E. Power Biggs in Mozart Country, Part 2

The author can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].

Hooray, hooray for the Mozart trip—we are delighted at the prospect of another race through Europe with you!” So began the aerogram from E. Power Biggs that Georg Steinmeyer opened in Oettingen, Bavaria, one day in May, 1955. Biggs had sent it in quick response to Steinmeyer’s letter to him of May 20, in which he must have committed himself—at least in principle—to helping Biggs with a second expedition through his native countryside, this time with Mozart’s music, Mozart sites, and Mozart organs as its focus.
Steinmeyer’s first trip with the Biggses, one year earlier, had indeed turned into something of a white-knuckled road race. Piloting the overloaded Mercedes 180 he had rented for them (overloaded only because the “amateur tape recorder” promised by Biggs had strangely metamorphosed—with the bank of automotive batteries needed to operate it—into hundreds of pounds of gear), Steinmeyer had managed to keep Biggs on time for every one of his engagements, but the pace of the nine-day trip had meant skipping a few important stops—like a pause even to see, much less to play, the Riepp organs at Ottobeuren.

“300 years ago, a fine perfection”

The zigzag course they had traced from Frankfurt to Munich the previous spring constituted only one short segment of the 75-day concert tour that had carried Biggs through some twelve countries from Portugal to Norway. That eleven-week journey had introduced him to musical glories of the instrument he had never known before; and an Ampex 403 had helped him “bring ’em back aloud” (as he shamelessly quipped) for an American audience whose ears were ready to listen. It had been Biggs’s well-known “tour of revelation,” the trip that changed not only his own life but the life of the pipe organ in North America, when it launched him on his mission to center the organ once more on what he perceived to be its most essential, yet long lost, character as a musical instrument. Upon his return to Boston, Biggs had begun immediately to communicate what the European instruments had taught him, publishing by the spring of 1955 no fewer than three perceptively detailed—and persuasively argued—articles about the musical excellence of classic European organs.1 “Three hundred years ago,” he liked to declare, “the organ had reached a fine perfection!” For the rest of his life, Biggs celebrated the qualities of organs built like those that had inspired Bach and other great composers of the past, among them—he would soon argue—Mozart, despite the paucity of music Mozart had actually penned for the instrument.
Although much of their 1955 correspondence is lost, we know that Biggs must have invited Steinmeyer to help with some version of a Mozart project even before the end of March, for in a letter to his chief State Department contact in Washington, Mary Stewart French, dated March 29, he refers to Steinmeyer in the warmest terms and outlines an early conception of the plan:
We intend [in late summer] to visit Austria, and particularly Salzburg and Vienna for their Mozart associations. We’re in touch with Georg Steinmeyer, the organ builder of Bavaria, who proved such an excellent friend and guide last year. . . . There’s one event that we’d particularly like to give—namely to play the three Mozart Fantasias and the seventeen short sonatas for small orchestra and organ in Salzburg Cathedral, where Mozart was once organist! It would be wonderful if this could be given under [U. S. Information Service] or Amerika-Haus sponsorship, and, if the cost of the small orchestra (perhaps 20 to 25 players) were an obstacle, we’d be glad to take care of this.

Steinmeyer: “The experience of a lifetime”

For Steinmeyer, the second coming of the Biggses, like their first (which had coincided with his honeymoon!), was going to compete with another major transition in his life: emigration to America with his young family. He knew he would soon be accepting a job at the Estey Organ Company of Brattleboro, Vermont. Quietly foundering in the mid 1950s, Estey was hoping to reverse its fortunes by adding this young German builder to its staff, who would bring with him the bonus of a prestigious name. Steinmeyer could see that time for personal projects that summer (like helping Biggs with his) could grow short, especially since Estey seemed to want him to come as soon as possible. Furthermore, he knew that travel time with the Biggses would in some ways amount to “the least of it.” In advance of their coming, he would have to help research organs, lay out the route, time all distances, contact responsible persons, coax them into granting access to record, schedule overnights, book accommodations, procure a vehicle, and so on. But Georg and Hanne Steinmeyer had grown very fond of the Biggses (20 years their senior) during that first “race.” And Steinmeyer respected—because he so completely shared—Biggs’s unfailingly upbeat resilience as a traveler. He liked the notion that his freedom to shape the new plan would indeed give Biggs a chance to discover some of the treasures they had neglected on the 1954 tour. And last but not least (Steinmeyer may have reasoned), a young organ builder moving to America could do worse than to earn the advocacy of America’s best known organist! Thus, despite his own uncertain agenda for the coming summer, he put aside all concerns and signed on for what he can term today “the experience of a lifetime.”
In the months that followed, Steinmeyer would first help Biggs lay out a complex plan, then make all the logistical arrangements for it to succeed, and finally work at his side for five weeks to help him fulfill it. At the end of the undertaking, with all the notes sounded and captured “before they could melt into thin air,” as Biggs liked to put it (in reference to Prospero’s words in Shakespeare’s The Tempest), a pleased Biggs (and Peggy) flew home with 84 half-hour reels of tape imprinted at 15 inches per second with 942 “takes” and 612 “inserts” of music—music not only by Mozart but by some two dozen other composers as well—played on 21 different organs. The venture would advance by two more albums the paradigm Biggs had established with the pair of releases born of the 1954 expedition.2 These had already begun to spin on turntables across America as he and Peggy “enplaned” once more for Europe to produce the first of many sequels: Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous European classic organs,” a single LP (ML 5078, to be released on April 2, 1956); and A Mozart Organ Tour (K3L 231, which would be released on July 16, 1956), a 3-LP album containing the 17 “Festival Sonatas” for organ and orchestra and Mozart’s complete works for solo organ played on 14 organs in Austria and southern Germany.3

A neglected dimension of Mozart

Biggs would find it easy enough, in the essay he wrote for the Mozart album, to formulate a high-minded justification for the project:

An anniversary should serve to enlarge our knowledge of a composer’s work. If Mozart the organist is a figure not too well remembered by us today, then his aspect of his genius should become better known.

Biggs himself had recorded six of the 17 sonatas for organ and orchestra in 1945 (78 rpm RCA Victor M 1019), and had played various solo works of Mozart from time to time in his weekly broadcasts from Harvard. But neither he nor anyone else had yet gathered so much of Mozart’s music for the instrument into a single release for record buyers. In an essay he prepared for High Fidelity Magazine, he added this further justification for the enterprise:

For about 150 of the 165 years that have elapsed since Mozart’s lifetime,” the only possible commentary on [Mozart’s letters about his travels] would have been further writing, in book or essay. Today, to our good fortune, we have other documentary means!4

He meant, of course, that modern tape-recording (which he liked to call “the photography of sound”) enabled a new dimension of biographical documentation. Furthermore, the essay continued, “. . . if an anniversary observance is to be worthwhile, it should serve to broaden our knowledge of a composer’s art, and not merely to prompt further recordings of already well-roasted chestnuts.” If the two exciting Fantasias in F minor have in the meantime become their own version of old chestnuts in the organ repertory, they have done so in part because Biggs put them on the map, literally as well as figuratively.
Today, thanks to the personal recollections of Steinmeyer and the abundant “retentions” of Biggs himself (“the man who never threw anything away”—in the not unappreciative words of Joseph Dyer, Chairman of the Organ Library of the Boston Chapter of the AGO), we can relive—in our 250th year of Mozart, 100th year of Biggs, and 50th anniversary of these two albums—the making of those memorable recordings.5

More than one Mozart project for Biggs

By the winter of 1955, as the Mozart year of 1956 beckoned ever more urgently for projects, Biggs had already begun to plan a wildly original one. Since that year would also mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, his favorite American hero, Biggs wanted to link Mozart’s music and Franklin’s invention of the glass harmonica. If Corning Glass could just blow harmonica glasses that would not keep breaking, and if Buffalo organbuilder Hermann Schlicker could somehow devise a reliable playing mechanism for a replica of Franklin’s instrument, the whole endeavor could culminate, Biggs hoped (as indeed it did, more or less), with a long-planned concert in MIT’s Kresge auditorium in the spring of 1956.6
But Biggs had also begun to nurse the idea of a more grandiose project: a plan to record Mozart’s seventeen sonatas for organ and orchestra at no less a venue than the cathedral in Salzburg, the space in which a teen-aged Mozart had composed and performed them. But there was more. Still aglow with the success of his 1954 odyssey linking composers and the territory of their Wirken, he could not fail to note the logical next extension of the concept he had invented on his tour-with-an-Ampex the previous spring. If he could find enough extant instruments to justify it, he would undertake a new tour of European organs, a “trail” of ones that Mozart had played or “might have played.”
At first he imagined that these would be confined mainly to the cities of Salzburg and Vienna. Although Salzburg’s cathedral enclosed a grand Mozartean space, its 1914 Mauracher organ preserved only a few ranks from an organ of Mozart’s day. Beyond these ranks, set now on an electro-pneumatic windchest, Salzburg housed only one reasonably authentic “Mozart organ,” the 1696 Egedacher instrument in the Chapel of St. Cajetan. And if Salzburg offered little, Vienna would offer nothing. The Austrian capital disappointed Biggs again and again! One year earlier, while on his grand tour, he had obtained no invitation to play a recital there; now he could come up with no playable—or at least accessible—organ of Mozart-vintage; and a few years later, when he sought an authentic instrument for his plan to record the Haydn organ concertos and redo the Mozart “seventeen” in stereo, Vienna would send him 30 miles to the south, to the Haydn-town of Eisenstadt, to find the right (actually perfect) instrument.7
The one bona fide “Mozart Organ” to which Biggs had already been introduced stood not in Austria at all, but 600 kilometers west of Salzburg in the Rheinland-Pfalz region of Germany. It was the 1745 instrument by Michael Stumm in the castle church of Kirch-heimbolanden. Steinmeyer had brought Biggs to see it for a few minutes on the first afternoon of their 1954 trip. When his long hours of research at Harvard’s Houghton Library in the winter of 1955 confirmed that Kirchheimbolanden would serve, in fact, as the perfect western terminus of a Mozart tour from the Rhineland to Salzburg, Biggs moved quickly to make plans.
The more he read the letters of the Mozart family, the better he saw that he would be able to contribute his own small (but for the organ world surely welcome) revision to the conventional image of Mozart. He discovered that Mozart had frequently improvised on organs for the sheer pleasure of it, that he had sought them out wherever he went, and that his hosts had often expressed amazement at his skill not only as a “clavierist” but as a “fuguer with pedals.” Best of all, Biggs liked the enthusiasm in Mozart’s surprisingly frequent remarks about the instrument—utterances like, “To my eyes and my ears, the organ is the king of instruments.”8 To the editor of the American Guild of Organists Quarterly, Biggs eventually remarked, “It would seem to me that organists may as well ‘claim’ Mozart, who today would practically have been an A.G.O. member.”9

“The whole thing has suddenly become clear”

In a letter dated May 1, it was time for Biggs to share his growing excitement with Columbia Masterworks executive David Oppenheim:

Our Mozart plans have suddenly come into focus. A reading of Jahn’s volumes on Mozart, and the composer’s own letters did the trick! Now we know just where Mozart went on his concert trips and what organs he played, and it’s interesting to find that he always asked to play the organ, and his playing absolutely fascinated people. . . . Mozart writes of his great love for the organ (he said, “the instrument is my passion”) but evidently he just played music out of his head and didn’t write too much down for publication, for the simple reason that there wasn’t a great demand for it at that period. Anyway, he wrote down just the right amount for our purposes! . . . We’re going over August 15, via TWA, and with Georg Steinmeyer, the organ builder, will follow the “Mozart trail” and play and record instruments Mozart played, ending in Salzburg. More details later—but the whole thing has suddenly become clear.

Now, too, he could send Georg Steinmeyer a more detailed proposal (we have no surviving letter, only these scraps of a draft):

Here are some plans, which will give you an idea of the time involved. . . The object of the visit [to begin on August 17] would be to retrace the routes traveled by Mozart, to visit towns and if possible to find the organs he once played. . . . There won’t be any concerts during this period, so we could give full time to the instruments to record a short piece or two on each, much as we did last year.
Then, at the beginning of September, we’d like to arrive in Salzburg, for a period of about two weeks. It’s possible that there might be concerts here, but in any case we would hope to do the same sort of thing as on the trip in and around Salzburg. . . . The general interest of the trip is of course to learn about instruments, the old, the restored, and some newer ones, and to play the music that belongs on them—some other composers, as well as Mozart. For we realize from last year’s visit what an enormous amount there is to learn, and we’d like to visit representative instruments in southern Germany, Austria, etc., as we did in the northern spots.
Do you think you could once again help us by choosing the best places and routes and making some preliminary enquiries about the use of the instruments? Also, in renting a car and coming with us as before, in any case, for the first two weeks and if possible for the Salzburg visit as well.
If it is possible for you to take these four weeks, we would very much like to have you come, and to ask you to do the preliminary work of arrangements for recording sessions, car rental, and planning the schedule. Also, this time we should practice what we preach and put the arrangements on a firm business basis—that is—all your expenses and the car costs, and in addition a weekly payment of say, $100 [perhaps the equivalent of a thousand dollars in 2006]. That is a total of $400.00 which we would be glad to deposit in an account here for you, with your family, or in Germany, since it might be useful for your westward journey.

The offer to remunerate Steinmeyer for the time he would spend traveling with them (but not, it seems, for all the time spent planning!) may have come partly in response to signals Steinmeyer had given about other approaching demands on his time. Or perhaps Biggs felt a twinge of guilt for having compensated his friend too meagerly (for nothing more than expenses) on the 1954 trip.

The trail lengthens

By May, Steinmeyer had accepted the job at Estey and could see that the mid-August date proposed by Biggs for starting the Mozart trip would present a problem. Better to begin sooner, he thought. And, given the ground to be covered, Steinmeyer wanted, if possible, “to do it right”; and so, before he knew it, and almost in spite of himself, he was soon encouraging Biggs to double the time allotted to the pre-Salzburg portion of the journey from two weeks to four weeks. Always ready for more adventure, of course, Biggs welcomed the expansion.
On July 3, only one month before the Biggses would arrive, Steinmeyer sent his first rough plan for the tour and expressed his belief that, with luck, he would be able to travel with them for the whole month of August, breaking away once they “settled” in Salzburg for the longer recording session. Perhaps in a subconscious effort to keep Biggs’s expectations somewhat in check, Steinmeyer let himself complete the letter of July 3 with, “We are terribly busy in the office at the moment. In the evenings we pack our trunks since we cannot pack in August.”
On his side of the Atlantic, Biggs was busy too, of course, corresponding with his diplomatic contacts in Vienna, Salzburg, and Washington with the aim of securing 1) Salzburg Cathedral as a recording venue for five days in early September, 2) an orchestra and conductor for recording the Mozart sonatas with him there, and 3) as many Austrian recital invitations as he could garner for the days just before and just after the recording sessions in Salzburg. Angelo Eagon, “Theater and Music Officer” at the American embassy in Vienna, was proving more helpful than he had the previous year, when he had in effect turned away Biggs’s solicitation of engagements to perform.
Between June 6 and 17, Biggs interrupted all correspondence to take himself, and as many members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as he could recruit (seven), away to Iceland to carry out another of his projects of 1955: a ten-day series of concerts in Reykjavik and elsewhere that he had persuaded the U.S. State Department to sponsor as a counter-move to the Soviets’ own cultural courting of the small Scandinavian nation he had come to love on his 1954 tour. Upon returning to Cambridge, he found that Eagon had risen nicely to the challenge of opening doors in Salzburg and booking engagements for him elsewhere in Austria—none in Vienna, of course! One of the five bookings gave him special satisfaction: a concert with orchestra at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, scheduled for August 25. He saw it as a foot-in-the-door to winning access to the cathedral, a first step in rewarding the optimism he had expressed to David Oppenheim, two weeks earlier, in a letter of June 4:

We are asking permission for the use of Salzburg Cathedral, for our recording, through no less an avenue than the American embassy in Vienna. So I think we’ll take this little hurdle along the Mozart trail in good style!

Better than batteries?

And then there was the matter of better equipment. Long before commitments for the Mozart trip were made in any quarter, Biggs had broached the notion of upgrading the recording equipment they had used in 1954. On April 13, he wrote these lines to Columbia engineer Vincent Liebler:

I believe in the fall we’re to make a foray to another section of Europe, and this of course brings up the idea of taking along the Ampex. . . . Perhaps we could improve the results a good deal by better equipment, either the machine itself or the microphone or in the matter of cycle control. Or, for that matter, in having expert technical assistance on the spot! . . . It would be fun to discuss ideas with you, and I’ll phone Monday to see what time might be convenient.

Ever a master of the kind of diplomacy that bends people to one’s will yet leaves them grateful for it afterwards, Biggs had soon won the promise of elaborate new equipment from Columbia. As before, however, it would not arrive until virtually the eve of his departure. To accompany the new gear, Columbia engineers had prepared an eight-page, single-spaced document of almost hilariously complex instructions, binding it into a folio with the title, “PROCEDURE FOR ASSEMBLY AND OPERATIONS OF MR. E. POWER BIGGS [sic] 1955 RECORDING EQUIPMENT.” The cover bears the date, July 29, the Friday before the Monday on which the Biggses would wing away from Boston. That weekend, one of them (most likely Peggy, since she would be the one to operate the equipment most of the time) sat down at a typewriter to attempt to distill the essence of the instructions onto one clear page. Halfway down it, two lines of strike-outs are followed by, “(I just blew everything up).”
The new equipment would bring, if by no means simplicity, at least freedom from dependency on batteries. They would no longer need to rent and renew a brace of heavy car batteries, only to watch their power begin to fade almost immediately. This year they would simply test the nature of the local current, and, provided it was indeed alternating current, “re-cycle” it with their oscillator to feed the new professional-grade Ampex 350 the 117-volt 60-cycle current it required. The new hardware, with its oscillator in two heavy units, actually weighed three times as much as the previous year’s less sophisticated gear if one discounted the batteries. And at $4500 it also cost three times as much.10 Moreover, its delicacy would lead to repeated repairs in the field. Steinmeyer remembers well the number of times he found Biggs, to his horror, once more taking the back off of one unit or the other to fix its latest malfunction: “Oh no, he’s not opening that thing up again!” (See series of photos: Another repair 1, 2, and 3, and Repairs completed 1 and 2) Last but not least, the equipment would need to be grounded; they would have to carry a long coil of wire to reach the nearest outdoor, cable-to-earth from a lightning rod. In one of his personal jottings, Franklin fan Biggs wrote: “Greatly indebted to Ben Franklin throughout tour, since usually used lightning rod as ground.” And he could not resist bringing Franklin into his more formal account of recording Mozart at Salzburg Cathedral: “Even Benjamin Franklin entered the picture, for the huge lightning rod of the Cathedral (Franklin’s invention) afforded a solid and perfect ‘ground’ for all electrical equipment.”11
For the electrical technician in Biggs (his original field of training), the complexity of the equipment was a major part of the fun. In a note for the Mozart album about the session in Absam, a small town near Innsbruck where he recorded the third of “Bach’s little preludes and fugues,” BWV 555, Biggs wrote, “Electric current here was 165 volts and 50 cycles. We boosted this to 230 volts, then halved it to 115, then again transformed it to 117 and 60 cycles.” How he enjoyed the sheer “electrical-ness” of it all despite his well-known remark about current as “a perfect way to ring a doorbell, but a poor way to open a pipe valve”! On the day they picked up the equipment, it was surely his idea to lay it all out on the floor of a studio at Columbia to be formally documented by a professional photographer. (See photo: 1955 equipment.12) A few days later, on August 2, he would just as proudly pose beside it stacked on an industrial scale at the airport in Frankfurt, while the meter registered 310 kg. (680 pounds).13

New tasks for the Reiseleiter

As Steinmeyer had expected, the tasks crowded in as the day of departure approached. On July 14, barely two weeks before the trip was to begin, Biggs sent this list of wishes and requirements:

Dimensions of the equipment are enclosed. One thing that we must be careful to watch is that no tapes should ever be kept near the oscillator, and when the oscillator is in operation no tapes should come within six feet of it, or they will be magnetically affected. . . . We do need to rent or borrow a transformer (200–110 volt step-down transformer) capable of handling a load of approximately 1000 watts. The oscillator can handle voltages of 100 to 150 A.C., 45 to 90 cycles, so higher voltages will have to be reduced by a transformer. Can you arrange for this, and let us know in confirmation? . . . And if you can borrow a little porter’s cart, we can in this way move stuff very easily. . . . In writing to the various churches for permission, would you enquire about the line and current at each place? As far as we know, we will not be able to do any recording in places where only direct current is available. And thus we may find that some of the places will be impossible. . . . Also, could you let us know how you think we should go about making hotel reservations? I believe you mentioned some way of making arrangements through suggestions of ESSO travel bureau. We will have to stay somewhere!—and of course it will be wonderful if you have already made these arrangements.

On July 27, 1955—the day the Allies agreed to end their four-way occupation of Austria and partition of Vienna—Steinmeyer cabled Biggs, “Transformer is rented car arrangement will be settled Thursday.”
The vehicle Steinmeyer had rented for them this time was a deluxe Volkswagen Microbus, the passenger version of VW’s “Type 2” or “Transporter,” which, as long as one were in no hurry, would cope more easily with the 1200 pounds of passengers and baggage than last year’s sedan had. With its row of sky-lights to left and right of the sliding fabric sunroof and the “deluxe” color scheme of black-on-red divided by a wide strip of chrome, it was the fanciest version of the classic Microbus. The nimbleness with which the vehicle moved its load despite a piddling 36 horsepower (upgraded that model-year from 25, as if just for the Mozart tour) so impressed Biggs that he would soon purchase his own more spartan version of the VW bus for use in future recording expeditions on both sides of the Atlantic.

“On the trail” at last

Steinmeyer stresses that travel by automobile in postwar Germany and Austria was mostly a miserable business. Roads were poor, narrow, and much under repair. Usable Autobahn, at least on the routes they would take, remained essentially non-existent. The VW bus, while spacious, whirred along noisily and punished its passengers on the rough roads. Air conditioning was unknown. Accommodations and food were plain. (See photo: Somewhere on the Mozart trail, page 21.)
But the Biggses knew what they were in for and loved it. They had done it all before! Off they sped from Flughafen Frankfurt on Tuesday, August 2, perfectly on schedule and, within a day, were recording Mozart in the castle church at Kirchheimbolanden. In his essay for the Mozart album, Biggs would later paint this picture of the composer’s music-making visit and, through “the magic of recording,” our own aural one:

The church . . . today is just about as it was when Mozart climbed the organ stairs. The original organ, on one side, faces a gallery where the noblemen listened that cold January [day in 1778] to young Wolfgang and Maria von Weber. A great fireplace, still in this gallery, was the only source of heat for the whole building. Mozart must have been cold on the organ side. . . . Naturally, in this gallery—opposite the organ—we set our microphone. By the magic of recording, we may all crowd into the same gallery to listen to the sounds that Mozart heard.

Biggs judged the 1745 instrument by Michael Stumm to have remained reasonably true to its Mozart-era sonorities despite the replacement of its trackers (in 1935) with an electric playing action.14 (In the album notes, he declined, of course, to mention the instrument’s electrification.) And indeed it sets forth the first of Mozart’s two F-minor Fantasias (K. 594) with satisfying pungency, more successfully, one can argue, than the gigantic Steinmeyer in Passau (“the world’s largest church-organ”) renders the second (K. 608)—at least in Biggs’s over-large registration of it. On the other hand, it is hard to fault Biggs for wanting to give listeners their money’s worth in Passau, even if it meant taking the drama of the already wild K. 608 over the top. The performance of K. 608 became the only point of disagreement in otherwise glowing reviews of the Mozart album. The Diapason’s reviewer wrote, “The only disappointment . . . is the big Fantasia recorded at the Cathedral of Passau. The rather sluggish-sounding organ and the overly resonant acoustics remove much of the excitement from this brilliant piece.” In The American Organist, however, the reviewer wrote, “K. 608 is recorded . . . in Passau Cathedral [on] an impressive sounding Steinmeyer installed in 1928. To my ears this is the most exciting overall combination of music, instrument, and performance on the album.”

Biggs on the Mozart Fantasias

The two great Fantasias, Biggs decided, must have had their musical origin in the organ improvisations that Mozart had played “spontaneously, out of his imagination,” for many years. In his essay for the album, as well as in an article he wrote for the AGO Quarterly, he supplemented common knowledge about the mercenary origin of this hair-raising funerary music—in a cheap commission by Count Müller-Deym, the proprietor of a Viennese wax museum—with his own cogently argued speculation about their artistic roots:

That some of the extraordinary music that flowed fluently enough in improvisation from Mozart’s fingers is preserved at all on paper is due to the rather curious commission offered him . . . in what was to prove to be the final year of his life, pieces to be played by a little flute organ that functioned as part of a musical clock. . . . He chafed at the piping limitations of the toy organ, but he also completely disregarded them. . . . From the memory of years, Mozart set down music of matchless grandeur. The Fantasias, so fortunately preserved by this chance commission . . . afford us an image of Mozart’s own extempore organ playing style.15

Biggs went on to advance an even more intriguing theory about Mozart’s own likely performance of the two works, once he had put them on paper:

On his way south from Frankfurt, after setting these Fantasias to paper, Mozart stopped at Ulm and again played the organ. Who can doubt that this noble Cathedral echoed that day to the stirring strains of these Fantasias, set down for a clock to play, but conceived for just such a grand place? If only Count von Deym had asked for more! Please go to Part 3, Continued.

The author can be reached at .

From Ochsenhausen, Biggs and company moved on to the jaw-dropper of all the Baroque places they would visit: Ottobeuren. Like a great white ship plowing across the sea of agriculture that surrounds it for miles, the Benedictine monastery at Ottobeuren begins to rise from the horizon of the Allgäu region many kilometers before one arrives at its portal. As Biggs later wrote to David Oppenheim, in a letter dated December 26, 1955, “It’s really quite a feather in our cap to have the Fantasy heard in—of all places—Ottobeuren, for this is just about the most remarkable example of rococo [anywhere], with a magnificent organ and spacious echo.” The “Fantasy” here is not by Mozart but by Bach: his Fantasia in G Major, BWV 572, for which, as Biggs wrote in the album notes, “the baroque splendor of Ottobeuren affords a perfect acoustical setting.”
Not the least of the rococo furnishings in the vast swirl of the church’s interior are the two extravagantly ornate choir organs completed by Karl Riepp in 1766 and renovated by the firm of Steinmeyer in 1914 and 1922.1 For this particular piece by Bach, the French accent of the larger, “Trinity” organ (four manuals, 49 registers) suits perfectly. And the recorded performance Biggs delivered as the ninth cut on the 1956 “Eight” album was a jaw-dropper in its own right. The coda alone, with fiery manual flourishes over the chromatically descending buzzsaw of a 16' Bombarde “to an insistent dominant,” was itself worth the price of the album. Among countless recorded performances of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue (including certainly his own rather plain one in Volume Five of “Bach Organ Favorites” played on the Harvard Flentrop), the performance he achieved at Ottobeuren on Friday, August 12, 1956, remains a stunner, easily the equal of its amazing setting. (See photo: Biggs at Riepp console, Ottobeuren.)

Recording cut short at Ottobeuren

Riepp’s “Trinity” organ stands on the “Epistle” side of Ottobeuren’s broad chancel, his smaller “Holy Ghost” organ on the “Gospel” side. On Steinmeyer’s many trips past the high altar under the gaze of visitors to the basilica (a three-star destination—“worth a journey”—in the Michelin Guide) to position and then to adjust his microphone, which he and Biggs had decided should be hung on the opposite side of the choir, in front of the lesser organ, Steinmeyer remembers feeling that decorum required him to genuflect at each pass. Had he failed once to do so? The sudden failure of a critical part in the Stanis-Hoffman oscillator that afternoon brought the Ottobeuren recording session to a cruel halt just as Biggs was moving from Bach to Brahms. It meant that for the rest of the tour they would have to perform a tricky, manual monitoring of cycle-control during each session, a major nuisance.2 (See photo: Finished too soon at Ottobeuren, page 27.) Ironically, they would soon receive this note from “boss” David Oppenheim, posted two days before the breakdown: “I am happy to hear that the Mozart trail is proving to be a negotiable one and that the equipment has settled down to doing its job.”
A half hour’s drive farther to the east on Saturday morning, August 13, brought them to a third example of baroque splendor, the monastery church at Irsee. The recording log entry for that visit consists of only one cryptic line: “the famous Irsee wobble.” And so they pressed on to examine organs at “Mozart sites” in Landsberg and Augsburg that weekend (not yet recording any) and arrived in Oettingen in time to dine bei Steinmeyer on Sunday evening. There, at the midpoint of their odyssey, they could slow the pace for two days, enjoy three nights of the Steinmeyer family’s hospitality, view the Steinmeyer organ shop—and finally get some laundry done.

An all-time favorite organ for Biggs

While the travelers recuperated from their two-week whirl of new places, Oettingen served as a point of departure for two day trips. On Monday, August 15 (the date Biggs had originally proposed for beginning the whole journey!), Steinmeyer took Biggs “down the road” to examine a 1948 Steinmeyer at the church of St. Georg in nearby Nördlingen, one of a trio of much-visited medieval towns along the Romantische Strasse. Biggs played some Brahms and Ritter on it, which they recorded to give themselves a chance to practice the “work-around” on the hobbled oscillator—nothing very inspiring for Biggs that day.
Tuesday, August 16, however, would present Biggs with one of the highlights of the trip. That morning, after another short drive from Oettingen, they came to the small monastery of Mönschsdeggingen, very much off all beaten paths. Here Steinmeyer introduced Biggs to an organ that he would later number among his 20 favorites of all time: the little seven-rank liegende Orgel (horizontal organ) of 1694, built by the Saxon (Lausitzer) Paulus Prescher (then working in Nördlingen). The instrument lies on, and partly below, the floor of the chancel, centered between the choir stalls on either side. In the manuscript of an unpublished (and undated—but probably post-1970) essay about his best-liked organs, Biggs wrote, “The pipes point away from the player “en chamade,” like so many guns on a battleship; the organ [thus] gains wonderful tone projection and accent.”3 It is precisely these qualities of course that Biggs most appreciated in any organ; and we hear them in full measure in the tuneful Little Prelude and Fugue in F-major, BWV 556 (accompanied, unfortunately, by a faint whistle that sometimes bedeviled the Ampex). Biggs’s choice to pluck this music from his portfolio that morning was a small stroke of programming genius, as fitting for the Prescher instrument as the selection of BWV 572 had been for the Riepp at Ottobeuren. Biggs must have carried a vast library of sheet music with him; but where did he keep it all? Steinmeyer has no recollection of any supply beyond the slender folder Biggs brought with him each day.

From Oettingen to Salzburg

Nine days remained before Biggs was to appear for his concert with orchestra at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, now rescheduled for the evening of Friday, August 26. After that initial “pass” through Salzburg, another week of Mozart-touring would follow, before a return for the sonata project in Salzburg Cathedral that would begin on Monday, September 5. On their way to the first Salzburg engagement they would spend August 17 and 18, Wednesday and Thursday, recording (along with pieces by Brahms, Reger, and Purcell) Mozart’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546, at both Ulm and Augsburg. (Condensing geography for the Mozart album, Biggs locates the prelude at Ulm, played on the Cathedral’s Walcker organ, and the fugue in the Pfarrkirche, Heilig-Kreuz, Augsburg, played on another Steinmeyer.) The party of four—Hanne Steinmeyer had joined the expedition at Oettingen—spent the afternoon and evening of Friday, August 19, playing (and recording to their hearts’ content) the automated musical instruments in the collection of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, to which Steinmeyer had persuaded “Verwaltungsdirektor Bäßler” to give them free access. There Biggs filled two reels of tape with such mechanical novelties as “Vierundzwanzig Trompeten und zwei Pauken,” followed by five more reels with numerous takes of the organ sonatas of Josef Rheinberger, his perennial favorite among “later” composers. He played the Rheinberger on the large Steinmeyer in the Festsaal of the museum.4 By noon on Saturday, August 20, the group had reached Innsbruck and environs where, for the rest of the weekend, they would explore possibilities for recording and make final arrangements to do so at Fügen, at Absam, and in Innsbruck’s famed “Silver Chapel” the following week, when they were to pass through the area again.
On Tuesday, August 23, the quartet reached Salzburg and settled in for the three days before Biggs’s Mozarteum “debut.” Between practice sessions with the orchestra for Friday’s concert, Biggs and Steinmeyer made a half day’s excursion eastward into the Salzkammergut for a recording session of little consequence at Bad Ischl; and later in the week Biggs recorded Brahms, Mozart, and motorcycles in the Church of St. Cajetan at the center of Salzburg, on the single most “authentic” Mozart organ he would find in his travels. In one of his notes, Biggs muses that he was hearing music exactly as Mozart had (except for the traffic noise), complete with the annoying sound of church’s strangely unmusical bell.

Playing Bierdeckel in Passau

With the Mozarteum engagement behind them, and with all arrangements completed for starting to record the sonatas a week later, the travelers set forth once more on the morning of Saturday, August 27. Steinmeyer drove them 200 km. northward, to the easternmost corner of Bavaria where, in the picturesque city of Passau, “piled” on an ever narrower tongue of land at the confluence of the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz, they would keep their 3:00 p.m. appointment to record Brahms chorales and Mozart’s dramatic K. 608 on the huge 1928 Steinmeyer organ in Passau Cathedral, another grand baroque space. After dinner on their second evening in Passau the four of them played “if you drop the coaster, you drink!” at a local Gaststätte. (See photo: Bierdeckel game in Passau.) The next morning, the Steinmeyers found themselves delivering curt messages between the two Biggses at breakfast: from Peggy, “tell Biggsy, please . . . ,” and from Biggs, “Well, please tell Peggy . . . .” Had one or the other dropped the beer coaster too often and downed too many draughts the previous evening? Had Peggy finally had enough of living out of the single suitcase they shared between them—only a fraction the size of the collection of gear they hauled around every day? Had all those noisy takes of K. 608 on “the world’s largest church organ” simply driven her over the edge? Steinmeyer has no recollection of the issue that morning but remembers that relations warmed again soon enough—probably long before lunchtime.

Repairs at Lambach

In any event, no visitor could stay angry for long at their next Mozart stop, on Monday, August 29: the monastery at Lambach, Austria, 100 km. southeast of Passau. “It is a beautiful place,” Biggs wrote, “with the courtyard buildings painted a jonquil yellow so that the whole place seems filled with sunshine whether or not the day [is] bright.” After the trip, Biggs remembered it as one of their happiest sojourns, despite some frustrating moments:
In the process of recording, we somehow dropped a minute screw vitally important to our equipment. [Steinmeyer: “Nothing less than the screw that held the recording head in place!”] After several fruitless hours of search for it we gave up, and returned disconsolate to the hotel. Next morning we were greeted by the smiling Abbot. He “couldn’t sleep” he said, and had arisen at four and searched the floor foot by foot by candle light and—minor miracle—he had found the missing part. Later that day, the microphone cable parted, necessitating metallic connection. A monastery soldering iron was produced, plugged in at the altar (where often is to be found the only electrical outlet) and repairs made right there.5
(See series of photos: Soldering at Lambach, pages 28–29.)

Up the valley of the Inn

On Tuesday, August 30, the travelers’ path led them southwestward, again toward Innsbruck. By the end of the week, Biggs needed to reach Feldkirch, at the extreme western tip of Austria near the border of Liechtenstein, where he was to play a concert on Saturday, September 3 (the second of the five that the American embassy in Vienna had arranged for him). On the way to Feldkirch, they would carry out plans laid the previous week for recording sessions at Fügen, Absam, and Innsbruck—located in a convenient row along their route up the valley of the Inn. In the parish church at Fügen (famed for Franz Gruber’s first performance of his carol “Stille Nacht”), Steinmeyer recalls everyone’s amazement at finding the seven-year-old son of the organist playing the “Mozart organ” with the virtuosity of a seven-year-old Mozart himself. (See photo: Another young Mozart?) Playing a handsome eighteenth-century organ in the Pilgrimage Church of St. Michael at Absam, Biggs recorded BWV 555, the last of the four “Little Eight” for which he had wanted to produce more “authentic” realizations than the ones he had carried home in 1954. And at the Silberne Kapelle in Innsbruck he competed with ceaseless traffic noise to record Mozart’s Adagio “for glass harmonica,” K. 356 (included in the Tour album), played on the chapel’s Italian organ of 1580, as well as music by Italian composers (never released). On the day after the recital in Feldkirch, Sunday, September 4, the Microbus with its precious cargo would retrace the long route eastward through the Alps to Innsbruck and then on to Salzburg. During that 350-kilometer grind across half of Austria, Biggs must have savored some sense of triumph at all that had fallen into place for the climactic week to come: a prestigious Mozart orchestra, an expert Mozart conductor, and permission to record in the most splendid of all Mozart spaces.

“An experience never to be forgotten”

On Monday morning, September 5, when Biggs and his team of “amateurs” carried their recording gear into Salzburg Cathedral (see photo: Arrival in Salzburg, page 30), they found a crew of hyper-professional engineers from Philips already at work, officiously setting up their fancy two-track equipment to record the project in stereo. Next to these Profis in their starched white laboratory coats, Georg Steinmeyer remembers feeling like a brash upstart.
That day he would be placing the microphone for the last time. As planned, he and Hanne would now peel away from the venture and go about the business of their move to America. With everything “set to record,” the two Steinmeyers wished the two Biggses Lebet wohl, sped away in the Microbus (without that load, how it could fly!), and reached Munich that evening. On September 11, Steinmeyer found time to send his friends a letter:
Dear Biggses, finally I have the time to write to you after being away from Salzburg almost a week. We arrived safely in Munich on the 5th in the evening. . . . On the 6th it took us from 8:30 a.m. until 4:20 p.m. to get through the whole visa procedure. With the baby it was not too much fun. We went back to Oettingen on the same evening, since a letter from Estey Organ Corporation was waiting for us. . . . We are finishing our packing at the moment and shall ship our trunks probably next week.

He went on to explain that Estey wanted him to come immediately, that the airline tickets the company had sent were expected any day, and that he would thus surely not be available to drive the Biggses from Salzburg to Frankfurt at the end of their Austrian circuit.
In Salzburg, meanwhile, Biggs found himself in his element:
There in Salzburg Cathedral, with acoustics on the same ample scale as Ulm, in the organ gallery where Mozart himself had once played the Sonatas, we recorded all 17 of these enjoyable works. The orchestra (the Camerata Academica of Salzburg) duplicated that used by the composer, and the director was Dr. Bernhard Paumgartner, leading Mozart authority. To complete the picture of authenticity, as far as possible only the organ stops in the present instrument that derive from the organ Mozart played were used. . . . The drama of recording there in the darkened cathedral through long evening sessions, with the Cathedral Square cleared of all traffic by the Salzburg police, is an experience never to be forgotten.6

Rehearsing during the day, the players mastered each piece so well (reading scores provided by Biggs) that they needed no more than a take or two in the evenings, and rarely an insert. The Diapason’s reviewer wrote, “The authentic atmosphere captured here apparently inspired all concerned to great heights—the results approach perfection itself!” And the reviewer for The American Organist agreed: “Playing and recording are uniformly excellent. . . . I feel increasingly indebted to Mr. Biggs for his outstanding contributions of this type.”
That the recording taken with a single microphone, placed by one who felt himself almost an interloper at the scene, should have been chosen by Columbia over what the crack team from Philips had produced still makes Georg Steinmeyer beam with pride. “Of course,” he concedes, “Columbia may not have had the means at that time even to process a stereo recording.” And yet it seems likely that Philips could easily have provided a monaural version if Columbia had asked for one. In any event, Columbia Masterworks was happy enough to release what the “Biggs team” had produced, with no further ado. And the reviews seem to have justified their decision.

“Salzburg Festival Tempo”

All in major keys, the sonatas differ from the two Fantasias, in their unsettling key of F minor, as day does from night:
Every one perfect in form, all seventeen are nonetheless quite varied in character. Some are of rare expressive beauty, as if for Christmas. Many are for festival occasions, particularly those with trumpets, oboes, and kettle drums. . . . It was in fact a remark of Dr. Paumgartner that led us to rechristen these engaging works “Festival” Sonatas. For Dr. Paumgartner accepted a compliment on his choice of tempo (in the C major Sonata that opens our recording) with the remark, “Yes, that’s the Salzburg Festival Tempo!”7

How grateful the un-churchy Biggs felt to be given a designation for these works beyond the customary “epistle,” or “church,” or even “short”! “Having noted their church origin,” he mischievously wrote, “one may as well forget it, for here is music to be enjoyed not only on Sunday but all through the week!”8 Finally, Biggs the connoisseur of “tonal clarity in the midst of reverberation” offers this characteristic observation:

It is worth noting how very cleverly Mozart writes for the spacious length of Salzburg Cathedral. Themes are strong and chordal in outline, so that the sound of orchestra and organ may pile on itself with fine effect yet without confusion.9

The measured tempo of the Paumgartner/Biggs performances sets them favorably apart from other recorded realizations of the pieces, especially considered as a collection. Most of the others sound almost frenetic by comparison, too over-energized to be enjoyed for more than one or two sonatas at a time. The graceful “swing” of the 1956 readings lets the seventeenth sonata fall as refreshingly on the ear as the first. Like Biggs in solo performance, these players seem to be listening closely to the music as they perform it. We can bet that the compliment by “someone” about the tempo Paumgartner set came from Biggs himself.

Homeward with his trophies

With the seventeen sonatas literally in the bag by the end of the day on September 9, the Biggses set off on Saturday, September 10, to keep their three remaining Austrian concert engagements (September 11 at St. Florian’s, near Linz, September 16 at Klagenfurt, and September 17 at Graz) and to continue exploring Mozart sites along the way. The far-flung concerts Angelo Eagon had arranged would take them, almost amusingly, to the most distant corners of Austria. For the one at Feldkirch, they had already journeyed far to the west. Now it would be 150 km. north, to the Monastery of St. Florian, for a recital on its “Bruckner” organ, then down the Danube to Vienna (200 km.), and finally to the southeastern provincial cities of Klagenfurt and Graz, close to the Yugoslavian border. The concert at Graz cathedral, on September 18, would place the Biggses 15 hours of travel time distant from the plane they were to board in Frankfurt for the flight home on September 21, according to calculations scribbled by Biggs as he planned their schedule for the final days.
Biggs kept the Ampex and all 84 tapes with him as the journey continued; but he must have sent the oscillator and all its accessories home at some point, possibly already from Linz following two post-Salzburg recording sessions: one at Kremsmünster on the way to Linz and one at St. Florian’s (in both cases, music of Brahms and Bruckner, none of it ever released). To avoid a repeat of the previous year’s nightmare (tapes long delayed in shipping and customs), Biggs wanted to bring his trophies home this time as part of his personal luggage. And it seems to have worked. Although he would still have to pay duty on the tapes’ contents, and leave them in the possession of U.S. customs in Boston for a week, payment could wait, it appears, until a final determination was made (by him) of the extent of the value of their contents.10 In the meantime he would have them to edit.
For travel from Salzburg to St. Florian’s and on to Vienna, the Biggses were accorded the services of an embassy car (a 1952 Plymouth station wagon) and driver. (After Graz, we can hope that they traveled by train, since it would have been more comfortable by far than by automobile, given the roads of the day and the mountainous terrain to be traversed. Steinmeyer points out that today’s ubiquitous car-rental agencies were unknown in the Europe of 1955; his own two rentals had been by special arrangement with dealers.) On their way from St. Florian’s to Vienna via Melk, Krems, and Klosterneuburg, the Biggses stopped to view Mozart’s reversed initials on the organ case at Ybbs, carved by him at the age of eleven. Biggs snapped a picture (see photo: Mozart’s initials at Ybbs, page 29), made his own pencil-tracing, and later began one of his essays about the trip by citing this curiosity:

M A W 1767—So reads the penknife signature on the organ case of the little church in the . . . town of Ybbs, on the Danube. Apparently Mozart was fond of inverting the order of his name—to Mozart Amadeus Wolfgang—and to announce himself as “Trazom.”11

As they had begun their tour with music-making at Kirchheimbolanden, so would they end it. On September 6, Biggs had received a sudden, irresistibly cordial invitation to return to Kirch-heimbolanden and play a recital there on the eve of the flight home from Frankfurt. He happily assented—in part, perhaps, because he liked the symmetry of it. On that flight home, he may have begun to compose the essay that added the symmetry of one last, very Biggsian, justification for his latest recording venture, now completed:

But why travel 15,000 miles with some 850 pounds [Biggs here ups the weight by 200 pounds!] of electronic equipment to record all this music? The spice of curiosity and the search for authenticity are the reasons, coupled with the conviction that the union of modern recording techniques with the arts of the classic organ builders is a particularly invaluable coincidence of the new and the old. By this happy coupling we hear music with new character and authenticity and we learn of organ building arts that have become almost forgotten.12

“Fifty miles of tape” Two weeks later, on October 8, he could already send this report to David Oppenheim:

I’m ploughing right into the 84 tapes, which are now safely through customs . . . and know that we have safely in the bag all items for the expected groupings: 1) All the Mozart music (“Down the Mozart Trail”), 2) the Bach “Eight little fugues and preludes” on eight historic European organs, 3) the Brahms “Eleven Chorale Preludes,” Opus 122 and some Bruckner—in eleven European Cathedrals.13

And on October 30 Biggs would write to him once more:

At last I’ve sorted out some fifty miles of tape and ploughed through stacks of photographs of last summer! And, as soon as convenient to you, I’d like to bring down the following for your consideration.

In “the following,” however, Biggs had replaced the Brahms and Bruckner with a program he proposed to entitle “Musical Fun in the Munich Museum,” with the sounds of all the automated instruments: “I think you’ll be tickled when you hear them,” Biggs wrote to Oppenheim, “In fact, you’ll grin from ear to ear at the ‘Twenty-four Trumpets and Two Kettle Drums.’” Oppenheim may have smiled, all right, but probably more at Biggs’s enthusiasm than at the prospect for any profit from the release of such a recording.
It would take less time to get the Bach album ready for release than the three-LP Mozart compendium simply because most of it was ready to go. Biggs had brought recordings of all eight of the little preludes and fugues back with him the previous year. But four of them dissatisfied him. He had wanted to replace these with versions to be played on more appropriate organs as he happened upon them on the Mozart trip. Notably, he tried each one of the four on only one organ, found the results pleasing, and put the piece away for the rest of the trip. The four replacements were these: No. 1 played on the Andreas Silbermann organ at Ebersmünster (replacing the big Schnitger in Hamburg), No. 2 played on the 18th-century Fuchs/Mauracher organ at Absam, Austria (replacing a modern Flentrop at Amstelveen, Holland), No. 4 played on the small Prescher organ at Mönchsdeggingen (replacing a modern organ in Hilversum, Holland), and No. 5 played on the Gabler organ at Ochsenhausen (replacing the Schnitger at Stein-kirchen). The others heard on the final LP, all recorded in 1954, were No. 2 at St. Jakobi, Lübeck, No. 6 at St. Jan’s, Gouda, No. 7 at Neuenfelde (hence no need for another Schnitger?), and No. 8 at Lüneburg (on the “Böhm” organ once played by Bach). Rounding out the album (some choice for “filler”!) would be Bach’s G-major Fantasia recorded at Ottobeuren.
Barbara Owen has rightly written that this album (fully entitled, Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, “played on eight classic European organs,” and released as ML 5078 in April of 1956, three months ahead of the Mozart collection), “deserved more attention than it received at the time.”14 Despite the sense one often has of hearing the music through a tunnel (or from the vestibule or outside a window) the easily discernable variety with which the nine organs speak makes for a rich collection. This album stands apart from the other three in the 1955–56 quartet in demonstrating how enormously different, yet uniformly appealing, older organs can sound from one specimen to the next.

“Bitten by the multi-track bug”

Until he heard an organ recorded in stereo, Biggs had not grasped the value of binaural recording for the instrument. He had assumed that any solo instrument would benefit little from spatial expansion. What he could not have known was that the space itself into which an organ speaks, more important for that instrument than for any other, would be precisely what stereophonic miking dramatically expands. It was, in fact, just before he began to edit his monaural Mozart recordings in late September that Biggs happened to experience the revelation of stereophonic sound. October 1 found him once more typing an excited note to David Oppenheim:

It’s certainly dangerous to go to the Hi-Fi Fair! One gets bitten [by] the multi-track bug! I didn’t believe that dual track recording meant much with the organ, but some of the demonstrations are very convincing. There are wonderful possibilities with some of the places we know in Europe.

Within two years, Europe would indeed provide the locus for Biggs’s first recordings in stereo. By then, he and Peggy would be exploring “Flentrop country” in their own VW bus, coming to know as many early instruments as they could find, and capturing Bach on the Schnitger/Flentrop organ at Zwolle for Bach at Zwolle, KS 6005, released in July 1958 as one of Columbia Masterworks’ earliest stereophonic LPs. For Biggs, real Bach country would have to wait at least another decade—but how it already beckoned to him!

Perhaps like Mozart

It should be easy enough to forgive E. Power Biggs (if forgiveness is in any sense required) for marketing himself and his instrument as successfully as he did. For the fundamental motivation behind his entrepreneurship was his own pure joy at music-making—and on the pipe organ no less! Yes, he made a living at it, and by all accounts a handsome one. But Biggs was one of those lucky few for whom the remuneration for “what they do” would also have been largely beside the point. The point for him was the music: making it the way he liked to make it, and sharing it on its own terms—as he saw those terms—with anyone who cared to listen. That legions became willing to pay good money to listen simply gilded the lily.
For Biggs, the music and the instrument were “the things,” and the church association of both nearly nothing. It must have been with some sense of identity with Mozart that he wrote for the A.G.O. Quarterly, “Once Mozart’s years as an organist at Salzburg were past, he did not seek a church position. Yet all his life he played organs all over Europe, and he did so for no other reason than that it gave him pleasure.”15 So, too, did Biggs “never again seek a church position” once he no longer needed one, and so too did he play organs all over Europe as much because it gave him pleasure as for any other reason.
Whether valid or not, the appearance of a kind of perpetual youthfulness in Mozart’s genius may have come to influence Biggs in his own development; for one can easily argue that he became more youthful in the application of his own special genius the older he grew. It is as if a Bach-like younger Biggs became more and more a Mozartean older Biggs. Whether Mozart enjoyed his own music-making more, or less, than Bach did his, no one can say. But the flourishes of exuberance that repeatedly erupt in his music—certainly in those “festival sonatas”—allow us to infer that Mozart might now and then have let out a whoop of glee at what he was creating, while we imagine Bach permitting himself merely a quiet smile of satisfaction (even as we may agree that Bach surely deserved to jump for joy at the excellence of nearly every bar he composed). Despite those seemingly “contrived-to-be-Bach-like” Biggs countenances that glare at us from so many of the Biggs/Bach album covers, we know that Biggs himself found a level of joy in his own music-making that seems to have been most akin to what convention, rightly or wrongly, imagines for Mozart. We know that Biggs, at least, saw in him the most joyful of music-makers and felt a kinship.

A third coming of the Biggses

After leaving Salzburg, Georg and Hanne Steinmeyer would not see their friends again until the day, one year later, when the Biggses’ Studebaker convertible, top down, rolled into the driveway at their first apartment in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was a sunny day in October, 1956 [editor’s note: 50 years ago to the month, of this issue of The Diapason]. Biggsy and Peggy had “motored” (as one did in those days) across Massachusetts on “The Mohawk Trail” from Cambridge to the Berkshires, to view the fall foliage and to deliver a special housewarming gift. From the back seat of the Studebaker Biggs produced a brand new Columbia phonograph, the latest model, and from the trunk a set of his current albums—foremost among them, of course, the ones Steinmeyer had helped him make.
Georg Steinmeyer still marvels at the magic of that record player: “It sounded absolutely wonderful to us. We listened and listened and listened. It was such a treasure—like nothing else we knew.” None of the excellent stereo equipment he has owned since has delivered quite the same level of psycho-acoustical excitement. We understand! The intervening decades have produced countless fine recordings of the same music played on the same, and similar, instruments. Technically, they sound ten times better than those old mono LPs—yet not one-tenth as thrilling.

Finally, by mid-September, Biggs had everything safely in hand; and, within a few weeks, he had distilled the countless takes into a program for The Art of the Organ that would fill four LP sides. (See photos: Biggs editing . . . and editing . . . and editing.) In the second week of November, he received the proofs and, after giving them a critical listen, sent this exuberant note to Howard Scott, music director at Columbia Records: “The proofs are grand, and it’s certainly a wonderful achievement to get so much on the sides. Hooray, hooray!”19
And yet there was trouble. Repeatedly, Biggs detected mysterious pitch variations and other gremlins creeping in at the mastering stage, and a hold had to be placed on production even after the album’s announced date of release, February 21, 1955. From March 3, we have this letter from Biggs to Howard Scott:
Many thanks for your phone call. Here’s a line to try to help solve matters! (1) Mr. Liebler has all basic unedited tapes, or he will know where they are stored. Record side 2 begins on spool 3. (2) The edited tape for record side 2 (prepared by Lothrop and Graham) must be under someone’s blotter! Basically it’s solid in pitch, and I’m certain that the considerable pitch ‘upsweep’ at the very end of Band 1 is not on the tape. (3) It would be grand if you can restore the tone quality of Record Side 2, since distortion (not present in the first test pressing) has crept into the current version.
In the meantime, the D-Minor project had gone smoothly forward. Already on January 13, Biggs had sent David Oppenheim copies of the two 25-minute tapes he had compiled (one for each side of the LP) with this note to accompany them:
Just a line to report that the D Minor collection turned out even better, I believe, than we had hoped. In fact, it’s a simply wonderful assortment of 32¢ bass notes, massive chords, contrast of manuals, and ear-catching die-aways. How enormously clever JSB was to create such effect from such simple musical means! . . . I think you may find that the D Minor could prove to be a unique hi-fi demonstration record, which might very well catch the fancy of people and exploit to the full the possibilities of speakers and equipment. Anyway, I hope you’ll like it!
Oppenheim did like it (it had, after all been more or less his idea). The masters were cut in no time, and the album released on February 2, with the title, Bach: Toccata in D Minor (A HI-FI Adventure), Columbia Masterworks ML 5032. Text on the album’s cover would aim to make it irresistible to the era’s new breed of high fidelity hobbyists: “Bach’s Toccata in D Minor recorded in matchless High Fidelity on 14 of Europe’s finest organs.” And Biggs’s own compelling essay on the back cover would offer this likely clincher:
So—here’s the “D Minor,” clothed in the sonorities of some five centuries of organ building. . . . With wonderful effect, the D Minor stirs up the latent echoes of the splendidly reverberant European cathedrals and churches, with a thrilling assortment of thundering bass notes, of discord resolving to concord, and of fascinating and lingering die-aways.
More weeks were to pass, however, before a glitch-free Art of the Organ album could finally make its way into the record stores as Columbia Masterworks SL 219. On March 26, already more than a month after its ostensible date of release, Biggs wrote to Oppenheim’s administrative assistant Florette Zuelke, one of his favorite contacts at Columbia: Here is the list [of addresses to which review copies of Art of the Organ should be sent]. It probably was not needed before, since SL 219 has gone into hiding. Incidentally, the suspense is terrific, and I do hope the album can burst forth again no later than early this week, for a huge response from all over the country and in Canada has resulted from our inclusion of European fragments in the CBS broadcasts. But it’s accompanied by a chorus of moans that no records are available!
The album’s strangely dark and gloomy cover (typical of many in the 1950s) superimposed a transparent map of Europe highlighting the cities in which Biggs had recorded upon a photograph of the traveler himself garbed in trench coat and scarf, clutching a military flashlight and a portfolio (of sheet music?). Presumably Biggs was to look the part of a cold-war adventurer or spy, but the hand-cropped photograph against a black background conveys more the sense of a latter-day Count Dracula on the prowl.
One must again wonder why, when photographs of Biggs himself were chosen for his albums, they reflected a personality so different from that of the real “Biggsy.” Only late in his career was the mismatch almost ludicrously corrected when Biggs appeared as a grinning dandy on the covers of his two albums of Joplin rags played on the pedal harpsichord, and as a costumed American patriot on the cover of his rousing Stars and Stripes Forever album, released in 1976 (the fruit of the last recording session of his life, conducted at the great organ in Methuen, Massachusetts).
The boxed Art of the Organ album contained, besides the two LPs of music by Sweelinck, Purcell, Buxtehude, and Bach, a glossy, 16-page booklet of photographs and anecdotal observations by Biggs about his adventures along the way. It also included an essay by Edward Tatnall Canby entitled, “King of Instruments: Supreme High Fidelity Test,” that celebrated the “record-ability” of classically voiced organs, thanks, as Canby put it, to their “tonal vigor and extraordinary intelligibility”:
The great stone spaces that house many of these organs create die-away times of more than four and five seconds, but in every case the notes of the music are distinct and clear, no matter how complex the counterpoint nor how rapid the figuration. The more closely you listen, the more revealing is this extraordinary clarity of detail in the midst of reverberation.

A generosity to the music

Much of the credit for the clarity that Canby praised must go to Biggs for his style of playing, which favored, as always, clean accent and transparent delineation of structures. And yet, as always with the “recorded Biggs,” it was something more than that, too: it is as if, while he played, he listened more critically than many another player to the real-time effect his fingers were producing, and adjusted the tempo and touch to apportion the musical space between notes and phrases to match the acoustical circumstances. We might fairly interpret this “giving” manner of playing as one more aspect of the man’s famous generosity—in this case to the music itself. He simply liked to give each note its just due, letting it register without compromise in its acoustical space before launching the next one upon it, no matter how lively the tempo. Over and over in his recording logs Biggs wrote “hurried” next to the takes that were to be rejected.
In another way, however, some of Biggs’s playing in these first two “field albums” falls below his normal standard. One gets a sense, understandably enough, that he is literally feeling his way through the older instruments, so very different from the ones to which he was accustomed. Barbara Owen has written, “With little time to practice on organs, which, however much he may have liked them, presented Biggs with unfamiliar and awkward console arrangements, some of the playing emerges strangely wooden and labored.”20 His bland choice of registration for the Sweelinck variations at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam pales beside the delightful sequence of colors he would give us eight years later, playing the same music on the lively Flentrop at Harvard.21 And some of the Pachelbel variations at Amorbach suffer from a similar lack of variety in registration (it is no wonder that Georg Steinmeyer may have wearied a bit of them on that long May afternoon).
But these are trivial quibbles indeed in the context of the sonic excitement that these two albums delivered in countless other ways. And the great adventure for our ears was about to continue. As Biggs nursed The Art of the Organ through its difficult birth in the winter of 1955, he found himself reading—with growing interest—the letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Soon he was plotting the route of the young composer’s travels on a map. Hopp—it was time for a letter to Georg Steinmeyer!
(To be continued)

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.

The author can be reached at [email protected] or [email protected].

“Why not just one more?”

The great number of takes and inserts in the recording sessions at Kirchheimbolanden reflect the typical tally for any stop on the trip—in total, more than 1500 separate segments and snippets amassed by the time Biggs flew home. At Kirchheimbolanden they consumed six reels of tape with 84 takes and 13 shorter inserts, most of them represented by the 68 takes of various sections of the F-Minor Fantasia, K. 594: four for the opening adagio, 50 for the allegro, and 14 for the concluding adagio. Biggs would play a piece all the way through once or twice, and then systematically work his way through it again, making several takes of each section. Then, having sprung from the bench to listen to parts of the recording, he would return to play a few additional inserts, sometimes of only a few bars, to have available if he should decide he preferred them when the time came to edit. Aside from extraneous noises, most of the takes would have nothing “wrong” with them. It is just that the advent of magnetic tape recording (still an exciting novelty in the early 1950s) enabled the luxury of so many easy takes that Biggs the “techie”—in parlance of today—could not resist the temptation to give himself every possible choice.16
Steinmeyer, without much to do at recording sessions once he had 1) dashed in to announce their arrival, 2) with Peggy and Biggs himself, carried all the equipment in (see photo: Ready to lug gear), 3) helped Peggy hook it all up while Biggs investigated the organ, 4) searched out and secured an electrical ground, and 5) stationed himself at the door to minimize interruptions, could only try to listen with interest and wait the session out. Everyone quietly rejoiced when Biggs would suddenly pull out an odd piece by Schlick, Murschhauser, Paumann, or Scheidt—among more than two dozen composers whose music he recorded on the trip—because they knew it meant the session would soon conclude. How did Biggs keep going for hour after hour? Steinmeyer offers one answer: at breakfast on the day of a recording session, he would ask the kitchen to fill a foot-high thermos half with coffee and half with hot water. “Sometimes that would be his only sustenance until the afternoon.”
Many a take did get spoiled by noise of course: traffic rumbling under the Silver Chapel in Innsbruck, a local train clattering next to the church in Mörlenbach, planes over Munich, radio interference at Ebersmünster and St. Florian’s, a pneumatic hammer at Lammbach, and even a town crier at Ochsenhausen. Everywhere they had to reckon with the hazard of barking dogs, bells at the quarter hour, and above all, of course, the visiting public. These were mostly Roman Catholic churches, to be kept accessible to the faithful at all times. Steinmeyer laughs aloud in recalling how often visitors would nod promisingly at his request for silence “because a recording is being made in there,” ease a massive door shut behind them without a sound, and then break into a great attack of coughing, “probably their first in months”; or perform an extravagant display of entering on tiptoe in big boots before clumping noisily across the floor to get a votive candle. Countless takes in the log bear the notation, “crash,” “great crash in die-away,” “three crashes.”
After two sessions at Kirchheimbolanden, on August 3 and 5, one on each side of their appointed day at the St. Bartholomeus-Kirche in nearby Mörlenbach on Thursday, August 4, to record a small organ presumed to have been played by Mozart before its removal to that neighboring town from Heidelberg Castle, they journeyed on to record, on Friday, August 5, a Fischer organ that had been played by Mozart in the castle chapel at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. In their session at Mörlenbach, they had found themselves recording almost as many railroad sounds as notes by Mozart and repeatedly chasing away the children who swarmed over the Microbus. Apologetic nuns finally collected their kindergartners, seated them on a curb, and “played hush-hush games with them” until the recording session had ended. “Then the nuns even helped coil all the cables.”

Sparrows at Ebersmünster

The party of three (Hanne Steinmeyer would not join them until the second half of the trip) spent the first weekend in Strasbourg, essentially confirming their assumption that their next recording session should take place not in the Alsatian capital at all but at bucolic Ebersmünster, half an hour’s drive up the broad Rhine Valley to the south. The westernmost example of south German baroque architecture, the splendid abbey church at Ebersmünster houses one of the region’s three well-preserved organs by Andreas Silbermann (the others are at Marmoutier and Arlesheim). Of Ebersmünster, where Mozart might have played, Biggs, in his first (later to be shortened) essay to accompany the 1956 Bach album, writes the following:

After we had found the little village, hardly more than a crossroads, with the great abbey building visible for miles around, and had spent the necessary time investigating the instrument and working out the music, it became clear that we had some assistants in the building. The music had stirred up a family of church sparrows, living in their nest built high on the vaulted ceiling of the church! They joined in the recording. Fortunately they were interested or courteous enough to be quiet whenever we were playing, yet as soon as music finished they would begin their discussion of the performance. Even in the few seconds of die-away between the prelude and fugue [in C major, BWV 553, first of the “Eight Little”], they squeeze in a few chirped remarks. Naturally these comments are left on the record. Not for a moment could we think of editing them out.

That family of sparrows may be as enduring as the 1730 Silbermann. They were still cheeping at Biggs when he returned to record “historic organs of France” in the late 1960s and continued to greet visitors throughout the 1990s. If any of the countless small clear window panes is missing at this moment, the sparrows of Ebersmünster are surely chirping there today.
After the morning’s session at Ebersmünster on Monday, August 8, the travelers drove eastward, crossed the Rhine near Freiburg, and climbed through the Black Forest to the “Mozart town” of Donaueschingen, at the source of the Danube. There Steinmeyer had arranged some recording time for them late in the afternoon on an instrument by his family’s firm more suitable for Reger and Karg-Elert than for Mozart. Biggs gamely recorded a few pieces by both of the moderns.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, August 9 and 10, the trio looped southward into Switzerland to view a few contemporary instruments that Steinmeyer thought Biggs might appreciate, then straight north again, skirting Lake Constance at the Rhine Falls, to begin their visits to a few of the scores of baroque churches that rise fabulously from the meadows of Swabia and Bavaria, and much of Austria. The spectacularly “baroquized” monastery church of Ochsenhausen became the first of these stops, on Thursday morning, August 11. Biggs’s choice of music to record on the visually stunning instrument (the first to be built by Joseph Gabler, in 1738, and his chief credential for earning the commission for his magnum opus at Weingarten), as colorful to the eye as to the ear, was the fifth of “Bach’s eight little preludes and fugues,” BWV 557, in G major. “Steinmeyer’s” microphone (see photo: Hanging the mike at Ochsenhausen, in Part 1) captured the clatter of the worn pedal trackers as faithfully as any lover of organ antiquity could have wished.17 (To be continued)

Creative freedom

Last Wednesday I was doing a service call at a church in New Jersey, where the Organ Clearing House installed a relocated organ a couple years ago. The pastor was holding keys as I tuned the reeds—a little unusual perhaps, except that this pastor was an organist before he was ordained. It was he who conceived and drove the acquisition of the organ, and we’ve enjoyed a friendly relationship since.

It’s a real pleasure for an organbuilder when a parish appreciates an instrument he has provided and uses it well. Along with the pastor’s affinity for the instrument, that church’s organist is doing a wonderful job finding his way around the organ, and using it creatively as he leads worship for the parish.

An organ tuner can tell a lot about a local organist by the character and quality of the list left on the console, and this organist’s lists are concise, accurate, and correct. When I commented on that, the pastor waxed enthusiastic about the organist’s work, and said something to the effect that although once in a while he disagreed with a choice, he knew he had to stay out of it and let his organist be creative. Terrific. How many organists out there would quail at the idea of working with (or for) an organist-pastor?

Yes, chef

A couple days later, Wendy and I went to the movies followed by a light supper at the friendly bar at the end of the block. While Wendy’s literary pull often draws us toward weighty films, this time we saw Chef. It included some personally painful scenes about divorced parents struggling to do right by their son, but otherwise it was fun, funny, and scintillating.

Carl Casper (John Favreau) is chef of a popular and prominent restaurant in Los Angeles owned by Riva (Dustin Hoffman). They learn that the big-shot restaurant critic (played by Oliver Platt) is coming to review the place, and Casper drums up excitement among the kitchen staff planning a special knockout menu. There are fantastic scenes involving a whole pig arriving in the kitchen in a big plastic bag, and a lot of mouth-watering test cooking. When Riva gets wind of this, he storms into the kitchen brandishing the regular menu and essentially orders Casper to present the usual fare. “It’s what we’re known for.” Casper protests, referring to their agreement that Riva wouldn’t interfere in the kitchen, but to no avail.

Predictably, the critic pans the place. Enter Casper’s son, the quintessential smarty-pants kid with a smart phone, who shares the resulting Twitter traffic with his dad. The critic has thousands of followers. Casper, the quintessential social-media newbie, pours fuel on the fire by mouthing off, thinking he was tweeting to the critic, and only the critic, and the fun really starts as Casper challenges the critic to return for a “real meal.” Hearing that news, Riva repeats his insistence, adds an ultimatum, and Casper storms out of the kitchen to find himself in an adventure that includes some mouth-watering food scenes and a hilarious caper with his ex-wife’s first husband. It’s all about creative freedom.

For all the saints

Fifth Avenue in New York City is a classy address, but with the Disney Store between 55th and 56th Streets, and the NBA (National Basketball Association) store between 47th and 48th Streets, it’s not quite as elegant as it once was. It’s hard to imagine Mrs. Astor or Mrs. Vanderbilt stopping in to buy an eight-foot-tall Mickey Mouse, even though either of them would have had help to carry it home. We’ll not discuss the Dennis Rodman sunglasses.

Halfway between these two tacky icons you’ll find St. Thomas Church. It’s a wonderful place for worship, a legendary place to hear music, and a refreshing respite from the million-dollar huckstering going on elsewhere in the neighborhood. (People routinely spend more on handbags in that neighborhood than I will ever spend to buy a car!) Walk into the nave and allow your breath to be taken away.

The reredos behind the high altar includes sixty figures of carved stone. I wonder if the artist proposed sixty-five, and the vestry voted to limit the project? People often refer to the “price per stop” of pipe organs. Do you suppose there’s a “price per saint” for a reredos?

In 1499, the 24-year-old Michelangelo completed Pietà, commissioned as the funeral monument to a French cardinal who was a representative to Rome. It’s a little over 68 inches tall and nearly 77 inches wide, and it weighs about 6,600 pounds. I did a Google search and learned that the current price of Carrara marble is $2.25 per pound. (Believe it or not, even though it’s prone to stains, people use it for kitchen counters. You shouldn’t carry coffee in paper cups inside St. Peter’s.) Looking at photos of Pietà, it’s hard to tell just how much of the original block of marble is left, but let’s guess that Michelangelo took away two thirds of the material to reveal his masterpiece. If so, the original block would have weighed 19,800 pounds. At today’s price, that’s $44,550. (I don’t know if that includes shipping.) Did Michelangelo’s commission specify the maximum weight and cost of the marble? Or did they simply provide him with a block? I wonder if Michelangelo tried to hold out for a larger block? Given cost-saving devices such as laser cutting tools, hydraulic cranes, diesel engines, and railroads, I bet the cost of marble relative to other consumer items is lower than it was in 1500. Just imagine the effort involved in bringing a 20,000-pound block down a mountain and 400 kilometers to Rome using technology available in 1500 AD.

A few years later, Pope Julius II commissioned Michelangelo to paint frescos on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo worked on that project from 1508 until 1512. I wonder if the Pope established a budget. I wonder if he put a limit on the number of scenes depicted. Did Michelangelo provide sketches for the client’s approval? I wonder if Julius II stopped in once in a while to check on the progress, and if so, did he ever put in his two cents’ worth about color choices? Did he pay attention to the vibrancy of the colors? “Mickey, that blue looks pretty rich. What’s the price per tube?” Did he fuss about how slow it was going? Or did he say, “Knock yourself out. Have a blast. Don’t worry about the cost.” I doubt it.  

A related thought: We have just finished dismantling an organ in a church where the pastor was downright unfriendly. I wonder if Julius II and Michelangelo liked each other? Early in the movie, the kitchen staff spreads the word to Chef Casper that “Riva is coming,” in sharp, explosive whispers. Think of Michelangelo’s young assistant hissing, “The Pope is coming . . . ”

You say you want a revolution…

In the early 1960s, the Beatles turned the music world upside down. The radical messages in the lyrics of their songs thrilled some people and terrified others. Old-timers fretted about the end of civilization, what with those hippie hairstyles and all. Funny, because looking at photos of the Fab Four from those days with dark jackets buttoned up, and skinny dark ties with white button-down shirts, they might as well be a quartet of congressmen—except they were too creative for that.  

Those songs were innovative and provocative. Millions of young people were influenced by them. And each of those millions has experienced the moment of hearing the Beatles for the first time in an elevator soundtrack—the music that changed the world reduced to twinkling away in the background. And what a gold mine is that twinkling. After pop-music icon Michael Jackson recorded a couple songs with former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney, Jackson seized an opportunity to incense McCartney by outbidding him to purchase the rights to the Beatles’ catalogue, putting McCartney in the position of having to pay licensing fees every time he wanted to sing Hey Jude.

According to the website Mail Online (of the British newspaper Daily Mail), following Jackson’s death, copyright laws allow the rights to return piecemeal to McCartney.  A revolution at what price?

Leave the driving to us

A week ago, I was waiting for a bus in the teeming New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, listening to a nondescript Vivaldi concerto for strings over tinny public speakers. I’ve been present for plenty of serious recording sessions where microphones and music stands are set about on a wood floor. There are open instrument cases strewn about along with half-finished bottles of water. A small group of musicians is playing their hearts out to the microphones for posterity. Together they listen to playbacks of each take, discuss, and start again. Do you suppose they realize that all that effort is destined for broadcast in a bus station? Does that define commercial success for a musical ensemble? Artistic fulfillment?

The parish organist spends all day Saturday at the console preparing a blockbuster postlude for the next morning. The recessional hymn is finished, benediction and response checked off, and he launches into it. Ten minutes later, with a paper cup of coffee in the narthex, the smiling congregants tell him, “The music was beautiful, as always.” I once appreciated that feedback, but when the same person says the same words with the same inflections week after week, year after year, it gets a little hollow. Was she listening? Did she notice anything special about it this week? Or does “as always” cover it for her, taking away the responsibility to listen critically?

Classical radio stations love listener surveys, inviting their audiences to vote on their favorite music. It’s like a sprawling focus group and allows the stations’ librarians to cull all that complicated overbearing music that no one likes from their record collections. No votes for Alban Berg? Out it goes. As a teenager listening faithfully to WCRB in Boston in the 1970s, I was already aware that it was a pretty short list of music they played: a Mozart symphony (number 40 in G minor), a Vivaldi concerto (Four Seasons), something by Respighi (Ancient Airs and Dances), another Vivaldi concerto (another season down, two to go).

The Louvre in Paris is one of the world’s largest museums with over 650,000 square feet of exhibit space. It’s the most visited in the world with nearly ten million visitors a year. There are more than 35,000 objects on display, but for most visitors only one is a focus point. It’s a painting about the size of a coffee-table book, thirty inches by twenty-one inches. Because it’s so very iconic and valuable it’s pretty much buried, concealed in a transparent vault. So many people throng to see it that most only get a quick glimpse. Of course it’s an essential artwork—enigmatic, mysterious, beautiful, wistful. But you can make more of your time in those hallowed halls if you simply don’t bother. Miss Mona will be fine without you. Go the other way and see all the rest of that glorious art at your own pace.

The art of organ building

It’s fun to wax poetic about organbuilding from the point of view of the humanities. The Greek physicist and inventor, Ctesibius (ca. 285–222 BC) created the hydraulis, widely considered to be not only a forerunner to the organ, but the actual first example of one. The remains of a primitive pipe organ were found in the ruins of Pompeii, the ancient Italian city destroyed by the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD. The organ in the Basilica of Valère in Switzerland, made famous by E. Power Biggs’s 1967 recording, Historic Organs of Switzerland, is accepted as the oldest playable organ in the world. Biggs’s jacket notes stated that the organ was built in 1390. Others now think it was more like 1435. But whether or not we need to quibble about a difference of 45 years, that’s a mighty old organ.

Twentieth-century organbuilders used sixteenth-century models as the basis for contemporary instruments around which developed a revolution in the trade. And many of those original sixteenth-century instruments survive and are played regularly, proof that such ancient ideals remain vital and relevant to modern musicians.

Organs built in the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries all combine the fruits of many skills. Take a close look at a metal organ pipe and marvel at the precision of the hand-drawn solder seams that join the various pieces of metal. Inspect the edges of leather gussets on a pipe organ bellows and see how the craftsman’s knife tapered the edge to microscopic thickness, just to ensure that there was no loose edge to get snagged and delaminate.

See the precision of the playing actions (either electro-pneumatic or mechanical)—how fast the notes repeat, how uniform is the touch and feel of the keys. And marvel at the glorious architectural casework, beautifully designed, built, and decorated to promote and project the instrument it contains, and to enhance its surroundings.

The company that built that organ is surely a collection of high-minded individuals, capable of the creation of such a masterpiece. But wait. You have no idea how many cooks might have been involved.

Art by committee

A church invites an organbuilder to present a proposal for a new instrument. He delivers a drawing or a model. Using blue tape, someone in the church marks off the space to be occupied by the proposed organ. That Saturday, the women of the altar guild arrive to prepare the sanctuary for tomorrow’s services. They see the tape outline—to them it looks like a police photo of a crime scene. They storm the rector’s office, demanding that the organ not cross a specified but imaginary line. Please don’t take offense, all you members of altar guilds. You do wonderful work and we’re grateful. But I know of one fine organ that was sorely compromised in the design stage by exactly this scenario.  

The same rector reviews the proposal. It looks a little imposing. Too fancy, too shiny. That organist has enough of an ego problem. Let’s tone it down a little.

The organist reviews the proposal. There’s no Larigot, there’s only one soft solo reed, and nothing at 32-foot. I’m not sure I can manage without a third (or fourth) keyboard. Can we beef it up a little?

The vestry/board of trustees/finance committee/session (your choice) reviews the proposal. No, our data suggests that we will not be able to raise more than…

And if the architect is still around, “How can you do this to my building?”

In the 1960s, comedian Allan Sherman (Hello muddah, hello fadduh . . .) produced a hilarious parody of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in collaboration with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops Orchestra. The recording of Peter and the Commissar was released in 1964, at the height of the Cold War—it was just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis—and using the familiar tunes and orchestrations of Prokofiev’s score (apparently no one had gotten their hands on those rights!), Sherman told in outrageous verse of how the fictional Peter had written a new tune, but had to obtain approval from the Commissars of Music before releasing it.

The Commissars had all sorts of ideas about how to improve it, including giving it the beat of a bossa nova—and gave Peter examples of their alterations to previous applications from famous composers like “Beethoven’s Fifth Cha-cha-cha,” “Brahms’ Lullaby Rock-n-Roll,” and “Pete Tschaikovsky’s Blues.” This kind of buffoonery was perfect for Fiedler and the Boston Pops. You can hear this terrific and biting romp online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFseskG8JTY.

Allan Sherman’s poetry reminds us of the stories of Julius II and Michelangelo, Riva and Chef Casper, Paul McCartney and his struggle to retain control of the artistic output of the combo that changed the world, and countless other examples in which a creator is disappointed by the influence of outside forces.  

One memorable line from Peter and the Commissar stands out: 

We all have heard the saying that is true as well as witty, 

A camel is a horse that was designed by a committee.