Paul Jordan dead at 75

Henry S. Fusner, Nashville resident from 1970 to 2015, died February 2. He was 91. Born in Parkersburg, West Virginia, in 1923, Fusner grew up in New Jersey, earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Juilliard School and a doctorate from the School of Sacred Music of Union Theological Seminary. His teachers included Gaston M. Dethier in organ and piano, Peter Wilhousky in conducting, Vittorio Gianini and Normand Lockwood in composition, and Clarence Dickinson in organ study.

Dr. Fusner held church positions in the New York City area, including the Church of St. Edward the Martyr in Manhattan and Emmanuel Baptist Church, Brooklyn. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio, in 1956 to be organist and choirmaster at the Church of the Covenant and teacher of organ and church music at the Cleveland Institute of Music. In 1970, he moved to Nashville to assume a similar position at First Presbyterian Church and as a teacher at the Blair School of Music, Vanderbilt University. Henry S. Fusner is survived by his niece, Dr. June Fusner Leyland (Gary), and nephews George R. Fusner, Jr. (Myra), and Neal Henry Fusner (Annaliesa).

Wilbur Held, 100, died March 24 in Claremont, California, a few months shy of his 101st birthday. Born August 20, 1914, in Des Plaines, Illinois, Held was an accomplished organist best known for his prolific compositions of sacred music in many forms. (See Larry Palmer’s article, “Celebrating Wilbur Held,” in our August 2014 issue, page 25.) In this issue, Nancy M. Raabe provides a remembrance on page 26. 

Paul Jordan, 75, organist, composer, and former professor of music, died March 1. He was born in New York to Dr. Henry P. Jordan, a German diplomat who took refuge in the U.S. to avoid serving the Nazi regime, and Irene Brandt Jordan, linguist and physical educator; the family lived in Germany from 1952–55 upon Jordan’s father’s reinstatement in the German diplomatic service. Jordan attended Harvard University and Columbia University, and received graduate degrees from the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik in Frankfurt am Main (where he studied under Helmut Walcha), the Yale School of Music, and the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago (DMA). Jordan was organist and music director at the United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, and starting in 1973, a professor of music at Binghamton University (SUNY), New York for 20 years, where he taught organ, harpsichord, recorder, directed the Collegium Musicum, conducted the University Orchestra, and coached singers on German pronunciation. He also designed the organs in the United Church on the Green and Binghamton University, Anderson Center for the Performing Arts. 

In his early career, among the first generation of musicians in America involved in the revival of early music, Jordan played recorder in Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 with the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. He also performed extensively on recorder with New York Trio da Camera (Grace Feldman, viola da gamba, Edward Brewer, harpsichord), and sang under Noah Greenberg.

As an organist, he performed at churches, cathedrals, and such halls as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the Gewandhaus in Leipzig. Known as a Bach specialist, Jordan also studied the works of Dieterich Buxtehude, whose works would influence J. S. Bach himself; he conducted a series of concerts in 2007 (the 300th anniversary of Buxtehude’s death) called “The Buxtehude Project.” 

As a composer and arranger, Jordan wrote many endings to J. S. Bach’s unfinished masterpiece, The Art of the Fugue. He was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts to commit the work to memory, and recorded the piece with his own ending (www.brioso.com/covers/BR128.htm).

Jordan published articles in magazines such as The American Recorder as well as a three-part article on Helmut Walcha, in celebration of Walcha’s 100th birthday, in The Diapason (October, November, and December 2007 issues); in the Peters Edition, Vol. II of Helmut Walcha’s Chorale Preludes, Jordan supplied the official translation of Walcha’s Notes on Interpretation. Beyond the realm of classical music, Paul Jordan was also passionate about more modern artists and works. He often played and promoted the music of Moondog, a renowned blind street musician and recording artist. In addition to his position at the United Church on the Green in New Haven, Jordan served as organist and music director in several Connecticut churches, including the First Congregational Church of Guilford, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Madison, and the First Church of Christ, Scientist, Westport. 

Paul Jordan is survived by his wife, Xilin Jordan, son, Libai, and brother, Don F. Jordan. Paul Jordan will be laid to rest in the family grave in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. A celebration of his life will be held on Sunday, June 7, 3:00 p.m., at Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Killingworth, Connecticut. In lieu of flowers, please send contributions to http://www.tibetfund.org.

(See Gavin Black’s tribute to Paul Jordan on pages 18–19 of this issue.)

1. Helmut Walcha: Nuit de Lumière may be ordered directly from the publisher, Jérôme Do Bentzinger, 8, Rue Roesselmann, F-68000 Colmar, France; Tel: 03 89 24 19 74; Fax: 03 89 41 09 57; E-mail: <[email protected]>.

Part 1 was published in the October 2007 issue of The Diapason.

Full disclosure
As this second section is more personal, the reader may indulge the author’s use of the first person singular. I first heard of Helmut Walcha through another mentor, Tui St. George Tucker, the late composer who not only taught me to play the recorder but was in some ways like a second, or alternate, mother. In my seventeenth summer, which I spent at Camp Catawba in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, where Tui directed the music, she simply instructed me, one day, to listen to recordings by Helmut Walcha, beginning with the six Trio Sonatas by Bach. At first I did not “get it.” Though years before I had been a choirboy and found the organ fascinating, I’d devoted neither systematic nor serious attention to its repertoire. I presumed that the recommended recordings would feature a grand but somewhat opaque, if not “muddy,” sound. It was a surprise, at first more puzzling than edifying, to be confronted with clearly inflected and articulated “chamber music” of a bell-like transparency and played, on historical instruments, in rather dry acoustics (e.g., the Schnitger organ “stored”—forever—in the village church of Cappel, north of Bremerhaven). Tui asked me not to be put off but to persist in listening. The revelation, my sudden epiphany of understanding and profound appreciation, came after the third or fourth try; now, I was hooked—as it turned out, for life.
The next spring, almost a year—and many Bach organ works—later, I wrote a fan letter to the player, asking him if, when next in Europe, I could meet him and hear him in person. Walcha replied that I should come to a Saturday afternoon service of Vespers at the Church of the Three Kings (Dreikönigskirche) in Frankfurt and let him know, in advance, both the date and my choice of two pieces; in my response, citing a date in September 1957, I asked for the chorale-prelude An Wasserflüssen Babylons (in 4 voices, cantus firmus in the tenor) and the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor—and was amazed, of course, when, some months later—and without further correspondence—my father and I walked into this church, just across the Main river from the Frankfurt Cathedral, and found both of these works in prominent positions in the printed order of service!
On the gallery afterwards, he recommended that I continue my piano studies in New York and in about three years come to audition for him at the Hochschule für Musik (State Music Academy) in Frankfurt. Nothing was said about organ lessons—nor were there any. The organist of the church where I was then singing allowed me to practice regularly there, on his Austin, after showing me, “Here are the manuals, here are the stop tabs, here are the pedals—you use toes and heels, both.” Not until after completing memorization of the Orgelbüchlein in the first of my four years of study with Walcha did I confess to him that he was my first organ teacher—a revelation he seemed to take in stride (“I don’t object to capable virgin students”); while I did not have a B.A., most of his foreign students had master’s degrees and many were on Fulbright scholarships.
Subsequently visiting Europe every summer in the decades following 1966, I saw him each year, at home or in his vacation haunts, until 1989 (two years before his death). It is fair to say that we developed a friendship, and after his own retirement he continued to encourage my work and to take a vivid interest in what I told him of the gratifications and frustrations of church and academic life at home in America. Soon after his 70th birthday I rendered an oral translation to him of the first portion of this article, in the form in which it had then been published, and was naturally pleased that he found it (while likely somewhat more systematic than had he himself put pen to paper) a valid summary of his views and pedagogical emphases.
Crucial to this full disclosure are, I think, the years of study and decades of friendship and, perhaps more important (or unusual), the fact that it was not only the music of Bach but also specifically its interpretation by Helmut Walcha that, as it happened, both drew me initially to the pipe organ and, in the end, served to nourish a lifelong interest and commitment to this musical medium.

The biography
A first biographical study of the organist, entitled Helmut Walcha: Nuit de Lumière, appeared about two years ago (no date is given) in Colmar, France, edited and published by Jérôme Do Bentzinger and authored, in collaboration, by two French organists, Joseph Coppey and Jean-Willy Kunz. To many it may be surprising that theirs should comprise the first available major documentation of so un-Gallic a musician and musical thinker.The book itself offers a list of hundreds of works, by some 30 composers, comprising Walcha’s memorized repertoire, but not one is French nor even from outside of the German cultural sphere. M. Coppey got to know his subject during Walcha’s few trips to France—he visited the cathedral of Poitiers, dedicated the organ at St. Séverin in Paris, and recorded some of the Bach harpsichord music, including the violin sonatas with Henryk Szeryng, in that city, and did his second—stereophonic—round of Bach organ recordings at St. Pierre LeJeune in Strasbourg—while M. Kunz is the son of a deceased friend who had originally intended to collaborate with Coppey in researching and writing this biography.
The barely 200-page book has some puzzling oddities—it is printed in a font almost as large as that of the New York Times Large-Type Weekly (for the sight-impaired), contains no index, and speaks of Helmut Walcha, along with his wife and some of their friends, mostly on a first-name basis. At the same time, the work leaves nothing to be desired in terms of reverence and affection for its subject. The authors—who speak little English, although one of them knows a good deal of German—did extensive research in Germany, tracking down friends, colleagues, pastors, and students of the master and—especially valuable—some of Walcha’s former chamber music partners, still lucid but now largely “lost” to the world in senior citizens’ centers. They also elicited written testimonials from associates and admirers, including from within the French cultural sphere (e.g., L. Rogg, M. Chapuis, R. Saorgin, M. Schaefer).
Praiseworthy and useful as these efforts and their results are, it can be said that the story told here really covers only the first half of Walcha’s life—the second half, after all, had a lot to do with the United States, via his 50 American students, of whom the evidence provided here is quite spotty. So far as I know, I am the only American student with whom the authors spoke. Among the others, those omitted here, in the published “non-exhaustive” list of students, include Robert Anderson, David Bowman, Edgar Billups, Virginia Banfield Bollinger, Edward Brewer, Larry Cook, Elise Cambon, Paul Davis, Melvin Dickinson (Margaret got in!), Sheila Beck Dietrich, Delbert Disselhorst, Tony Godding, Barbara Harbach, Philipp Isaacson, Gene Janssen, Lorna DaCosta McDaniel, Margaret Mueller (John did make it), David Mulbury, Doris Parr, Edmund Shay, Bob Thompson, and Nancy Walker! It was good to see in print the names of Frankie Cunningham and Betty Steeb (both among the students sent over early on by the late, and great, Arthur Poister), as well as that of Oberlin’s David Boe (who married the second daughter of Walcha’s pastor, Pfarrer Paulus North).
There is no sign of the three South African students, including composer Jacobus Kloppers (now in Canada) or Elise Feldtmann Liebergen. Among the Germans, Oda Jürgens (long active in Berlin) and Helmut Röhrig (who settled in Cincinnati) are missing—and, although composer Reinhold Finkbeiner did make it onto the list, there is no indication of his having been interviewed, which would quite likely have provided color and special interest in light of his outspoken dissent from aspects of Walcha’s aesthetics and pedagogy. Like Disselhorst, Charles Krigbaum is mentioned once (on page 141), as a contributor to the 70th-birthday Festschrift, but then, 18 pages later, omitted from the list. Yet it has to be said (at least here) that, as the Yale University organist for decades, Krigbaum would appear to have occupied the most prestigious position attained by any of Walcha’s students, anywhere.
The American and other omissions are particularly egregious inasmuch as Prof. Walcha himself often remarked (but never in France?) that of his best students a considerable number was to be found among the Americans. In addition, although the most intense wonder at Walcha’s prodigious memory and veneration for his interpretation and technique are expressed repeatedly, the biography lacks the sort of detailed analysis and explanation of these factors that readers would be justified in expecting such a book to attempt. In short, another biography—or at least a “Part Two”—will still be needed. The pictorial material in the book—much of it of an “exclusive” nature—is wonderful and, for those interested in acquiring such (even if nary an American be shown therein), probably worth the price of the volume. We are grateful to M. Bentzinger for the samples he has kindly provided for reproduction in these pages.1

The historical context
The historical context out of which Walcha and his interpretation emerged was that of the “Leipzig School” of the early 20th century. Thomas-Kantor Karl Straube stood at its center. His own life was marked by the transition from the late-19th-century extravagantly Romantic interpretation of pre-Romantic music to a new, disciplined and “ascetic” neo-Classicism that came to pervade certain, even large-scale, compositions by musicians like Stravinsky and Hindemith no less than the seemingly unrelated arts of organ-building and organ-playing. In Germany it was connected with the destructive caesura of World War I and the hopes aroused by formation of a new, Kaiser-less “Weimar Republic.” In any case it was clear that the old, complacent and hyper-bourgeois order was dead and nothing would ever be the same again; all was open to reconsideration.
In this context, and parallel to his friendships with outstanding late-Romantic musicians like Reger and Leipzig’s own Karg-Elert, Straube opened himself, “midstream,” to the growing interest in early organs and the interpretative concepts seemingly implicit in their structural features (tracker action; Werkprinzip; absence of facile electric playing aids; high mixtures and mutations; etc.). Neglected old instruments like the two Silbermann organs in Rötha, just outside of Leipzig, came to set new standards and, once newly playable and audible, imprinted their sonorities indelibly on the minds of aspiring and up-to-date musicians like the young Helmut Walcha.
In the unique atmosphere of “Weimar’s” creative ferment—soon to yield to the fanaticism of Nazism and the consequent pervasive chaos of the new German racial, foreign and military policies—it seems highly unlikely that Straube and his own finest pupil (and the next Thomas-Kantor) Günther Ramin, who, though only nine years older, became Walcha’s major teacher, could have reached the thorough, “chiselled” and, in time, “settled” concept of virtually every detail of interpretation that came to comprise Walcha’s accomplishment and, at least in terms of the applied interpretative method, his most specific organistic and musical emanation and legacy.
And yet Walcha, who studied theory with Reger’s conservatory successor Karg-Elert but was musically involved with the more neo-classical Leipzig composer Günter Raphael and his pupil Kurt Hessenberg (later Walcha’s beloved Frankfurt friend and colleague), attributed to Straube (under whose cantata-conducting in Bach’s Thomaskirche he sometimes played continuo) and, especially, to Ramin his life’s major organistic inspiration—along with that of Albert Schweitzer, through that scholar’s early study of both historical organs and the theological and pictorial symbolism in Bach’s music. In conversation it was, as Coppey and Kunz have noted, hard to elicit from him the specifics. Detective work, including carefully aimed examination of Straube’s correspondence, writings and editions and of Ramin’s recordings—perhaps leading to a musicologist’s future dissertation—might yet uncover the most critical points of both similarity and difference between Walcha’s concepts and those of his early Leipzig models. Lionel Rogg’s pronouncement of him as “original” implies, I think, that it was not only in Walcha’s sometimes ravishing sonorities that he may—or must—have diverged from his teachers.
In two somewhat ironic ways Helmut Walcha’s productivity was framed and promoted by misfortune. In his personal history, the poor eyesight and subsequent blindness (resulting from the teenager’s smallpox-vaccination calamity) served both to focus and enhance his musical ear and to promote the uniquely “horizontal” and minutely analytical method of learning (i.e., memorizing) polyphony voice by voice. In the history of his times, the need for safety from the World War II bombings of Frankfurt prompted Walcha’s flight to the tranquillity of the countryside, where he was able to learn, undisturbed by any urban distractions, the entire Well-Tempered Clavier, and doubtless to hone and solidify those more general interpretive concepts that would inform all his concerts, recordings and lessons.

Performing and recording
Among those who became familiar with Walcha’s recordings and were also fortunate to hear him in person, many perceived a subtle but unmistakable difference between the two musical experiences. My own observations confirmed the fairly consistent difference and I have, after considerable thought, concluded that it arose from different concepts operative in the artist in the two contexts. For Walcha a recording was foremost a documentation of the score, of the composer’s discernible intentions as objectively as possible—it was not intended to be, any more than could be avoided, a record, for eternity, of a particular moment in a particular performer’s life; not an attempt, that is, to artificially “freeze” such a subjective human moment beyond the composer’s already confirmed success in integrating an original experience, song and form into the enduring work of art. This extrapolation of mine is consonant with Walcha’s attitude toward improvisation; he was not opposed to subjectivity and certainly not to spontaneity—but these were of the moment, not of eternity. For this reason he did not improvise in concerts—i.e., in the “presence” of finalized masterful works—nor did he authorize the recording, the “eternalization,” of any of his thousands of glorious subjective and spontaneous liturgical expressions. Those of us allowed to partake of some of his “greater” ritards or other spontaneous rhythmic “bendings” of the moment, in an inimitable and unrepeatable interaction between him and a particular concert audience, would not ever wish to have missed them—yet nor would most of us desire to have such superimposed upon the documentation he chose to leave behind of his underlying, more objective conception.
In addition to the word Musiker, for musician, the German language includes a special word, Musikant, for the musician—the performer—who feels and transmits the experience of a beguiling spontaneity. Without any part of a doubt, Walcha was a Musikant as well as a Musiker—yet I can imagine him expressing a view that recordings are not an appropriate place for vagaries of Musikantentum. It is quite possible to believe, as many may, that, on the contrary, recordings, like all performance, can justly be about little else. To this premise I presume to venture no comparably axiomatic rejoinder. In departing this field of contention, however, it may be permissible also to pose a question: Is it possible that subjective spontaneous re-interpretations of particular musical passages, such as inevitably emphasize—more than is usual or ultimately justifiable—particular aspects of a work at the expense of others, may, however enchanting at the moment, when frequently reiterated through the objectification of recording, be perceived as grating and finally come to stand, rather than as mediators, as obstacles between the listener and the sensibility—as embodied in the work—of the composer?

The poet-singer—communication for the ages
In what I hope is only an apparent paradox, I hasten to affirm that of course the poet-singer in this great artist desired, especially in his work as an interpreter, to communicate with the hearts of fellow humans, both in the moment and across the ages. All the salient features of his performance—the singing, sometimes overlapping legato, interrupted by the “breathing” of the pipes simulating the human lung, the pointed staccato, the gravitas of portato, the nuanced virtuosity of leggiero touches, the accentuated highlighting of syncopations and of other rhythmic as well as harmonic tensions, the clear yet sensuous registrations as well as the illumination of form through their changes, the intriguing simultaneity of different articulations, and the “chiselled” or etched identification and re-identification of motivic structures and relationships—were applied to this end. One may differ about the degree of his success, but no one can properly gainsay Walcha the sincerity and intensity of his work toward two goals—of optimal communication with his listeners, and of endurance of the insights he believed to have achieved especially about the music of Bach and the conditions for its fullest realization.
This may be the place for three suggestive and all somewhat surprising quotations. It is no German, but René Saorgin, writing in French in his testimonial (on pg. 199) in the book by Messieurs Coppey and Kunz, who declares that “Helmut Walcha was quite certainly the greatest organist of our time.” Lionel Rogg, when I drove him from Kennedy Airport to New Haven some 35 years ago, told me plainly that “Walcha is a great romantic” (I don’t believe he meant it with a capital R, but rather that he was referring to the poetic intensity he felt communicated in Walcha’s renditions). And the late Robert Baker emerged from Walcha’s summer 1963 concert of pre-Bach masters on his then new Karl Schuke church organ to tell me, in considerable excitement, “He’s a colorist—like Clarence Dickinson!” (I don’t believe Bob really meant quite like Clarence Dickinson—but the colors he surely heard.)

Playing!
While seeking to zero in yet further on “what made Walcha Walcha,” it is useful to recall that over the centuries German philosophers—such as Schiller, Nietzsche and H. Marcuse—have repeatedly emphasized the relationship of play, and indeed the playfulness of the child, to the work of the “serious” artist. That art is always, to a significant extent, play, or that the artist’s “work” is, itself, a kind of play, was—contrary to a common false impression—well manifested in our subject. He had no children, but he took a lively interest in them, in particular in the children of his friends (e.g., making reference to them in occasional poems he wrote); he had a ready sense of humor, enjoyed funny stories and sported a hearty and infectious laugh; he identified better than many a musician with the more humorous elements in Baroque music, e.g., fresh, somewhat insolent repeated notes, or certain bold leaps, or fast—and jocular—alternating neighboring tones; he understood the provocative capriciousness of the stylus phantasticus passages in 17th-century music (though the term itself was not yet in common circulation); and he loved and liberally employed the airy playfulness intrinsic to many of the applications of high-pitched, “Baroque” flutes and principals, of mutations such as sundry fifths and thirds, and of bright Zimbel-type mixtures or Tertian combinations. It will be apparent, indeed, that this artist’s playfulness plays right on into our next subject.

The Walcha organ
Touring throughout Germany, as well as in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, England and France—and recording on historical organs—Walcha came to know an extraordinary number and variety of instruments. He could master, and more quickly so than most sighted musicians (and—also—later recall!), the intricacies of any console—the precise distance between manuals, the instrument’s specifications, and the locations of the stop (and of any combination) mechanisms, and the different structures among the key- and pedal-boards of new and old organs. Most importantly, he could always find, and usually did use—as was said of J. S. Bach—unconventional, hitherto untried combinations of stops, and he thus drew from most instruments sonorities previously unheard and yet uncannily apt for the composition to be realized. He looked always for emotional expression and warmth in addition to the clarity required for following the polyphony, and he certainly displayed no fear of a good tremulant.
By the end of the 1950s, in recognition of his sustained and extraordinary contributions to the cultural life of Frankfurt am Main, the city fathers determined to have built for installation in Helmut Walcha’s church an instrument of his own design and specifications. After Walcha, who had an excellent von Beckerath organ at his disposal in the large recital hall of the Hochschule, and who had enjoyed instruments by Karl Schuke in Berlin and elsewhere, apprised the city government that he would find either of these builders suitable for the Dreikönigskirche, the mayor and councillors arrived at a decision to afford special consideration to the delicate needs of the isolated city of West Berlin—i.e., for ongoing political, moral and financial support from West Germany—and thus, all else being equal, to award the commission to West Berlin’s Schuke (rather than to von Beckerath, of Hamburg in West Germany).
Following its dedication in 1961, and for the rest of his public musical life, this three-manual Schuke was Walcha’s “home” instrument. It is likely that he explored all of his then still current repertoire—notably including many 17th-century works as well as the late(st) works of Bach, including, e.g., the Art of the Fugue and the Musical Offering’s Six-Part Ricercar—with its resources. And of course he exploited it no end in delicious and brilliant free and chorale-related liturgical improvisations. The organ, while ample for the sympathetic room, was never over-aggressive, and featured a rich pedal palette complemented by a deeply resonant, (relatively) foundation-strong Hauptwerk, a lyrical Oberwerk with Krummhorn, and a bright and playful Brustwerk. Interestingly, however, this latter division includes no principal (a 2′ one would have been “normal”) and only a very high mixture, but instead features such (playful!) “gourmet specialties” as a 4′ Quintadena and a 4′ Regal!
I personally have found an interest in such stops elsewhere only in the work of the late M. Searle Wright, coming from a quite different aesthetic—as in his partial revision of the specifications of an organ Edwin Link had assembled and donated to the old chamber hall of S.U.N.Y. in Binghamton, Searle’s home town. Though I enjoyed (as did Robert Baker) Walcha’s idiosyncratic application of these sonorities in Frankfurt, I would (and recently did, on the Dreikönigs organ in its currently refurbished and very slightly altered condition) not find much use for them for my own musical purposes.
Yon Brustwerk division—by no means all bad!—does represent a triumph of Helmut Walcha’s playfulness (and his especially playful relationship to some of other composers’ and his own music) over certain organ-structural considerations that, for most other artists, would in the end take precedence . . . That, at least, is the only way that I can understand it. It was/is his instrument—and did/does he not deserve to have (had) it? A monument to playfulness—how many of those are there?■
This article will be continued.

Part 1 was published in the October 2007 issue of The Diapason.

Full disclosure

As this second section is more personal, the reader may indulge the author’s use of the first person singular. I first heard of Helmut Walcha through another mentor, Tui St. George Tucker, the late composer who not only taught me to play the recorder but was in some ways like a second, or alternate, mother. In my seventeenth summer, which I spent at Camp Catawba in the Blue Ridge mountains of North Carolina, where Tui directed the music, she simply instructed me, one day, to listen to recordings by Helmut Walcha, beginning with the six Trio Sonatas by Bach. At first I did not “get it.” Though years before I had been a choirboy and found the organ fascinating, I’d devoted neither systematic nor serious attention to its repertoire. I presumed that the recommended recordings would feature a grand but somewhat opaque, if not “muddy,” sound. It was a surprise, at first more puzzling than edifying, to be confronted with clearly inflected and articulated “chamber music” of a bell-like transparency and played, on historical instruments, in rather dry acoustics (e.g., the Schnitger organ “stored”—forever—in the village church of Cappel, north of Bremerhaven). Tui asked me not to be put off but to persist in listening. The revelation, my sudden epiphany of understanding and profound appreciation, came after the third or fourth try; now, I was hooked—as it turned out, for life.

The next spring, almost a year—and many Bach organ works—later, I wrote a fan letter to the player, asking him if, when next in Europe, I could meet him and hear him in person. Walcha replied that I should come to a Saturday afternoon service of Vespers at the Church of the Three Kings (Dreikönigskirche) in Frankfurt and let him know, in advance, both the date and my choice of two pieces; in my response, citing a date in September 1957, I asked for the chorale-prelude An Wasserflüssen Babylons (in 4 voices, cantus firmus in the tenor) and the Passacaglia and Fugue in C Minor—and was amazed, of course, when, some months later—and without further correspondence—my father and I walked into this church, just across the Main river from the Frankfurt Cathedral, and found both of these works in prominent positions in the printed order of service!

On the gallery afterwards, he recommended that I continue my piano studies in New York and in about three years come to audition for him at the Hochschule für Musik (State Music Academy) in Frankfurt. Nothing was said about organ lessons—nor were there any. The organist of the church where I was then singing allowed me to practice regularly there, on his Austin, after showing me, “Here are the manuals, here are the stop tabs, here are the pedals—you use toes and heels, both.” Not until after completing memorization of the Orgelbüchlein in the first of my four years of study with Walcha did I confess to him that he was my first organ teacher—a revelation he seemed to take in stride (“I don’t object to capable virgin students”); while I did not have a B.A., most of his foreign students had master’s degrees and many were on Fulbright scholarships.

Subsequently visiting Europe every summer in the decades following 1966, I saw him each year, at home or in his vacation haunts, until 1989 (two years before his death). It is fair to say that we developed a friendship, and after his own retirement he continued to encourage my work and to take a vivid interest in what I told him of the gratifications and frustrations of church and academic life at home in America. Soon after his 70th birthday I rendered an oral translation to him of the first portion of this article, in the form in which it had then been published, and was naturally pleased that he found it (while likely somewhat more systematic than had he himself put pen to paper) a valid summary of his views and pedagogical emphases.

Crucial to this full disclosure are, I think, the years of study and decades of friendship and, perhaps more important (or unusual), the fact that it was not only the music of Bach but also specifically its interpretation by Helmut Walcha that, as it happened, both drew me initially to the pipe organ and, in the end, served to nourish a lifelong interest and commitment to this musical medium. 

The biography

A first biographical study of the organist, entitled Helmut Walcha: Nuit de Lumière, appeared about two years ago (no date is given) in Colmar, France, edited and published by Jérôme Do Bentzinger and authored, in collaboration, by two French organists, Joseph Coppey and Jean-Willy Kunz. To many it may be surprising that theirs should comprise the first available major documentation of so un-Gallic a musician and musical thinker.The book itself offers a list of hundreds of works, by some 30 composers, comprising Walcha’s memorized repertoire, but not one is French nor even from outside of the German cultural sphere. M. Coppey got to know his subject during Walcha’s few trips to France—he visited the cathedral of Poitiers, dedicated the organ at St. Séverin in Paris, and recorded some of the Bach harpsichord music, including the violin sonatas with Henryk Szeryng, in that city, and did his second—stereophonic—round of Bach organ recordings at St. Pierre LeJeune in Strasbourg—while M. Kunz is the son of a deceased friend who had originally intended to collaborate with Coppey in researching and writing this biography. 

The barely 200-page book has some puzzling oddities—it is printed in a font almost as large as that of the New York Times Large-Type Weekly (for the sight-impaired), contains no index, and speaks of Helmut Walcha, along with his wife and some of their friends, mostly on a first-name basis. At the same time, the work leaves nothing to be desired in terms of reverence and affection for its subject. The authors—who speak little English, although one of them knows a good deal of German—did extensive research in Germany, tracking down friends, colleagues, pastors, and students of the master and—especially valuable—some of Walcha’s former chamber music partners, still lucid but now largely “lost” to the world in senior citizens’ centers. They also elicited written testimonials from associates and admirers, including from within the French cultural sphere (e.g., L. Rogg, M. Chapuis, R. Saorgin, M. Schaefer).

Praiseworthy and useful as these efforts and their results are, it can be said that the story told here really covers only the first half of Walcha’s life—the second half, after all, had a lot to do with the United States, via his 50 American students, of whom the evidence provided here is quite spotty. So far as I know, I am the only American student with whom the authors spoke. Among the others, those omitted here, in the published “non-exhaustive” list of students, include Robert Anderson, David Bowman, Edgar Billups, Virginia Banfield Bollinger, Edward Brewer, Larry Cook, Elise Cambon, Paul Davis, Melvin Dickinson (Margaret got in!), Sheila Beck Dietrich, Delbert Disselhorst, Tony Godding, Barbara Harbach, Philipp Isaacson, Gene Janssen, Lorna DaCosta McDaniel, Margaret Mueller (John did make it), David Mulbury, Doris Parr, Edmund Shay, Bob Thompson, and Nancy Walker! It was good to see in print the names of Frankie Cunningham and Betty Steeb (both among the students sent over early on by the late, and great, Arthur Poister), as well as that of Oberlin’s David Boe (who married the second daughter of Walcha’s pastor, Pfarrer Paulus North). 

There is no sign of the three South African students, including composer Jacobus Kloppers (now in Canada) or Elise Feldtmann Liebergen. Among the Germans, Oda Jürgens (long active in Berlin) and Helmut Röhrig (who settled in Cincinnati) are missing—and, although composer Reinhold Finkbeiner did make it onto the list, there is no indication of his having been interviewed, which would quite likely have provided color and special interest in light of his outspoken dissent from aspects of Walcha’s aesthetics and pedagogy. Like Disselhorst, Charles Krigbaum is mentioned once (on page 141), as a contributor to the 70th-birthday Festschrift, but then, 18 pages later, omitted from the list. Yet it has to be said (at least here) that, as the Yale University organist for decades, Krigbaum would appear to have occupied the most prestigious position attained by any of Walcha’s students, anywhere.  

The American and other omissions are particularly egregious inasmuch as Prof. Walcha himself often remarked (but never in France?) that of his best students a considerable number was to be found among the Americans. In addition, although the most intense wonder at Walcha’s prodigious memory and veneration for his interpretation and technique are expressed repeatedly, the biography lacks the sort of detailed analysis and explanation of these factors that readers would be justified in expecting such a book to attempt. In short, another biography—or at least a “Part Two”—will still be needed. The pictorial material in the book—much of it of an “exclusive” nature—is wonderful and, for those interested in acquiring such (even if nary an American be shown therein), probably worth the price of the volume. We are grateful to M. Bentzinger for the samples he has kindly provided for reproduction in these pages.¹

The historical context

The historical context out of which Walcha and his interpretation emerged was that of the “Leipzig School” of the early 20th century. Thomas-Kantor Karl Straube stood at its center. His own life was marked by the transition from the late-19th-century extravagantly Romantic interpretation of pre-Romantic music to a new, disciplined and “ascetic” neo-Classicism that came to pervade certain, even large-scale, compositions by musicians like Stravinsky and Hindemith no less than the seemingly unrelated arts of organ-building and organ-playing. In Germany it was connected with the destructive caesura of World War I and the hopes aroused by formation of a new, Kaiser-less “Weimar Republic.” In any case it was clear that the old, complacent and hyper-bourgeois order was dead and nothing would ever be the same again; all was open to reconsideration. 

In this context, and parallel to his friendships with outstanding late-Romantic musicians like Reger and Leipzig’s own Karg-Elert, Straube opened himself, “midstream,” to the growing interest in early organs and the interpretative concepts seemingly implicit in their structural features (tracker action; Werkprinzip; absence of facile electric playing aids; high mixtures and mutations; etc.). Neglected old instruments like the two Silbermann organs in Rötha, just outside of Leipzig, came to set new standards and, once newly playable and audible, imprinted their sonorities indelibly on the minds of aspiring and up-to-date musicians like the young Helmut Walcha.

In the unique atmosphere of “Weimar’s” creative ferment—soon to yield to the fanaticism of Nazism and the consequent pervasive chaos of the new German racial, foreign and military policies—it seems highly unlikely that Straube and his own finest pupil (and the next Thomas-Kantor) Günther Ramin, who, though only nine years older, became Walcha’s major teacher, could have reached the thorough, “chiselled” and, in time, “settled” concept of virtually every detail of interpretation that came to comprise Walcha’s accomplishment and, at least in terms of the applied interpretative method, his most specific organistic and musical emanation and legacy.

And yet Walcha, who studied theory with Reger’s conservatory successor Karg-Elert but was musically involved with the more neo-classical Leipzig composer Günter Raphael and his pupil Kurt Hessenberg (later Walcha’s beloved Frankfurt friend and colleague), attributed to Straube (under whose cantata-conducting in Bach’s Thomaskirche he sometimes played continuo) and, especially, to Ramin his life’s major organistic inspiration—along with that of Albert Schweitzer, through that scholar’s early study of both historical organs and the theological and pictorial symbolism in Bach’s music. In conversation it was, as Coppey and Kunz have noted, hard to elicit from him the specifics. Detective work, including carefully aimed examination of Straube’s correspondence, writings and editions and of Ramin’s recordings—perhaps leading to a musicologist’s future dissertation—might yet uncover the most critical points of both similarity and difference between Walcha’s concepts and those of his early Leipzig models. Lionel Rogg’s pronouncement of him as “original” implies, I think, that it was not only in Walcha’s sometimes ravishing sonorities that he may—or must—have diverged from his teachers.

In two somewhat ironic ways Helmut Walcha’s productivity was framed and promoted by misfortune. In his personal history, the poor eyesight and subsequent blindness (resulting from the teenager’s smallpox-vaccination calamity) served both to focus and enhance his musical ear and to promote the uniquely “horizontal” and minutely analytical method of learning (i.e., memorizing) polyphony voice by voice. In the history of his times, the need for safety from the World War II bombings of Frankfurt prompted Walcha’s flight to the tranquillity of the countryside, where he was able to learn, undisturbed by any urban distractions, the entire Well-Tempered Clavier, and doubtless to hone and solidify those more general interpretive concepts that would inform all his concerts, recordings and lessons.

Performing and recording

Among those who became familiar with Walcha’s recordings and were also fortunate to hear him in person, many perceived a subtle but unmistakable difference between the two musical experiences. My own observations confirmed the fairly consistent difference and I have, after considerable thought, concluded that it arose from different concepts operative in the artist in the two contexts. For Walcha a recording was foremost a documentation of the score, of the composer’s discernible intentions as objectively as possible—it was not intended to be, any more than could be avoided, a record, for eternity, of a particular moment in a particular performer’s life; not an attempt, that is, to artificially “freeze” such a subjective human moment beyond the composer’s already confirmed success in integrating an original experience, song and form into the enduring work of art. This extrapolation of mine is consonant with Walcha’s attitude toward improvisation; he was not opposed to subjectivity and certainly not to spontaneity—but these were of the moment, not of eternity. For this reason he did not improvise in concerts—i.e., in the “presence” of finalized masterful works—nor did he authorize the recording, the “eternalization,” of any of his thousands of glorious subjective and spontaneous liturgical expressions. Those of us allowed to partake of some of his “greater” ritards or other spontaneous rhythmic “bendings” of the moment, in an inimitable and unrepeatable interaction between him and a particular concert audience, would not ever wish to have missed them—yet nor would most of us desire to have such superimposed upon the documentation he chose to leave behind of his underlying, more objective conception.

In addition to the word Musiker, for musician, the German language includes a special word, Musikant, for the musician—the performer—who feels and transmits the experience of a beguiling spontaneity. Without any part of a doubt, Walcha was a Musikant as well as a Musiker—yet I can imagine him expressing a view that recordings are not an appropriate place for vagaries of Musikantentum. It is quite possible to believe, as many may, that, on the contrary, recordings, like all performance, can justly be about little else. To this premise I presume to venture no comparably axiomatic rejoinder. In departing this field of contention, however, it may be permissible also to pose a question: Is it possible that subjective spontaneous re-interpretations of particular musical passages, such as inevitably emphasize—more than is usual or ultimately justifiable—particular aspects of a work at the expense of others, may, however enchanting at the moment, when frequently reiterated through the objectification of recording, be perceived as grating and finally come to stand, rather than as mediators, as obstacles between the listener and the sensibility—as embodied in the work—of the composer?

The poet-singerСcommunication for the ages

In what I hope is only an apparent paradox, I hasten to affirm that of course the poet-singer in this great artist desired, especially in his work as an interpreter, to communicate with the hearts of fellow humans, both in the moment and across the ages. All the salient features of his performance—the singing, sometimes overlapping legato, interrupted by the “breathing” of the pipes simulating the human lung, the pointed staccato, the gravitas of portato, the nuanced virtuosity of leggiero touches, the accentuated highlighting of syncopations and of other rhythmic as well as harmonic tensions, the clear yet sensuous registrations as well as the illumination of form through their changes, the intriguing simultaneity of different articulations, and the “chiselled” or etched identification and re-identification of motivic structures and relationships—were applied to this end. One may differ about the degree of his success, but no one can properly gainsay Walcha the sincerity and intensity of his work toward two goals—of optimal communication with his listeners, and of endurance of the insights he believed to have achieved especially about the music of Bach and the conditions for its fullest realization.       

This may be the place for three suggestive and all somewhat surprising quotations. It is no German, but René Saorgin, writing in French in his testimonial (on pg. 199) in the book by Messieurs Coppey and Kunz, who declares that “Helmut Walcha was quite certainly the greatest organist of our time.” Lionel Rogg, when I drove him from Kennedy Airport to New Haven some 35 years ago, told me plainly that “Walcha is a great romantic” (I don’t believe he meant it with a capital R, but rather that he was referring to the poetic intensity he felt communicated in Walcha’s renditions). And the late Robert Baker emerged from Walcha’s summer 1963 concert of pre-Bach masters on his then new Karl Schuke church organ to tell me, in considerable excitement, “He’s a colorist—like Clarence Dickinson!” (I don’t believe Bob really meant quite like Clarence Dickinson—but the colors he surely heard.)

Playing!

While seeking to zero in yet further on “what made Walcha Walcha,” it is useful to recall that over the centuries German philosophers—such as Schiller, Nietzsche and H. Marcuse—have repeatedly emphasized the relationship of play, and indeed the playfulness of the child, to the work of the “serious” artist. That art is always, to a significant extent, play, or that the artist’s “work” is, itself, a kind of play, was—contrary to a common false impression—well manifested in our subject. He had no children, but he took a lively interest in them, in particular in the children of his friends (e.g., making reference to them in occasional poems he wrote); he had a ready sense of humor, enjoyed funny stories and sported a hearty and infectious laugh; he identified better than many a musician with the more humorous elements in Baroque music, e.g., fresh, somewhat insolent repeated notes, or certain bold leaps, or fast—and jocular—alternating neighboring tones; he understood the provocative capriciousness of the stylus phantasticus passages in 17th-century music (though the term itself was not yet in common circulation); and he loved and liberally employed the airy playfulness intrinsic to many of the applications of high-pitched, “Baroque” flutes and principals, of mutations such as sundry fifths and thirds, and of bright Zimbel-type mixtures or Tertian combinations. It will be apparent, indeed, that this artist’s playfulness plays right on into our next subject.   

The Walcha organ

Touring throughout Germany, as well as in the Netherlands, Scandinavia, England and France—and recording on historical organs—Walcha came to know an extraordinary number and variety of instruments. He could master, and more quickly so than most sighted musicians (and—also—later recall!), the intricacies of any console—the precise distance between manuals, the instrument’s specifications, and the locations of the stop (and of any combination) mechanisms, and the different structures among the key- and pedal-boards of new and old organs. Most importantly, he could always find, and usually did use—as was said of J. S. Bach—unconventional, hitherto untried combinations of stops, and he thus drew from most instruments sonorities previously unheard and yet uncannily apt for the composition to be realized. He looked always for emotional expression and warmth in addition to the clarity required for following the polyphony, and he certainly displayed no fear of a good tremulant.

By the end of the 1950s, in recognition of his sustained and extraordinary contributions to the cultural life of Frankfurt am Main, the city fathers determined to have built for installation in Helmut Walcha’s church an instrument of his own design and specifications. After Walcha, who had an excellent von Beckerath organ at his disposal in the large recital hall of the Hochschule, and who had enjoyed instruments by Karl Schuke in Berlin and elsewhere, apprised the city government that he would find either of these builders suitable for the Dreikönigskirche, the mayor and councillors arrived at a decision to afford special consideration to the delicate needs of the isolated city of West Berlin—i.e., for ongoing political, moral and financial support from West Germany—and thus, all else being equal, to award the commission to West Berlin’s Schuke (rather than to von Beckerath, of Hamburg in West Germany).

Following its dedication in 1961, and for the rest of his public musical life, this three-manual Schuke was Walcha’s “home” instrument. It is likely that he explored all of his then still current repertoire—notably including many 17th-century works as well as the late(st) works of Bach, including, e.g., the Art of the Fugue and the Musical Offering’s Six-Part Ricercar—with its resources. And of course he exploited it no end in delicious and brilliant free and chorale-related liturgical improvisations. The organ, while ample for the sympathetic room, was never over-aggressive, and featured a rich pedal palette complemented by a deeply resonant, (relatively) foundation-strong Hauptwerk, a lyrical Oberwerk with Krummhorn, and a bright and playful Brustwerk. Interestingly, however, this latter division includes no principal (a 2′ one would have been “normal”) and only a very high mixture, but instead features such (playful!) “gourmet specialties” as a 4′ Quintadena and a 4′ Regal! 

I personally have found an interest in such stops elsewhere only in the work of the late M. Searle Wright, coming from a quite different aesthetic—as in his partial revision of the specifications of an organ Edwin Link had assembled and donated to the old chamber hall of S.U.N.Y. in Binghamton, Searle’s home town. Though I enjoyed (as did Robert Baker) Walcha’s idiosyncratic application of these sonorities in Frankfurt, I would (and recently did, on the Dreikönigs organ in its currently refurbished and very slightly altered condition) not find much use for them for my own musical purposes. 

Yon Brustwerk division—by no means all bad!—does represent a triumph of Helmut Walcha’s playfulness (and his especially playful relationship to some of other composers’ and his own music) over certain organ-structural considerations that, for most other artists, would in the end take precedence . . .  That, at least, is the only way that I can understand it. It was/is his instrument—and did/does he not deserve to have (had) it? A monument to playfulness—how many of those are there? n

This article will be continued.

Paul Jordan has previously written for The Diapason, The American Organist, Musik und Kirche, and The American Recorder. Of his five recordings (two of them double albums), one, though 29 years old, has not yet been published, and three are out of print. The last one, however, the Art of Fugue, is still available at . Paul has also recorded for several radio networks and concertized in more than 100 cities on four continents, most recently again in Germany, and in England. He has graduate degrees from Yale, the Frankfurt State Academy of Music, and the American Conservatory in Chicago. His longest church tenure was at United Church on the Green in New Haven, Connecticut, exceeded however by 22 years of teaching at the State University of New York in Binghamton.

Helmut Walcha, the great German organist, may have had the distinction of knowing more keyboard music of Bach by heart than any other individual in history, including quite likely the composer himself. Walcha, who would be 100 years old this year, was born in Leipzig; he became blind at the age of seventeen, and could boast as his innermost possession virtually all the organ works of J. S. Bach, the harpsichord works, including the Well-Tempered Clavier and the Goldberg Variations, and the entire Art of the Fugue, which Walcha may have been the only person to have both performed and recorded from memory. The international renown of this organist, who moved to Frankfurt am Main in 1929 and lived there until his death in 1991, was based initially on his comprehensive series of recordings of the Bach organ works, undertaken on historical instruments during the late 1940s and early 1950s and issued under the Archiv label of Deutsche Grammophon. Helmut Walcha was the teacher of some 200 organists—a fourth of these were Americans, many of whom came to occupy important teaching positions in the United States. Following his retirement in the early 1970s from teaching and then from concert life, he could still for some years be heard regularly at Vesper services on Saturday afternoons at the Dreikönigs-kirche in Frankfurt. Walcha’s final recording, a double album of pre-Bach German Baroque compositions, received a Deutscher Schallplattenpreis. The first portion of the following three-part study formed part of a contribution to Bach-Stunden, a Festschrift for Helmut Walcha on the occasion of his 70th birthday, published by Evangelischer Presseverband in Hessen und Nassau, Frankfurt/Main, Germany.

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The essential principle that students could derive from Walcha, both by observing his life and artistic expressions and by absorbing his articulable methods, attitudes and conclusions, was that of balance. He was not an extremist, but a reconciler and integrator. With sufficient exposure and, of course, receptivity, students could learn from him that he—like indeed most serious organists—subsisted and acted within some fifteen dialectical fields, in relation to which he himself almost invariably came to choose the middle path, the one that bears at least the possibility of comprehensiveness through mediation and synthesis. As with all creative individuals, the overarching dialectic was between openness—a kind of receptivity, which of itself would strive to be infinite—and its counter-pole: narrowed focus, concentration and self-discipline. The following is an attempt—based on Walcha’s conception, artistic accomplishments, and pedagogical activities—to summarize the more specific perspectives that sustain organists’ work and with respect to which their individual orientations may be defined.

1. Song and Form
The fundamental impulse of organ music is vocal in nature; we are dealing, keyboard notwithstanding, with a wind instrument—i.e., with singing, one step removed. Hence, the process of breathing and its palpable projection in the interpretation, though not mechanically required, is musically of the essence, and all the more so in view of the static nature of the organ’s sound—a quality that on the one hand moves the organist’s music-making yet a step further away from the flexibility of the more natural (or “primary”) musical transactions of singers and wind and string instrument players (and even of pianists) but on the other hand provides the basis for many of the specific glories of the medium: e.g., its capacity for objectivity, for religious transcendence, for sharply etched realization of complex polyphony in detail, yet equally for compelling projection of formal architecture on a grand scale. Even though—perhaps in view of its ideological functions in the jargons of Hegelians, Marxists, Freudians, Existentialists, and some theologians—the word dialectic was not one commonly employed by Helmut Walcha, it may be said that the first of the Spannungsfelder or dialectical fields of tension within which the organist must move is that between the poles of subjective expressivity and formal objectivity. Projection of subjective expressivity involves receiving and actively experiencing the primary impulse of the individual musician as emotionally responsive poet-singer and transmitting it via tone production by—albeit in this instance already mechanized—breath or wind. Effective realization, on the other hand, of the calculated objectivity of “abstract” formal and contrapuntal procedures presupposes—in both the act of composition and the performer’s interpretive re-creation—an artisanship of conscious manipulation and fusion of given musical materials, as discrete building-blocks, into artistic “edifices.” Organists’ movements between these poles are inescapably dialectical: they mediate, reconcile, observe, initiate, influence and preside over the poles’ unceasing cycles of interaction, interpenetration and re-differentiation.

2. Polyphony and Virtuosity
At another level, there is a synthesis between what we have just described as the vocal and the formal counter-poles; the early genres of organ composition such as ricercar, canzona, and to a considerable extent even fugue were derived from models of vocal polyphony and may thus be said to represent, within the corpus of organ music, a trend toward formal embodiment of the vocal impulse. To this tendency the counterpart or antithesis, arising from the instrument itself, is the human Spieltrieb—an “itchy” playfulness of the hands, stimulated in a special manner by the specific freedom afforded by the mechanized objectivity inherent in all instruments, and particularly in the keyboard. The possibility of going beyond the voice (in terms especially of velocity with subtleties of touch, non-vocal intervallic leaps, or complexity of texture), once recognized, is inevitably explored, relished and cultivated, and ultimately formalized, e.g., in toccatas and many fantasies and the more instrumentally inspired fugues. In Walcha’s teaching, pieces, sections of pieces, individual voices, and especially the compositions’ basic motivic building-blocks, were carefully examined and analyzed with respect to this differentiation, and interpreted accordingly.

3. Breathing
Returning to the more primary level, that of the original vocal impulse, and the corresponding requirement that the music breathe—that is, that the continuity of the individual line be periodically interrupted—it became evident that, given both the complexity of structure of much organ music and the special exigencies of the instrument’s static sound, the breathing itself could not be left to chance or the vagaries of intuition. Rather, the performer’s musical instinct needed to be supplemented, and indeed illuminated, by the exertion of conscious criteria and intellectual responsibility in arriving at the crucial decisions regarding articulation. Not surprisingly, the four main criteria fall into two pairs, each of which again defines a dialectical field. In the first field the question of articulation must be examined in terms of the individual line or voice, abstracted from its contrapuntal-harmonic environment. Two criteria then define the spectrum of possible decisions: first, the intrinsic shape of the line—that is, its unique motivic components as well as larger-scale shifts of direction, expressive emphases, and so on—as against the requirements of underlying, not necessarily immanent rhythmic structure; that is, the placement of the linear components in relation to the metric pulse and, especially, the possible use of such components to define not only the values of the line but also those of the meter and its subdivisions. Whereas in rendering Renaissance music such decisions—except in the case of dance rhythms—would be made largely on the basis of intrinsic linear shape, in music of the Baroque period the dance rhythms and the meter exert more universal claims of their own, so that there may often be an interpretive tension between these and the more purely linear forces. At the second level, however, the more shape-oriented and the more metric types of articulation are seen as one inasmuch as they relate to the individual (horizontal) line. The respective tentative decisions, which—as shown—often already embody a creative compromise, must now undergo balancing through considerations intrinsic to the vertical dimension. A considerable density of texture, for instance, might prompt an attempt at clarification via still more liberal articulation. In contrast, the intensity of certain kinds of harmonic pulls, such as those surrounding a suspension and its resolution, would in some instances preclude execution of a motivically justifiable caesura in the tension-bearing line or lines.

4. Registration
If articulation thus had the double function of enhancing the organ’s vocal-expressive qualities while at the same time providing for formal, motivic and textural clarity, the mastery of registration—an equally crucial element of Walcha’s pedagogy—required a comparable simultaneous exertion in different directions or in some instances an intermediate balancing of the two. Registration on the one hand is among the organist’s most intimate modes of emotional expression and communication, comparable in one sense to the pianist’s personal touch and thus an indispensable vehicle for such warmth and sensuality as can be brought to the art; but, as with articulation, an objective integrity and aptness of registration are also required for fulfilling the organist’s obligation to the musical text and illumining for the listener the structure and form of the work at hand. The formal-structural level of consideration in turn requires attention to two factors: the transparency of simultaneous vertical occurrences and the chronological-spatial coherence and/or appropriate differentiation of successive formal subdivisions.

5. Tempo and Rhythmic Qualities
Both tempo and Tempogefühl (the latter referring to the feeling or projection of tempo) are experienced as aspects of two spectrums that more closely resemble bordering spheres than contrasting poles. The individual interpreter’s orientation—momentary or general—within this double-spectrum is one of the most delicate and imponderable phenomena in music. The sense and effect of tempo ranges—“from left to right”—from monumentality, through deliberate restraint, to poised serenity—and, on the other side of our “border-line”—from a relaxed “swing,” through a more facile, “surfacy” flow, to a dynamic forward-surge. Reversing direction, the dialectic is akin to that between the virtuosity of abandon and the virtuosity of control, or—for the listener—to being overwhelmed and being illuminated. Walcha’s example and teaching as well as some musicological research suggest that a high proportion of Bach’s music in particular revolves around the double-spectrum’s mid-line, though such an insight does not remove a considerable remaining leeway for differences in individual pulse, interpretation, or concept of variety. Throughout Walcha’s work and teaching, too, that inexorable dialectic between performance-tempo and room acoustics remained an ever-present (if of course at times exasperating) consideration. A further crucial dialectic in the sphere of rhythm and tempo is ever operative between a “purely metronomic” pulse and such nuances of agogic freedom as constitute one of the primary expressive tools of all performers (though to varying degrees) in all musical idioms.

6. Improvisation
No student who attended Saturday Vespers at the Dreikönigskirche in Frankfurt could fail to be impressed, and somehow influenced, by both Walcha’s chorale-related and his free improvisations. These improvisations were of a quality comparable at least to that offered by more renowned practitioners of the art, e.g., in France. Thus in Walcha’s and, inevitably, in many of his students’ lives there has been a threefold dialectic (Wechselwirkung) between pre-structured and (more or less) improvised music: within the traditional repertoire (in analysis and corresponding rendition of the comparably contrasting, more or less “improvisatory” elements contained therein); in one’s varied “utilitarian” or functional church-music (and in some cases also concert) activities; and in original composition.

7. Organ-Building
In the critical sphere of organ-building and its characteristic influence upon the art of organ-playing, there was in Walcha’s career a certain discernible interpenetration of, and moderation between, northern and southern influences. The extremes here could be defined as represented by such instruments as the Clicquot in Poitiers or some of the 17th-and 18th-century Silbermann family’s organs in southern Germany (or Switzerland or Alsace) on the one hand and achievements by mid-20th-century Scandinavian organ builders in Denmark and Sweden on the other. There is yet another polar interaction in the field of organ-building that permeated and in some ways defined Walcha’s work and teaching: that between the artistic essentials of historic organ building—mechanical playing action; classic specifications, scaling and voicing; the Werkprinzip; casework and slider-chests; etc.—and modern accretions and technical conveniences, such as swell mechanisms, but also electric stop-action, combination systems, and the like.

8. The Horizontal and the Vertical
As elsewhere in his oeuvre, J. S. Bach sustained in his keyboard works—which formed the center of Helmut Walcha’s life and work—an historically perhaps unique balance between the energies of the vertical and horizontal dimensions, between the appreciable and conceivable requirements of long- and short-range harmonic coherence on the one hand and those of melodic and contrapuntal integrity on the other. The implications and ramifications of this achievement—not to mention its inexhaustible fascination—pervaded, as did perhaps no other single factor, Helmut Walcha’s entire career, his teaching, his concept of the art of music; one is tempted to say: his very view of the world.

9. To and from Bach
This gave rise to another dialectic, by which none of his students could long remain unaffected: that which becomes operative in applying or attempting to apply what is learned or absorbed from the “Bachian” dialectic, or from its specific type of “ecological balance,” to the understanding and interpretation of music—of both earlier and later periods, and of other national origin—which may embody it in less judicious proportions, or in which it, in turn, appears to be “counter-balanced” by other artistic forces.

10. Correctness and Communication
Of often underestimated significance (yet comparable perhaps to that of registration in its consequences) is a philosophical approach that views the exigencies of musicological correctness, i.e., of “purity,” “historicity,” “authenticity,” and the equally compelling need to communicate with the living audience under greatly altered historical circumstances, as two poles of a spectrum, which—rather than allowing either to lay absolute claim to the interpreter—must be mediated and reconciled in the performer’s practice. While there is room for dispute over the nature of permissible compromises, the premise as such tends to act as a safeguard against fanaticism and dogmatism at one end of the spectrum and untamed artistic libertinism at the other.

11. Life, Faith, Art
While the context of this summary precludes an attempt to present the next two points in any detail, it is clear, and cannot be left unstated, that in addition to the overarching artistic dialectic of openness and discipline, as mentioned at the outset, there are other contexts and relationships of a high order that play a role in the life and productivity of any individual—such as the unending dialogue between the postulates of one’s creed, theology or religion, and one’s daily experience of life. None of Helmut Walcha’s students were unaware that in his case the context was that of a deeply felt Lutheran Christianity, nor could the particular congruence of this factor with the beliefs held by Bach himself escape notice or fail to engender speculation about its implications for Walcha’s artistry and, in particular, his Bach interpretation. The type and extent of influence exerted by such a vivid example of unity and continuity between presupposition and execution will of course vary from case to case and in each instance be filtered through the student’s own particular creedal background.

12. Text and Symbol
Similarly evident in Walcha’s life, again as in Bach’s own, was a constant interaction between musical experience and activity and theology. This lent special force to his detailed elucidation of a related interpretive dialectic, that between implied verbal text and music—crucial to the realization especially of Bach’s chorale-related organ works, some of which may remain relatively impenetrable—i.e., from an exclusively musical point of view—until their verbal or pictorial symbolism has been illuminated and, then, integrated into the interpretation.

13. Performance and Pedagogy
In yet another respect were Walcha’s life and influence characterized by an extraordinary balance of forces: that between artistic creativity and pedagogical mission. The pedagogy was not limited to lessons, but expanded to include the marvelous lectures on the Well-Tempered Clavier at the Hochschule in Frankfurt and—beyond those—the renowned Bach-Stunden held at the university in the years immediately following World War II, and of course innumerable program notes or introductory remarks at selected concerts throughout his active life. In addition, the individual pedagogy was a two-way street; unlike some other artists, Helmut Walcha was not easily bored by studio instruction (nor did he miss lessons), and he clearly took pains to learn and profit from his experience as a teacher.

14. Organ Plus
His work as a performer sustained an interaction and a dialogue between the demands and repertoires of the organ and the harpsichord. Among his students, this duality will often be reflected, if not always identically, then in the dialogue and cross-fertilization of organ and piano, or organ and composition, or—most frequently—organ and conducting.

15. Beyond Speech and Thought
Finally, like all lives, Walcha’s stood under the mysterious interaction of that which can readily be expressed, articulated and imparted, and that which, by contrast, seems prohibitively difficult to communicate (and with regard to which the philosopher Wittgenstein once went so far as to propose a permanent silence). In a moment both rare and characteristic—opening for a revealing instant the door into that realm—Walcha answered a student’s query, at a semester’s-end party of the Church Music Division of the Hochschule, as to the ultimate criterion for a musician’s calling: “What makes you know that you must be a musician are those secret and indescribable moments of transcendent joy which come upon you from time to time—at the keyboard—in the deep absorption of long and lonely hours of practice.”

This article will be continued.

Parts 1 and 2 were published in the October and November 2007 issues of The Diapason, respectively.

Improvising and composing
Under the rubric of ‘Performing and Recording’ I sought to clarify Walcha’s concept of the relative places of the objective and subjective, the calculated and the spontaneous, the performance for the moment and the recording for the ages. As discussed, these categories pertained mainly to the role of the performer in interpreting and rendering the compositions of other musicians. In contrast, say, to a Paul Hindemith, Walcha’s primary role and, at least for many decades, the main basis of his reputation, was as an interpreter. This emphasis may have meanwhile shifted somewhat, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon worlds of sacred music, where the four volumes of his own Chorale-Preludes, as published by Peters Verlag, have become liturgical staples, recognized for their quality, originality and accessibility even by younger musicians who may never have heard Walcha’s performances as an organist, and in particular his interpretations of Bach, either live or in their recorded embodiments.
It is useful to understand that these compositions grew out of Walcha’s extensive liturgical praxis—for, of the hundreds if not thousands of worship services he played, virtually all included improvisations, and in particular of chorale-preludes in many diverse styles, idioms, textures, durations, and degrees of “modernity” and complexity. Indeed, these publications are the only form in which Walcha allowed his improvisational art to be preserved. At the same time, as he would be the first to concede, there is a clear line between the spontaneity of improvisation and the fixed and calculated structures of written compositions.
His wife Ursula—indispensable assistant in Walcha’s learning of new scores (she played each voice separately as dictation into his memory), in helping to evaluate his registrations (and, when necessary, pulling stops), and in his travels (these three roles cited from among her innumerable contributions to his welfare and success)—was wont to voice her view that her husband’s compositions, fine as they were, did not quite represent the full glory of his improvisations. Still, we are fortunate to have them for their intrinsic values and as a minimal record of this artist’s most personal—and often moving—manner of conveying the meanings of the tunes and texts of hymns, and of his considerable capacities as a musical thinker within as well as outside of the Bachian “box.”

Provocateur for his times
(Walcha and Reger)
Regardless of whatever preoccupations we may nurture with matters of cosmic order, time (eternity) beyond human or even natural history, perennial philosophies and unalterable truths, we are also all children of our own time, embedded in its more or less chaotic history, and subject, with little recourse, to its shifting winds. For Germans the year 1945 marked the “zero hour,” as Hitler and his minions had severely ruptured the integrity of the nation’s spirit and the opposing Allies reduced a large portion of its “physical plant” to rubble—together also leaving virtually no survivors untouched by loss of friends and family. With World War II coming so close on the heels of—and even more destructive than—the earlier “war to end all wars,” the newly traumatized mood was less one of quick fermentations and liberations than of a need to reexamine the bases of one’s existence, to slough off all that was superfluous, and even to seek renewal in a return to long-lost but once well-tried and venerable traditions. This context may help provide the “logic” behind the postwar decisions of most German Protestant church authorities to remove most of the Victorian-era hymns from the books and—in a sense: artificially, by sheer act of will—to replace them with the sorts of older hymns which, e.g., had still been in common use when Bach included settings of them in his Orgelbüchlein (and elsewhere), but which had long since, by the “organic” processes of history and changes of taste, gone out of use (and out of the hymnals).
I describe these aspects of the broad existential and the related ecclesiastical situations also as the context in which Walcha, at the turn of the decade from the 1940s to the 1950s, committed a bold act, which was in some sense to haunt him for the rest of his life. As a responsible and already established artist in his own 40s, he felt self-confident and also—looking at the world around him—somehow impelled to publish an article, in a widely read sacred music journal, about the organ music of Max Reger (who had died, in the midst of the first world-conflagration, in 1916).
In it Walcha made several key points that I recall from my own reading—I had, a decade after its publication, to seek the article out in the library. He dared to express a less than positive evaluation of the pervasive chromaticism, grandiosity and hyper-expressivity of Reger’s idiom—in conversation, at least, I recall a comparison with the overbearing decadence of the Völkerschlachtdenkmal (Monument to the Battle of the Nations) in Leipzig. More importantly, he claimed that Reger’s organ music was not, in the truest sense, organ music! It wrote out explicitly, in mountains of notes, the very octaves and other overtones that the organ “produces by itself,” by virtue of its tonal structure, e.g., in the mixtures of the principal chorus, in the realization of much simpler, basic notations that indeed have been appropriately reduced, by real organ composers (e.g., Bach), to the bare contrapuntal and harmonic essences of the music. Not only the sound, but even the appearance of Reger’s music, Walcha implied, was overladen and pretentious and tended to hide the presence of ideas, which, once reduced to their essences, might prove to be relatively insignificant.
Not leaving it there, Walcha proceeded, in notational form, to reduce the opening strains of one of Reger’s grandest and most renowned organ opuses to such essences, to their “actual” musical meanings, expressed in plain four-part harmony. Having thus “unmasked” the reality, the professor—he had his naïve side—evidently expected dyed-in-the-wool Romanticists to close the book and go home, now cured of their Reger addiction. Or, he didn’t care . . . And he went on to unmask the late-Romantic master in yet another respect. He quoted lengthy samples of inner voices from fugues by Reger, voices which were, indeed, distinguished by being undistinguished, if not virtually shapeless. He implied that such voices can be retained only on a short-order basis—they lack the kind of identity that would enable them to penetrate to the deeper layers of musical apperception. This demonstrated, too—here, the coup de grâce—that Reger was writing fugues on paper only, fugues that had some visual “earmarks,” but lacked the substance of genuine polyphony. Again, the late gentleman is revealed to have been something of a four-flusher . . .
In a concession, Walcha acknowledged the likelihood that it was not merely ignorance that prompted Reger’s lavishly doubled and tripled notation: it was probably made necessary by the relative lack of overtones in the tonal structure of the organs with which Reger had contact, organs built, self-evidently, before the Orgelbewegung (the neoclassicist reform movement of the 1920s) had succeeded in bringing back the earlier type of instruments with their richer overtone resources. But this too becomes evidence against the continuing credibility—or viable use—of Reger’s organ compositions: designed for organs that required the use of so many fingers all at once, they will sound harsh, if not ridiculous, if applied to our current instruments that have all these overtones already—and properly so—built into their tonal structures! No, Reger—Walcha believed—would be found to have not much going for him in this newly “essential” world of 1950.
And then the consequence. In the light of the foregoing considerations, he said, “I have decided to strike Max Reger from the list of composers whose works students at the Frankfurt Hochschule are required to play.” One might ask: If students here in New Haven in 2007 are not required to play Reger, why should students in Frankfurt in 1950 have been required to? But those were different times, and in a different country. The article occasioned “storms” of professorial protest in endless letters of rebuttal in subsequent issues of the journal. Part of the trauma was due to a conflation of “not required to” with “forbidden to.” Another part was a nervous fear of a creeping return of the kind of authoritarianism and censorship that had characterized German cultural life during the “thousand year empire” from 1933 to 1945. Another element was no doubt simple envy of and dislike for Helmut Walcha, coupled with an outspoken rejection of his opinionated outspokenness. Another may have been a sense that as the duly appointed head of the Frankfurt school’s Church Music Institute, Walcha had the prerogative to make such decisions without enduring such a challenge—but did it have to be with that rationale, and that provocative publicity?!
If not already in that written context, Walcha did eventually offer the additional explanation that while in wartime he was memorizing the 48 W.T.C. Preludes and Fugues in the country retreat, he came to realize that there was not enough room in his mind to accommodate their highest-density substance and still hold on to the discursive Reger organ extravaganzas that he had learned and often played in his younger years; something had to give. A related question cannot be repressed: Is there anyone alive who knows and plays, or was there ever anyone who knew and played—during the same period of life—the entire Well-Tempered Clavier as well as a set of giant Reger organ works, both from memory?
In any case, the occasional determined Frankfurt student did propose Reger for study in the lessons over the ensuing decades and did not necessarily find Walcha unreceptive. There were two possibilities: if the work was to be one that Walcha himself had once played, he might well take it on, and—relearning it quickly from listening—would soon also even be able to demonstrate it again at the console . . . If it were a piece unfamiliar to Walcha, there were other, often quite willing teachers available at the school. [Disclosure: during my own Frankfurt time, Armin Schoof studied Reger’s great F-minor work with Walcha—though it is not specifically included in the Coppey-Kunz repertoire list—while I enjoyed learning the much smaller, but also tellingly “Regerian” Prelude in A Minor from Opus 69 with Prof. Hartmann at the cathedral downtown.]
In wrapping up this episode, which I have narrated in detail because I believe it to be of interest yet perhaps not readily accessible to other American organists, my own feelings are that, despite a number of inherent misunderstandings, it formed a characteristic, if marginal part of the process of cleaning up from the vestigial messiness of some Romanticism along with some forms of potential brutality, which that emotional/artistic nexus had left behind in the political and cultural sphere [the line, say, from Wagner’s to Hitler’s anti-Semitism], and that the controversy engendered by Walcha’s boldness was needed, or useful, in 1950, as a healthy means to help clarify both aesthetic and human rights positions in certain German musical circles—and this even if perhaps there is now no one left who could still agree in all specifics with either Walcha’s or some of his critics’ theses.

Lifestyle, discipline, personal time, hobbies
The Walchas’ personal lifestyle was characterized primarily by modesty and simplicity, an almost vegetarian diet, herbal teas, regular afternoon naps, an occasional glass of wine; after the international success of his recordings—his D Minor Toccata and Fugue recording alone, he once told me, financed his house organ—the couple could have lived in much greater opulence; but they chose not to do so. For one thing, such a change could have impinged on the accustomed quietude and focus requisite for his ongoing musical attainments. His discipline, structured by his sense of time, was extraordinary; on top of all the organ and harpsichord music, and the entire Lutheran hymnal—including the words of hymns with thirteen verses—he also had his datebook in his head. When I once gave him a long-playing album for his birthday in October and a few days later asked if he had heard it, he said, “Oh no, I won’t be able to listen to that until February—it’s scheduled for the 19th, after my afternoon nap.” When at my lesson on February 20th I remembered to inquire if he’d yet had a chance to listen to the album (the early Swingle Singers singing Bach), he responded immediately, “Oh yes, we listened to it yesterday, as planned, right after my nap . . .”
Helmut and Ursula (though I never used those words) made time for quiet social events with the students—often in their home—and with their friends. There was never an impression that they were rushed, under deadline pressures, or had not gotten enough sleep. In the summers they loved to take long walks in the Black Forest—and, after a few explanations, he had the layout of the landscape memorized (just as he knew, and could give you a guided taxi tour of the Frankfurt cityscape). They also managed to attend concerts, of his colleagues, or of students such as myself who might be performing in other media (e.g., he wanted to hear recorder, he wanted to hear counter-tenor; or, if I happened to play an organ concert near where they were vacationing, they might show up unexpectedly and socialize with us afterwards—other students have told similar stories . . .).
In retrospect, it is hard to imagine how all this was possible, especially inasmuch as he could read neither words nor music in Braille. They listened to some radio, and he alluded to their reading entire books (including novels) together, she reading to him regularly in the evenings. He was curious, and the questions he asked of people were meaningful and well formulated; it was a pleasure to try to answer to his satisfaction. His main hobby, I think—as well as a way to practice—was playing his house organ. In his retirement he did so purely for fun, telling me, for instance, how nice it felt to be freed from the compulsion of always playing for note perfection. Though his harpsichord playing seemed not as idiomatic, sensuous, mellifluous as, say, Gustav Leonhardt’s (or as his own organ playing), he did enjoy the East German cembalo he had at home.
In his retirement he turned also to other enjoyments—listening to Wagner (as he had in his youth)—or learning French(!), something he felt he’d missed out on throughout his music studies and professional life. Of course he had to approach this in his own systematic way, starting with the music: from his tutor he wanted first to find out how to pronounce all the nasal word endings, in, en, an, on, un (hard enough to distinguish in context . . . ). “Good luck, Helmut!,” I thought when he told me this. (But if anyone could do it . . . ) This did not of course mean that he was going to start learning to play some French music—there seemed to be an uncrossable line there; yet at least he wished to find out more about the language behind it . . .

Friends, successors
When it came time to think about his successors, at school and church, Walcha, as might be expected, thought judiciously. While there were several of his former students, on both sides of the Atlantic, who he believed would be qualified to succeed him in either or both positions, he also thought it wiser—at least in making suggestions to the school administration—to move outside of “the family.” The Geneva organist and recording artist Lionel Rogg and he admired each other’s playing and had exchanged views in letters; on balance, Rogg seemed a worthy candidate both to carry forth the pedagogical work within a congenial aesthetic tradition and to sustain the prestige of the church music division of the Hochschule. Coming from Geneva, however, Rogg was understandably less than enthusiastic about the contours and ambiance of post-war Frankfurt as a city; while the chance to preside over the Schuke across the river just might have been able to persuade him, Walcha was still yearning for a few more years of unencumbered work at his Dreikönigskirche. In the end, the successor at school was Edgar Krapp, who, it is said, convinced Walcha and the others with an especially cogent rendition of the C-minor Passacaglia and Fugue.
Later, at church, Walcha was succeeded by his recent student Renate Meierjürgen, who had already been directing the choir and was something of an expert on his Chorale-Preludes. This appointment kept matters at the church, literally, in the family for the rest of the Walchas’ lives, inasmuch as Frau Meierjürgen, a single woman, had also agreed to move in with the Walchas on Hasselhorstweg, where she became instrumental in helping both of them to cope with the difficulties of old age and now continues to reside. Her successor at the church became Andreas Köhs, a concert organist and choral-orchestral conductor as well as a music editor with a major publisher. Like most German organists today, given the slow attrition of the churches’ budgets under the continuing system of church financing via state-collected taxes, and with a dwindling congregation as almost everywhere, he faces an ongoing struggle to maintain, if not expand the program—meaning, in this case, to continue Dreikönigs’ traditional contributions to the city’s cultural life in a manner worthy of the memory of the relatively recent tenures, at this institution, of such stellar historical figures as (the conductor and, later, Thomas-Kantor) Kurt Thomas and Helmut Walcha.
The Walchas had several concentric circles of friends, relatives and associates. Among their closest friends in their later years, in addition to Frau Meierjürgen, were the late composer Kurt Hessenberg and his wife Gisela; harpsichordist Maria Jäger-Jung, who died this year; the organist Karl Köhler, formerly in charge of much of the liturgical organ program at the Hochschule and still residing in Frankfurt; the late Berlin painter Gerhard Rechenbach (who painted the portrait of Helmut Walcha that still adorns the living room on Hasselhorstweg), and the loyal Adolf Kirschner, still living in Frankfurt, with whom the friendship dated back to the year 1935. In addition it is clear that they enjoyed a close relationship with Christel North-Wittmann (the oldest daughter of Pastor Paulus North), who at one time directed the church’s choir, and her family, as also with Helmut Walcha’s former assistant Agathe Calvelli-Adorno (a niece of the late eminent philosopher) and her brilliant scientist-husband Rainer Jaenicke. Of course there were important friendships lost to death—I think of the late Erich Thienhaus, who on behalf of Deutsche Grammophon recorded many of Walcha’s early albums, and his companion—a couple to whom, in my recollection, the Walchas referred quite often. Helmut Walcha and many of his former students, on both sides of the ocean, kept in touch with each other, some in more rigorous, some in looser ways. But the affections from and for the Walchas were and are spread around the planet. Nowhere do his work and person continue to be more revered, for instance, than today in Japan.

The organ in the musical world
Our instrument is grandly self-contained and we are, with few exceptions, not required to interact with other musicians in order to enjoy it; in addition, it usually sits, not portable, in church buildings and liturgical contexts a good step or two removed from the venues and concerns of the larger—and secular—musical world. We congregate less with other musicians than among ourselves, and then with clergy and church people for whom music is often one of several means toward approaching religious goals but rarely an end in itself. In these circumstances it may not be surprising that some organists have, over the last seven or eight decades, been drawn to doctrines that advocate simplistic solutions to the problems of musical interpretation—cries of “everything legato except repeated notes!, everything detached!, everything portato except for occasional couplets!, no Romanticism!, no Classicism!, only Eclecticism is American!, organs without tremulants!, no thumbs!, never legato over the bar-line!, no cases!, no swells!, no electric bellows!, no combinations!, no more tracker-action!, choral accompaniment only on British organs!, never play from memory!, always play from memory!, historical temperaments only!, Spanish Renaissance organs to the rescue!”—etc.
Is there a reader who has not heard all of these cries? Is it a problem that none of them ever crossed the lips of Helmut Walcha? It is a problem, for us—I submit—that almost none of them ever crosses the lips of an oboist or a singer or a violinist or a composer or a pianist . . . For any of these people, to advocate such creeds would soon render them dysfunctional as musicians. For them the issue is, and has to be, the virtually endless variety of means available, and required!, for convincing, communicative interpretation of music. How and where have we, do we (through our isolation?), go wrong, become so narrow? Out there, also—scratched beneath the surface—even the Harnoncourts and Hogwoods, Herreweghes and Gardiners would admit that delving ever deeper into the cave of history, to retrieve from its dim light ever greater jewels of truth, of authentic instructions from the dead (instructions then to be enforced by a kind of Early Music Police, analogous to composers’ Avant-garde Music Police of the 1960s), is not actually the way, not the primary way, in which musical interpretation evolves (or “improves”)—among people living in a 21st century.
Helmut Walcha was no more opposed to good historical research than to subjectivity or spontaneity; indeed he knew that, as an intrinsic part of our lives and times, it contributed inevitably and often usefully—or usably, for it needs to be used and not worshipped—to change, via those endless hermeneutic cycles (no matter how often we like to believe an endpoint has been reached . . . ) of reconsiderations and revisions without which life and history are not possible. But the primary focus of his work and teaching was the artist’s obligation to deal responsibly—a path at least as challenging—with the immanent structure and character of each individual work, not by subjecting it to a patented solution, but by minute examination and analysis—of its specific language and being and discernible structure and expressive intentions—by the eyes and intellect and heart and (rather than by theories) via the inner ear informed by these three human faculties and supplemented by such intriguing general stylistic mandates or suggestions as are contemporaneously proffered through the insights or opinions of historians.
I have enjoyed listening to recordings and performances by some of the brilliant young organists entering church and concert life today. Much of their work conveys a fine visceral excitement—passion has not been lost! While the generations may be well advised to eschew directly “interfering” with each other, empathy and respect for the mysteries of new (or old) perceptions and of different internally driven emphases need perhaps not preclude some beneficial reciprocal stimulation and cross-fertilization (as another part, indeed, of the ineluctable historical hermeneutic). While I can—and have tried to—learn from attending to playing-styles informed by the most recent historiography, and even from such seductively looser and more “casual” kinds of musical gestures as seem favored among some of the younger artists, I confess that what I do find largely missing these days is a sense of the deep interpretative responsibility to the essence of each individual work, and the consequent specific and lucid internal organization of each musical rendition, which characterized and was so widely appreciated half a century ago in the work of Helmut Walcha. Perhaps, prompted by his centennial, a broad and detailed reconsideration of the sound recordings of this artist, in conjunction with his educational legacy, could facilitate a reformulation (resolidification?) of our interpretative priorities—within a new hermeneutical cycle of consciousness—and thereby also contribute, in analogy to his work’s earlier direct appeal beyond the confines of the organ world, to bringing our instrument and its repertoire yet a step closer—as most of us desire—toward the center of mainstream contemporary classical music culture.
It is my hope that, by way of encouraging such an undertaking or at least discussion, recollections by others who knew or felt strongly about Helmut Walcha—along with other relevant comments or critiques prompted by this article—will be forthcoming in the pages of The Diapason.■

Gavin Black studied formally with Paul Jordan in 1973–74, and informally from summer 1968 through early 2015. Gavin first publicly performed on a keyboard instrument when Paul invited him to play the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D Minor in the Valentine’s Day service at United Church on the Green in February 1974. You can reach Gavin by e-mail at [email protected].

Paul Jordan

March 12, 1939–March 1, 2015

An appreciation

As I was preparing this month’s column, I received news that my former teacher, mentor, colleague, and lifelong friend Paul Jordan had died after a lengthy illness. I decided to use this column to write about Paul: an appreciation made up of anecdotes, memories of things that he said or did when he was my formal teacher or over the many years following, and my impressions of what he was like as a musician and especially as a person and a friend. This is neither an obituary nor a biography. I don’t want to create a comprehensive version of Paul’s life story, and I wouldn’t be able to. Even though I knew him well for nearly fifty years, there is a lot about that story that I don’t know. That is the way with life, of course: you never get around to everything, and you never know when you will wish that you had. This will be quite personal and idiosyncratic to me and to my connection with one of the very most important people in my own life. 

I met Paul Jordan in the summer of 1968 at Chestnut Hill Creative Arts Center, a summer camp in Killingworth, Connecticut, near New Haven where I grew up. At that point I had been taking piano lessons for three years, but had just decided to switch to bassoon. I had always assumed that piano lessons were only a preliminary activity: a way of learning about music prior to choosing an orchestral instrument. I remember how excited I was when, as we were heading to camp on the bus one day, another camper said that she thought that one of the counselors played organ in a New Haven church. I believe I had been saying something about how I played piano and liked Baroque music, and this led the fellow camper to suggest that I might want to try out an organ. It is not too much to describe that specific moment as the beginning of my life as an organist. I owe it to the camper, and I owe the way it worked out to Paul. 

When I tracked down the counselor/organist I had been told about and asked him about the church and the organ, he expressed how happy he would be to introduce me to the instrument. At the time this seemed like an act of unfathomable generosity, and it felt like the opening of the doors to mysteries, complexities, and joys that I wouldn’t have dared to dream about. That was the perspective of an eleven-year-old who had scarcely ever been inside a church, had never played an organ, and was not too comfortable talking to people he didn’t already know. It’s not just Paul agreeing to let me visit United Church on the Green and play the Hillebrand organ that made an impression: it was his particular combination of the matter-of-fact and the enthusiastic. Looking back on it, I think that he was conveying the message that I (a youngster whom he didn’t know at all and who couldn’t play) was “worthy” to come a play a fine new instrument. That was a message powerful enough to resonate across nearly half a century.

This is also the essence of what was extraordinary about Paul over his whole life. He was excited and enthusiastic about what he was doing—sometimes with a kind of spontaneous joy that we might describe as childlike, or at least as not having lost the best of the attitudes of childhood—and he was very positive that what he was doing was important, and that his doing it was important. But he also radiated the belief that each and every person was important and that no one was on the outside: of course, if you want to come play the organ you should come play the organ.

The fact that it was Paul and the organ that he had designed for United Church that I encountered first steered my tastes and interests in a certain direction. If, living in New Haven, I had first discovered the famous Woolsey Hall instrument, would I have grown up musically in a very different direction? Of course, I don’t know: there are always multiple influences. As it actually happened, though, the first organ at which I ever sat was the United Church Hillebrand. In showing me this organ and letting me come to the church and get to know the instrument extremely well—and largely on my own over several years, before I finally started taking lessons—Paul was sharing something that was a close extension of himself. The instrument was there because of his time studying in Germany with Helmut Walcha and because of his eloquence and persuasiveness in convincing the church that this was the specific organ they should get. Paul was a principal designer of the instrument, and the stoplist reflected some of his ideas, such as the importance of the Quintadena, the beauties of the Regal, the importance of flute-scaled 22⁄3′ and 2′ on the Great, the value of a 51⁄3′ in the Pedal, and so on (the organ has undergone some redesign over the years). What he referred to as the “chamber-music quality” of all of the reeds also reflected his tastes. 

That Regal was the source of another lesson that has stayed with me—a lesson about diversity of tastes. The impression that I got from Paul over many years was that he had strong and decided tastes and opinions about how things should be in music—with respect to organs and organ design, matters of interpretation and aesthetics, and so on—and had a real delight in different people seeing things in different ways. In those olden days, I was a boy soprano in the choir at Trinity Church on the Green in New Haven—two churches away from United Church, with Center Church in between. The organist and choir director there was G. Huntington Byles. Mr. Byles, as we called him, had been there since the mid 1930s and had studied in Europe—especially in England and in the English tradition—in the years prior to that. He was an august figure who exuded knowledge, experience, and tradition. One day Paul was demonstrating the Hillebrand Regal for me—it was (and remains in my memory) an absolute favorite of mine, and clearly was of his. At one point he gave a wry smile and said “Now that sound wouldn’t be to Mr. Byles’s taste.” A simple thing, but one of my first introductions to the notion that the things that I (or “we”) liked or thought or believed were not universal—and to the notion that that was OK. 

Another time, probably around the summer of 1973, I had attended a few lectures and workshops at which some extremely new ideas about Baroque articulation and rhythm were being expounded. These ideas revolved around non-legato and the use of articulation to create meter-based patterns of stress or accentuation. At that stage, largely through Paul’s influence, but also through my own listening, I was a real devotee or disciple of Helmut Walcha, and I was disturbed by what I heard at these events. I told Paul the story of all of this one evening sitting in his office at United Church. I expressed a kind of urgent frustration that these teachers and the students they were trying to influence didn’t seem to know how much more powerful Walcha’s approach was. I thought that if they listened to his recordings, they would see how wrong they were. Paul smiled (as he always did) and said, “You know, they think that what they’re doing is right. They like it better.” I couldn’t fathom that, but it planted a seed that helped me to grow out of a youthful zealot’s pigheadedness.

As the years went by, I actually became more receptive than Paul did to some of the new ideas (or, new/old ideas) about Baroque articulation, timing, fingering, and so on, which gained currency in and after the early 1970s. The details of my own aesthetic as a performer diverged from his. This is natural: neither his approach nor mine was static. There were times when I was afraid that Paul would dislike or disapprove of some performance or recording of mine. In allowing myself to experience that fear, I was doing him an injustice. When I sent him a copy of my organ recording for PGM—around 1997—I did so with more than a little trepidation. He was enthusiastic in his praise of the CD, and wrote my parents a long, heartfelt letter about what an accomplishment he thought it was, and how proud and pleased both he and they ought to be.

More recently—in fact, only a month or so ago—I sent Paul some informal recordings that I had made that included the three Bach settings of Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland from the Leipzig Chorales. He phoned me after listening and said nice things about the performances—also, from his perspective of having known me and my playing for decades, expressing a bit of surprise at the extroverted quality of some of the playing. Then he said that he had some questions (maybe the word was “concern”) about my agogics in the first of the three settings (BWV 559). I laughed and said, “I thought that you might,” and we agreed that we would follow up and talk about that some time later. We never did.

I want to quote something that I wrote in my column in The Diapason from August 2008, about a brief but very salient incident that occurred during the time in the early 1970s when I was taking formal lessons with Paul:

Early on in the time when I was studying organ with Paul Jordan—probably in about 1973—I was trying to play a short piece for him. Whenever I made a wrong note, I hesitated, or stopped, or tried to go back. Paul said to me that I should always know before I started a passage whether I was, on the one hand, playing it, or, on the other hand, drilling it. If the former, then I should be utterly committed to keeping it going, never breaking rhythm, always thinking about the next thing, not worrying about what just happened. If the latter, then I should know in advance what bit of the music I was drilling, and indeed go back and repeat it as many times as I needed to, but on purpose, not as a result of letting myself be derailed. This brief comment was, I believe, the source of at least half of my own ability to practice effectively and to perform, and to help others learn how to do the same.

Paul was a fine countertenor and sang with the New York Pro Musica led by Noah Greenberg. Paul once told me that while Greenberg didn’t think that Paul’s voice was appropriate for solos, he noticed that it could help other sounds to blend. That is, if Paul’s voice were added to the voices of two other countertenors, his voice would help the other two sounds to cohere. He related this directly to organ registration, and thus taught me something about how to listen to the effect of adding or taking away stops: not just “What does it sound like?” but also “What does this change do to the structure and behavior of the sound?”

A brief summary of Paul’s work and career would go like this: he was an organist, pianist, harpsichordist, composer, conductor—both orchestral and choral—church musician, writer (who published in The Diapason and elsewhere), translator (of, for example, the prefaces to Helmut Walcha’s chorale preludes), organ designer, teacher, singer, and a recorder virtuoso unsurpassed by any, and equaled by few. 

Paul came to New Haven—initially to study at Yale, then to serve as organist and choir director at United Church—at the same time when my own conscious memories begin to be plentiful. I was born and raised in New Haven, so it always seemed to me that we grew up in the same time and place, and the same community: I was growing up as a child, Paul was growing up as a young musician and teacher. In any case, we had a shared sense of the New Haven of those days, and a shared love for it. We knew and remembered, each from his own perspective, many of the same people, places, and events. Paul always seemed to feel that everything and everyone was important and worthy of respect, and thus he remembered and delighted in remembering things from the past that might have seemed peripheral to his life: things that happened in my family, among people I knew, or in communities (the Law School where my parents taught, or a school I attended) that were not a central part of his everyday life but were of mine. I realized that, among people who were not members of my immediate family, Paul felt most to me like someone who was, and being with him felt most like being with my family and connected to my origins and upbringing. This greatly colors the way—ways—in which I miss him.