Experiencing the Story: Oberlin’s 2017 Winter Term Trip to the Netherlands and Germany

Editor’s note: In 2019, Larry Palmer will celebrate fifty years as harpsichord editor for The Diapason. There is much to celebrate in his work, bringing us insight to this instrument!

Below, Larry presents to us his favorite column from these years, slightly updated, for your reading pleasure.

A letter from Johann Sebastian Bach

To: Professor Larry Palmer

Harpsichord Editor, The Diapason

From: Johann Sebastian Bach

Kk Kapellmeister, Emeritus

Via: SDG Millennial Communications Network (MCN)

Sehr Angesehener Professor Palmer,

I have been meaning to write you for nearly one-third of the past century to tell you how pleased I am that you and your colleagues are concerned with harpsichord matters in your journal The Diapason. It was really quite a shock to many of us up here when the harpsichord came back into fashion, for I had despaired of ever hearing my music properly performed on earth after the decline of my own preferred keyboard instruments. It has been heartwarming (for those, at least, who still have hearts) to note the steady resurgence of the harpsichord, an instrument which, in recent years, is even recognizable.

And the number and variety of performances of my music! I have been prevented from expressing my gratitude to my earthly admirers because of various celestial interventions. It has been a busy century or so here, too, you know (just trying to keep peace between Wanda Landowska and Sylvia Marlowe, each convinced that she plays my music the “right” way, has taxed even eternal patience)! Additionally, the arguments between Arp Schnitger and Aristide Cavaillé-Coll have been constantly entertaining, if a bit time-consuming! At any rate since a rare constellation of opportunity has aligned itself in Heaven, I thought it would be the perfect time since my departure from Earth to communicate through you to my many non-celestial admirers.

It would be lovely if your twenty-first-century players of my music could be a little more concerned with the music and musical communication and less concerned with the minutiae of articulation. Whether the wiggles of a trill go in one direction or another, or, even, whether each accrued fly speck in the score means something, is far less important than the music itself. Surely each player has enough intelligence to decide where an ornament will add something and where it simply gets in the way? (I’ve had to squelch quite a few ideas to the contrary from those organists Widor and Dupré since getting to know them so well here.) And please, stop squabbling about which type of instrument is my preferred one: a well-crafted harpsichord, responsive in action, resonant in sound, satisfies me immensely, as does a finely voiced pipe organ placed in a resonant space, preferably free of carpeting.

I have not come to like the piano any better for my music than I did at the court of King Frederick, and I must say that some strange sounds have wafted up here (what are those little silver plates on which you serve up music?) such as the ones with a well-known pianist playing the solo part of my F-Minor Harpsichord Concerto on his piano, especially since he chose to use a harpsichord as the continuo instrument in his misguided performance? Who comes up with such perverted readings of my music? It took me quite a long time to realize that it even was mine!

I’d like people to know that I don’t expect every performance of my larger works to be complete: cut and paste as necessary, just as I always did for specific performances. After all, my Aria with Diverse Variations, the work you call the Goldberg Variations, was meant to put a nobleman to sleep, night after night (and I gather from distant observation that many performances now manage to do that even for the less-than-aristocratic), so my dear student Goldberg stopped playing when his task was completed, and happily slipped away to enjoy his late-night libation, just as I used to get away during those interminable hour-long sermons at the Thomaskirche so I could warm my hands and drink beer at Zimmermann’s. And what a strange idea to perform all six trio sonatas in one concert! I, too, know they are wonderful pieces (and so modern), but I wouldn’t want to hear all of them in one sitting, nor would I want to hear six of my English or French suites in one concert.

But it is wonderful, and unexpected, to know that so many listeners still want to hear my creations. I am also delighted to see that some of you have been finding my little musical signatures and jokes, with which I was able to keep my mind active. Congratulations, Herr Professor, on noticing my backward signature in the B-flat Prelude from my Well-Tempered Clavier.  Keep looking: there are many more finds in store for the observant connoisseur.

And now I must bid you “Auf Wiedersehen!” I want to share some time with my wives and children, and see if our dear friend Isolde Ahlgrimm, who still calls herself the “Widow Bach” to the high dudgeon of both Anna Barbara and Anna Magdalena, would like to join us at our heavenly repast. After that we all have a required celestial computer class to attend, so you may expect more frequent communications from this sphere to yours in the future.

 —Your faithful JSB.

[Originally published in The Diapason, July 2000]

What a winter.

Our son Andy writes for a daily news service at the State House in Boston and gets to see his prose online and in print the next day. Writing for a monthly journal is a little different. You’re reading in May, and I can only hope that the giant gears that drive the universe continued to function properly and the weather is warm. 

I’m writing in March on the first day of spring. I’m in my office at our place in Newcastle, Maine, looking across the Damariscotta River, a dramatic and beautiful tidal river. We’re eight miles up from the Gulf of Maine and the Atlantic Ocean, and the tide chart says that we’ll have an eleven-foot high tide just before 11:00 this morning, a couple hours from now, so the ice floes are drifting north toward town with the tide. I can barely see the sea ice on the river, because my usual view is all but obscured by the piles of snow outside.

A couple weeks ago, the weatherman predicted a heavy snowfall, to be followed by rain. There were already several feet of snow on the roof, so we hired some local guys to shovel the roof, fearing that the added weight would be too much. Those piles added to the drifts already in place to leave six feet on the ground outside my windows.

We’ve spent a lot of time outside this week in eight-degree weather because we have a new puppy, and in spite of the cold, we’ve heard the calls of eastern phoebes and cardinals right on schedule. The wicked weather must be unsettling for these denizens of springtime in coastal Maine. Think of the poor ovenbirds, who get their name from the oven-shaped nests they build on the forest floor.

We’ve had about 90 inches of snow here this winter, which is plenty, but it’s a foot-and-a-half short of the all-time record of 108 inches set in Boston this year. Last weekend, friends and family there were rooting for the predicted snowfall to exceed the two inches needed to break the record—“if we’ve been through all this . . . .” I trust they’re happy with their bitter reward. 

Subways stopped running, roofs collapsed, and houses burned down because fire hydrants were buried deep beneath the snow. Local school officials are debating whether to bypass legislated minimum numbers of school days, because it’s simply not possible to make up all the days lost to cancellations through the winter. And the New York Times quoted the city’s guide to street defects, which defines a pothole as “a hole in the street with a circular or oval-like shape and a definable bottom.” An actionable pothole is one that’s at least a foot in diameter and three inches deep. I wonder what they call a hole that doesn’t have a definable bottom.

But baby, it’s cold outside.

It’s been a terrible season for pipe organs. Long stretches of unusually cold weather have caused furnaces to run overtime, wringing the last traces of moisture out of the air inside church buildings. Concerts have been postponed, and blizzards have sent furious drafts of cold air through old stained-glass windows, causing carefully regulated and maintained pitches to go haywire. One Saturday night, a colleague posted on Facebook that the pastor of his church called saying there would be “no church” tomorrow. The sewers had frozen and the town closed public buildings.

One organ we care for outside of Boston developed a sharp screech lasting a few seconds when the organ was turned on or off. After spending a half hour tracking it down, it was easy to correct by tightening a couple screws and eliminating a wind leak, but it had been a startling disruption on a Sunday morning. 

A church in New York City that is vacant because it merged with a neighboring congregation suffered terrible damage when an electric motor overheated, tripping a circuit breaker for the entire (poorly designed) hot-water heating system. Pipes froze and ruptured, the nave floor flooded ankle deep, and the building filled with opaque steam. A week later, when heat was restored, steam vented, and water drained and mopped up, the white-oak floorboards started expanding, buckling into eight-inch-high mounds, throwing pews on their backs, and threatening to topple the marble baptismal font.

My phone line and e-mail inbox have been crackling with calls about ciphers and dead notes, swell boxes sticking and squeaking, and sticking keys—all things that routinely happen to pipe organs during periods of unusual dryness. And I can predict the reverse later in the season—maybe just when you’re finally reading this—as weather moderates, humidity increases, heating systems are turned off, and organs swell up to their normal selves.

The floor squeaks, the door creaks . . . 

So sings the hapless Jud Fry in a dark moment in the classic Broadway musical, Oklahoma!. He’s lamenting his lot, pining after the girl, and asserting to himself that the smart-aleck cowhand who has her attention is not any better than he. The lyrics pop into my head as I notice the winter’s effects on the woodwork that surrounds me. We have a rock maple cutting board inserted in the tile countertop next to the kitchen sink. The grout lines around it are all broken because the wood has shrunk. The hardwood boards of the landings in our stairwells are laid so they’re free to expand and contract. Right now, there are 5/16′′ gaps between them—by the time you read this, the gaps will be closed tight. I need to time it right to vacuum the dust out of the cracks before they close. And the seasonal gaps between the ash floorboards of the living and dining rooms are wider than ever.

The teenager trying to sneak up the front stairs after curfew is stymied in winter, because the stair treads and risers have shrunk due to dryness, and the stairs squeak as the feet of the culprit cause the separate boards to move against each other.

The other day, working in my home office in New York, I heard a startling snap from my piano, as if someone had struck it with a hammer. I ran up the keyboard and found the note that had lost string tension. Plate tectonics. Good thing the tuner is coming next week. 

As I move around in quiet church buildings, I hear the constant cracking and popping of woodwork changing size. Ceiling beams, floorboards, and pews are all susceptible. But it’s inside the organ where things are most critical. The primary rail of a Pitman chest shrinks a little, opening a gap in the gasketed joint, and three adjacent notes go dead in the bass octave of the C-sharp side because the exhaust channels can no longer hold pressure. And there’s a chronic weather thing in Aeolian-Skinner organs: The ground connections to the chest magnets are only about a quarter-inch long, and near the screws that hold the magnet rails to the chest frames, where the wood moves with weather changes, the ground wires yank themselves free of their solder and cause dead notes.

Let’s talk about pitch.

Fact: Temperature affects the pitch of organ pipes. You might think this is because the metal of the pipes expands and contracts as temperature changes, and while that is technically true, the amount of motion is so slight as to have minimal effect. The real cause is changes in the density of the air surrounding and contained by the organ’s pipes. Warmer air is less dense. If a pipe is tuned at 70°, it will only be in tune at that temperature. If that pipe is played at 60°, the pitch will be lower; if it’s played at 80°, the pitch will be higher.

While it’s true that all the pipes involved in a temperature change will change pitch together (except the reeds), it’s almost never true that a temperature change will affect an entire organ in the same way. In a classic organ of Werkprinzip design, with divisions stacked one above another, a cold winter day might mean that the pipes at the top of the organ are super-heated (because warm air rises), while the pipes near floor level are cold. 

There are all kinds of problems inherent in the classic layout of a chancel organ with chambers on each side. If the walls of one chamber are outside walls of the building, while the walls of the other back up against classrooms and offices, a storm with cold winds will split the tuning of the organ. I know several organs like this where access is by trap doors in the chamber floor. Leaving the trap doors open allows cold air to “dump” into the stairwells, drawing warmer air in through the façade from the chancel. This helps balance temperature between two organ chambers.

One organ I care for has Swell and Great in the rear gallery on either side of a large leaky window. The pipes of the Swell are comfortably nestled inside a heavy expression enclosure, while the Great is out in the open, bared to the tempest. A windy storm was all it took to wreck the tuning of the organ as cold air tore through the window to freeze the Great. It only stayed that way for a few days, until the storm was over, the heating system got caught up, and the temperatures around the building returned to usual. Trouble was, the organ scholar played his graduate recital on one of those days, and there was precious little to do about it.

One of the most difficult times I’ve had as an organ tuner was more than twenty years ago, caring for a huge complicated organ in a big city. The church’s choir and organists were doing a series of recording sessions in July, preparing what turned out to be a blockbuster bestselling CD of Christmas music, on a schedule for release in time for the holiday shopping season. It was hot as the furnaces of hell outside, hotter still in the lofty reaches of the organ chambers, and the organ’s flue pipes went so high in pitch that the reeds could not be tuned to match. It was tempting to try, and goodness knows the organists were pressing for it, but I knew I was liable to cause permanent damage to the pipes if I did. It was a surreal experience, lying on a pew in the wee hours of the morning, wearing shorts and a tee-shirt, sweating to the strains of those famous arrangements by David Willcocks and John Rutter rendered on summertime tuning.

Mise en place

I started doing service calls maintaining pipe organs in 1975, when I was apprenticing with Jan Leek in Oberlin, Ohio. Jan was the organ and harpsichord technician for the Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, and had an active maintenance business on the side. I worked with him three days a week when I was a student, and loved driving around the countryside and rolling from church to church. (Many of my peers were trapped on that rural campus by a college that didn’t allow students to own cars.) I suppose in those days we did fifty or sixty service calls each year, and as my career expanded, there were some periods during which I was caring for well over a hundred organs, visiting each at least twice a year. I suppose the annual average has been around sixty a year, or 2,400 since those naïve days in Ohio. 

Each organ has peculiarities, and each has its own environment of climate and acoustics. The tuner-technician has to learn about each organ and how it relates to the building, as well as learning the ropes of the building itself. Over the years you learn where to find a stepladder, how to get the keys to the blower room, and most important, where to find the best lunch in town.¹

And speaking of peculiarities, organists crown ’em all. A professional chef has his mise en place—his personal layout of ingredients, seasonings, and implements that he needs to suit his particular style of work and the dishes he’s preparing. It includes his set of knives (don’t even think of asking to borrow them!), quick-read meat thermometer, whisk, along with an array of seasonings, freshly chopped or minced garlic, parsley, basil, ground black and white peppercorns, sea salt, and several different cooking oils. 

Likewise, the organist, both professional and amateur, sets up his own mise en place—cluttering the organ console with hairbrushes, nail clippers, sticky-notes, paper clips, cough drops, bottled water, even boxes of cookies. Sometimes the scenes are surprisingly messy, and these are not limited to those consoles that only the organist can see. Next time you’re at the church, take a look at your mise en place. Does it look like the workplace of a professional? If you were a chef, would anyone seeing your workspace want to eat your food? 

Care for the space around the organ console. Ask your organ technician to use some furniture polish, and to vacuum under the pedalboard.² Keep your piles of music neat and orderly, or better yet, store them somewhere else. Remember that what you might consider to be your desk or workbench—the equivalent of the chef’s eight-burner Vulcan—is part of everyone’s worship space.

Everywhere you go, there you are.

There’s another aspect of visiting many different churches that troubles me more and more. As a profession, we worry about the decline of the church, and the parallel reduction in the number or percentage of active churches that include the pipe organ and what we might generally call “traditional” music. But as I travel from one organ loft to another, peruse Sunday bulletins and parish hall bulletin boards, I’m struck by how much sameness there is. What if suddenly you were forbidden to play these pieces:

• Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring (you know the composer)

• Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (ibid.) 

• Nun danket alle Gott . . . (which of the two?)

• Sheep may safely graze

• Canon in D

• Hornpipe

• Etc., etc.

Each of these is a beautiful piece. There are good reasons why we all play all of them, and congregations love them. The same applies to choral music. We could get the sense that if we took away “ten greatest hits,” no organist could play for another wedding. Take away a different “ten greatest hits,” and no organist could play another ordinary Sunday worship service.

I know very well that when you’re planning wedding music, it’s difficult to get the bride (or especially, the bride’s mother) to consider interesting alternatives. And I know very well that when you play that famous Toccata, the faithful line up after the service to share the excitement. It would be a mistake to delete those pieces from your repertoire.

But if we seem content to play the same stuff over and over, why should we expect our thousands of churches to spend millions of dollars acquiring and maintaining the tools of our trade? Many people think that the organ is yesterday’s news, and I think it’s important for us to advocate that it’s the good news of today and tomorrow.

The grill cooks in any corner diner can sustain a business using the same menu year after year, but if the menu in the “chef restaurant” with white tablecloths and stemware never comes up with anything new, their days are numbered.

This summer, when many church activities go on vacation, learn a few new pieces to play on the organ. Find a couple new anthems to share with the choir in the fall. You might read the reviews of new music found each month in the journals, or make a point of attending reading sessions for new music hosted by a chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Here’s a real challenge for you—work out a program of preludes and postludes for the coming year without repeating any pieces. Can you rustle up a hundred different titles? You never know—you might find a new classic. Remember—every chestnut you play was once new music! ν

Notes

1. In the days when I was doing hundreds of tunings a year, I made a point to schedule tunings so as to ensure a proper variety of lunches. As much as you may like it, one doesn’t want sushi four days in a row! It was tempting to schedule extra tunings for some of the churches—there was this Mexican place next to First Lutheran . . . Wendy would say I have a lot to show for it. 

2. It’s traditional for the organ technician to keep all the pencils found under the pedalboard.

Sounds of the natural world

We have counted about sixty-five different species of birds in our yard in Maine. We have ruby-throated hummingbirds (3 inches long and .1 ounce), great blue herons (52 inches long and 51⁄2 pounds), and bald eagles that weigh in at around 12 pounds, have wing spans over 7 feet, and dive to the water at 100 miles per hour, miraculously surfacing with a fish in their talons. We have five different varieties of gulls (greater black back, lesser black back, herring, laughing, and Bonaparte’s gulls), and five of woodpeckers (downy, hairy, red-bellied, flicker, and pileated woodpeckers). We have crows, lots of crows, but we also have their goth-heavy metal cousins, the ravens.

We have half a dozen different bird feeders around the yard, so we see lots of our birds up close. Except for the pileated woodpeckers that are too big, all our woodpeckers come to the suet feeders on the deck, next to the hummingbird feeders that are the sites of pugnacious air battles. There is a definite pecking order among hummingbirds.

Recently, son Christopher and his sons, Ben and Sam, came for a weekend. We were sitting on the deck one evening, and five-year-old Ben started noticing the variety of birds coming and going from the feeders just outside the screen. I identified some of them for him and told him a little of what I know about them. Pretty soon he was identifying the birds himself as they returned to the feeders. I brought out a field guide, and Ben and I sat at a table on the deck for a full hour looking at the pictures and reading about the birds we were seeing, getting the hang of understanding the range maps, looking further into birds we might see in the area, and those we would never see here. The following morning, Ben picked up the guide and sat down with me for another hour. In an age when parents struggle with the “screen issue,” trying to find a balance between staying current and staving off addictions, those were a couple hours I will never forget.

The weekend after that visit, they all went camping. Chris sent a photo of Ben with field guide in hand, working hard to identify some slithery creature that another kid had in a plastic container. I do not know if this curiosity about the natural world will last long, but for now, Grandpa sure is pleased to share something special with a bright young mind.

Taking a glimpse into the natural world with my grandson refreshed my awareness of all that lives around us. (As I write, I am watching a pileated woodpecker tear up a tree, chips flying and insects scurrying.) And I do not have to be in Maine to be a witness. Last year I joined a group of New York University students in Washington Square Park watching a red-tailed hawk sitting in a tree eating a squirrel.

§

When I write of birds, many readers will think instantly of Olivier Messiaen, that giant of twentieth-century music who was so inspired by birdcalls. In earlier works, Messiaen included stylized, even perhaps fictional birdcalls in his music. At the Paris Conservatoire, Messiaen was a student of Paul Dukas, who encouraged all his students to “listen to the birds,” a suggestion that informed much of Messiaen’s music and life. He traveled the world notating birdcalls, accompanied by his second wife, Yvonne Loriod, who made tape recordings to back up her husband’s pen. And the calls that he collected are present in much of his music, often as direct quotes, and often as the primary substance of entire pieces.

One of Messiaen’s great works is his Catalogue d’Oiseaux (Catalogue of Birds), a suite of thirteen pieces for solo piano, each inspired by a different specific bird. The French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard presented this work in a unique series of performances at the Aldeburgh Festival in 2016. He programmed four concerts based on the time of day that the various birds are active, and played them outdoors, allowing the audiences to hear the local birds comment on the music. The first of those concerts started at 4:30 a.m., the very hour when crows start hollering in our yard in Maine. Aimard was a student of Yvonne Loriod, Messiaen’s widow, who performed the premier of the work, and to whom the music is dedicated, and he must have had many inspiring conversations with her about this great piece. You can read Michael White’s New York Times review of those performances at https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/arts/music/review-pierre-laurent-aim….

Follow the nuts.

Watching birds on the deck with Ben was fun for me, but there is another level of that activity, better known as “birding.” I know lots of people who can be called “organ nuts,” and many of those are also “train nuts,” so colleagues are well equipped to understand that rare breed of nut, birders. If you are hiking in a state park and run into a group of people with floppy hats, lots of pockets on their clothes, $2,500 binoculars (a.k.a. “binos” or “bins”), and camera lenses the size of howitzers, it is a safe bet that they are birders.

There are nearly a thousand different species of birds in the United States, and serious birders set off to site as many as they can in a single year. It is called a “big year” as hilariously chronicled by Steve Martin and Jack Black in the 2011 movie by that name. For most serious birders, a big year consists of 675 species. A new record of 749 was set in 2013, which was shattered in 2016 by four different people, with the highest tally at a whooping, oops, whopping 780. Because many birds are season and site specific, achieving a big year involves intricate planning and tens of thousands of miles of travel. In these adventures, identifying a bird by sound counts as a sighting, whether or not you actually laid eyes on the creature.

Most birds have several different distinct calls. There are multi-syllabic calls and warbles, and one-tone “notes,” and they are as different aurally as the birds can be visually. You would never mistake the “pew-pew-pew” of a cardinal with the raucous “caw-caw” of a crow. The raven’s call is similar to the crow’s, but down a fifth and dripping with attitude. Robins sing a rhythmic series of warbles, as do goldfinches, but the goldfinch’s song is an octave and a half higher. The song of the rock dove (a.k.a., pigeons) is a characteristic chuckling cooing while her demure cousin, the mourning dove, produces a similar tone quality, but in an ordered and measured cadence.

Any field guide includes page after page of sparrows that all look alike. They are distinguished by features like a little brown mark behind the eye, a black stripe on the crown, or a tuft of brown on the white belly. Even serious birders refer to “LBJ’s”—little brown jobs. But their songs are much more distinctly different from each other. You would never mistake the multi-octave swirl of the song sparrow from the dry trill of the chipping sparrow.

One of the more beautiful calls we hear at our place is that of the hermit thrush. It is an otherworldly, hollow trilling, easy to pick out near sunset in the woods to the north of our driveway. When you record it and play it back slowly, you can distinctly hear two different lines of music. And even more exciting, the various pitches are related to each other by the overtone series. Three cheers for Pythagoras!

All birds have a sound-producing organ called a syrinx, a two-piped structure capable of producing two pitches simultaneously. The various types of thrushes, which include our locally admired veery, have all developed complex songs that exploit the contrapuntal capability of the syrinx to the fullest. The world of birds brings one of the richest varieties of musical tone on earth.

§

The ancient Greeks and Romans each developed complex systems of gods and myths in efforts to explain natural phenomena they did not understand. We are all familiar with Zeus, the cranky and irascible god of the sky and thunder. The iconic image of a heavy bearded dude with a quiver full of lightning bolts was enough to make a humble farmer behave himself.

A Greek myth tells of Syrinx, a chaste nymph who was chased by the leering and persistent Pan. In an effort to escape, she ran to the edge of a river and pleaded to the other nymphs to protect her. In response, they turned her into hollow grasses that made haunting whistles when the frustrated Pan’s breath hit them. Pan cut the grasses to different lengths and fastened them together, making a musical instrument on which he could play tunes. From legend into reality that instrument was called, wait for it, the panpipe, or in ancient Greek, the Syrinx. (The word syringe is derived from the same root.)

The panpipe is the ancient forerunner of the pipe organ, so we have a mythical connection between birdcalls and the organ. All are wind-produced sounds. Different species of birds have hollow cavities like sinuses, specially evolved echoing bone structures, and other physiological features to help project their calls. The hermit thrush is a pudgy LBJ with a peppered white breast, less than seven inches long and weighing just a few ounces, but its call is heard clearly hundreds of feet away.

As the lusting Pan chased Syrinx to the bank of the river, to be rewarded only by the invention of a musical instrument, I wonder how many early musicians and craftsmen were inspired by birds to develop more sophisticated varieties of tone color.

Listen.

Over centuries, organbuilders have developed countless different organ stops, each distinguished from the next by the shapes and dimensions of their pipes. An experienced organbuilder, voicer, or tuner will automatically call up the characteristic sound of an English Horn when seeing the equally characteristic “Choo-choo Train” at the top of the resonator. Listen to a recording of colorful organ music or during a live performance and see how many different individual stops you can identify. How would you describe the difference between the timbre of that English Horn and an Oboe or Clarinet? In your mind’s ear, do you know the differences between those stops?

It is more difficult to identify by ear the stops that make up a big chorus, unless you are familiar with the given instrument. In the pews or on a recording, it is easy to tell that you are hearing a principal chorus, but is there an 8′ flute playing that darkens the chorus just a little? Maybe (watch out for lightning bolts) even a 4′ flute?

Turn that story around. You are sitting on the bench of an organ that is new to you, ready to register a familiar piece. Do you draw the same list of stops that you used last week on a different organ? Do you decide you cannot play that piece on this organ because there is no Tierce? You have an idea in your mind’s ear about how that piece could or should sound. Find the combination that comes closest to that. Or, find a completely different combination that sounds good. No one is insisting that the Mixture has to be on all the time. Choosing stops, especially on a well-balanced organ of good size, is one of the great freedoms granted to organists.

If adding an 8′ flute to a chorus is a subtle change for the listener, it is a magic ingredient for the organist, something like a dash of turmeric to make a subtle change in a recipe. It is actually a gift to the listener, because the chorus at the beginning of the fugue is just a little different from that at the beginning of the prelude or toccata. Some trained listeners might notice that, but with any luck, you will have lots of untrained listeners in the pews. Your subtle touches of registration will make your program more interesting. No one wants to listen to the same 8′-4′-2′-IV all afternoon, no matter how much they know about organ sound. Color those basic-four with a light reed, with a Quint, with a flute or two. Go ahead. I dare you.

Do you recognize the difference between the sound of a wide-scaled principal and one with narrow scale? Echoing the early twentieth century, it is increasingly common today to find two, three, or even four different 8′ principals on a single keyboard division. Why is that? Is not one enough? For how long would you gaze at a painting by Rubens if every time he used red he used the same red?

I was taught a few rules of registration in my first organ lessons. For example, it was suggested that you should not use a 4′ flute over an 8′ principal. Fair enough, you might say. But what if it sounds good? You are not going to be pulled over and given a ticket for playing in a “no flute” zone.

The listening organist can spare the listeners another ignominy. You draw a couple stops and start to play, and it sounds awful. Why? The cap of middle D-sharp of that Gedeckt has slipped and the pipe speaks drastically sharp. Do not use that stop. Couple the Postiv chorus to the Great, and you hear a great clashing clang. It might be that the exposed Positiv is surrounded by warmer air than the Great. When the sun goes down it might be fine. But for now, not so much. Turn off the coupler and find another sound.

The best performances of organ music come from musicians who listen as they play. If you do not want to listen, why should your audience? 

§

I leave you with another lovely episode from grandson Ben. His parents took him to early life music lessons that included introductions to lots of instruments. (He has a pretty good embouchure for the copper-hunting trumpet we have on the mantle.) In a recent visit, he and I sat together at the piano for twenty or thirty minutes. I taught him the names of the notes, how to find “C” (just to the left of the group of two black notes), and a little about how scales work. I asked what songs he knows, and he quickly gave me “Twinkle, twinkle.” I played the tune in the key of C and showed him how you can play it in different keys using scales based on different notes. I compared major and minor scales, and then played “Twinkle, twinkle” in the minor. He furled his little five-year-old brow, “Oh, Grandpa, that’s a very dark ‘Twinkle, twinkle.’”

This interview was first published in Dutch in Het Orgel 96 (2000), no. 5. Leonhardt had been made an honorary member (Lid van Verdienste) of the Royal Dutch Society of Organists in the previous year. Apart from small adaptations in the first few paragraphs, an occasional correction, and explanations, no attempt has been made to update the content of the article for this translation. The interview on which the article was based took place during the 2000 Leipzig Bach Festival. Leonhardt read the article before it went to the editor and was very pleased with it. I am grateful to the Royal Dutch Society of Organists and the editor of Het Orgel, Jan Smelik, for permission for its republication.*    

Gustav Leonhardt (1928–2012) was perhaps after Wanda Landowska—the most influential harpsichordist of the twentieth century. As Professor of Harpsichord at the Amsterdam Conservatory he introduced countless young musicians from all over the world to the interpretation of early music, especially the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. From his work with the Leonhardt Consort—with his wife Marie as first violinist—grew a limited but no less significant career as a conductor: Leonhardt’s contribution to the complete recording of Bach cantatas for Telefunken and his renditions of operas by Monteverdi and Rameau are milestones in the history of recorded music.

As an organist, Leonhardt has not become nearly as famous—perhaps because organists in general don’t tend to become famous in the way other musicians do, perhaps also because he limited himself to early music. Even among Dutch organists, Leonhardt remained an outsider. Therefore, his being made an honorary member of the Royal Dutch Society of organists in 1999 was an important recognition of a man who has helped define the way we have listened to and performed early music for more than half a century.

I spoke with Leonhardt in the summer of 2000 in Leipzig. He was chairman of the jury of the prestigious Bach competition for harpsichord; ironically, Leonhardt’s former student Ton Koopman held the same position at that year’s organ competition. I met the master after one of the competition rounds and we walked together to our hotels. Leonhardt is often said to have been formal; it is well known how he used to address his Dutch students with the formal pronoun u (pronounced [ü]; the equivalent of the German Sie); this must have come across as utterly prehistoric in the 1970s. But in fact, Leonhardt was extremely friendly; he conversed easily and openly about a host of topics. As we passed by the Thomaskirche, Leonhardt volunteered his opinion of the new Bach organ by Gerhard Woehl.¹ The conversation quickly moved from Woehl to Silbermann, and Leonhardt mentioned the organ at Großhartmannsdorf, which he played in the film The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach: “You know, that Posaune 16 . . . ” His face and gestures spoke louder than a thousand words. I asked why no organbuilder today seemed to be able to make such a Posaune. “Look,” he said dryly yet firmly, “first of all, you have to want it.”

In 2000, at 72, Leonhardt was very much alive and well, still playing some 100 concerts a year. For a concert in Göteborg that year, he didn’t even have a hotel: he arrived in the morning, played a concert in the afternoon, and flew on to Portugal in the evening for a concert the next day. I asked whether he enjoyed traveling; he shrugged: “I mean, it’s simply part of it.” Leonhardt was happy to have the interview on his ‘free’ Friday, when there were no competition rounds. “But if you don’t mind, could we do it early?” What is early, 9 am? “Well, earlier would be fine too.” 8:30, 8 am? “Just fine.” It sounded as if 6:30 would have been OK too.

Jan-Piet Knijff: How did you become interested in organ and harpsichord?

Gustav Leonhardt: Through my parents, I think. They weren’t professional musicians—my father was a businessman—but they were enthusiastic amateurs. What was rather unusual was that, even before the Second World War, we had a harpsichord at home, a Neupert, a small one.² My parents played Beethoven and Brahms for pleasure, but from time to time also Bach and Telemann. Apparently they thought they had to buy a harpsichord for that. I had to learn how to play the piano as a boy; I mean, had to, it was simply a part of life. I don’t remember liking it very much. When the harpsichord came, they let me play written-out figured-bass parts. I didn’t care much for it, but of course, it must have shaped my musicality. During the last few years of the war there was no school, no water, no electricity. Marvelous, of course—especially that there was no school! Moreover, I turned sixteen that year, so I more or less had to hide from the Germans. My brother and I took turns being on the lookout. It was all very exciting. During that time, I was so attracted to the harpsichord. And since there was little else to do, I simply played all the time. And of course, there was the enormous love of Bach. Dad was on the Board of the [Dutch] Bach Society, where Anthon van der Horst conducted.³ At fifteen, I started studying music theory privately with van der Horst. Yes, that I enjoyed very much. I often pulled stops for him at concerts. That’s really where my love of organs comes from.

J-PK: You went to study in Basel. Would it not have been logical to study in Amsterdam with van
der Horst?

GL: Maybe, but harpsichord was high on my wish list too. And the Schola Cantorum in Basel was at the time the only place in the world where one could study early music in all its facets, including chamber music and theory. It pulled like a magnet: I had to go there.

That was in 1947, only a few years after the war, and Holland was really still a poor country at the time. There was very little foreign currency, so studying in Switzerland was not all that easy. Thankfully, my father had business contacts, so from time to time, I went on bicycle from Basel to Schaffhausen to pick up an envelope with Swiss francs . . .⁴ I studied both organ and harpsichord with Eduard Müller, for whom I still have the greatest admiration and respect.

J-PK: Can you tell me more about him?

GL: He was first and foremost an excellent organist, who in addition was asked to teach harpsichord, I think. He was the organist at a terrible organ, but whenever a new tracker was built—Kuhn or Metzler in those days—we went to try it out, right away, you know.

The way people played Bach on the organ was still pretty dreadful at the time, with many registration changes, swell box, that kind of thing. But even then, Müller played completely differently. For example, he would tell you that it was common to change manuals in this-or-that bar, but that that was simply impossible, because you would break the tenor line in two! So I learned from him to analyze very ‘cleanly’ and to use that as the basis for my performance.

Harpsichord playing was still very primitive in those days. The instruments I played on in Basel were simply awful. It wasn’t until later that I came to know historic instruments. The idea that you used different types of harpsichords—French, Italian—didn’t play a role at all. I did collect pictures of historic instruments, but really without wondering what they might sound like.

Strangely enough, Müller was not at all interested in historic instruments as far as harpsichords went. On the other hand, he was very precise with articulation. You had to play exactly the way Bach wrote. Bach was the order of the day. A little piece by Froberger or Couperin every now and then, but mostly Bach, really. August Wenzinger,⁵ with whom I studied chamber music, was much broader in that regard. He played the whole repertoire: French, Italian, and the seventeenth century as well. We also had to sing in the choir, Senfl and Josquin, but also monody. That was a revelation. We had Ina Lohr,⁶ who was the first to use the old solmisation system again as the basis of her theory classes. Everything was incredibly interesting.

Look, things were kind of black-and-white at the time. On the one hand there was Romanticism, and that was horrible, so you wanted something different. The Neue Sachlichkeit played an important role. I think I actually played very dryly in those days.

J-PK: Many people would argue that you still played dryly many years later.

GL: Everyone is free to think whatever they want, but I personally think I have allowed much more emotion in my performances over the years.

J-PK: Were there still others who influenced you as a young musician?

GL: [Immediately] Hans Brandts Buys.⁷ We lived in Laren, near Hilversum [between Amsterdam and Utrecht—JPK]. I played cello as well, and I sometimes played the cello in cantata performances he directed. I never studied with him, but he had an enormous library, most of all about Bach. In one word: a dream. I used to spend hours there, browsing, making notes. Brandts Buys also had a two-manual harpsichord, something quite unusual at the time. He had an enormous respect for what the composer had written. I learned that from him.

After my studies I got to know Alfred Deller, the famous countertenor.⁸ I had heard a tiny gramophone record of his and was incredibly impressed. It showed that singing could be more than a dead tone with tons of vibrato. Diction: that was what it was all about. The tone helps the diction. Deller was a master in this regard. That is incredibly important to me. We organists and harpsichordists have to think dynamically too. We have to shape the tone.

J-PK: After your studies you became Professor of Harpsichord in Vienna.

GL: Well, I mean, I taught there and yes, it was called ‘Professor.’ I actually went to Vienna to study conducting, even though it did not interest me very much. I don’t even remember now why I did it. It may have been at the urging of my parents. Organ and harpsichord, how was one ever going to make a living that way? With conducting one could at least pay the bills, that kind of thing.

But the most important thing in Vienna was the library. I’d sit there all day, from opening till close, copying music—by hand of course—and making notes from treatises. I still use that material today. Much has been published since, but not nearly everything.

J-PK: What kind of things did
you copy?

GL: Oh, everything. Froberger, Kuhnau, Fischer . . . Tablature too, I could read that easily back then—I’m completely out of practice now. I also copied lute tablatures, just out of interest.

In Vienna I got to know Harnoncourt.⁹ We were just about the only people interested in early music and played an awful lot together, viol consort also. That was relatively easy for me because of my cello background.

But after three years Leonhardt had had enough of the Austrian capital and returned to the Netherlands, where he was appointed Professor of Harpsichord at the Amsterdam Conservatory. At the end of the 1950s he became organist of the Christiaan Müller organ of the Eglise Wallonne, the French Protestant Church of Amsterdam.

GL: My wife is francophone and we both belong to the Reformed Church, so we went to the French church as a matter of course. I knew the organ already, but it was in very poor condition at the time. The action was terrible and it played very heavily. So when the position became vacant, I said that I was willing to do it on the condition that the organ would be restored properly. That was fine. I knew Ahrend already, so he restored the organ, with Cor Edskes as consultant.¹⁰ 

J-PK: How did you meet Ahrend?

GL: I don’t remember exactly. In any case, I had seen an organ they had built in Veldhausen.¹¹ That was a revelation back then, but I have recently played the organ again and it was still a revelation. That doesn’t happen very often, that one thinks the same way about an organ so many years later.

J-PK: What made Ahrend & Brunzema so special?

GL: I don’t know. They just understood organs somehow. They had ears and just knew how to get the sound they wanted.

J-PK: Ahrend has often been criticized for imposing too much of his own personality on an instrument when restoring it, for example
in Groningen.

GL: Well, I mean, he does have a strong personality, and in the Martini [the Martinikerk at Groningen—JPK], a great deal had to be reconstructed. In such a situation one can hardly blame anybody for putting his mark on a restoration.

J-PK: Was that also the case in Amsterdam?

GL: No. A lot of Müller pipes had survived in excellent condition and the new pipes Ahrend provided matched the old pipes very well indeed. Yes, the Waalse [Eglise Wallonne—JPK] is definitely the best-preserved Müller in my opinion—not that there is a lot of choice, unfortunately.¹² 

J-PK: You made a whole series of recordings on the organ, including composers such as Froberger, Couperin, and de Grigny . . . 

GL: . . . who really don’t belong there at all. You are totally right about that and I really don’t remember why we did it. Perhaps Telefunken wanted some diversity in the repertoire. On the other hand [he continues almost triumphantly], what should I have played on the Amsterdam Müller instead?

J-PK: The Genevan psalter, I suppose.

GL: [He laughs, covering his mouth with his hand.] Precisely—or Quirinus van Blankenburg.¹³

J-PK: As a harpsichord teacher, you have had a tremendous influence on a whole generation of harpsichordists from all over the world.

GL: Oh, come on . . . For a long time, I was simply the only one.

J-PK: Have you never wanted to teach organ?

GL: I’ve never really thought about that. But even for harpsichord I never had more than five students at the same time. That was more than enough. The rest of the time I was so busy with concerts and recordings.

[The conversation moves in a different direction; Leonhardt clearly wants to discuss something else.]

I don’t know if it’s on your list, but the difference between organ and harpsichord, I wouldn’t mind saying something about that. Look, the harpsichord has in a way stopped at some point in time. The organ went on, but changed completely. In my view, organ and harpsichord are intimately connected. To a large extent, the instruments shared the same literature and performers played both instruments. That stops at the end of the eighteenth century and in my mind it’s only because of its function in church that the organ has continued to exist. In other words, without the church, the organ would have died out as well. Interest in the organ at the beginning of the nineteenth century was practically zero, really.

All right, so the organ continued to exist. But over time, it changed so much that, really, it became a different instrument, at least in my view. That is a problem for the present-day organist that really does not exist for harpsichordists. How can a man serve so many masters? I don’t believe that is possible; at least, I can’t.

The problem is, we aren’t theorists. Musicologists can study different styles—that’s not a problem. But we musicians have to take the work of art in our hands . . . [an expressive gesture] . . .
and present it. That is something completely different; it demands much more ability to empathize. I have to say, when all is said and done, the colleagues whom I admire the most tend to be those who specialize at least to some extent.

[I mention an early-music specialist who at the same time is a jack-of-all-trades. Yes, Leonhardt agrees: a great musician.] But even so, you can hear that he plays so much other music as well.¹⁴ It’s a problem, of course. Take the flute: How much literature is there from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries? Three Bach sonatas! We harpsichordists can bathe in a wealth of early music. One can easily spend a lifetime with it.

J-PK: Don’t you think the old composers are so far away from us that it is more difficult to empathize with them?

GL: No, I don’t. If you really study the time and the art of the period in all its facets—painting, architecture, and so forth—a composer like Froberger can come just as close as, say, Widor. And look, Widor has become early music too by now. One has to study that just as well. It’s no longer our own time; it’s not self-evident.

J-PK: You had to practically put yourself in Bach’s shoes when you played the lead role in Jean-Marie Straub’s film, The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach.

GL: It wasn’t acting, you know. Performing in costume, that’s all. Just because I happened to do the same things as Bach did: playing organ and harpsichord, and conducting. Well, except for composing, of course. [A gesture of profound awe.] I found it a very respectful film, it was made with a lot of integrity, and I enjoyed contributing to it, also because Bach has determined my whole career.

J-PK: I think Frans Brüggen once said in an interview, ‘Leonhardt is Bach.’¹⁵ 

GL: [A gesture makes clear that he couldn’t disagree more.] I consider Bach the greatest composer who ever lived. But I also see him as a composer in his time, not just as some remarkable phenomenon. In that sense, I’m not a Bach man.

J-PK: Your career has mostly focused on harpsichord playing and conducting.

GL: Well, no, not conducting, that has always been a side path; I don’t do it more often than once or twice a year. The Bach cantata project, too, was really only one or two weeks a year. Conducting to me is in a way the same as playing chamber music, except I happen not to be playing.

J-PK: My point is that as an organist you have been relatively free to do whatever you wanted.

GL: That is true. The harpsichord is my livelihood; the organ is in a sense a luxury. It’s also a different kind of instrument. [Enthusiastically:] One can be crazy about an organ, I think. Harpsichords don’t really have that. That is because an organ usually has a much stronger personality than a harpsichord; that is part of what makes it such a fantastic instrument. On harpsichord, one has to work much harder to get a beautiful sound. A good organ does half the job for you if not more. A good organ dictates—in the best sense of the word—much more than a harpsichord.

J-PK: With all your interest in past centuries it seems that there is one aspect of our time that interests you in particular.

GL: I think I know what you mean.

J-PK: Fast cars?

GL: [Big smile—for a moment he looks almost boyish.] As the Germans say, Wenn schon, denn schon.¹⁶ If one needs a car at all, surely a beautiful one is better than an ugly one. I just got a new Alfa 166, three liters, and it really is a great pleasure. It’s a rather fiery one, you know, the kind that just wants to go out for a ride. In the city, he has to stay on the leash, but out of town . . . Yes, a real pleasure. ν

* I am also grateful to Hans Fidom, the former editor of Het Orgel who suggested that I interview Leonhardt. Finally, I thank my wife Brigitte Pohl-Knijff and the following colleagues, students, and friends for their comments on earlier drafts of this translation: Margaret Barger, Robert Brown, Jim Nicholls, Jodie Ostenfeld, and Paul Thwaites. For any dutchisms that remain I take sole responsibility.  

1. Gerhard Woehl built the new Bach organ (IV/61) for the Thomaskirche in the Bach year 2000.

2. The founder of the firm, Johann Christoph Neupert (who was apprenticed to Johann Baptist Streicher in Vienna) and his descendants were avid collectors of historic keyboard instruments. Still in business today, the firm built its first harpsichord in 1906.

3. Dutch organist, conductor, and composer Anthon van der Horst (1899–1965) was conductor of the Dutch Bach Society from 1931. He taught organ at the Amsterdam Conservatory, where his students included Albert de Klerk, Piet Kee, Bernard Bartelink, Wim van Beek, and Charles de Wolff. 

4. Schaffhausen, on the Swiss-German border, is some 60 miles from Basel.

5. August Wenzinger (1905–1996) was a cellist, viol player, conductor, and a pioneer of historically informed performance practice. He taught both cello and viol at the Schola Cantorum from 1933, where his most famous student (apart from Leonhardt) was no doubt viol player Jordi Savall, who succeeded him in 1974.    

6. Ina Lohr (1903–1983) studied violin in Amsterdam and theory and composition in Basel. One of the founders of the Schola Cantorum, she taught theory there on the basis of solmisation. She was also assistant conductor to Paul Sacher with the Basel Chamber Choir.

7. Johann Sebastian (Hans) Brandts Buys (1905–1959) came from a large Dutch family of musicians, which included some fine composers. A pioneer of harpsichord playing in the Netherlands, Brandts Buys was also active as a conductor. As a performer and musicologist he specialized in the music of his namesake, J.S. Bach. Brandts Buys had an unusually strong interest in historically informed performance and was the first in the Netherlands to conduct the St. Matthew Passion with a small choir and orchestra (1947). Leonhardt presumably took part in performances with the Hilversumse Cantate Vereniging (Hilversum Cantata Society), which Brandts Buys led during the war years 1943–1945.

8. The countertenor Alfred Deller (1912–1979) was central in reviving and popularizing the countertenor in the twentieth century. He founded the Deller Consort in 1948. Benjamin Britten famously wrote the role of Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream for Deller (1960), who recorded it with the composer conducting.  

9. Nikolaus Harnoncourt (b. 1929), cellist, later conductor, founder of the period-instrument ensemble Concentus Musicus Wien (1953, first public performance 1957). Harnoncourt’s Concentus and the Leonhardt Consort collaborated for a recording of Bach’s St. John Passion (1965) and shared the complete recording of Bach’s sacred cantatas for Telefunken’s Das alte Werk. 

10. Jürgen Ahrend (b. 1930), German organ builder, active 1954–2005. In the 1950s and ’60s Ahrend and his then-associate Gerhard Brunzema (1927–1992) were perhaps the most serious, consistent, and successful in reviving the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century North-German organ style.  

11. In Bentheim county, Germany, near the Dutch border. The organ was built by Ahrend & Brunzema in 1957, and enlarged with a Rückpositiv by the Dutch firm Mense Ruiter in 1997.

12. Other surviving Müller organs include those in Haarlem, Leeuwarden, Beverwijk, and the Kapelkerk at Alkmaar. 

13. Apart from more imaginative works such as the cantata L’Apologie des femmes (The Women’s Apology, 1715), Quirinus van Blankenburg (1654–1739) published a Harpsichord and Organ Book of Reformed Psalms and Church Hymns (The Hague 1732).

14. Fortunately, I no longer recall whom I mentioned to Leonhardt.

15. The Dutch recorder player, flautist, and conductor Frans Brüggen (b. 1934) performed extensively with Leonhardt in such groups as Quadro Amsterdam and the trio with cellist Anner Bijlsma.

16. ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’

Recent recordings of Bach’s Goldberg Variations

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

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

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

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

Diego Ares

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

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

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

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

Wolfgang Rübsam

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

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

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

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

Helmut Walcha

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

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

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

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

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

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

ARTEK goes German

Two days before Johann Sebastian Bach’s 330th birthday, while exercising my daily morning custom of reading The New York Times I was happily surprised to see a picture of a very ornate harpsichord being played by Gwendolyn Toth. What a pleasant way to begin a March morning, I thought. Accompanying the photo was a Critic’s Notebook piece, “Plucking Away, 300 Years Later,” by James R. Oestreich. A quick scan of his essay convinced me that I wanted to know more details about this festival of German music played on four Germanic harpsichords, so I contacted Dr. Toth, who responded to my request with an electronic copy of the 16-page program booklet as well as the illustrations that brighten this column.

Gwen Toth founded ARTEK (The Art of the Early Keyboard) in 1986. Various programs under her direction have been lauded in the New York media, and several of us in Texas have benefitted from the generosity of Toth and her husband Dongsok Shin, who have shared difficult-to-find replacement parts for at least two of our Willard Martin harpsichords (one of them a Saxon-style instrument). So it was with particular empathy that I read the programs and extensive notes from this festival and forthwith decided that there was much of interest to share with the readers of this column.

To celebrate Toth’s new two-manual harpsichord, a close copy by John Phillips of the celebrated 1739 instrument made by Johann Heinrich Gräbner the Younger of Dresden, Toth devised two concert programs plus several associated events to occur on Friday and Saturday, March 13 and 14. One might be quite certain that Johann Sebastian Bach would have approved of these particular dates, especially the second!* The venue was New York’s Immanuel Lutheran Church, where Toth is the music director (in addition to her positions as orchestra director at Manhattan College and harpsichord teacher at Montclair State University). 

The first program comprised the complete second part of Bach’s Clavierübung, but with a most interesting twist: because the Gräbner instrument has an expanded bass range (the lowest note is DD rather than the usual FF), Toth decided to play the French Ouverture in the key of G minor rather than its published key of B minor, a downward transposition of a major third. As she wrote in notes to the program, “ . . . Ultimately one faces the question of, having the extra lower notes, how does one make use of them?” Since the composer himself had made a downward transposition from its original C minor to B minor for the published version of his monumental work, it seemed to be an apt way to revel in the magnificent possibilities provided by the added bass strings. Following intermission came the Italian Concerto, but in this case an attempt at a similar downward change of key did not prove satisfactory, so Toth decided to play it in its usual key of F, thereby “displaying the beautiful sound of the high range of the instrument” as well.

Master harpsichord builder John Phillips continued the festive evening with a question and answer session. In his eloquent written notes to the program, Phillips provided two possible explanations for the unusual range of this harpsichord’s prototype: 

If it were intended for ecclesiastical use the low DD would, at Kammerton, sound the same pitch as the CC (16-foot C) of the organ at Chorton—a whole step higher. If it were to be played in consort with the organ, including its 16-foot range, there would be no need to go below DD. Since it was tuned to Kammerton, it could still play with other instruments without transposing. If the intended use were for the theater orchestra, the low DD would be the same as the lowest note of a violone in the most usual tuning. In either case, this instrument would have excelled as a ‘big band’ continuo harpsichord. 

Additionally Phillips mentioned his surprise that he had produced a total of 13 Gräbner-inspired harpsichords since the first commission for one in 1998: 

Even though the first copy of the 1739 instrument was musically revelatory to many, I assumed that no one else would be interested in such a big . . . and heavy harpsichord. I was wrong. Musicians took to them. The one before you is my third 1739 . . . and there are ten more Gräbners of other somewhat smaller varieties as well.

Events on day two began in the afternoon with several free workshops: the first was concerned with “Concepts of Early Keyboard Technique,” led by Dr. Toth, who utilized both a harpsichord and a clavichord, a favorite pedagogical instrument in the 18th century, for her presentation. The second workshop, “Lessons in Harpsichord Quilling and Maintenance,” was guided by Dongsok Shin, who serves as harpsichord technician for both the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Metropolitan Opera.

At eight that evening a concert of music for multiple harpsichords engaged four distinguished New York harpsichordists: Bradley Brookshire (assistant conductor and harpsichordist at the Metropolitan Opera), Stephen Rapp (assistant organist at St. Patrick’s Cathedral), Gwendolyn Toth, and Dongsok Shin. The music, most of it rarely heard in concert, included Concerto in D for two harpsichords by Joseph Schuster (Toth and Shin), Duetto in C Minor for two harpsichords by Müthel (Shin and Rapp), Sonata in G Minor [Allegro] by Mattheson (Brookshire and Shin), Sonata in F for two harpsichords by W. F. Bach (Rapp and Brookshire), Concerto in B-flat Major for two harpsichords by Graun (Toth and Rapp), and, for the grand finale, Concerto in A Minor, BWV 1065, by J. S. Bach, with the entire ensemble, including ARTEK strings.

Four diverse Germanic instruments by three builders provided appropriate keyboards for this stylish presentation. In addition to John Phillips’s magnum opus, Owen Daly of Salem, Oregon, contributed his newly finished harpsichord based on one built in Hamburg in 1728 by Christian Zell. Daly’s harpsichord, with a compass of FF–d′′′, has a classic disposition of three stops: 8′, 8′, and 4′ registers, with manual coupler and buff stop. Of special interest is its stringing in Stephen Birkett’s historically produced iron and brass wire. 

Philip Tyre was the builder of Bradley Brookshire’s 1990 harpsichord. Originally a single-manual instrument (GG–e′′′) with two 8′ stops and a 4′ register, strung in brass throughout, its prototype was a harpsichord built in 1738 by the organ-maker Christian Vater of Hannover. In 2005 Willard Martin added a buff stop and enlarged the case to accommodate a second keyboard. 

The fourth harpsichord, owned by New Jersey resident Edward Brewer (an Oberlin classmate of mine, who often transported me as a passenger on his motorcycle during our junior year in Salzburg), was built by Thomas and Barbara Wolf of The Plains, Virginia, and is also a two-manual instrument based on Vater’s single-manual harpsichord, “but with rather different sound results,” according to Dongsok Shin’s note in the program.

Director Toth ended the program note to her solo recital with these wise words, “Playing Bach on a German harpsichord has been truly a revelation. Both the orchestral quality of the full sound and the clarity of the individual notes serve his music in a way no French harpsichord (for many years the instrument of choice for Bach) can ever match. A perfect marriage of instrument and repertoire.” 

I would concur, having experienced one of John Phillips’s instruments slightly more than a decade ago during the Southeastern Historical Keyboard Society’s conclave at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida. There, on our quest to hear Bach as Bach might have heard Bach, we tried to absorb into our minds and ears not only the fullness of sounds produced by the magnificent nine-foot harpsichord, but also those created through the quiet beauty of Willard Martin’s Lautenwerk, a gut-strung keyboard instrument; and those dynamically controllable sounds made possible through David Sutherland’s fascinating recreation of a Dresden fortepiano: all three instruments based on prototypes that Bach almost certainly knew. Many years earlier, Isolde Ahlgrimm had noted wryly that “Bach probably would have been quite surprised to hear his music played ‘authentically’ on the ubiquitous French-style instruments of the mid-20th-century harpsichord revival, lovely as they are.”

I daresay that ARTEK’s German odyssey is yet one more hopeful journey in the ever-ongoing attempt to bring more historical accuracy into our performances of music from the past.

* Should you have difficulty making sense of this sentence, please e-mail me at [email protected] or write to Dr. Larry Palmer, 10125 Cromwell Drive, Dallas, Texas 75229. I will be happy to send an explanation. As always, news items and comments are welcome.