As the world celebrates 250 years of Mozart in 2006, many of us will also be celebrating 100 years of E. Power Biggs (1906–1977). The happy coincidence of yet a third anniversary, the semi-centennial of Biggs’s A Mozart Organ Tour, the landmark recording released by Columbia Masterworks in the month of July 1956, gives us an ideal place to start the party.
Biggs’s trip “down the Mozart trail” from Strasbourg to Salzburg, across the pre-Alpine highlands of southern Germany and south to Innsbruck, produced one of the most imaginative and memorable Mozart recordings of all time. It took the measure of Mozart’s limited output for the organ more generously than it had yet been taken and set a new benchmark for Biggs himself in his still novel enterprise of recording older music in the landscape from which it had sprung.
Even under non-anniversary circumstances, the Mozart album would make an excellent point of entry for considering the larger Mr. Biggs. Dating from the pivotal midpoint of his recording career, it capped a quartet of albums released by Columbia Masterworks during an 18-month period in 1955 and 1956 that presented the distillate of some 150 reels of tape Biggs had filled on his first two journeys to the organ lofts of Europe: in the spring of 1954 and the summer of 1955. Like no other organ albums before them, they showcased the instrument itself no less than the music. And they awakened us to the notion of “organ as place,” as musical destination, not to mention as destination worthy of pilgrimage. The four albums in this series were, in order of appearance (and with dates of release by Columbia Masterworks): Bach, Toccata in D Minor, “a HI-FI Adventure” (ML 5032, February 5, 1955), a single LP with 14 performances of the toccata (one with fugue) played on 14 different organs; The Art of the Organ (KSL 219, February 21, 1955), a two-LP set with music of Purcell, Sweelinck, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Bach performed on 20 notable organs; Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous European classic organs” (ML 5078, April 2, 1956), a single LP; and A Mozart Organ Tour (K3L 231, July 16, 1956), a 3-LP album containing the 17 “Festival Sonatas” for organ and orchestra, and complete works for solo organ, played on 14 organs in Austria and southern Germany.1 The two 1955 releases presented music Biggs had recorded “on the side” during his 11-week concert tour of as many countries in the spring of 1954. Of this music, only the six Pachelbel pieces and two of the Bach “D Minors” were recorded in the German south. The two 1956 releases, on the other hand, consisted almost exclusively of “takes” made on the 1955 Mozart trip.
If Biggs had never heard anything like the sonorities that cascaded from many of these instruments, neither had we. And, thanks to the advent of magnetic tape recording—in general use beginning only in 1950—we too came to know those sounds well enough to appreciate how dramatically different they were from any we had heard before, and how strangely vital and appealing. The old instruments might have known alterations of one kind or another since first sounding in their splendid spaces—possibly (we liked to think) under the fingers of a Sweelinck, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Bach, or even Mozart—but that did not matter to us. The spaces themselves had not changed. And, change or no change, the proof was in the listening: even through the tunnel of vintage, monaural “high fidelity,” the texture of the sound, so amazingly varied from instrument to instrument, yet so uniform in clarity and cohesiveness, compelled our ears. We listened, for example, to those “eight little preludes and fugues played on eight famous European classic organs,” the 1956 companion to A Mozart Organ Tour, and were, like Biggs himself, forever smitten. Whether the music had been written by Bach or Krebs (or whomever) did not matter. As Biggs presented these tuneful miniatures, they would lead initiates straight to greater music by J. S. Bach, of undisputed attribution.
Georg Steinmeyer was there—twice!
As we revisit the making of these remarkable recordings, we are fortunate indeed to have the recollections of an eyewitness (earwitness!) to the process, the “man who hung the mike” for no fewer than 18 of the performances that found their way into these albums. He is Georg F. Steinmeyer, scion of the well-known organbuilding family of Oettingen, Germany (specifically, great grandson and namesake of the G. F. Steinmeyer who founded Orgelbau Steinmeyer in 1847). Currently, he serves as Vice President of the Estey Organ Museum in Brattleboro, Vermont.
By the early 20th century, the Steinmeyers of Oettingen had come to “own” much of the organ landscape of Germany. Steinmeyer had been one of the first to undertake a sympathetic restoration of an historical instrument in Germany—and, indeed, one of great significance: Karl Riepp’s “Trinity” organ in the fabulous rococo abbey at Ottobeuren. Still largely in innocence of the movement that they were helping by chance to found, according to Steinmeyer, his grandfather’s team inadvertently established many of the restoration standards of the Orgelbewegung. Motivated simply by the respect they felt for what Riepp had achieved in the two astonishing instruments he had constructed on either side of the chancel between 1754 and 1766, they went about their refurbishing as true conservators, completing work on the “Trinity” instrument in 1914 and on its smaller companion, the “Holy Ghost” organ, in 1922. The quality of what they had accomplished at Ottobeuren so delighted Albert Schweitzer that he paid the Steinmeyer family a visit in 1929. Georg Steinmeyer does not remember the breakfast conversation himself, much less how he might have responded to the question as a 5-year-old, but his family never tired of repeating the story of how Albert Schweitzer asked the young boy that morning, “Glaubst Du, Junge, an die Schleiflade?” (Do you believe in the slider chest, young man?)
In fact, Georg Steinmeyer did much more than hang the microphone for Biggs (yes, there was just one—Columbia did not begin to record in stereo until the fall of 1956) on both of his forays to “Mozart country”—first, the nine hectic days of performing and recording in May 1954, and then the more leisurely 40 days with Mozart, recording only, in August and September 1955. He served as the Biggses’ universal “man on the ground”: as booking agent, organ guide, touch-up tuner, accommodations manager, automobile renter and driver, German translator, and last but by no means least, co-carrier of hundreds of pounds of recording equipment. Today, at age 82, Steinmeyer could as easily do it all again, it seems. He has the athletic moves of a man half his age and the nimble wits (and wit) to match. His eyes twinkle as he recalls “travels with Biggsy.” Thanks to Georg Steinmeyer, and thanks to materials preserved in the Biggs archives at the Organ Library of the Boston Chapter of the AGO at Boston University, we can now deepen our knowledge of this watershed time for Biggs.2
But first, Biggs at 100
With his name attached these days to some 50 CD offerings at Amazon.com, and with eBay a-flurry with Biggs transactions, some might argue that there is little chance of our forgetting the man. Certainly, time has revoked none of the superlatives that Lawrence Moe enumerated nearly three decades ago in the tribute he wrote for his teacher and friend:
During his lifetime, E. Power Biggs unquestionably played more organ recitals to larger audiences, performed on the organ with more symphony orchestras, played a more extensive repertory, and recorded more organ music than anyone else in history. Perhaps of greater and more lasting importance was his influence on the movement to restore the organ to some of the grandeur it enjoyed in the 17th and 18th centuries.3
But time is slowly making Biggs a stranger to a generation that owes him much. Today, even the organ world has begun to lose a valid sense of the “no small sensation” that was E. Power Biggs. A generation ago, his name meant “famous organist” in any American household, including ones with not the slightest interest in organ music. Now, as the era of his notoriety recedes into the past, many who encounter his name for the first time on the cover of a CD, or even attached to their OHS stipends, may imagine it to be some over-the-top stage moniker invented by a musician who could only have been an organist (what else, with that name?), and no doubt one with an insufferable ego.
The fact of the matter, of course, is that Jimmy Biggs (or “Bimmy Jiggs,” as he exuberantly signed the handwritten draft of the jacket notes he had penned for the 1956 “Eight Little Preludes and Fugues” album—not to mention the self-effacing “E. Punk Biggs” that he would slip in elsewhere just for fun) was a man of perfectly sufferable ego, with a personality as good-natured and charming as they come. The imposing name by which he let himself be known professionally was no mere invention but a perfectly legitimate (if certainly fortuitous) shortening of his full natural name: Edward George Power Biggs. A member of his family confirms that “Power” (the middle name of his father Clarence Power Biggs) was the maiden name of his paternal grandmother that had become, in common Victorian fashion, the first half of a double surname—like “Vaughan Williams.” To his parents and young friends, Biggs must have seemed more of a “Jimmy” than an “Eddy” or a “Georgy,” and so that nickname stuck until his wife Peggy (according to friend Barbara Owen) replaced it with “Biggsy.” When something more formal was needed, she (and Biggs himself) simply reached for “EPB,” a set of initials that, in the world of the pipe organ, will forever signify only one person.
Anyone who knew the genial man behind the all too earnest mien that appeared on many an album cover understood that the formidable look had more to do with Biggs’s respect for the music and the instrument he played than with any assertion of his own importance. As his eye lights on a 1955 photo of Biggs turning to grin at the camera from the front seat of their VW bus somewhere on “the Mozart trail,” Georg Steinmeyer exclaims, “Now, to me, that’s Biggsy!”
Of course, it would have been hard not to respect Biggs under any circumstances. Steinmeyer says that during his two recording expeditions with Biggs along the back roads of Germany and Austria, his respect for him bordered on awe. And yet, EPB’s most impressive achievements were still to come. “I can think of no other organist, on either side of the Atlantic,” Steinmeyer muses today, “who has exercised as much influence on the world of his instrument.” Certainly, no other has exuded the enthusiasm Biggs did for the pipe organ in its purest and most classic form, much less communicated it as well: first to his weekly radio audience of many thousands (over time, perhaps millions) in more than 800 North American broadcasts from 1942 to 1958, and then to growing legions of record buyers in the golden age of high fidelity during the 1960s and 70s. In the final decades of his life, his fans waited for the next “Historic Organs of X,” or next volume of “Bach Favorites” played on the Flentrop at Harvard, as eagerly as they waited for the next offering from the Beatles. Despite the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis (diagnosed already in 1958, the same year that his Flentrop arrived), the unfailingly cheerful and high-spirited Biggs played on to the end, extending his recording of historic organs, or organs in historic spaces, to more than two dozen adventures in musical geography. By the time he died, with many plans still unfulfilled, his discography comprised a staggering 148 titles. Beyond his recordings and recitals, he published dozens of articles and delivered countless addresses in advocacy of “classic principles” of pipe organ design. His influence on the Orgelbewegung in North America (and share of responsibility for lessons learned both good and bad) remains incalculable. Not long ago, Jonathan Ambrosino offered this capsule assessment of Biggs, as provocative, perhaps, as it is perceptive:
. . . Biggs was fundamentally a romantic organist, even if of great chastity. He stood ready to evolve a personal style from contact with fresh experience, whether it came in the form of old European instruments, the first wave of imported tracker organs, or his own Challis pedal harpsichord. Even if he rarely touched a swell pedal near the end, Biggs owned his phrasing, his touch, his style. That it was no more ‘authentic’ than, say, Landowska’s Bach seems beside the point. First and last, Biggs was a communicator, a musician who knew that his mission relied on developing a recognizable musical posture. His playing was one component of a larger persona that drew in a particular audience; though his ‘scholarship’ was everywhere praised, it was really his curiosity he was best able to convey.4
Provocatively, the term “romantic” describes neither Biggs’s first choice of organs, nor favorite kind of music, nor characteristic style of playing—all of which are as unromantically Apollonian as romanticism itself is Dionysian.5 He became famous for advocating articulately voiced, tracker-action instruments, and for disdaining the specification in which one might “contentedly wallow.”6 He liked his music tuneful and linear—and, above all, structured: older music of almost any kind; and, among the moderns, Sowerby and Joplin for their jazz-like “delineations,” and Hindemith and Pepping for their neo-baroque tidiness (Messiaen’s ethereal washes of color held little attraction). The “clipped” style of his playing, recognizable with almost any music, can be described as robust and forward-leaning yet rarely rushed; precise in touch yet flexible in phrasing; and most gratifying of all perhaps, responsive to the dictates of a sensitive ear as he played.
But “romantic” applies without question to his adventuresome, ready-for-anything pursuit of ever better organ sounds. Who but a “romantic” would embark on a classical Mozart organ tour with 650 pounds of recording equipment; or commission a classically voiced Schlicker large enough for solo performance in an auditorium but small enough to be folded into a trailer that could be hauled behind a 1953 Studebaker convertible; or, in the era of quadraphonic sound, conceive of recording Bach toccatas, as Biggs did in 1973, on the four separate organs of Freiburg Cathedral (all playable at once from a central console) delighting in the notion that Bach, like Biggs himself, “might have enjoyed tossing his antiphonal phrases side to side, or even batting them right down the church from one end to the other, as in some splendid tennis match.”7
And, “romantic” most assuredly applies to the aura with which Biggs endowed the organ in its purest form. By romanticizing the “classic” organs of Europe as history made audible, as living, breathing links to famous composers, and as destinations fabulously remote from our own quotidian world, Biggs made organ-romantics of all who fell under his spell. He once jotted on a notepad, “A wonderful aspect of the instrument is, there they stand! Down the centuries they come!” And down the centuries their recorded sounds seemed to echo. For record shoppers, the allure began even with the jacket notes Biggs wrote himself:
The very old and the very new meet on these records. For the organs heard are nine of the most famous and distinctive instruments of organ-building history. Of an extraordinary musical longevity, they are certainly among the oldest instruments still in normal everyday use. Yet though some are more than 400 years old, their characteristic sounds seem more vital than ever. . . .8
And even to fellow hi-fi aficionados, his pitch was essentially romantic:
High fidelity enthusiasts find, too, that these unique recorded sonorities add a new sense of space to reproducing equipment. And as the echoes of great music recede down the vaulted ceilings of some historic building, it may seem that your loudspeaker takes on a corresponding and possibly altogether new dimension of depth.9
How could any browser of LP bins in the 1950s resist the purchase of such an album, if only for its promise of access to something so amazing? By comparison, the jacket notes on “competing” albums from Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft’s Archiv label and Telefunken’s Das alte Werk seemed prosaic and dreary.
Awakening the ears of others to the sounds that had so beguiled his own became Biggs’s great mission in life. That he could be as good a marketer for these sounds as a missionary for them led to the occasional tongue-cluck of “middlebrow” by some whose pronouncements seem to reveal more about their own resentment of his success than insight into his art. It was as if his making the arcane accessible to the many somehow devalued it—despite a level of taste with which no one could argue. Mean-spiritedness of this kind (or any other) elicited little reciprocity from the unfailingly generous Biggs, for whom exuberant yet tasteful music-making was its own reward. His interpretations of Bach and other older music stand sui generis and, as Ambrosino suggests, largely “beside the point” of debates about authentic performance practice. Clean, transparent, and “declamatory,” Biggs’s Bach makes its own case for authenticity.
Unlike the volatile Virgil Fox (who seems to have felt his sense of rivalry with Biggs far more acutely than his counterpart), the ebullient EPB seemed to move through life happily at ease “in his own skin,” secure in simply making music the way he liked to make it. Less the virtuoso than an impeccably fine player, Biggs subordinated his act of performing to “the music’s own performance,” playing with an ear and a touch that, regardless of tempo, enabled a fine flowering, note by note, bar by bar, phrase by phrase. Craig Whitney has rightly observed that Biggs could have been describing himself when he cited what he admired most in the playing of his teacher G. D. Cunningham:
His own playing projected a wonderful sense of accent, a splendid ongoing rhythm. This rhythm was by no means metronomic; it was plastic and flexible. The secret (though “the secret” is no secret at all) was his sensitivity to note durations and his finger control of the organ key, disciplined by his piano technique.10
A “wonderful sense of accent,” a “splendid ongoing rhythm,” and an exceptional “sensitivity to note durations”: these were the hallmarks of Biggs. To the Dionysian extreme of all things formless and unbridled (and of course Virgil Foxian), Biggs, simply by nature, presented the Apollonian antithesis. From his advocacy of classic principles in organ design to his very clean touch, Biggs aimed to gratify the ear with unexpected clarity and “light.” It may well have been the surprise of such sonic light that made fans of so many, winning their ear for a musical instrument that they might otherwise never have taken seriously. Volume I of “Bach Organ Favorites” played on the Harvard Flentrop (the ubiquitous “white album” of 1961), may have been the single release by Biggs that most effectively delivered this kind of musical surprise.11
As late to Europe as to his instrument
As Biggs began to plan his first full-scale tour of continental Europe, the trip was to have been a recital tour only (with no thought of recording), to venues obligatory for any world-class concert organist. Indeed, one wonders whether the tour was not undertaken in part to match the public travels of Virgil Fox, who, since his early studies in Paris, had performed frequently in Europe. For a time, Biggs may simply have regarded his own emigration from England as enough of an international stretch. Or, like many a Briton of his generation, he may have looked upon the continent of Europe as somehow less worthy of an Englishman’s attention. The new world was the thing, not the old. But in the spring of 1954 he went, and discovered the pipe organ as if for the first time.
There had once been a real first time for Biggs, of course, some three decades earlier. It had occurred for him at the relatively mature age of 18, in the second year of what would normally have become a six-year apprenticeship, at an electrical engineering firm in London. Remarkably, it is a document from the 1954 tour that sheds fascinating light on that moment long past. Among his papers, we find the typewritten translation by one K. van Bronkhorst of an article published by an unnamed reporter in an unnamed Amsterdam newspaper, based on an interview that this reporter had conducted with Biggs on May 6, 1954, between practice sessions preceding his recital at the Oude Kerk that evening. One paragraph is of particular interest:
This 48-year-old musician has made a remarkable career. Originally he was an electrician, though with a decided musical talent which manifested itself in a great skill at piano-playing. The organ interested him only insofar as the electrician [in him] was concerned. Repair work on [electro-pneumatic] organs brought him much in contact with the instrument, which intrigued him more and more from a technical standpoint. Then, one day, he could not resist the temptation to sit on the organ bench and let his fingers, accustomed to the piano-technique, stir the organ keyboard. The mighty sounds impressed him; he played with greater and greater boldness, pulled register after register, and finally was so lost in his playing that he completely forgot his real job, the repair work on the organ. From that moment on—he was then [eighteen]—he gave up his old job and studied organ.
This account of “how it all began” for E. Power Biggs may ring outlandishly romantic, but we have no evidence that he disclaimed any part of it; and for now, at least, it fills a significant lacuna in his biography.
Biggs had played countless “average” organs in the intervening three decades, before, in the spring of 1954, he at last encountered the very old instruments of Europe and found their sounds and their response beneath his fingers to be “a revelation”—his word for the experience until the end of his days. Given his predilection for articulate, “outgoing” tonality, one wonders all the more why he had waited so long to mine the mother lode of the kind of sound he had, in a sense, been waiting for all his life. Certainly, he had heard the testimony of travelers like organ enthusiast Emerson Richards, and his colleague Melville Smith at the Longy School, not to mention his own compatriot émigré G. Donald Harrison, chief voicer for the firm of Aeolian-Skinner. As early as 1923, after hearing a “Silbermann organ familiar to Bach,” Richards (who also visited the Steinmeyer factory on two occasions in the 1920s and ’30s) had called for renewed attention to “proper choruses” even in specifications like the one he prepared for the enormous Midmer-Losh in the Convention Hall at Atlantic City.12 And Harrison had been working for years to bend the Skinner sound in a decidedly more classical direction. Biggs had read his Schweitzer, studied organ specifications, and listened to the stories of all these travelers; yet none of it had quite prepared him for his own surprise: “As a means to describe a certain sound, words are blunt tools,” he found himself writing. “A sonority must be heard to be understood, enjoyed, or even in some cases believed!”13
The “pre-education” of Biggs’s ear had begun on his own doorstep, with G. D. Harrison’s experimental “Baroque” organ of 1936. Biggs himself had taken a keen interest in the idea of this instrument from the beginning—and it was he who arranged to have it placed in the ideal acoustical setting of the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. There, as he wrote decades later, “it sounded extraordinarily well, bright tone, outgoing,” although, he continued, “of course the bland voicing did not give the organ any articulation, and the electric action precluded any control of chiff, had there been any chiff.”14 The instrument’s musical attractiveness suited it well for broadcasting, and by 1942 Biggs had begun his live weekly half-hour programs carried nationwide (and across Canada) by the CBS Radio Network for the next 16 years. In his 1977 tribute to Biggs, Lawrence Moe wrote, Even now I am astounded when I think of the vast literature he covered in sixteen years of broadcasting. Series of programs included the entire works of Bach, all the concertos by Handel, ensemble and concerted music of every kind involving the organ, great swaths of solo literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works by classic, romantic, and contemporary composers were heard week after week. He commissioned works from American composers Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, and Leo Sowerby, to name but a few, and he revived interest in countless composers of the past.15
And thus the instrument that had attuned Biggs’s ear to the virtues of a well-developed organ ensemble educated the ear of a growing public as well, not only to the listenable sound of such an instrument but to the wide repertory that could be played on it with success.
Biggs meets Steinmeyer
It was to one of these Sunday morning broadcasts that G. Donald Harrison brought Georg Steinmeyer in the fall of 1950. His guest had come from Germany a few months earlier to begin a one-year internship with Aeolian-Skinner of Boston, under the auspices of a postwar program for international technical cooperation, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. Harrison was no doubt eager to have Steinmeyer hear his attempt at creating a neo-baroque organ. They sat in the small audience that was permitted to listen under the arch at the far end of the hall, and afterwards Harrison led Steinmeyer up to the gallery to meet Biggs. As he followed Harrison up the stairs that morning, he learned that he had been preceded one year earlier by the famous doctor who, two decades before, had quizzed him about slider chests. (Schweitzer had spend a few days in Boston on his way home from delivering an address at the Goethe bicentennial celebration in Aspen.) And in a broader sense, he knew he was walking in the footsteps of his own father, Hans, who, in 1913, had likewise come to Boston in his mid-twenties to work for E. M. Skinner. While installing the Finney Hall Skinner at Oberlin College in 1915, Hans Steinmeyer had met and soon married the young American woman who would become Georg’s mother a few years after the family moved back to Germany.
Georg Steinmeyer and Biggs took an immediate liking to each other, and it is easy to understand why. They shared a lively sense of humor, a keen antenna for “good ideas,” and the ability to pursue those ideas with an intensity that could exhaust the people around them. Recalling Biggs’s capacity for long—often nocturnal—hours of hard work, Barbara Owen exclaims, “How the man could focus—he was so much an ‘Aries,’ you could almost believe in astrology!” In readiness to focus on a task and to work like a dynamo to get it done, however, Biggs had met an equal in Georg Steinmeyer.
The Biggses invited young Steinmeyer to Thanksgiving dinner that year, which became only the first of several meals he would enjoy at 53 Highland Street, the grand Victorian home on a hill in Cambridge, about one mile from Harvard’s Germanic (by then Busch-Reisinger) Museum. When he brought with him a catalogue of Steinmeyer “factory” organs one evening, Biggs lost no time in placing an order for a tiny one-stop, hand-pumped portative. Steinmeyer and Biggs laid its parts out on the parlor rug when it arrived, more or less in kit form, and spent a Saturday morning assembling it.
Three years later, as Biggs was planning his European tour with the help of various branches of the U.S. State Department tasked with fostering cultural exchange, he had an easy answer when the request came for names of his contacts in Germany: “The organ builder Hans Steinmeyer, whose wife is American and whose son Georg has visited us on various occasions here, is the chief name I have to offer.”16 It was the energetic Georg, however, not his father, who quickly became the chief planner of the Biggses’ initiation to “Steinmeyer Country.” After concluding his internship at Aeolian-Skinner in 1951 (and with plans to return to the USA for good as soon as possible), he had gone home to work again for his father, helping first to complete the post-war replacement for the 1937 Steinmeyer Hauptorgel in the heavily damaged Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg, and then to refurbish the famous 1737 instrument of Joseph Gabler at Weingarten. Near the end of 1953, he sent the Biggses a long letter (unfortunately lost) laying out an itinerary for concerts and organ visits that would have taken them to every historic instrument between Frankfurt and Munich (not to mention many a Steinmeyer instrument). At the end of that letter he must have confessed the wish that they could somehow devote two months to doing all he had proposed. For, on January 20, Peggy Biggs sent this reply: Thank you so very much for your detailed letter about our proposed trip to Germany. This information is really invaluable to us. . . . All the names and places you have suggested look wonderful, and I’m afraid that by the time we have laid our definite plans we’ll wish we had two months also. . . . As you know, we would not want to have the concerts come too close together. Biggsy would want to have at least a full day to become familiar with each instrument before the concerts. . . . EPB is on the west coast and will be back here at the end of January. With warmest greetings from us both— As she typed these lines, Peggy may already have had an inkling of the latest “good idea” her husband was hatching—off in California—to crowd even more activity into their tight schedule for Europe. As he played the European masters up and down the west coast that January, Biggs’s mind turned ever again to the journey he would soon make to the geographic source of so much of that music. And, the more he thought about the organs he would encounter along the way in spaces known to Sweelinck, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Bach (perhaps already Mozart), the more excited he became about the concept of making recordings—someday—that could “relate the music, the organ, and the place.”
(To be continued)
Author’s note: This three-part essay had its genesis in an exciting chance encounter at a recent OHS seminar. When Mr. and Mrs. Georg F. Steinmeyer kindly asked how my own interest in the organ had begun, I confessed that it had dated from my being “dragged” by a music-major girlfriend at the age of 21 to an Orgelkonzert played on an 18th-century instrument in Lucerne, Switzerland. The “light for the ears” that radiated from that organ had just astonished me. Back in the U.S. after a summer’s language study at a Goethe Institute (and more organ concerts that I had sought out on my own!), and hungering for more such sonic light, I headed straight for the Apex Music Corner in Schenectady to discover in the LP bins—along with the first U.S. offering from those other musical “Brits” of the day, the Beatles (for it was the fall of ’63)—a modest-looking album entitled, Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous classic European organs.” One hearing of this album (I continued to explain to the Steinmeyers) had hooked me for life on E. Power Biggs and the sounds he stood for—not to mention, of course, the sounds of countless other fine organists and other kinds of organs. By that point in my recitation, Herr Steinmeyer’s eyes had taken on a special twinkle: “And do you know,” he laughed, “I helped Biggsy make that recording!” I was floored. Most of us have some particular record in our collection that we treasure above almost all the rest, some early acquisition that holds a kind of iconic meaning for us simply because it “set our direction.” For me it had always been that 1956 Biggs LP. And there I was, to my disbelief, speaking with one of the principals responsible for making that “exotic” record!
And what a Biggsian crackerjack of a fellow Georg Steinmeyer himself has turned out to be! I am enormously grateful to both of the Steinmeyers for the excuse they gave me to write this piece about the cultural hero of my youth for whom my admiration remains most enduring. Their recollections of “travels with Biggsy” have been invaluable. And of course I am most grateful of all to EPB himself in his centenary year for the memory of (1) his tireless—but unfailingly good-humored—advocacy of the musical point of view that his recordings taught me to share, (2) his example of great decency and generosity in all things, and (3) his will to play spiritedly on until the end, his enthusiasm amazingly undiminished by a battle of two decades with one of the cruelest afflictions that could befall any organist.
