, and because I didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the job, I was cool, probably to the point of being arrogant. Consequently, I greatly impressed the interviewers. It was explained to me that there was one organ major who would be a senior. Her organ teacher, who was also a pianist and taught theory, had been drafted. The organ “department” had been set up two years before when one Mary Christena had come over from the main campus wanting to major in organ. An organ curriculum was hastily fabricated, the Holtkamp was promptly purchased, and now they needed a regular organ teacher to get Miss Christena through her senior recital. 

I would teach any other organ students that might show up when it was learned that there was an organ teacher (there were nine of them), I would teach two sections of freshman music theory (after observing the chairman of the department teach another section of the same class each day), a music appreciation class for the general student body (there were about 70 enrolled, it turned out), and I would conduct the Choral Union, the only choral group on campus. This would result in my conducting in the auditorium a performance of Messiah, with orchestra, just before Christmas. I had never conducted an orchestra, to say nothing of an orchestra with a big chorus of 90 or so singers. But as I said earlier, I was not one to duck. I was new at academia and didn’t know that this teaching load was brutal and now would be considered illegal. It was a job, and I intended to be a success at any cost.

But I wasn’t offered the job on the spot, which was of no concern to me. I wanted to go back to New York. As a matter of fact, I called my parents and suggested that they come east instead of my going on to Colorado. They would meet me in Chambersburg, where I would go to visit Rudy and Selma Wertime. Did I tell Dean Sanders about this? NO, of course not. (Guardian Angel almost gave up on me at this point.) Three days later, my family and I were at the Wertimes in Chambersburg, when I got this irate call from Dean Sanders wanting to hire me. I don’t know how he found me. He probably contacted someone at Union who knew I had a girlfriend in Chambersburg and knew the name. I never asked. Maybe Guardian Angel slipped him a note.

So I was being offered a real job, a permanent job, albeit in the hills of Indiana. Well, I stalled a bit. My parents pushed, Guardian Angel was pushing, I am sure. I thought that surely that draft would get me any day, and a job at Indiana University would look good on my résumé some day, so I gave the dean a reluctant “yes.” The Dickinsons called me a day later suggesting that I postpone the appointment for a year, so I could finish the degree, but that was out of the question since Miss Christena would be awaiting her new teacher in September. So after a week in the city with my parents, I was off to Bloomington, Indiana, for an entirely new life, and as it turned out, a wife.

Mary Christena turned out to be a fine organist, and again I was faced with a situation I wasn’t quite ready for. But I didn’t duck, and she got a performer’s certificate with distinction for her senior recital. It was not until after Mary’s graduation that the student-teacher relationship segued into a more personal one. After a summer of dating, Mary went to New York to Union Seminary on my recommendation. I wanted her to experience the school, and especially the milieu of New York City and the great church music. However, she spent only one semester at Union, terminated by my going to New York to propose at Christmas. And that event can be subject for another paper—shorter than this one, I assure the reader. We were married June 4, 1944. (I never had trouble remembering that date. The assault on Normandy was to take place that week.)

There is one loose end that must be taken care of in closing: THE DRAFT. During my first Christmas vacation at I.U., I had three recitals scheduled in the East—for the American Guild of Organists Chapter of Baltimore, before the New Year’s midnight service at First Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., and in Chambersburg. Of course I had as yet not learned how to cope with the stress of this sort of behavior, and I took sick on the B. & O. train returning from Washington to Indiana. A few days later, my landlords called a doctor, and I was promptly swished off to the hospital in an ambulance with a severe case of pneumonia. (Guardian Angel was taking severe measures!) 

I was very ill, and had not the sulfa drugs just come on the market, I might have died. But after three weeks, I was released, only to go back to my room to find THE letter from Uncle Sam telling me to report for induction in Indianapolis. Why had it taken them so long to find me? I had registered in Rochester, giving my address as Sterling, Colorado, but I found out later that my registration had been sent to Sterling, Pennsylvania, wherever that is.  And when they finally found me, it was discovered that I had registered as a conscious objector—and that is another story—so interviews had to be made with all sorts of people in Colorado to see what sort of a jerk I was. (Was Guardian Angel back of all this? Surely not . . . ) But now I was going through induction in Indianapolis, then, pale, and suspect. The late January quota for draftees was unusually low that month, and after the examining doctors took a good look at me and they took a look at my 1-A-O classification, I was told that I probably wouldn’t do much good for the U.S. Army and to go back to I.U. “and teach them how to sing the Star-Spangled Banner.”  

So that’s how I met my wife. Do I believe in a Guardian Angel? Sometimes I almost think that I do. Maybe everyone has a similar chain of events that direct them through life. They just don’t spill the whole tale in a writer’s club. I leave it up to you, with apologies for being too forthcoming. n

What a pleasure it has been to prepare this essay for publication in The Diapason to honor and celebrate the 90th birthday of Dr. Oswald G. Ragatz. This inspirational tale provides a glimpse of the organ and church music scene in New York in the early forties, as well as the documentation of the beginning of the I.U. Organ Department at that same time. When Dr. Ragatz retired in 1983, that organ department that he found in Bloomington in 1942 with the Holtkamp organ in the practice room had grown to a department with a notable historic concert organ in the I.U. Auditorium, two respectable studio organs, and eleven pipe organs in practice rooms for student use. Ragatz built the department to a level where it could take its place along with the other large university organ departments in the United States. Currently, the organ department of the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University is one of the largest institutions offering degrees in organ in the United States.  

With approximately 400 living IU alumni organists, the former students of Oswald Ragatz can be found all over the U.S. and in several foreign countries. Teaching and playing in both churches and universities, these Indiana University organists carry the Ragatz legacy with them in all of their endeavors. We salute you, Dr. Ragatz. Happy birthday and many happy returns.

—David K. Lamb

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.■