Catching the bug
In 1964 Columbia Records released a set of two LPs recorded by E. Power Biggs, The Golden Age of the Organ, which included tracks recorded on nine historic organs in Germany and three in the Netherlands. Most of the instruments were built during the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries by Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) and his sons. The instrument in Oosthuizen, the Netherlands, was built in 1521, more than forty years before the birth of Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. The late organ historian Barbara Owen, who was a close friend of Biggs, told me that “Biggsy” and his wife Peggy drove a Volkswagen bus loaded with a huge Ampex tape machine across the two countries, doing all the recording engineering themselves.1 I suppose they made all the contacts and arrangements with the churches themselves as well. The raw tapes were delivered to Columbia Records in New York, and the set was released as one in a series of recordings by Biggs that included Historic Organs of France, Historic Organs of Switzerland, and several other countries.
I started taking organ lessons in 1968 on the three-manual Holtkamp organ built in 1956 for Saint John’s Chapel of the Episcopal Theological School (ETS, later Episcopal Divinity School, now defunct) in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was twelve years old. When I was thirteen, I got my first job playing the organ at Saint Eulalia’s Catholic Church in my hometown of Winchester, Massachusetts. The simple electronic organ was, poetically, a Conn “Artist.” I was paid $35 a week to play five Masses each weekend, an absolute fortune for a 1960s middle-schooler. My father was professor of homiletics at ETS, which was a short walk from Harvard Square, and there was plenty of time for our family to explore the area, especially for me the fantastic record department at the Harvard Coop where I dipped into my vast wealth to scoop up recordings of organ music. When I put The Golden Age of the Organ on the KLH stereo system in the living room at home, I was hooked. I especially loved the chorale preludes of Ernst Pepping (1901–1981) that Biggs sprinkled across many of the organs on the recording, and Bach’s transcription of Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Violins from L’Estro Armonico, which he recorded on the Schnitger organ in Zwolle, a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Amsterdam. Whenever I registered those pieces on a new organ, I had the sound of the Zwolle organ in my ears, tough going if it was a 1930 Möller.
Most of us who play on, work on, and/or care about pipe organs are familiar with images of the iconic historic organs of Europe. If I put photos on flash cards for a game of bar trivia, could you guess Haarlem, Zwolle, Hamburg, Groningen, Oosthuizen, Strasbourg, Marmoutier? If you listened to Biggs’s recordings from the 1960s and 1970s and read the jacket copy like you read cereal boxes, you could. It is over fifty-five years since I first heard that recording of the Zwolle organ and got the bug about the organs of Northern Europe. I have visited some wonderful organs in Europe while on multi-interest vacations, but I had never seen the beauties that influenced me so strongly as a teenager.
Go it alone.
Early this year, Wendy heard from a pal from Spain she knew as a student in London. He and his wife would be visiting their son in Philadelphia, and after a fifty-year hiatus, they wondered if they might meet. Coincidentally, Wendy’s son, his wife, and their two sons live in Philadelphia, so it was easy to arrange a visit, and an hour-long talk in a coffee shop turned into “Let’s go to Spain.” I saw my chance. I would be happy to go to Spain to meet your friends, and I would like to go on to the Netherlands to visit organs. Alone. I want to be able to see those organs, meet the people around them, and learn that culture in person without the usual vacation distractions like, “Oh, let’s stop in here. . . .”
“Okay,” she said. “We’ll spend a week in Spain, visit Xavier and Cindy, you go to the Netherlands. I’ll go visit another pal in Paris; we’ll fly home separately. Perfect.”
We flew to Barcelona and checked into a hotel across the great square from the Gothic Cathedral of the Holy Cross and Saint Eulalia, the patron saint of Barcelona. (I do not know why that parish in Winchester was named for Saint Eulalia.) The cathedral is the seat of the Archbishop of Catalonia and houses a four-manual organ with over sixty stops that was completed in 1569 and has been recently restored. We did not hear the organ but marveled at the sight of such a monumental instrument, 456 years old. We visited museums dedicated to the work of Catalan artists Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso, the glorious Basilica Sagrada Familia designed by Antoni Gaudí and still under construction, and Park Güell, a forty-two-acre park conceived as a high-end housing development, loaded with structures and features designed by Gaudí including the house where he lived. We ate wonderful tapas dinners, drank lusty Spanish wine, and reveled in the traditional celebration of the Feast of Saint Joan honoring the summer solstice with traditional dances and giant puppets, a time that spanned several days in the neighborhood around the cathedral and our hotel.
We took a train to the Medieval town of Besalú to meet Xavier and Cindy, who live in a secluded restored fifteenth-century farmhouse. Cindy, an art historian, treated us to her well-rehearsed tours of museums for Salvador Dalí and Catalan’s Jewish history. We had meals at seaside restaurants and in the ancient town square of Besalú.
I was the victim of a pickpocket in Besalú. Through the marvel of internet banking, I could see that one of my cards had been charged right away, reported and resolved the fraud, canceled all my cards, and replaced them with new virtual cards stuffed into my Apple wallet. It took less than an hour. A few days later, a tradesman’s van broke down outside town, and while waiting for a tow, he found my wallet in the roadside gravel. Of course, the cash was gone, and I am now busy entering new card numbers into countless online accounts, but I have the wallet, driver’s license, and medical cards.
We took a train to Paris where we met Wendy’s pal, and I took a taxi from Garde de Lyon to Garde de Nord for my train from Paris. Including time for a drink at a café near the station, I was in Paris for less than two hours and on my way to Amsterdam. Alone.
Anything you can do. . . .
The Golden Age of the Organ is a very apt name. During the Baroque era, the art of organbuilding was developed and refined to an extraordinary degree. New temperaments were developed bringing new beauty and pizazz to the overall sound. The design and construction of monumental organ cases advanced, and they were decorated with all imaginable elements from architectural details to saints, angels with trumpets, putti, even lions. The organs were typically funded and owned by the municipality and stood as symbols of the city’s importance. If a town built a huge organ in their Grote Kerk (Great Church), the next town responded by building one a little larger and a little fancier to stay a step ahead. Competition like that sure was good for the organbuilders, and they made the most of it.
As I have studied European organs over the years, I have wondered just how they were constructed without power tools. I have stood at a table saw for a full day cutting tracker stock. It is mind-numbing work, and if you let your mind go numb, you lose a finger. If you are building an organ with a fifty-foot case, you are going to need a forty-foot vertical tracker run. To cut the stock for that tracker run for a four-octave, forty-nine note keyboard, you would have to make almost 2,000 feet of saw cuts. That is the better part of a half mile of saw cut for an eighteenth-century craftsman to make by hand, and before you could make a half mile of cuts, you would have to plane the boards flat by hand. And the huge timbers of that fifty-foot case? Are you kidding me?
Erik Winkel, director of Flentrop Orgelbouw, Zaandam, the Netherlands, had the answer: ship builders. The Netherlands, France, Spain, and Portugal were all seagoing nations. Think of the daring fifteenth-century explorers like Christopher Columbus and Vasco da Gama, who crossed oceans for the first time. Around 1602, the Dutch West India Company and the Dutch East India Company developed global trading routes and established colonies in South America, South Africa, and what is now Indonesia. It took something like 2,000 oak trees to build each ship they sailed, and it was the shipbuilders who were equipped for such heavy woodworking, so they were often employed to build the roofs and organ cases in large churches. If you are building an organ with a metal 32′ Principal, what do you use for a mandril to roll those huge pipes? Easy—a ship’s mast. Erik told me that they made those huge pipes in the church so they would not have to transport them risking dents and damage, but they would have to transport that mast to the church. Oxcarts?
Groningen, Martinikerk
This great church was named for Saint Martin of Tours (no, not a cocktail), patron saint of Utrecht, which included Medieval Groningen. Opened in 1225, it is the oldest church in the city. It was extended in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, including the addition of a massive, tall tower and a lofty choir area positioned ahead of the nave, which resembles a Gothic apse from the outside.
The church originally had a fifteenth-century organ, which was expanded including the construction of the existing main case in 1542. The towers of the main case were added later in the sixteenth century. In 1691 Arp Schnitger (1648–1719) was engaged to build new Hoofdwerk and Bovenwerk divisions, which he completed at the end of January 1692. The work was immediately declared a success, and on February 15 Schnitger was contracted to build the massive pedal towers. After Arp’s death, his son Franz Caspar Schnitger built the Rugwerk, finishing in 1729, the year of his death.
There was some work done during the nineteenth century to “improve” the organ, and between 1937 and 1939 J. de Koff & Zoon made radical changes, revoicing the organ in a Romantic style and providing an electric action played from a remote console. Plans for a thoughtful historic restoration started in 1971. Jürgen Ahrend restored and reconstructed the Rugwerk and Bovenwerk in 1976 and 1977 and completed the Hoofdwerk and Pedaal in 1983 and 1984. He built new tracker actions in the style of Schnitger, restored the wind pressure to its original 80 millimeters, and returned to the original style of voicing. The 2′ Fluit of the Rugwerk had been removed, and only one pipe was preserved in a museum, which Ahrend used to reconstruct the entire rank that features a reverse taper, something like a Bell Gamba.
The organ forms its own loft. Ten voluptuous brackets with gilded acanthus leaves support the back of it against the rear wall of the church, and four painted columns support the front of the organ, one under each pedal tower, and one under each side of the Rugwerk case.
Sietze de Vries serves as one of the organists for the Martinikerk. He met me before worship on Sunday morning and led me up the steep and narrow stone spiral staircase. The keydesk has a classic layout, very much like the large Flentrop organs in the United States, with long horizontal rows of knobs, some of which seem just out of reach. The knobs for the Rugwerk stops are behind the player on the back of the Rugwerk. This Rugwerk is unusually large with sixteen stops.
As Sietze started to demonstrate the organ, I could see right away that he had no trouble reaching all those knobs. Not only is he tall with long arms, he is also an acrobat, and the knobs popped in and out with remarkable dexterity, a lesson for some of us who depend on combination actions. He started with the Hoofdwerk 16′ Praestant, a rich foundation for the organ with plenty of presence and color and pure definition of pitch to the lowest notes. Add the 8′ Octaaf, and you are ready to build a brilliant and cheerful chorus with complex mixture compositions.
He continued with a variety of softer stops, comparing flutes between manuals, and introduced the quintadenas, which were revelatory. The organ has a 16′ Quintadena on the Rugwerk and an 8′ Quintadena on the Hoofdwerk, both colorful stops with bright harmonics, balanced for lovely contrast, but with none of the squeaking rattling sense we get at home when a Quintadena is little more than a poorly speaking Gedeckt with an identity crisis, unable to assert pitch or define timbre.
The organ has eleven reeds from colorful and gentle (Vox Humana, Viola da Gamba, Schalmei, Hobo) to powerful and regal (Trompets, Bazuin). The blending of reeds with flues is a testament to the original builders’ deep understanding of the math of pipemaking and the magic of voicing, and that of the brilliant restorer. Anything goes with anything, allowing endless combinations. I marvel at the command those eighteenth-century artisans had over the tone and timbre of their organ stops, both singly and collectively.
The church building is owned by the Protestant Church and houses an active congregation. The Martinikerk organ is owned by the church, and as it is recognized as a monument, the maintenance is funded by both the church and the state. After my hour with Sietze, I attended worship. I do not understand a word of Dutch, but with a little help from the man sitting next to me and a hymnal loaned from the woman behind me, I was thrilled to mumble along with the many psalms and hymns. There were hundreds of people in attendance, people who have the privilege of singing with that fantastic organ every week.
Thank you to the woman sitting behind me. You sing beautifully, followed Sietze’s ascending key change with alacrity, and it was fun chatting with you and your husband after the service. I was pleased that you knew your organist by name and you are aware that people like me go out of their way to experience the organ in your church. It was a good morning. Time to get my luggage from the hotel next door, find the train station, and get to Haarlem where I am staying for the next five nights.
I am twenty-four hours into my time in the Netherlands and have lots more to see. I will be back here in these pages next month to continue the trip.
Notes
1. See “E. Power Biggs in Mozart Country,” by Anton Warde, Part 1, July 2006, pages 20–23; Part 2, August 2006, pages 22–25; Part 3, September 2006, pages 21–25; and Part 4, October 2006, pages 26–30.
