World Library Publications 1957 recording

As the world celebrates 250 years of Mozart in 2006, many of us will also be celebrating 100 years of E. Power Biggs (1906–1977). The happy coincidence of yet a third anniversary, the semi-centennial of Biggs’s A Mozart Organ Tour, the landmark recording released by Columbia Masterworks in the month of July 1956, gives us an ideal place to start the party.
Biggs’s trip “down the Mozart trail” from Strasbourg to Salzburg, across the pre-Alpine highlands of southern Germany and south to Innsbruck, produced one of the most imaginative and memorable Mozart recordings of all time. It took the measure of Mozart’s limited output for the organ more generously than it had yet been taken and set a new benchmark for Biggs himself in his still novel enterprise of recording older music in the landscape from which it had sprung.
Even under non-anniversary circumstances, the Mozart album would make an excellent point of entry for considering the larger Mr. Biggs. Dating from the pivotal midpoint of his recording career, it capped a quartet of albums released by Columbia Masterworks during an 18-month period in 1955 and 1956 that presented the distillate of some 150 reels of tape Biggs had filled on his first two journeys to the organ lofts of Europe: in the spring of 1954 and the summer of 1955. Like no other organ albums before them, they showcased the instrument itself no less than the music. And they awakened us to the notion of “organ as place,” as musical destination, not to mention as destination worthy of pilgrimage. The four albums in this series were, in order of appearance (and with dates of release by Columbia Masterworks): Bach, Toccata in D Minor, “a HI-FI Adventure” (ML 5032, February 5, 1955), a single LP with 14 performances of the toccata (one with fugue) played on 14 different organs; The Art of the Organ (KSL 219, February 21, 1955), a two-LP set with music of Purcell, Sweelinck, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Bach performed on 20 notable organs; Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous European classic organs” (ML 5078, April 2, 1956), a single LP; and A Mozart Organ Tour (K3L 231, July 16, 1956), a 3-LP album containing the 17 “Festival Sonatas” for organ and orchestra, and complete works for solo organ, played on 14 organs in Austria and southern Germany.1 The two 1955 releases presented music Biggs had recorded “on the side” during his 11-week concert tour of as many countries in the spring of 1954. Of this music, only the six Pachelbel pieces and two of the Bach “D Minors” were recorded in the German south. The two 1956 releases, on the other hand, consisted almost exclusively of “takes” made on the 1955 Mozart trip.
If Biggs had never heard anything like the sonorities that cascaded from many of these instruments, neither had we. And, thanks to the advent of magnetic tape recording—in general use beginning only in 1950—we too came to know those sounds well enough to appreciate how dramatically different they were from any we had heard before, and how strangely vital and appealing. The old instruments might have known alterations of one kind or another since first sounding in their splendid spaces—possibly (we liked to think) under the fingers of a Sweelinck, Pachelbel, Buxtehude, Bach, or even Mozart—but that did not matter to us. The spaces themselves had not changed. And, change or no change, the proof was in the listening: even through the tunnel of vintage, monaural “high fidelity,” the texture of the sound, so amazingly varied from instrument to instrument, yet so uniform in clarity and cohesiveness, compelled our ears. We listened, for example, to those “eight little preludes and fugues played on eight famous European classic organs,” the 1956 companion to A Mozart Organ Tour, and were, like Biggs himself, forever smitten. Whether the music had been written by Bach or Krebs (or whomever) did not matter. As Biggs presented these tuneful miniatures, they would lead initiates straight to greater music by J. S. Bach, of undisputed attribution.

Georg Steinmeyer was there—twice!

As we revisit the making of these remarkable recordings, we are fortunate indeed to have the recollections of an eyewitness (earwitness!) to the process, the “man who hung the mike” for no fewer than 18 of the performances that found their way into these albums. He is Georg F. Steinmeyer, scion of the well-known organbuilding family of Oettingen, Germany (specifically, great grandson and namesake of the G. F. Steinmeyer who founded Orgelbau Steinmeyer in 1847). Currently, he serves as Vice President of the Estey Organ Museum in Brattleboro, Vermont.
By the early 20th century, the Steinmeyers of Oettingen had come to “own” much of the organ landscape of Germany. Steinmeyer had been one of the first to undertake a sympathetic restoration of an historical instrument in Germany—and, indeed, one of great significance: Karl Riepp’s “Trinity” organ in the fabulous rococo abbey at Ottobeuren. Still largely in innocence of the movement that they were helping by chance to found, according to Steinmeyer, his grandfather’s team inadvertently established many of the restoration standards of the Orgelbewegung. Motivated simply by the respect they felt for what Riepp had achieved in the two astonishing instruments he had constructed on either side of the chancel between 1754 and 1766, they went about their refurbishing as true conservators, completing work on the “Trinity” instrument in 1914 and on its smaller companion, the “Holy Ghost” organ, in 1922. The quality of what they had accomplished at Ottobeuren so delighted Albert Schweitzer that he paid the Steinmeyer family a visit in 1929. Georg Steinmeyer does not remember the breakfast conversation himself, much less how he might have responded to the question as a 5-year-old, but his family never tired of repeating the story of how Albert Schweitzer asked the young boy that morning, “Glaubst Du, Junge, an die Schleiflade?” (Do you believe in the slider chest, young man?)
In fact, Georg Steinmeyer did much more than hang the microphone for Biggs (yes, there was just one—Columbia did not begin to record in stereo until the fall of 1956) on both of his forays to “Mozart country”—first, the nine hectic days of performing and recording in May 1954, and then the more leisurely 40 days with Mozart, recording only, in August and September 1955. He served as the Biggses’ universal “man on the ground”: as booking agent, organ guide, touch-up tuner, accommodations manager, automobile renter and driver, German translator, and last but by no means least, co-carrier of hundreds of pounds of recording equipment. Today, at age 82, Steinmeyer could as easily do it all again, it seems. He has the athletic moves of a man half his age and the nimble wits (and wit) to match. His eyes twinkle as he recalls “travels with Biggsy.” Thanks to Georg Steinmeyer, and thanks to materials preserved in the Biggs archives at the Organ Library of the Boston Chapter of the AGO at Boston University, we can now deepen our knowledge of this watershed time for Biggs.2

But first, Biggs at 100

With his name attached these days to some 50 CD offerings at Amazon.com, and with eBay a-flurry with Biggs transactions, some might argue that there is little chance of our forgetting the man. Certainly, time has revoked none of the superlatives that Lawrence Moe enumerated nearly three decades ago in the tribute he wrote for his teacher and friend:
During his lifetime, E. Power Biggs unquestionably played more organ recitals to larger audiences, performed on the organ with more symphony orchestras, played a more extensive repertory, and recorded more organ music than anyone else in history. Perhaps of greater and more lasting importance was his influence on the movement to restore the organ to some of the grandeur it enjoyed in the 17th and 18th centuries.3

But time is slowly making Biggs a stranger to a generation that owes him much. Today, even the organ world has begun to lose a valid sense of the “no small sensation” that was E. Power Biggs. A generation ago, his name meant “famous organist” in any American household, including ones with not the slightest interest in organ music. Now, as the era of his notoriety recedes into the past, many who encounter his name for the first time on the cover of a CD, or even attached to their OHS stipends, may imagine it to be some over-the-top stage moniker invented by a musician who could only have been an organist (what else, with that name?), and no doubt one with an insufferable ego.
The fact of the matter, of course, is that Jimmy Biggs (or “Bimmy Jiggs,” as he exuberantly signed the handwritten draft of the jacket notes he had penned for the 1956 “Eight Little Preludes and Fugues” album—not to mention the self-effacing “E. Punk Biggs” that he would slip in elsewhere just for fun) was a man of perfectly sufferable ego, with a personality as good-natured and charming as they come. The imposing name by which he let himself be known professionally was no mere invention but a perfectly legitimate (if certainly fortuitous) shortening of his full natural name: Edward George Power Biggs. A member of his family confirms that “Power” (the middle name of his father Clarence Power Biggs) was the maiden name of his paternal grandmother that had become, in common Victorian fashion, the first half of a double surname—like “Vaughan Williams.” To his parents and young friends, Biggs must have seemed more of a “Jimmy” than an “Eddy” or a “Georgy,” and so that nickname stuck until his wife Peggy (according to friend Barbara Owen) replaced it with “Biggsy.” When something more formal was needed, she (and Biggs himself) simply reached for “EPB,” a set of initials that, in the world of the pipe organ, will forever signify only one person.
Anyone who knew the genial man behind the all too earnest mien that appeared on many an album cover understood that the formidable look had more to do with Biggs’s respect for the music and the instrument he played than with any assertion of his own importance. As his eye lights on a 1955 photo of Biggs turning to grin at the camera from the front seat of their VW bus somewhere on “the Mozart trail,” Georg Steinmeyer exclaims, “Now, to me, that’s Biggsy!”
Of course, it would have been hard not to respect Biggs under any circumstances. Steinmeyer says that during his two recording expeditions with Biggs along the back roads of Germany and Austria, his respect for him bordered on awe. And yet, EPB’s most impressive achievements were still to come. “I can think of no other organist, on either side of the Atlantic,” Steinmeyer muses today, “who has exercised as much influence on the world of his instrument.” Certainly, no other has exuded the enthusiasm Biggs did for the pipe organ in its purest and most classic form, much less communicated it as well: first to his weekly radio audience of many thousands (over time, perhaps millions) in more than 800 North American broadcasts from 1942 to 1958, and then to growing legions of record buyers in the golden age of high fidelity during the 1960s and 70s. In the final decades of his life, his fans waited for the next “Historic Organs of X,” or next volume of “Bach Favorites” played on the Flentrop at Harvard, as eagerly as they waited for the next offering from the Beatles. Despite the ravages of rheumatoid arthritis (diagnosed already in 1958, the same year that his Flentrop arrived), the unfailingly cheerful and high-spirited Biggs played on to the end, extending his recording of historic organs, or organs in historic spaces, to more than two dozen adventures in musical geography. By the time he died, with many plans still unfulfilled, his discography comprised a staggering 148 titles. Beyond his recordings and recitals, he published dozens of articles and delivered countless addresses in advocacy of “classic principles” of pipe organ design. His influence on the Orgelbewegung in North America (and share of responsibility for lessons learned both good and bad) remains incalculable. Not long ago, Jonathan Ambrosino offered this capsule assessment of Biggs, as provocative, perhaps, as it is perceptive:
. . . Biggs was fundamentally a romantic organist, even if of great chastity. He stood ready to evolve a personal style from contact with fresh experience, whether it came in the form of old European instruments, the first wave of imported tracker organs, or his own Challis pedal harpsichord. Even if he rarely touched a swell pedal near the end, Biggs owned his phrasing, his touch, his style. That it was no more ‘authentic’ than, say, Landowska’s Bach seems beside the point. First and last, Biggs was a communicator, a musician who knew that his mission relied on developing a recognizable musical posture. His playing was one component of a larger persona that drew in a particular audience; though his ‘scholarship’ was everywhere praised, it was really his curiosity he was best able to convey.4

Provocatively, the term “romantic” describes neither Biggs’s first choice of organs, nor favorite kind of music, nor characteristic style of playing—all of which are as unromantically Apollonian as romanticism itself is Dionysian.5 He became famous for advocating articulately voiced, tracker-action instruments, and for disdaining the specification in which one might “contentedly wallow.”6 He liked his music tuneful and linear—and, above all, structured: older music of almost any kind; and, among the moderns, Sowerby and Joplin for their jazz-like “delineations,” and Hindemith and Pepping for their neo-baroque tidiness (Messiaen’s ethereal washes of color held little attraction). The “clipped” style of his playing, recognizable with almost any music, can be described as robust and forward-leaning yet rarely rushed; precise in touch yet flexible in phrasing; and most gratifying of all perhaps, responsive to the dictates of a sensitive ear as he played.
But “romantic” applies without question to his adventuresome, ready-for-anything pursuit of ever better organ sounds. Who but a “romantic” would embark on a classical Mozart organ tour with 650 pounds of recording equipment; or commission a classically voiced Schlicker large enough for solo performance in an auditorium but small enough to be folded into a trailer that could be hauled behind a 1953 Studebaker convertible; or, in the era of quadraphonic sound, conceive of recording Bach toccatas, as Biggs did in 1973, on the four separate organs of Freiburg Cathedral (all playable at once from a central console) delighting in the notion that Bach, like Biggs himself, “might have enjoyed tossing his antiphonal phrases side to side, or even batting them right down the church from one end to the other, as in some splendid tennis match.”7
And, “romantic” most assuredly applies to the aura with which Biggs endowed the organ in its purest form. By romanticizing the “classic” organs of Europe as history made audible, as living, breathing links to famous composers, and as destinations fabulously remote from our own quotidian world, Biggs made organ-romantics of all who fell under his spell. He once jotted on a notepad, “A wonderful aspect of the instrument is, there they stand! Down the centuries they come!” And down the centuries their recorded sounds seemed to echo. For record shoppers, the allure began even with the jacket notes Biggs wrote himself:
The very old and the very new meet on these records. For the organs heard are nine of the most famous and distinctive instruments of organ-building history. Of an extraordinary musical longevity, they are certainly among the oldest instruments still in normal everyday use. Yet though some are more than 400 years old, their characteristic sounds seem more vital than ever. . . .8

And even to fellow hi-fi aficionados, his pitch was essentially romantic:
High fidelity enthusiasts find, too, that these unique recorded sonorities add a new sense of space to reproducing equipment. And as the echoes of great music recede down the vaulted ceilings of some historic building, it may seem that your loudspeaker takes on a corresponding and possibly altogether new dimension of depth.9

How could any browser of LP bins in the 1950s resist the purchase of such an album, if only for its promise of access to something so amazing? By comparison, the jacket notes on “competing” albums from Deutsche Grammophon Gesellschaft’s Archiv label and Telefunken’s Das alte Werk seemed prosaic and dreary.
Awakening the ears of others to the sounds that had so beguiled his own became Biggs’s great mission in life. That he could be as good a marketer for these sounds as a missionary for them led to the occasional tongue-cluck of “middlebrow” by some whose pronouncements seem to reveal more about their own resentment of his success than insight into his art. It was as if his making the arcane accessible to the many somehow devalued it—despite a level of taste with which no one could argue. Mean-spiritedness of this kind (or any other) elicited little reciprocity from the unfailingly generous Biggs, for whom exuberant yet tasteful music-making was its own reward. His interpretations of Bach and other older music stand sui generis and, as Ambrosino suggests, largely “beside the point” of debates about authentic performance practice. Clean, transparent, and “declamatory,” Biggs’s Bach makes its own case for authenticity.
Unlike the volatile Virgil Fox (who seems to have felt his sense of rivalry with Biggs far more acutely than his counterpart), the ebullient EPB seemed to move through life happily at ease “in his own skin,” secure in simply making music the way he liked to make it. Less the virtuoso than an impeccably fine player, Biggs subordinated his act of performing to “the music’s own performance,” playing with an ear and a touch that, regardless of tempo, enabled a fine flowering, note by note, bar by bar, phrase by phrase. Craig Whitney has rightly observed that Biggs could have been describing himself when he cited what he admired most in the playing of his teacher G. D. Cunningham:
His own playing projected a wonderful sense of accent, a splendid ongoing rhythm. This rhythm was by no means metronomic; it was plastic and flexible. The secret (though “the secret” is no secret at all) was his sensitivity to note durations and his finger control of the organ key, disciplined by his piano technique.10

A “wonderful sense of accent,” a “splendid ongoing rhythm,” and an exceptional “sensitivity to note durations”: these were the hallmarks of Biggs. To the Dionysian extreme of all things formless and unbridled (and of course Virgil Foxian), Biggs, simply by nature, presented the Apollonian antithesis. From his advocacy of classic principles in organ design to his very clean touch, Biggs aimed to gratify the ear with unexpected clarity and “light.” It may well have been the surprise of such sonic light that made fans of so many, winning their ear for a musical instrument that they might otherwise never have taken seriously. Volume I of “Bach Organ Favorites” played on the Harvard Flentrop (the ubiquitous “white album” of 1961), may have been the single release by Biggs that most effectively delivered this kind of musical surprise.11

As late to Europe as to his instrument

As Biggs began to plan his first full-scale tour of continental Europe, the trip was to have been a recital tour only (with no thought of recording), to venues obligatory for any world-class concert organist. Indeed, one wonders whether the tour was not undertaken in part to match the public travels of Virgil Fox, who, since his early studies in Paris, had performed frequently in Europe. For a time, Biggs may simply have regarded his own emigration from England as enough of an international stretch. Or, like many a Briton of his generation, he may have looked upon the continent of Europe as somehow less worthy of an Englishman’s attention. The new world was the thing, not the old. But in the spring of 1954 he went, and discovered the pipe organ as if for the first time.
There had once been a real first time for Biggs, of course, some three decades earlier. It had occurred for him at the relatively mature age of 18, in the second year of what would normally have become a six-year apprenticeship, at an electrical engineering firm in London. Remarkably, it is a document from the 1954 tour that sheds fascinating light on that moment long past. Among his papers, we find the typewritten translation by one K. van Bronkhorst of an article published by an unnamed reporter in an unnamed Amsterdam newspaper, based on an interview that this reporter had conducted with Biggs on May 6, 1954, between practice sessions preceding his recital at the Oude Kerk that evening. One paragraph is of particular interest:
This 48-year-old musician has made a remarkable career. Originally he was an electrician, though with a decided musical talent which manifested itself in a great skill at piano-playing. The organ interested him only insofar as the electrician [in him] was concerned. Repair work on [electro-pneumatic] organs brought him much in contact with the instrument, which intrigued him more and more from a technical standpoint. Then, one day, he could not resist the temptation to sit on the organ bench and let his fingers, accustomed to the piano-technique, stir the organ keyboard. The mighty sounds impressed him; he played with greater and greater boldness, pulled register after register, and finally was so lost in his playing that he completely forgot his real job, the repair work on the organ. From that moment on—he was then [eighteen]—he gave up his old job and studied organ.

This account of “how it all began” for E. Power Biggs may ring outlandishly romantic, but we have no evidence that he disclaimed any part of it; and for now, at least, it fills a significant lacuna in his biography.
Biggs had played countless “average” organs in the intervening three decades, before, in the spring of 1954, he at last encountered the very old instruments of Europe and found their sounds and their response beneath his fingers to be “a revelation”—his word for the experience until the end of his days. Given his predilection for articulate, “outgoing” tonality, one wonders all the more why he had waited so long to mine the mother lode of the kind of sound he had, in a sense, been waiting for all his life. Certainly, he had heard the testimony of travelers like organ enthusiast Emerson Richards, and his colleague Melville Smith at the Longy School, not to mention his own compatriot émigré G. Donald Harrison, chief voicer for the firm of Aeolian-Skinner. As early as 1923, after hearing a “Silbermann organ familiar to Bach,” Richards (who also visited the Steinmeyer factory on two occasions in the 1920s and ’30s) had called for renewed attention to “proper choruses” even in specifications like the one he prepared for the enormous Midmer-Losh in the Convention Hall at Atlantic City.12 And Harrison had been working for years to bend the Skinner sound in a decidedly more classical direction. Biggs had read his Schweitzer, studied organ specifications, and listened to the stories of all these travelers; yet none of it had quite prepared him for his own surprise: “As a means to describe a certain sound, words are blunt tools,” he found himself writing. “A sonority must be heard to be understood, enjoyed, or even in some cases believed!”13
The “pre-education” of Biggs’s ear had begun on his own doorstep, with G. D. Harrison’s experimental “Baroque” organ of 1936. Biggs himself had taken a keen interest in the idea of this instrument from the beginning—and it was he who arranged to have it placed in the ideal acoustical setting of the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. There, as he wrote decades later, “it sounded extraordinarily well, bright tone, outgoing,” although, he continued, “of course the bland voicing did not give the organ any articulation, and the electric action precluded any control of chiff, had there been any chiff.”14 The instrument’s musical attractiveness suited it well for broadcasting, and by 1942 Biggs had begun his live weekly half-hour programs carried nationwide (and across Canada) by the CBS Radio Network for the next 16 years. In his 1977 tribute to Biggs, Lawrence Moe wrote, Even now I am astounded when I think of the vast literature he covered in sixteen years of broadcasting. Series of programs included the entire works of Bach, all the concertos by Handel, ensemble and concerted music of every kind involving the organ, great swaths of solo literature from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, works by classic, romantic, and contemporary composers were heard week after week. He commissioned works from American composers Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Howard Hanson, and Leo Sowerby, to name but a few, and he revived interest in countless composers of the past.15
And thus the instrument that had attuned Biggs’s ear to the virtues of a well-developed organ ensemble educated the ear of a growing public as well, not only to the listenable sound of such an instrument but to the wide repertory that could be played on it with success.

Biggs meets Steinmeyer

It was to one of these Sunday morning broadcasts that G. Donald Harrison brought Georg Steinmeyer in the fall of 1950. His guest had come from Germany a few months earlier to begin a one-year internship with Aeolian-Skinner of Boston, under the auspices of a postwar program for international technical cooperation, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor. Harrison was no doubt eager to have Steinmeyer hear his attempt at creating a neo-baroque organ. They sat in the small audience that was permitted to listen under the arch at the far end of the hall, and afterwards Harrison led Steinmeyer up to the gallery to meet Biggs. As he followed Harrison up the stairs that morning, he learned that he had been preceded one year earlier by the famous doctor who, two decades before, had quizzed him about slider chests. (Schweitzer had spend a few days in Boston on his way home from delivering an address at the Goethe bicentennial celebration in Aspen.) And in a broader sense, he knew he was walking in the footsteps of his own father, Hans, who, in 1913, had likewise come to Boston in his mid-twenties to work for E. M. Skinner. While installing the Finney Hall Skinner at Oberlin College in 1915, Hans Steinmeyer had met and soon married the young American woman who would become Georg’s mother a few years after the family moved back to Germany.
Georg Steinmeyer and Biggs took an immediate liking to each other, and it is easy to understand why. They shared a lively sense of humor, a keen antenna for “good ideas,” and the ability to pursue those ideas with an intensity that could exhaust the people around them. Recalling Biggs’s capacity for long—often nocturnal—hours of hard work, Barbara Owen exclaims, “How the man could focus—he was so much an ‘Aries,’ you could almost believe in astrology!” In readiness to focus on a task and to work like a dynamo to get it done, however, Biggs had met an equal in Georg Steinmeyer.
The Biggses invited young Steinmeyer to Thanksgiving dinner that year, which became only the first of several meals he would enjoy at 53 Highland Street, the grand Victorian home on a hill in Cambridge, about one mile from Harvard’s Germanic (by then Busch-Reisinger) Museum. When he brought with him a catalogue of Steinmeyer “factory” organs one evening, Biggs lost no time in placing an order for a tiny one-stop, hand-pumped portative. Steinmeyer and Biggs laid its parts out on the parlor rug when it arrived, more or less in kit form, and spent a Saturday morning assembling it.
Three years later, as Biggs was planning his European tour with the help of various branches of the U.S. State Department tasked with fostering cultural exchange, he had an easy answer when the request came for names of his contacts in Germany: “The organ builder Hans Steinmeyer, whose wife is American and whose son Georg has visited us on various occasions here, is the chief name I have to offer.”16 It was the energetic Georg, however, not his father, who quickly became the chief planner of the Biggses’ initiation to “Steinmeyer Country.” After concluding his internship at Aeolian-Skinner in 1951 (and with plans to return to the USA for good as soon as possible), he had gone home to work again for his father, helping first to complete the post-war replacement for the 1937 Steinmeyer Hauptorgel in the heavily damaged Lorenzkirche in Nuremberg, and then to refurbish the famous 1737 instrument of Joseph Gabler at Weingarten. Near the end of 1953, he sent the Biggses a long letter (unfortunately lost) laying out an itinerary for concerts and organ visits that would have taken them to every historic instrument between Frankfurt and Munich (not to mention many a Steinmeyer instrument). At the end of that letter he must have confessed the wish that they could somehow devote two months to doing all he had proposed. For, on January 20, Peggy Biggs sent this reply: Thank you so very much for your detailed letter about our proposed trip to Germany. This information is really invaluable to us. . . . All the names and places you have suggested look wonderful, and I’m afraid that by the time we have laid our definite plans we’ll wish we had two months also. . . . As you know, we would not want to have the concerts come too close together. Biggsy would want to have at least a full day to become familiar with each instrument before the concerts. . . . EPB is on the west coast and will be back here at the end of January. With warmest greetings from us both— As she typed these lines, Peggy may already have had an inkling of the latest “good idea” her husband was hatching—off in California—to crowd even more activity into their tight schedule for Europe. As he played the European masters up and down the west coast that January, Biggs’s mind turned ever again to the journey he would soon make to the geographic source of so much of that music. And, the more he thought about the organs he would encounter along the way in spaces known to Sweelinck, Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Bach (perhaps already Mozart), the more excited he became about the concept of making recordings—someday—that could “relate the music, the organ, and the place.”
(To be continued)

Author’s note: This three-part essay had its genesis in an exciting chance encounter at a recent OHS seminar. When Mr. and Mrs. Georg F. Steinmeyer kindly asked how my own interest in the organ had begun, I confessed that it had dated from my being “dragged” by a music-major girlfriend at the age of 21 to an Orgelkonzert played on an 18th-century instrument in Lucerne, Switzerland. The “light for the ears” that radiated from that organ had just astonished me. Back in the U.S. after a summer’s language study at a Goethe Institute (and more organ concerts that I had sought out on my own!), and hungering for more such sonic light, I headed straight for the Apex Music Corner in Schenectady to discover in the LP bins—along with the first U.S. offering from those other musical “Brits” of the day, the Beatles (for it was the fall of ’63)—a modest-looking album entitled, Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous classic European organs.” One hearing of this album (I continued to explain to the Steinmeyers) had hooked me for life on E. Power Biggs and the sounds he stood for—not to mention, of course, the sounds of countless other fine organists and other kinds of organs. By that point in my recitation, Herr Steinmeyer’s eyes had taken on a special twinkle: “And do you know,” he laughed, “I helped Biggsy make that recording!” I was floored. Most of us have some particular record in our collection that we treasure above almost all the rest, some early acquisition that holds a kind of iconic meaning for us simply because it “set our direction.” For me it had always been that 1956 Biggs LP. And there I was, to my disbelief, speaking with one of the principals responsible for making that “exotic” record!
And what a Biggsian crackerjack of a fellow Georg Steinmeyer himself has turned out to be! I am enormously grateful to both of the Steinmeyers for the excuse they gave me to write this piece about the cultural hero of my youth for whom my admiration remains most enduring. Their recollections of “travels with Biggsy” have been invaluable. And of course I am most grateful of all to EPB himself in his centenary year for the memory of (1) his tireless—but unfailingly good-humored—advocacy of the musical point of view that his recordings taught me to share, (2) his example of great decency and generosity in all things, and (3) his will to play spiritedly on until the end, his enthusiasm amazingly undiminished by a battle of two decades with one of the cruelest afflictions that could befall any organist.

Reflections ten years later

Joyce Johnson Robinson is editorial director of The Diapason. 

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

A generosity to the music

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

The author can be reached at .

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

Recording cut short at Ottobeuren

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

An all-time favorite organ for Biggs

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

From Oettingen to Salzburg

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

Playing Bierdeckel in Passau

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

Repairs at Lambach

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

Up the valley of the Inn

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

“An experience never to be forgotten”

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

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

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

“Salzburg Festival Tempo”

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

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

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

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

Homeward with his trophies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bitten by the multi-track bug”

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

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

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

Perhaps like Mozart

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

A third coming of the Biggses

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

Lucien Deiss, C.S.Sp., died on October 9. His funeral was celebrated on October 13 at Seminaire des Missiones in Larue, France. Best known to Roman Catholics in the U.S. through his scriptural songs such as “All the Earth,” “Keep in Mind,” and “Grant to Us, O Lord,” Fr. Deiss was also widely known in Europe and the United States as a scholar in the fields of sacred scripture and patristics. He was selected by Pope Paul VI to coordinate the Lectionary psalter following the Second Vatican Council. His Biblical Hymns and Psalms was one of the first collections of congregational music for Roman Catholics. For this he was given an honorary doctorate in sacred music from Duquesne University. An advocate of the reforms of Vatican II, Fr. Deiss dedicated much of his life to liturgical catechesis through workshops and the well-known “Deiss days” sponsored by WLP (then World Library of Sacred Music).

Czech composer Petr Eben died October 25 at his home in Prague at the age of 78. Born January 22, 1929, in Zamberk, Eben began piano study at age six and organ at nine. At 10, he composed his first musical pieces. As a teenager, he was imprisoned in the Nazis’ Buchenwald concentration camp. After the war, he studied piano and composition at Prague’s Academy of Music.
He taught for several decades, first at Prague’s Charles University, and later at the Academy of Performing Arts. From 1977–78, Eben was teaching composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, England. In 1990 he became professor of composition at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague and president of the Prague Spring Festival.
Over his career he composed some 200 pieces, including works for organ and piano, orchestral and chamber compositions, oratorios, masses and cantatas as well as pieces for children. Among his best-known works were the organ cycle Job; the oratorio Sacred Symbols for the Salzburg Cathedral; Windows (four movements for trumpet and organ inspired by Marc Chagall’s stained glass designs for a synagogue in Jerusalem); and Prague Te Deum. He concertized around the world, performing his compositions as well as improvisations on organ and piano, including at Paris’s Notre Dame Cathedral, London’s Royal Festival Hall, and the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California.
Eben’s music is regularly performed throughout Europe, the USA, Canada, Japan and Australia. He was awarded many prizes for his works: 1990, by the Czech government for his organ cycle Job; 1991, the Ordre Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French Minister of Culture; 1992, Professor (honoris causa) of the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester; 1993, the Stamitz Prize of the German Künstlergilde; 1994, doctorate (honoris causa) from Prague Charles University; and in 2002 he received a high Czech decoration, the Medal of Merit. Eben is survived by his wife Sarka and three sons, Marek, David and Krystof.
Eben’s works for organ include:
Concerto for Organ and Orchestra No. 1 (Symphonia gregoriana), 1954.
Concerto for Organ and Orchestra No. 2, 1983.
Windows on the Pictures of Marc Chagall (trumpet and organ), 1976.
Fantasia for Viola and Organ Rorate Coeli, 1982.
Landscapes of Patmos (organ and percussion), 1984.
Tres iubilationes (brass and organ), 1987.
Two Invocations for Trombone and Organ, 1987.
Sunday Music, 1957–59.
Laudes, 1964.
Ten Chorale Preludes, 1971.
Two Chorale Fantasias, 1972.
Small Chorale Partita, 1978.
Faust, 1979–80.
Mutationes, 1980.
Versetti, 1982.
A Festive Voluntary (On Good King Wenceslas), 1986.
Hommage à Buxtehude, 1987.
Job (organ), 1987.
Two Festive Preludes, 1990, 1992.
Biblical Dances, 1990–91.
Amen, es werde wahr, 1993.
Momenti d’organo, 1994.
Hommage à Henri Purcell, 1994–95.

Albert Fuller, harpsichordist, conductor, teacher and author, died September 22 at his home in Manhattan, at the age of 81. As co-founder in 1972 and artistic director of the Aston Magna Foundation in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, he was among the pioneers of the revival of playing baroque music on the original instruments for which it was conceived. A frequent recitalist, Fuller also recorded extensively, including the first American original-instrument complete set of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. The 1977 recording, made at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, became the initial release of the Smithsonian Institution’s recording program and went on to sell more than 100,000 copies.
Born July 21, 1926, Fuller grew up in Washington, D.C., where he was a boy soprano with the choir at the National Cathedral and studied organ with Paul Callaway. He went on to study harpsichord at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and at Yale University, where his teachers included Ralph Kirkpatrick and Paul Hindemith, and then went to Paris on a Ditson fellowship. He made his New York debut at Town Hall in 1957, and in 1964 joined the faculty of Juilliard as professor of harpsichord. He was also on the faculty of Yale University, 1976–79.
In 1972, Fuller founded the Aston Magna Foundation. Up to 30 performers gathered for several weeks each summer to study and play early music on the original instruments. Fuller left the Aston Magna Foundation in 1983 and went on to found the Helicon Foundation, a New York-based ensemble whose repertoire included music by Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms.

Rudolf “Rudy” O. Inselmann died July 6 in Newport Beach, California at the age of 72. He majored in piano at Wartburg College, Waverly, Iowa, then attended Capital Bible Seminary and became an ordained Lutheran minister. He received an MA in organ from Indiana University and a doctorate in sacred music from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. After teaching music at the University of El Paso, he joined the faculty of Christ College, now Concordia University, Irvine, California. He served as organist at Church of the Good Shepherd in Arcadia; St. Clement’s Episcopal Church, San Clemente; St. Kilian Catholic Church, Mission Viejo; and Our Lady Queen of Angels, Newport Beach. Dr. Inselmann was dean of the Orange County AGO chapter from 1998–2000; he was also a longtime member of the Music Teachers Association of California.

Henry Ray Mann died June 30 in Greenville, Michigan. He was 72. A graduate of the University of Richmond, he earned a master of sacred music degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he served as organist-director in several churches and formed an organbuilding firm in partnership with Larry Trupiano. Henry Mann was known for his skill and artistry in the manufacture and voicing of wood pipes. He retired to Trufant, Michigan in 1992, subsequently serving as organist at Settlement Lutheran Church.

Bruce E. Mathieson died July 19 in Morgantown, West Virginia, from injuries sustained in an accident. He was 50 years old. Early in his 42 years of organ playing, he won two junior organist competitions. He was a graduate of Holyoke Community College with an associate degree in music. Mr. Mathieson served in the U.S. Navy for 24 years, and was the organist on the U.S.S. Enterprise during his service on that ship; he also played for Pope John Paul II while in Rome. After retiring from the Navy, he worked for West Virginia University and was organist at Point Marion Baptist Church in Point Marion, Pennsylvania; he also assisted the choir of Westover United Methodist Church in Westover, West Virginia. He was a charter member of the new Monongahela AGO chapter in West Virginia. Bruce Mathieson is survived by his wife of 29 years, Karla Landry Mathieson, a son, a daughter, his mother, two brothers, three sisters, and two grandchildren.

Roy G. Wilson died May 31 at the age of 92 in El Paso, Texas. A graduate of New Mexico State College, he earned a master’s degree from Texas Western College and focused his career on school administration in several El Paso schools. A lifelong musician, he served Grace United Methodist Church for over 50 years as organist, choir director, or as both. He regularly provided music for the Grace pre-school program and area school districts, and accompanied for solo and ensemble contestants. A member of the El Paso AGO chapter, he served as dean on several occasions. Mr. Wilson is survived by two daughters, a son, eight grandchildren, and eleven great grandchildren.