E. Power Biggs in Mozart Country, Part 3

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.

It is amusing to trace the metamorphosis of what was to have been little more than a concert tour of Europe in the spring of 1954—one already fiendishly long and tightly scheduled—into a recording venture without precedent. As the itinerary took shape for his first serious European tour, Biggs looked forward to becoming acquainted with many notable organs along the way (although it also seems clear that he had not yet developed any really visceral interest in historic organs per se, perhaps because he had not yet experienced the right one).1 By the end of January 1954, however, the idea of getting to know historic organs in Europe seems to have advanced to “actively recruiting” them for an exciting but still vaguely conceived purpose: a recording project of some kind—someday, somehow—that might link composer, instrument, and landscape.
Barely back in Cambridge after a month of concerts in California, Biggs headed straight for New York in the first week of February to test his “boss’s” interest in such a project. It was surely in this conversation—probably when Biggs spoke of “scouting” instruments—that David Oppenheim, director of Columbia Masterworks, made the innocently momentous, and in Biggs lore now famous, suggestion: “Take with you a small tape recorder and let it run while you play.”2 Oppenheim then continued, “Be sure to record one [same] piece everywhere. This will make [possible] an immediate comparison of all the different instruments you play.”3 Recalling this conversation two decades later, Biggs wrote, We visualized, as I remember, some little miracle-box about the size of a portable typewriter. For advice, we turned to the engineering staff of Columbia. After they had a good chuckle, they explained to us some recording facts of life. And by the day of air embarkment for Lisbon, our little typewriter-sized recorder had blossomed into 500 pounds of Ampex equipment. Excess baggage charges to Lisbon alone were astronomical.4
At twenty years’ remove, Biggs’s memory seems to have confused (or perhaps intentionally conflated) the relatively modest—if by no means trivial—162 pounds of equipment carried in 1954 with the much heavier and more sophisticated hardware they brought with them on the Mozart tour, one year later.5 In any event, Vincent Liebler, director of recording operations at Columbia Records, the engineer who must have been chief among the chucklers that day, agreed to oversee the creation of custom recording equipment suitable for use in the field. Liebler would try to have it ready a month before the Biggses’ departure in mid-April.6

More than “snapshots” of sound

The broadcaster in Biggs had leapt at the idea of capturing some “snapshots” of sound from Europe to insert in his Sunday morning programs. And, of course, he knew he would always have the D-Minor Toccata up his sleeve (like Bach, he imagined) to serve as the common denominator for Oppenheim’s “one piece” assignment. On the train back to Boston, Biggs must have rejoiced at the prospect of the recording equipment that he and Oppenheim had just commissioned. We can imagine his excitement to have been greatest of all at Oppenheim’s suggestion, before their conversation had ended, that they consider trying to do some formal recording already that spring. Oppenheim had even proposed that they contact Philips of Holland, Columbia’s affiliate on the Continent in the 1950s, to solicit their suggestions for possible locations and their assistance, perhaps, in making such recordings.
Biggs spent the weekend putting together repertory for three LP’s worth of Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Hindemith. And on Monday morning, February 8, he sent the plan to Oppenheim with these lines: “It was fine to see you last week, and I think things are working out in a very exciting way. . . . It’s possible that Philips may know of some particularly magnificent organ along our route, and if so, I’ll make plans to record anywhere that you or they suggest.” And then he added, “If this ‘formal recording’ does not take place, we could take all this material in our stride ourselves.” With this, we have the first indication that Biggs was prepared, with the help of his wife Peggy, and using the equipment that Columbia was compiling for him, to act as his own producer and recording engineer in Europe regardless of what Philips decided to do (which, as it turned out, would be little).
In the same outgoing mail that Monday, Biggs sent Liebler a copy of his itinerary and quickly received this acknowledgement:
We will start investigation of the power facilities in these various cities, and from that we can determine what type of power supply to incorporate in your new tape equipment. We will do everything possible to expedite this equipment so that you will have it around the middle of March. However, it is entirely in the hands of Colonel Ranger, who is building the equipment. . . . As for your coming down to go to school, this can only be done when the equipment is ready, and I believe the best place for this schooling will be in Colonel Ranger’s office in Newark, N.J. I will keep you informed of our progress during the next few weeks.7
Progress on the equipment went slowly, however. And it appears that “Colonel Ranger” may have turned the whole task back to Columbia’s engineers at some point with the advice that they simply purchase a standard Ampex 403 and modify it for battery operation. The equipment that Biggs had expected to pick up in mid-March would be barely ready by mid-April, uncomfortably close to his day of departure. In the meantime, the ever-alert audiophile in him had caught wind of a smaller Ampex that was supposed to be introduced before long.8 On April 5, however, Liebler wrote to dismiss that possibility and summon Biggs to New York for a lesson in using his new equipment:
We will be looking forward to seeing you early Monday morning, April 12th. We are doing everything possible to get the equipment in at that time. It seems that most of this equipment is not generally available across the counter, and it has become necessary to send out scouts to pick up the units that we want. . . . We can find nothing regarding a new light-weight Ampex portable being released around April 15th. The one we have settled for is the lightest two-unit Ampex available, and it should give you professional results. The power battery supply has been assembled especially for this Ampex. . . . I am looking forward to seeing you on Monday for lesson # 1.
With a long list of pre-departure errands still to be run in the few remaining days before the Biggses’ flight from Boston, lesson #1 in New York City probably remained the only lesson. But the electrical technician in Biggs—his original calling, after all—no doubt felt confident that no further schooling would be needed. As he and Peggy prepared to depart on Sunday, April 18, “the notes of his Easter morning CBS broadcast still echoing in his ears,” Biggs dashed off this quick note to Oppenheim: “Here we go! The equipment is certainly wonderful, and we are going to make every effort to make the most of it. Unfortunately, overweight payments to the airlines [for its 162 pounds] will come to about a thousand dollars, around the circuit, but there is just no alternative.”9 Oppenheim immediately cabled this (undated) reply to Biggs in Lisbon, his first station on the “circuit”:
SORRY ABOUT EXTRA TRANSPORTATION COSTS FOR EQUIPMENT WILL GLADLY PAY HALF OF COST OUTRIGHT AND OTHER HALF ADVANCED AGAINST ROYALTIES GREETINGS DAVID OPPENHEIM
Wonderful as Biggs judged the equipment to be, he nevertheless needed to cable New York for advice from time to time. Two weeks into the tour, S. E. Sorensen, one of the engineers at Columbia Records, responded to some of Biggs’s queries with this letter directed to him en route in London:
Dear Mr. Biggs: We are delighted to hear of your good progress. Keep it up. . . . Regarding the -1/2db level when playing the standard 1000 cycle tape, we feel that this is nothing much to be concerned about. Leave well enough alone. . . . Your difficulty with fuses may have been caused by starting the generator without its normal load. . . . We found it safer to leave the Ampex tape machine switch ‘ON’ and then starting the generator. In this way we are not subjected to a high voltage starting surge. . . . We are sending you five fuses immediately via this letter. Should you require more please advise. . . . We are all anxiously waiting to hear your recordings. We will report our comments at the first opportunity. . . . Best of luck from us all here in New York.10
And seventeen days later, he wrote this to Biggs in Copenhagen:
Dear Mr. Biggs: From your letter of May 17, we have concluded your principal trouble to be in your basic battery supply. Your entire success hinges on the use of good if not perfect batteries. For your future protection specify and order at least four (4) batteries connected in parallel for 12-volt operation. . . . Regarding your problem with the frequency meter, we can only confirm your suggestion of maintaining the 60 cycle reed at the 60 cycle point and by a very careful anticipating of the adjustment maintain it at its maximum excursion. Other than this we cannot advise you. . . . We have not yet listened to your recordings. We are looking forward to this experience. . . . Lots of luck.11
Between the laconic letters from Sorensen, however, came this upbeat and amusing note from the boss himself, dated May 13, mailed to Frankfurt, and addressed to both of the Biggses:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Biggs: I just want you to know that I am delighted that you are making such progress and that we can offer you both contracts as recording engineers upon your return to the United States. I am certainly looking forward to hearing the results of your work, and I trust that there will be some tapes on the way within short. . . . Please try to do a little relaxing, at least three minutes a day, and think of us here in the United States, from time to time, glued to our television sets watching the great Washington circus, of which you no doubt are made more than aware. . . Excelsior! David [Oppenheim]
(Oppenheim’s “Washington circus” surely refers to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which Oppenheim and his wife, the actress Judy Holliday, must have followed with keen interest, given Holliday’s investigation by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, four years earlier.)

700 “takes” and counting

Recording at every opportunity “around the circuit” between 40 concerts and broadcasts in eleven countries, Biggs filled 65 reels of tape (of the 71 they carried) with more than 700 individual “takes.” Peggy Biggs quickly became her husband’s expert monitor of meters and keeper of recording logs—not to mention his chief assistant in hauling all the equipment. The hardware to be carried in and out of every recording venue included the 58-pound Ampex 403P (P for portable—in two units, luckily), to which Columbia’s engineers had added circuitry and accessories to regulate the potentially unsteady 110 volt AC power produced by the special motor-driven generator they had designed (a 64-pound device that would in turn receive its power from a minimum of two—but ideally four—full-sized, lead-acid automotive batteries to be rented on the ground at each stop along the way), a twelve-pound microphone, and finally a utility bag containing several pounds of tools and connecting cable. Upon his return, Biggs wrote to Liebler, “Very many thanks for all your interest and wonderful cooperation in the whole venture. We both acquired blisters on our hands from lugging the stuff around, but it was fun.”12 (See photo: “Recording engineer” Peggy Biggs, 1954, on page 22.)
Philips played only an indirect role in the 1954 project. Its home office in Baarn, Holland, served first as the receiving station for a shipment of blank 3M tape from New York (sent from there, presumably, because the Ampex had been calibrated for the characteristics of that tape alone) and later as the depot through which most of the completed reels were shipped back to New York. Philips did no recording with Biggs until the following year when (as we shall see) its white-smocked engineers recorded the Mozart sonatas in Salzburg Cathedral alongside Columbia’s two “engineers in mufti,” Georg Steinmeyer and Peggy Biggs.
For the previous six months, Biggs and Steinmeyer had corresponded about concert arrangements (set, finally, for Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Munich, in that order), as well as about recording possibilities, car rental, and organ itinerary. Three years had passed since Steinmeyer had last seen the Biggses. Home in Oettingen again by the end of 1951 (after completing his one-year apprenticeship at Aeolian-Skinner in Boston and an adventurous auto tour of the United States), Steinmeyer first worked on his father’s project to restore the large Steinmeyer instrument at Nuremberg’s St. Lorenz-Kirche following its wartime destruction. It was there that he made the acquaintance of the “light of his eyes”: a young Nürnbergerin named Hannelore. For better or for worse, the Biggses’ schedule would place them in Steinmeyer’s responsible hands a scant five days after his wedding on May 8; and the bride and groom would in effect “honeymoon with the Biggses.” Steinmeyer’s last letter to the Biggses before their arrival had included this poignantly couched request concerning his bride:
If Hanne can get a few days off because of our wedding, would you mind if I ask you if she can join us for a few days? Hanne speaks English fluently since she is a German language teacher at an American school and since she has a diploma as an interpreter for English. She also loves music—and I think, besides all that, she is a nice girl. But I don’t know how much luggage you have and if you like to travel with a stranger. You will have so many impressions and so much to do, to see, and to hear on your trip that I would understand if you like to travel alone with me. Please do not hesitate to write me what you think. It is rather arrogant to ask you such a question—but I hope you will forgive me and see it as a matter which happens when people are in love.13
The Biggses sent an enthusiastic affirmative of course; and at their first recording session (in Heidelberg) Biggs would even tape an interview with the newlyweds.

Bringing the Mercedes to its knees

Steinmeyer stood waiting at the gate in Frankfurt when the Biggses’ flight from Berlin landed, shortly after noon on Thursday, May 13. He had made the five-hour drive from Oettingen that morning in the Mercedes 180 that Biggs had agreed to rent for the week, and had brought with him the two heavy, 12 volt, 125 ampere-hour, automotive batteries that Biggs had asked him to rent along with the car, for powering the AC generator. Half an hour before landing, the Biggses had flown over Eisenach, the town of Bach’s birth, and a destination beyond easy reach by Westerners in the years of the Cold War. Steinmeyer thus became the first to be told, under hugs and over handshakes, the story that Biggs would retell again and again, and eventually include in the booklet that accompanied The Art of the Organ:
On our way to Heidelberg from Berlin, we flew to Frankfurt, passing over Eisenach and gaining an unforgettable picture of this city, with its red roofs clustered together and sheltered by the hills. At this moment we were just one mile from Bach’s birthplace, yet with no chance to visit this historic spot. For we were in the Russian controlled area of East Germany, and—fortunately—one mile up in the air. Flying down the “corridor,” following the concert in Berlin, the pilot had allowed us to go up to the cockpit to watch the historic city of Eisenach approach. As the little village appeared ahead and passed gradually beneath the plane, the pilot asked my wife, “Were you born there?” “No,” Peggy replied, “but a friend of ours was, almost three hundred years ago.” “Must be an old friend,” was the pilot’s comment.
As the travelers claimed their baggage—more a matter of freight—Steinmeyer discovered that he had not been wrong to worry about how much his guests would bring, for when the combined weight of the recording equipment, the passengers, and their normal bags had been added to that of the two huge batteries in the trunk, it was enough to bring the Mercedes to its knees. At this point, Biggs was still carrying 56 reels of tape in metal containers (15 of the original 71, imprinted with Purcell in England and Sweelinck in Holland, had already been shipped homeward). In letters to his European contacts before he came, Biggs had almost laughably minimized the size of the tape recorder he would bring, still calling it “our own little amateur machine” long after he knew it would amount to far more than that. His aim, no doubt, had been to minimize fears of disruption and to deflect in advance any fees that some authorities might have been tempted to levy for formal recording. As late as March 11, for example, only five weeks before his departure and even as Columbia’s engineers were adding yet more weight to the Ampex, Biggs had appended this seemingly casual postscript to one of his letters to Steinmeyer: “P.S. We hope to bring our own amateur tape machine (instead of a Leica), and we hope to take a few musical snapshots of some of the organs we play.” Of course, he may not have been completely disingenuous in minimizing the nature of the equipment at that point, for we know that he was still hoping for the sudden introduction of a new lightweight machine by Ampex.

Rural color at Amorbach

If the weight of the recording equipment had come as one surprise to Steinmeyer, nothing had prepared him, either, for the countless hours they would all spend using it. To him (and no doubt to Peggy—not to mention to Hanne), the number of takes in each recording session seemed endless. On the long Sunday afternoon at Amorbach alone, they recorded 45 takes, averaging five apiece for each of the nine variations in Pachelbel’s partita, Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan. It is not that Biggs would flub his playing, Steinmeyer explains; rather, he simply wanted the luxury of several options from which to assemble (like Glenn Gould) one best version of each piece. And given the nature of the instrument, of course, he liked to carry away more than one set of registrations to have at his disposal when the time came to edit. Yet to Steinmeyer it often seemed that each new take was as good as the last—provided that no one had slammed a door or dropped a broom or sneezed or buzzed past the church on a motorcycle. Biggs’s final directives penciled in the margins of the recording logs (kept during the sessions by Peggy in small spiral notebooks and later typed up with more generous space for Biggs to add his editing notes) show that he nearly always combined two or three takes to make the definitive one: usually the beginning of one take, the middle of a second, and the final bars of a third (the latter, often, for nothing more than a better-sounding die-away). As he edited the Pachelbel partita recorded at rural Amorbach (for The Art of the Organ) Biggs delighted in retaining the peal of the abbey’s bells at one point and the crow of a rooster before one of the variations.
When scheduling recitals, Biggs liked to have at least one full day to get to know each instrument. On the days between the concerts in Heidelberg’s Heiliggeist-Kirche on May 15, Frankfurt’s Gnaden-Kirche on May 17, Nuremberg’s St. Lorenz-Kirche on May 19, and Munich’s St. Markus-Kirche (the church of Karl Richter) on May 21, Steinmeyer drove the Biggses to various instruments of note in the same countryside that they would be exploring more thoroughly one year later—although none of them knew it then—with the “recorder set on Mozart.” For now, however, the focus was on recording Johann Pachelbel, Nuremberg’s native son, and on adding more Bach D-Minors to the growing collection. Biggs recorded in four south German locations on the 1954 trip: in Heidelberg on Friday, May 14, playing the Bach Toccata (5 takes) and various pieces by Pachelbel (14 takes) on the 1948 Steinmeyer organ in the Heiliggeist-Kirche; then in Amorbach on Sunday afternoon, May 16, playing the Pachelbel partita (with its total of 45 takes) on the 1782 Stumm organ in the Abbey Church there; next in Nuremberg on Tuesday, May 18, playing further pieces by Pachelbel (22 takes) on the large 1952 Steinmeyer organ in the St. Lorenz-Kirche; and finally in Weingarten on Thursday, May 20, playing another Bach D-Minor (5 takes) and more pieces by Pachelbel (15 takes) on the 1737 Gabler organ in the vast Benedictine Abbey that looms on a bluff above the town.

The day at Weingarten

The log of their day of recording at the Baroque basilica of Weingarten, the largest church of its kind north of the Alps, offers a typical glimpse of both the frustrations and the satisfactions Biggs encountered while taping in the field. Through Steinmeyer’s “connections” (since he himself had been a member of the team that had just completed a major renovation of the organ), he had been able to gain access for Biggs to the fabled instrument for most of that Thursday. Steinmeyer had booked rooms at a small hotel only a few hundred feet below the abbey’s pompous façade, and Biggs, who had long ago learned that the dress of an English gentleman caused doors to open more briskly before him than did lesser attire—especially in places like Weingarten—wore his best pin-striped suit that day, complete, as always, with vest-pocket handkerchief. No public performance had been scheduled for Weingarten, but he dressed for the day as if he were to give one. (See photo: Biggs at the console at Weingarten, May 20, 1954.)
By shortly before 11:00 a.m., the equipment had been set up in a sunlit gallery to the south of the organ, and Biggs had finished exploring the resources of the imposing but gently voiced instrument, the prospect of which may be the most famous in all the world. (See photo: Ready to record at Weingarten, May 20, 1954.)
Peggy had donned her earphones, and Steinmeyer had taken his post at the main entrance to urge silence from entering visitors. Biggs drew his registration for Pachelbel’s Toccata in D Minor, and barked, “Take one!” In Peggy’s log, we read: “Take 1—with one note clock struck 11.” Then, “pitch variation at end of this—but no indication on dials”; and further, “Take 2—with door crash and mob of people.” Nevertheless, the combination of these two takes, plus one “insert” to make a repair, became Band 1, Side 2 of The Art of the Organ. (See photo: Peggy Biggs records at Weingarten, May 20, 1954, page 24.)
Despite the hazards of trying to make a formal recording under informal circumstances, Biggs reveled in the luxury of spending the better part of a day with the fabulous instrument. As the afternoon wore on, Steinmeyer recalls, the sun streaming through the great west window at Biggs’s back grew uncomfortably warm, but he played on and on. “We recorded until ten minutes to six,” Biggs wrote in his album notes, “and had microphone and all equipment down by six for the Monks’ Evensong.” In an article he would soon write for High Fidelity Magazine, Biggs promised hi-fi buffs that they, like him, would marvel at “the rich carpet of sound that rolls from the Weingarten organ.”14 And in that essay his own early electrical training would give him an elegant metaphor to explain the character of that sound: Gabler would never voice a pipe to the upper reaches of its tonal capacity. To achieve full and yet mellow sonorities, he would instead make stops of double pipes—two pipes speaking, one might say, in parallel. This produces a rich “amperage” of sonority on an unforced “voltage.”15

Back to the lowlands

After the concert in Munich that ended their week with Steinmeyer, the Biggses and all their equipment—minus the batteries, of course—flew off to continue six more weeks of recitals, broadcasts, and recording sessions. They traveled to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, then southward again to Paris in anticipation of a recital at Notre Dame that had been scheduled for Sunday, June 13. Immediately upon their arrival, however, on June 10, they learned that the event would have to be cancelled because of the sudden death of cathedral organist Count St. Martin. In one respect, the cancellation in Paris proved fortuitous for Biggs. For it enabled him to add still more days to the free time that had already opened in his schedule when Vienna and Salzburg proved barren of opportunities to perform that year. Upon learning of the cancellation, he wasted not a moment before cabling the new friends he had made in Holland and northern Germany two weeks earlier, to let them know that he would return even sooner than anticipated to take advantage of their readiness to help him explore further—and further record—the organs that had beguiled his ears first: those of the Dutch and German north.16
We, too, can be grateful for that expanded week of “study time” for Biggs. For it was in those ten days between June 11 and June 22 that he deepened his appreciation of the organs that would determine more than any other the course of his own aesthetic development: the sparkling Schnitgers at Steinkirchen and Neuenfelde, the robust “Böhm” organ in Lüneburg (a note survives from the organist there authorizing him to record as long as he wished on the evening of June 15, provided he played any composer but Böhm!), the bright “Buxtehude” instrument in the Jakobikirche of Lübeck, the 1736 Moreau organ that so “splendidly disturbs,” as Biggs put it, the vast space enclosed by the cathedral at Gouda, and the modern Flentrop at Amstelveen. Given Biggs’s predilection for clarity and “Apollonian individuation” in every realm of aesthetics, we can easily understand that he would be “bowled over” (a favorite expression of his) by what he heard—and felt beneath his fingers—while playing these organs. To him, the music seemed to spring from the instruments as if from living organisms. In them, he had found at last “the welcome feeling of on-the-beat accuracy” at his fingertips for which he had been waiting a lifetime.
Near the end of their journey, during a week of appearances in Iceland, the Biggses received good news from Vincent Liebler:
Just a line to let you know that we finally cleared the first shipment of tapes containing reels numbered 1 thru 8. I checked them with Mr. Oppenheim and they appear to be well recorded. If all the rest of the places have been recorded as well, I am sure you have achieved an excellent batch of material.17
Buoyed by Liebler’s report, a gleeful EPB and Peggy amused themselves on the final leg of their Loftleidir flight to New York by estimating “the total weight of pipes, wind chests, consoles, and other music-making material” that the Ampex had recorded: “Our guess was that the equipment had gobbled up the sounds of some two or three million pounds of organ weight. No wonder we became enormously fond of the machine!”18 Most of what the tapes had captured, of course, would be deemed unusable for one reason or another; recording on the fly had guaranteed that take after take would be marred by some great crash or other non-musical blemish. But there would be enough wheat among the chaff to enable two albums in 1955, while leaving some of the choicest material for cuts on the “Eight Little Preludes and Fugues” LP that would be released one year later as a companion to the Mozart set of 1956.

“May we start urgent inquiries?”

Biggs had hoped to begin editing his miles of tape the moment he got home. A letter to David Oppenheim dated July 5, the Monday after his return, provides a wealth of insight into his view of the trip, his hopes for the projects, and his tally of recording-related costs—in 1954 dollars:
It was nice to chat with you by phone on our return to New York last week, and here’s the promised outline of the music done and the places in which we recorded. . . . First choice for release, undoubtedly, is the three-record set Sweelinck-Buxtehude-Pachelbel, which carries out the idea of European music recorded in the very places in which these chaps lived and worked. It also brings an impressive list of famous organs and other notable cities. . . . I feel quite sure we’ll be ahead of any competitors, both in the musical plan and choice of places, but I guess we do have to move fast, in order to be first in the record market with the idea. . . . All tapes—nos. 1 through 71 plus six small tapes—should be here by now. . . . If they have not arrived, may we start urgent inquiries? . . . I have to bring down the Ampex that we used. It runs, but evidently went out of adjustment in the last week of the trip. If it can be adjusted, perhaps I can bring it back here [to Cambridge] and do a lot of the preliminary editing right away. . . . I’d like to discuss the general financial arrangement for the whole project. Air excess ran to just over $1000.00. Direct costs of handling equipment—taxis, some long distance car trips, contributions to churches, battery rentals, and other inescapables (which I have all itemized) add up to another $1589.00. There are also bills on hand for $1730.00 from Columbia Records for cost of equipment, all incidentals, and for tape shipments.
But where were those tapes? They had not arrived, and an anxious Biggs typed this note to Liebler, on July 8:
Since everything hinges on getting the rest of the tapes safely over here, and as soon as possible, I thought you’d like these [attached] complete details of the shipments. . . . I’m coming down to see David Oppenheim next Tuesday, and I will bring the Ampex machine for examination. . . . If there’s a studio free, I could even start work on editing some of the tapes—before seeing Oppenheim at 3:00 p.m. . . . On the other hand, if the Ampex can be restored to condition, and if I may bring the tapes back here, we can do all the preliminary editing without taking up any more of your studio time. . . . Although we can make a start with what we have, we do need all the tapes in order to extract the musical sequence of compositions we’re after—so here’s hoping your cables produce speedy shipments!
Liebler’s cables did produce speedy shipments, but the frustration had only begun. Declaration papers incorrectly prepared by Philips caused the shipments to be held in customs for weeks. At the end of August, fully two months after his return to the U. S., Biggs was still struggling to get his tapes. On August 29, he wrote to Jay Goeller at Columbia Records to announce that he would make a special detour to New York City on his way home from Toronto within a few days, specifically to retrieve more of the tapes:
I’ll pick up the tapes you already have, Nos. 61 through 63, 71, and 6 small tapes, plus the bulk shipment of 15 through 44 which surely should be delivered by then. If it isn’t, we’ll just have to badger the customs people, for they have had the tapes for six weeks now and it is outrageous that they should be held up this way.
GO TO CONTINUATION OF THIS ARTICLE

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.

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)

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)

Jeffrey K. Chase is a practicing attorney in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with a concentration in the area of estate planning. He is a member of the bar of the United States Supreme Court. Prior to becoming an attorney, he earned a bachelor’s degree in music literature and a master’s degree in musicology. He has been a published feature writer and music critic for The Michigan Daily and The Detroit Free Press and has also written for High Fidelity, The Diapason and The American Organist.

Professor Marilyn Mason’s Historic Organ Tour 55 last July featured visits to Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg and Prague, all enchanting cultural capitals or significant cities of the former Hapsburg Empire. Participants, greeted by our excellent, handsome and witty guide Almar Otjes, assembled July 11 in Budapest, the city of caves, spas and coffeehouses, for the beginning of a musical and historical adventure replete with congenial camaraderie, noteworthy organs, historic sites, and interesting food and wine.
Budapest is also the home of the Aquincum Organ, the oldest known extant pipe organ in the world, dating from circa 228 A.D. and unearthed only in 1931. Its name derives from the ancient Romans’ designation of its province (now known as Hungary) containing a plethora of thermal baths. This small organ is considered to be the prototype for all European organs. After this singular early appearance, the organ wasn’t to reappear again in Hungarian lands for a millennium and a half—until the final defeat of the Ottoman Turks in 1686—because, under the domination of the Turks, churches were converted to mosques, where organs were forbidden.

Organs in Budapest
Eager to begin our itinerary, we proceeded directly from the airport to the organ at St. Antal, a church built in 1947, with a rather plain interior except for its ceiling of interestingly painted decoration. We were impressed by the good acoustics and clarity of organ sound. This organ, restored in the 1990s, lacks subtlety of sound and is, therefore, especially good for loud and bombastic music.
The largest church building in Budapest (and the second largest in Hungary) is St. Stephen’s Basilica, built between 1857 and 1905. It is named to honor Stephen (c. 975–1038), the first King of Hungary, whose mummified fist is housed in its reliquary. Prior to playing this four-manual Angster/Rieger/Varadi and Son organ, we were introduced to its resident organist István Koloss (among whose teachers was Marcel Dupré), who demonstrated the organ. (It was also there that we were introduced to the young organist Norbert Balog, who assisted us on our visits to the other organs in Hungary on the itinerary.) Of special interest are this organ’s horizontal copper trumpet pipes.
Other organs visited in Budapest were those in the churches of St. Anthony of Padua and of St. Anthony at Bosnyak Square; the four-manual Rieger organ (1902) in St. Peter’s Franciscan Church; the neo-classic Empire-style Great Lutheran Church on Deák Square (the oldest Lutheran church in Budapest), which houses the first mechanical organ in Budapest; and St. Matthias Church, with its four-manual Rieger-Kloss organ.
Of particular interest was the new five-manual mechanical/electric action organ in the Bartók National Concert Hall. This fine organ, inaugurated in 2006, has 92 stops, 470 wooden pipes, 5,028 tin pipes, 1,214 reed pipes, and is one of the largest organs in Europe. A special feature is a sostenuto for all divisions. (See “A Concert Organ for the Béla Bartók Hall in Budapest,” by Burkhard Goethe, The Diapason, October 2008.)
Synagogues are rarely known for their organs because, unlike churches, synagogues rarely house an organ. But the very beautiful Great Synagogue in Budapest (also known as the Dohány Street Synagogue), with the largest seating capacity of any synagogue in Europe (1,492 seats for men and 1,472 seats for women), contains a 1996 Jehmlich of Dresden organ (Op. 1121) with two separate consoles. Both Franz Liszt (a Catholic) and Camille Saint-Saëns (a Jew) performed on the original organ in this synagogue.

Esztergom Basilica
Esztergom is one of the oldest towns in Hungary and was its capital from the 10th century until the mid-13th century. The red marble Basilica of the Blessed Virgin Mary Taken into Heaven and St. Adalbert, built from 1822 to 1869, is the main church of the Archdiocese of Esztergom-Budapest, the largest church building in Hungary, the third largest in Europe, and the seat of the Roman Catholic Church in Hungary. It is also the tallest building in Hungary, and its altarpiece depicting the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, by Michelangelo Grigoletti, is the largest painting in the world painted on a single piece of canvas.
This basilica’s organ is an 1856 Mooser, currently undergoing renovation and enlargement. It has five manuals and (only) 85 of the planned 146 stops, and contains the largest organ pipes in Hungary (about 35 feet long). If completed as planned, it will be the largest organ in Hungary and the third largest organ in Europe. At the time of its construction in 1856, this organ was the largest in Hungary with 49 stops, 3,530 pipes and three manuals. The present instrument preserves several stops from the organ Liszt had played.
During some free time many attendees visited the house on Csalán Road, on the Buda side of the Danube, which was Béla Bartók’s last residence in Hungary. It is now a museum honoring Bartók’s memory and displaying many of his collections and personal possessions.
Leaving Budapest on the way to Vienna, we visited the attractive Baroque Tihany Abbey and its two-manual organ in a nearly 250-year-old case. This monastery’s deed of foundation is the oldest Hungarian document preserved in its original form. Although mainly written in Latin, it does contain some Hungarian words and expressions and is considered to be the oldest written linguistic record of the Hungarian language. Joined there by Prof. István Ruppert, we journeyed not far from Lake Balaton to a nearby winery owned by Prof. Ruppert’s cousin, where we participated in a wine tasting and lunch. Satiated with good food and drink, we continued on to visit the three-manual organ at Zirc and then the 1989 Aquincum, Ltd., three-manual organ at the Holy Ghost Church in Györ, built during the Communist occupation.

Vienna
The twin-spired Votive Church in Vienna was built near the site of a failed assassination attempt on the life of young Emperor Franz Joseph in 1853. This church was constructed over 23 years (from 1856 to 1879) and, in commemoration and gratitude for the fact that Franz Joseph survived that attempt without even a scratch, his brother Archduke Ferdinand Maximilian (who later became Emperor Maximilian of Mexico) dedicated this church, whose name “Votive” means an offering given in thanks for deliverance from a hardship or difficult circumstances, as thanks for the survival of his brother.
The organ in the Votive Church is an 1878 Walcker with three manuals, 61 stops, and 3,762 pipes, mechanical action and cone valve chests. Damage during World War II necessitated restoration, and by 1952 Molzer had, with the exception of the wind supply, restored it to its original condition. Today it is regarded as one of the most distinguished historic landmarks of the art of European organ building. Our attendees had the good fortune of presenting a noontime concert on this organ.
That afternoon we took a side trip to Eisenstadt to visit the Esterhazy Palace, where Haydn had worked and which today houses the acoustically near perfect Haydn Saal; and, just up the street, we visited Haydn’s house, which is now a museum containing Haydn memorabilia.
The next day contained a very full itinerary, with visits to organs in five churches and one concert hall. The first stop was Vienna’s St. Stephen’s Cathedral, which houses two organs—a 1991 mechanical key and stop action four-manual Rieger organ, which is one of the largest instruments of its kind in Austria, and a 1960 Michael Kauffmann four-manual, 125-stop electric action organ with more than 9,000 pipes and which was financed by public donations (could this have been done today?!).
The Vienna Konzerthaus was opened in 1913 with a five-manual Rieger organ of 116 stops and electro-pneumatic action, which was restored in 1982. The lavishly decorated St. Charles Church (Karlskirche), begun in 1715 and completed in 1737, was commissioned by the Emperor Charles VI to thank God for answering his prayer to end the 1713 Black Plague. It is a splendid Baroque edifice designed to glorify the power and rights of the Habsburg Empire and contains an 1847 Seyberth organ that was restored by Hradetzky in 1989.
St. Michael’s Church contains a three-manual, 40-stop gilded pipe organ (1714) by Johann David Sieber; the largest Baroque organ in Vienna, it was played by the 17-year-old Haydn in 1749. It was in this church that Mozart’s Requiem was first performed as a memorial to its composer on 10 December 1791. In 1986–87 Jürgen Ahrend undertook a large-scale restoration of this instrument.
The Gustav-Adolph Kirche, named to honor a Swedish general who, in 1643, marched with his army to Vienna in the war of religions (the Thirty Years War), was built about 1835 and, seating 1,500 people with its double balconies (as has the Great Synagogue in Budapest), was the largest non-Catholic church in Austria. When it was built, Protestant churches were not permitted to have an entrance from the street, so the main entrance was off the yard (now it is on the street side). It contains a Carl Hesse two-manual, 32-stop tracker organ from 1848.
The Schottenkirche (The Scots Church) was originally built for the Irish Benedictines. (In the 12th century, when Ireland was known as “New Scotland,” Irish monks were invited to come to Vienna from Regensburg.) Since that time the building has suffered many casualties, and the structure extant today is not the original church on this site, but a Baroque-style edifice built from 1638–1648. The altarpiece in the Lady Chapel contains Vienna’s oldest votive painting of the Virgin. The great Baroque organist Johann Fux worked here about 1690. In this church on June 15, 1809, a memorial service, at which Mozart’s Requiem was performed, was held for Joseph Haydn, who had recently died in Vienna. The Schottenkirche choir organ is a two-manual, 20-rank Mathis instrument from 1994. The main organ is now a three-manual, 49-rank Mathis instrument from 1995.

Salzburg
The next day was our abbey day as we drove from Vienna to the charming town of Salzburg, birth city of Mozart. Our first stop was at the twin-towered Augustinian Abbey of St. Florian, the largest abbey in Upper Austria, where the young Bruckner had been organist, where he had written many of his compositions, and where, at his request, he is buried under the organ he loved so dearly. There are three organs in the abbey. The great organ, an instrument built by the famous Slovenian organ builder Franz Xavier Kristmann in 1771, was one of the most monumental organs in the Central European region and, until 1886, was the largest organ in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. At Bruckner’s instigation, in 1873 Matthäus Mauracher, Sr., rebuilt the organ to four manuals and 78 stops. Today, after two subsequent renovations, it has 7,386 pipes. An unusual feature of this instrument is that the reeds are not under expression.
The last abbey visited is the yellow Benedictine Baroque fortress Abbey Melk, constructed in the early 1700s. Of the great organ built by the Viennese builder Gottfried Sonnholz in 1731, only the case remains. In 1929 this organ was subject to “modernization.” In 1970 a new instrument by Gregor Hradetzky of Krems with three manuals, 45 stops, and 3,553 pipes on slider chests was installed in the old case. The organ in the vestry was built in 1986 by the Reil Brothers of the Netherlands and placed in the existing baroque vestry cupboards.
A visit to old Salzburg is like a time warp into history. Nestled picturesquely in the Austrian Alps, Salzburg was a principality under the rule of its Archbishop until joining Austria in 1816. The Kajentanerkirche, constructed between 1685 and 1697 and incorporating an abbey and a hospital, was built for the Cajetan Order, whose purpose was to recall the clergy to an edifying life and the laity to the practice of virtue, and to combat the teachings of Martin Luther. This church contains a one-manual Christoph Egedacher organ from 1672 that was restored by Rieger in 1982.
Salzburg’s Franciscan Church, the “people’s church,” experienced its last major renovation by the noted Salzburg architect Hans von Burghausen at the beginning of the 15th century. It is noted for its magnificent hall choir, which effectively reflects the fusion of light and darkness, one of this church’s special features. The tower houses one of the oldest preserved bells made by the master bell-founder Jörg Gloppischer in 1468. The organ is a three-manual Metzler from 1989.
From there we walked the short distance to the Salzburg Cathedral, where we played the three-manual west gallery 1988 Metzler organ, and also the two-manual Pirchner pillar organ from 1991. That afternoon we took a side trip to the Shrine of Our Lady of Maria Plain, a place of pilgrimage for more than 300 years that is situated on a hilltop with a spectacular view overlooking Salzburg. Originally the home of a 1682 Egedacher instrument in its choir gallery, today it houses a 1955 two-manual organ built by Georg Westenfelder of Luxembourg based on the presumed disposition of the Egedacher organ. The existence of the original Egedacher pipes of the Copel 8′ helped with the reconstruction. The hallmarks of the current organ are its marvelous sound and its sensitive action.

Organs in Prague
Surprisingly, with two exceptions, the organs we experienced in Prague were disappointingly undistinguished. When we arrived at St. Aegidius Church at about 4:20 on a Sunday afternoon, we were informed that our recital was to begin in about 10 minutes, so, with no time to acclimate to the organ, we were “on stage” before the public. The recital went off well. That’s show business!
St. Vitus Cathedral, a huge gothic church, was begun in the Middle Ages, but for various reasons completed only in 1929. Continuously full of tourists and the din of their footsteps and conversation, it is the home of a rather undistinguished Josef Meltzer three-manual organ built in 1929–31. From there we visited organs in St. Stephen’s Church and in St. Nicholas Church, where we played another recital, but this time with the advantage of rehearsal time.
Our Lady of the Snow, founded by Charles IV in 1347, was intended to be the grandest church in Prague, but only the chancel was ever completed. This church played an important role in the history of the Hussites, who were the followers of Jan Hus, a pre-Luther Protestant reformer.
In contrast, it was a real treat to play the Johann Mundt (1632–90) two-manual, 28-stop organ (1671–73) in a former Hussite church that is now called Church of Our Lady Before Tyn. Mundt, originally from Cologne, was one of the many foreigners who made Prague his home and who helped to shape the vibrant cultural life of this distinctive Bohemian metropolis in the north part of the Habsburg Empire. It is reported that when Mundt signed the contract for the construction of the Tyn Church organ, he claimed that this instrument would have no equal in the kingdom. The consensus is that this, the oldest pipe organ in Prague and one of the most representative 17th-century organs in Europe, was the organ jewel on the tour.
St. Ignatius, built from 1665–87, is a typical Baroque Jesuit church. Its stuccowork and statues of Jesuit and Czech saints are intended to awe people with the power of the Jesuit order.
The historic organ in SS. Simon and Judas, formerly a church and now a concert hall, was the last organ visited and the other Prague exception to organ mediocrity. It is reported that both Haydn and Mozart played this instrument. Not relative to organs but noteworthy was a Bentley with a boot on its tire parked outside the building. That was indeed a sight to behold! One would think that anyone who could afford a Bentley could afford to pay a ticket.
Like a meal with great food, with second and third helpings, the visits to the organ buffet in Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg and Prague, and the generosity of the respective resident organists, provided plenty of time to sample and savor the varieties and flavors of the various organs.