E. Power Biggs in Mozart Country, Part 4

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

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

“300 years ago, a fine perfection”

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

Steinmeyer: “The experience of a lifetime”

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

A neglected dimension of Mozart

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

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

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

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

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

More than one Mozart project for Biggs

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

“The whole thing has suddenly become clear”

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

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

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

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

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

The trail lengthens

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

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

Better than batteries?

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

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

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

New tasks for the Reiseleiter

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

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

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

“On the trail” at last

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

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

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

Biggs on the Mozart Fantasias

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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)

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)

John Bishop is executive director of the Organ Clearing House.

Whenever I’m demonstrating, playing, selling, or moving an organ, people ask, “How did you get into this?” I’m pretty sure every organist and organbuilder has fielded a similar question.

Roots
I got interested in the pipe organ as a pup. When I sang in the junior choir as an eight-year-old kid, the director was Carl Fudge, a harpsichord maker and devoted musician. When my voice changed and I joined the senior choir, I sat with other members of Boston’s community of musical instrument makers. I took organ lessons, found summer jobs in organbuilders’ workshops, studied organ performance at Oberlin, and never looked back. It’s as if there was nothing else I could have done.
As I’ve gone from one chapter of my life to the next, I’ve gathered a list of people who I think have been particularly influential in the history of the pipe organ, and who have influenced my opinions and philosophy. I could never mention them all in one sitting, but I thought I’d share thoughts about a few of them in roughly the order of their life spans. This is not to be considered a comprehensive or authoritative list, just the brief recollections of their role in the work of my life.
Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) was a prolific organbuilder active in Germany and the Netherlands. He was involved in the construction of well over a hundred organs—more than forty of them survive and have been made famous through modern recordings. As a modern-day organbuilder, I marvel at that body of work accomplished without electric power, UPS, or telephones. Schnitger’s work burst into my consciousness with E. Power Biggs’ landmark Columbia recording, The Golden Age of the Organ, a two-record set that featured several of Schnitger’s finest instruments. I was captivated by the vital sound, especially of the four-manual organ at Zwolle, the Netherlands, on which Biggs played Bach’s transcription of Vivaldi’s D-minor concerto from L’estro armonico. His playing was clear, vital, and energetic, and I remain impressed at how an organ completed in 1721 could sound so fresh and brilliant to us today.
Schnitger’s organs all sport gorgeous high-Baroque cases and some of the most beautiful tonal structures ever applied to pipe organs. Many of the most influential organists of his day were influenced by Schnitger’s work, which was a centerpiece of the celebrated North German school of organbuilding and composition.
In my opinion, Aristide Cavaillé-Coll (1811–1899) is a strong candidate for best organbuilder, period. No single practitioner produced more tonal, mechanical, or architectural innovations. Among many other great ideas, he pioneered the concept of multiple wind pressures, not only in a single organ but also in a single windchest. Big organs in large French churches had the perennial problem of weak trebles, especially in the reeds. That’s why the Treble Cornet was so important to Classic French registration—if you wanted to play a dialogue between the bass and treble of a reed stop, accompanied by a Principal, you used the Trompette for the bass and Cornet for the treble (remember Clérambault 101!). Cavaillé-Coll used one pressure for bass, slightly higher pressure for mid-range, and higher still for the treble. This required complicated wind systems that would be no problem for us today, but remember those were the days of hand-pumping. Imagine that for more than half of Widor’s career at St. Sulpice, the 100-stop organ had to be pumped by hand. Those poor guys at the bellows handles must have hated that wind-sucking Toccata!
Cavaillé-Coll’s organs created vast new possibilities for composers through tone color and snazzy pneumatic registration devices. It’s safe to say that without his work we wouldn’t have the music of Franck, Vierne, Widor, Dupré, Tournemire, Messiaen, Saint-Saëns, Pierné, Mulet, or Naji Hakim, to name a few. A pretty dry world . . .
Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) was a Scottish-born industrialist who built great companies in nineteenth-century America for the production of steel and many other products. The rapid expansion of the railroads formed a lucrative market for Carnegie’s products, and he built a vast fortune. He once stated that he would limit his earnings to $50,000 a year and use the surplus for the greater good. He gave millions of dollars for the establishment of great universities, notably Carnegie-Mellon University and the Carnegie Institute of Technology, and countless library buildings were built throughout the United States with his money. He loved the pipe organ and was a loyal customer of the Aeolian Organ Company, commissioning several instruments for his homes. His love of the organ did not carry across to religious devotion—he was cynical enough about organized religion that as he gave money for the commissioning of new organs for churches he said that it was his intent to give the parishioners something to listen to besides the preaching. In all, Andrew Carnegie and the Carnegie Foundation contributed to the purchase of more than 8,000 pipe organs. During the time I was a student at Oberlin and for several years after my graduation, I was organist of Calvary Presbyterian Church in Cleveland, where there was a large Austin organ donated by Andrew Carnegie.
Dudley Buck (1839–1909) was born in Hartford, Connecticut, educated at Trinity College, and studied organ at the Leipzig Conservatory in Germany. He was organist at Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York, for many years, was a prolific composer and an active concert artist. His studies in Europe formed him as one of a group of American musicians who brought European virtuosity to the United States. This in turn inspired the transition of the nineteenth-century American organ from the simple, gentle, English-inspired instruments of the early eighteenth century with primitive Swell boxes and tiny pedal compasses to the instruments more familiar to us, with significant independent pedal divisions, primary and secondary choruses, and powerful chorus reeds. The first American organ Renaissance was under way.
Ernest Skinner (1866–1960), one of America’s most famous organbuilders, was a pioneer in the development of electro-pneumatic keyboard and stop actions, and in the tonal development of the symphonic organ. His brilliantly conceived combination actions gave organists convenient, instant, and nearly silent control over the resources of a huge organ. Those wonderful machines can fairly be described as some of the first user-programmable binary computers, built in Boston starting in about 1904, using wood, leather, and a Rube Goldberg assortment of hardware. Mr. Skinner devoted tremendous effort to the creation of the ergonomic organ console, experimenting with measurements and geometry to put keyboards, pedalboard, stop, combination, and expression controls within easy reach of the fingers and feet of the player. He was devoted to the highest quality and was immensely proud of his artistic achievements. He lived long enough to see his organs fall out of favor as interest in older styles of organbuilding was rekindled, and he died lonely and bitter. He would be heartened, delighted, and perhaps a little cocky had he witnessed the reawakening of interest in his organs some twenty-five years after his death.
E. Power Biggs (1906–1977) was central to the second American organ Renaissance. He was born and educated in England and experienced the great European organs of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries before coming to the United States. Disenchanted with mid-twentieth-century American organbuilding and empowered by the introduction of the long-playing record (remember those black discs with the holes in the center?), he traveled Europe with his wife Peggy, recording those venerable instruments, handling the heavy and bulky recording equipment himself. He produced a long series of recordings of historic European organs, each of which focused on a single country or region and featured performances of music on the organs for which it was intended. This vast body of recorded performances brought the rich heritage of the European organ to the ears of countless Americans for the first time. Biggs’s recordings were an early example of the power of the media, made in the same era of fast-developing technology in which the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race was so heavily influenced by that mysterious new medium, television.
The response from organists and organbuilders was swift and enthusiastic. Dozens of small shops were established and important schools of music shifted the focus of their teaching to emphasize the relationship of organ music and playing to those marvelous older instruments.
In 1956 Biggs imported a three-manual organ built by Flentrop, which was installed in Harvard’s Germanic Museum, later known as the Busch-Reisinger Museum, now known as Busch Hall. Using that remarkable instrument, Biggs produced his record series released on Columbia Records, E. Power Biggs Plays Bach Organ Favorites, which became the best-selling series of solo classical recordings in history. Especially through the wide distribution of his recordings, Biggs was enormously influential, introducing a new world-view of the organ to the American public.
Virgil Fox (1912–1980) was a contemporary of Biggs, equally widely known and respected, who represented a very different point of view. He was champion of a romantic style of playing, celebrating organs with symphonic voices, lots of expression boxes, and plenty of luscious strings. His virtuosity and musicianship were without question, his lifestyle was flamboyant, and he was outspoken in his opinions, especially as regarded his artistic rival Biggs. Fox was determined that the “new” approach to organs and organ playing as borrowed from earlier centuries in Europe would not overshadow the romantic symphonic instruments that he so loved.
The rivalry between Biggs and Fox formed a fascinating artistic portrait and could well have been a healthy balance, but at times was vitriolic enough to become destructive. We had tracker-backers and “stick” organs on one side and slush buckets and murk merchants on the other. Those members of the public who were not interested enough in the organ to know how to take sides often simply walked away.
Jason McKown (1906–1989) was a right-hand man to Ernest Skinner, born in the same year as Mr. Biggs. It was my privilege to succeed Jason in the care of many wonderful organs in the Boston area when he retired, including those at Trinity Church, Copley Square (where Jason had been tuner for more than fifty years) and the First Church of Christ, Scientist (The Mother Church) that is home to an Aeolian-Skinner organ with 237 ranks. We overlapped for six months at the Mother Church to allow me a chance to get my bearings in that massive instrument. With forty-one reeds and more than a hundred ranks of mixtures, that organ was a challenge to tune. Jason had helped with the installation of several Skinner organs in the area in the 1920s that he maintained until his retirement, leaving me as the second person to care for organs that were sixty years old. He had prepared organs for concerts played by Vierne and Dupré, and though he never drove a car, he dutifully cared for dozens of organs throughout the Boston area, taking buses wherever he went. Jason’s wife Ruth was a fine organist and long-suffering key-holder. She had been a classmate and lifelong friend of former AGO national president Roberta Bitgood. I attended Jason’s funeral at his home church, Centre Methodist Church in Malden, Massachusetts, home to a 1971 Casavant organ. When that parish disbanded, the Organ Clearing House relocated Jason’s home organ to Salisbury Presbyterian Church in Midlothian, Virginia. Jason was a gentle, patient, and humble man who spent his life making organs sound their best.
Sidney Eaton (1908–2007) was an organ pipe maker and the last living employee of the Skinner Organ Company. He was Jason McKown’s co-worker and a long-time resident of North Reading, Massachusetts, where I lived for about ten years. I got to know Sidney when he was very old and quite crazy—I think he lived alone long enough to stop disagreeing with himself, and when he lost himself as his final filter he could say some outrageous things. One day I stopped by his house on my way to say hi and he came to the door in his birthday suit. Nothing weird, he had just forgotten to get dressed. Sidney told me about working next to Mr. Skinner as he dreamed up the shimmering Erzähler, the beguiling English Horn, and Skinner’s most famous tonal invention, the French Horn. Though it was often a challenge to find the line between fact and fantasy, I felt privileged to have had an opportunity to hear first-hand about some of our most famous predecessors. In his last years, Sidney road around town on an ancient Schwinn bicycle with balloon tires, a wire basket on the handlebars, and a bell that he rang with his thumb. He would lift his right hand and give a princely wave and a toothless smile to anyone driving by, whether or not they were an organbuilder.
Charles Fisk (1925–1983) began his musical life as a choirboy at Christ Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where E. Power Biggs was the oft-truant organist. He studied physics at Harvard and Stanford, worked briefly for the Manhattan Project in New Mexico under Robert Oppenheimer, and rescued himself to become an organbuilder. He apprenticed with Walter Holtkamp in Cleveland, Ohio, became a partner in the Andover Organ Company, and later formed the venerable firm of C. B. Fisk, Inc. My father, an Episcopal priest now retired, was involved in the purchase of two organs by Fisk. When I was growing up, we lived equidistant (about three blocks) between two Fisk organs, one in my home church and one in the neighboring Congregational church, where I had my lessons and did most of my practicing through high school. I didn’t know Charlie well but I did meet him several times and attended workshops and lectures that I remember vividly. I consider him to be the Dean of the Boston School of revivalist organbuilders—that fascinating movement that was well underway as my interest in the organ developed.
Brian Jones (still very much alive and active!) was director of music and organist at Trinity Church in Boston when Jason McKown retired and I took on the care of the complicated and quirky organ there. Complicated because it is in fact two organs in three locations, with a fantastic relay system and sophisticated console, quirky because it was first a Skinner organ, then an Aeolian-Skinner organ, and then continuously modified by Jason in cahoots with George Faxon, long-time organist there, and much beloved teacher of many of Boston’s fine organists. Brian understood the central position of that church in that city—a magnificent building designed by H. H. Richardson, decorated by John LaFarge, and home to some of the great preachers of the Episcopal Church—and the music program he created reflected the great heritage of the place. He brought great joy to the church’s music as he built the choir program into a national treasure. Otherwise polite-to-a-fault Back Bay Bostonians would draw blood over seats for the Candlelight Carol Service (now famous through the vast sales of the twice-released Carols from Trinity), and the 1,800-seat church was packed whenever the choir sang. I remember well the recording sessions for the second professional release, which took place in the wee hours of stifling June and July nights, the schedule dictated by the desire for a profitable Christmas-shopping-release. It was surreal to lie on a pew in 90-degree weather, tools at hand, at two in the morning, listening to the third take of I saw three ships come sailing in.
My Trinity Church experience included tuning every Friday morning in preparation for the weekly noontime recital. The opportunity to hear that great organ played by a different musician each week had much to do with the evolution of my understanding of the electro-pneumatic symphonic organ that I had been taught to consider decadent. And the weekly communal lunches that followed each recital at the Thai place across the street introduced me to many of the wonderful people in the world of the pipe organ.
My wife, Wendy Strothman, was organist of the Follen Community Church (Unitarian Universalist) in Lexington, Massachusetts, and chair of the organ committee when we met. I was invited to make a proposal to the committee for the repair and improvement of the church’s homemade organ for which there seemed to be little hope, but whose creator was still present as a church member. A spectacular 14-rank organ by E. & G.G. Hook fell from the sky as a neighboring U.U. church closed and offered the organ. With lots of enthusiastic volunteer help, we restored and installed the organ. I marveled at Wendy’s commitment to her weekly musical duties as she managed the rigors of her day job—executive vice-president at a major publishing house in Boston. When the organ was complete, the church commissioned Boston composer Daniel Pinkham to compose a piece for this wonderful organ. He responded with a colorful and insightful suite called Music for a Quiet Sunday, published by Thorpe Music. It includes about a half-dozen tuneful, attainable pieces and a partita on the tune Sloane. Daniel had sized up Wendy’s dual life and produced a marvelous collection of pieces aimed at the skillful dedicated amateur who worked hard to squeeze out enough practice time from a life filled with pressing professional responsibilities, not to mention raising a family. I write often about the brilliant big-city organists who I am privileged to know—their deep dedication, and virtuoso skills. Daniel’s reading of Wendy’s situation was a third-person insight for me into the joy of playing the organ in church as a sideline to a professional career.
There are dozens of you out there who know you’re on my list. Stay tuned. We’ll do this again.