Conclusiones del capítulo

In 1928 Günther Ramin, organist of St. Thomas, Leipzig, and thus someone with great influence in the lively and energetic spheres of church music, organ-play- ing, and conservatory education, published one of the many essays inspired by the decade’s newer attitudes to organs and organ repertory. His pamphlet includes the following remarks:

Our period is moving rapidly in regard to evaluation and reassessment of artistic complexes, and one is almost taken aback at how big and far-reaching the Organ Renewal Movement has become in the space of six years. May this [haste] not be a sign that this renaissance has come about as one of the many spiritual currents of fashion in the post-war era, rather may the true kernel and genuine enthusiasm of this process of change be preserved!1

Many themes can be discerned in these remarks, representing certain views com- monly held at the time. These views were that there was a discrete Orgelbewegung, one that was only six or so years old at that point; that despite (probably) being a “fashion” it had a “kernel of truth” and the character of a “renaissance”; that it related specifically to the postwar period, a period of general reevaluation in Germany; and of course that it was a subject on which the organist of the Bach church could usefully offer thoughts to the musical community. Each of these themes is a subject for contemplation today, not least insofar as they still exist in the minds of musicians who seem barely aware of the broader musical interests that were being developed in other countries at that time. The Orgelbewegung was and is a national movement that often exposes the limitations of cultural centrism at the very moment it is being original and “enlightened.” As such it is something of a case-study for the assumptions that underlie an important, well-populated

sphere of practical music-making in the 1920s, and indeed underlie a good deal of performance inside and outside Germany over the rest of the twentieth century. A Discrete Bewegung?

That Ramin’s booklet, despite the apposite nature of its contents, has been almost entirely absent from recent literature concerning the Orgelbewegung is itself a sign of one of the Bewegung’s most powerful traits: just as it promoted certain attitudes about organs and organ music presented as the canonic or official view, so it created a narrow canon of literature on the subject, in particular the writings of Albert Schweitzer, Wilibald Gurlitt and Christhard Mahrenholz.2

Gurlitt’s and Mahrenholz’s analysis of the change in tastes in which they saw themselves as taking a leading role became, and has continued to be, a German orthodoxy for understanding a decade of monumental musical developments in which organs and church music assumed, frankly, only a marginal part. More recent German writing has modified this position only in certain details: an author might now point out that Schweitzer’s credit ought to be shared by another Alsatian reformer, Emil Rupp, or that in any case Schweitzer’s position has been misunderstood and that he had little sympathy with back-to-the-past interests.3

In general there still appears to be little awareness of the broader background, those events preceding the German Orgelbewegung which were described by L. F. Tagliavini already nearly thirty years ago now.4 _{Particularly dominated by this}

canon and following entirely in its footsteps have been writers in those countries traditionally dependent on established German norms, including Denmark, Hol- land, and (during the years of partition) East Germany. This is the more surprising because Denmark in particular was producing “historically aware” organs here and there already in the 1920s,5 _{so that for many years, as far as new organs were}

concerned, one could more nearly approach the spirit of Buxtehude in Denmark than in Germany. That in effect Schweitzer and Rupp themselves challenged German orthodoxy by claiming Widor as the greatest organ-composer after Bach6_{—and therefore implied that his organist-type was of paramount impor-}

tance to modern builders—did nothing much to convince leaders of the move- ment to broaden their ideas, one imagines. To them, it was such a claim as this that must have seemed provincial.

Questions about the received view of the German Organ Reform Movement can be raised under various heads. These include its attitudes towards historical performance, towards Urtext editions of music, and towards the work of writers elsewhere and to what extent it sympathized with extant old instruments that were too small or too quaint for the music of Bach.

On the attitude to historical performance: to a large extent this depends on the other attitudes (to Urtext editions, old instruments, etc.) and it seldom if ever appears as a topic beyond the details of organ registration. For the organist the question of timbres (stop registrations) does no doubt loom large, but it is striking

what a minor part was played in earlier phases of the reform by the questions that occupy so many pages in today’s publication, such as mechanism or temperament or articulation.

On editions of music: it is strange that in referring to Karl Straube’s collec- tion Alte Meister des Orgelspiels (1904)7 _{Gurlitt should imply approval for its edi-}

torial techniques. for if one bears in mind the standards already established by the Guilmant-Pirro series Archives des Maîtres de l’Orgue (1901–), Straube’s edit- ing amounted to little more than making updated arrangements. Perhaps it was politeness or partiality (Gurlitt had been a Straube pupil), but just as likely is that old French music was still regarded as too frivolous for Gurlitt to find Guilmant’s work important. Nor was it only the Archives des Maîtres that were (as far as I know) nowhere acknowledged by the canonic Orgelbewegung writers, for the bet- ter German scholarly editions do not seem to enter much into their deliberations either, except as sources for popular editions. It is otherwise difficult to see why in his Pachelbel edition of 1928 Karl Matthaei should treat Seiffert’s impeccable DTB volumes of 1901 and 1903 in this way. According to Matthaei, in this edi- tion “all signs, phrasing, registration, tempo markings and so on are the result of careful study on the Praetorius organ”—Gurlitt’s 1921 organ at Freiburg, stoplist in Appendix 1—and registrations have been added such as were “partly outlined” by Straube in his recitals on that organ (Bärenreiter Edition 238, preface). This sounds as if Matthaei-Gurlitt-Straube were setting out to create a received view of Pachelbel. If so, it was one that would put back the idea of performances faithful to Pachelbel, since neither the Freiburg Praetorius organ nor the old instruments known to Straube would go very far in illuminating what Pachelbel had taken for granted in Erfurt and Nürnberg.

On the work of writers elsewhere: important though the achievements of major new German organ monographs were in the 1920s,8 _{they were not alone. Equally}

concerned with great instruments of the past, with the mature repertories of music composed for them and, by implication, with a renewed sense of the lessons they could teach modern builders, was the work of individual writers such as Félix Raugel in France.9 _{Various French studies of old organ cases, though perhaps}

superficial musicologically, also evince a respect for such lessons, as does the first great study of the organ as art-object, Arthur Hill’s The Organ-Cases and Organs of the Middle Ages and Renaissance, 2 vols (London, 1883, 1891).10 _{From time to time}

in such books, explicit criticism are made of the then contemporary standards of design and workmanship, and derogatory comparison is made between them and the work of the past. Such criticism is an eminence grise behind much of the performance practice interests of the time and became a prime mover of Orgelbe- wegung philosophy: but it certainly did not originate there, nor is it acknowledged by its writers.

On old organs of little use to Bach: the Orgelbewegung’s interest in or aware- ness of the historic position of extant old instruments in general—other than those fit for major works of Buxtehude and Bach—should by no means be taken

for granted. The smaller old organs of East Friesland raise questions about the Movement’s principles, for while the attention paid them in the 1920s by cer- tain Orgelbewegung leaders was useful, nevertheless many of the fine instruments since restored there were declared by those leaders at that time to be irreparable and hopelessly antiquated.11 _{It should be clear from the instruments particularly}

associated with Orgelbewegung philosophies—the Freiburg “Praetorius organ” and the Marienkirche, Göttingen (see Appendix 2)—that despite the claims made by its spokesmen, the Movement’s organological understanding was not at all fully alerted to earlier periods. Only the stoplist of these organs and the new timbres created by the oldstyle stops suggest anything historical: the mechanism and other structural details betray no awareness that the organ as we know it is a historical phenomenon, to modify too many parameters of which is to change it beyond the definition of “organ.” (Only in the last thirty years, and only by certain craftsmen, has something of this sort been recognized for harpsichord and other keyboard instruments.) Without an understanding of the historical periods of the organ it is difficult to imagine an understanding of historical performance or those elements in it that follow as a matter of course from particular types of instrument. “Fashion” Versus “Kernel of Truth”

That for some time the Schweitzer-Gurlitt-Mahrenholz sequence dominated the thinking of certain historians is clear from the writing of Gurlitt’s successor in Freiburg, when in 1967 the university hosted another organ conference. Show- ing the Orgelbewegung to be no mere movement for a return-to-the-distant-past, H. H. Eggebrecht isolated three elements in the broad concept of such a “move- ment” in the 1920s: protest against certain developments in the recent past, affir- mation of values chiefly on behalf of earlier music against the “collapse” of music during the postwar years, and the fixing of norms in order to establish “canonic” views as to what was correct or not.12 _{By extracting such elements in the thinking}

of the period, Eggebrecht is able to quote aptly from a writer of 1933:

[In this sense would] the German Music Movement come fully into its own only through the push forward of National Socialism.13

Not surprisingly, Eggebrecht also found that Adorno claimed a Gemeinschaft or “common purpose” between at least one musical movement (the Singbewegung) and fascism. But conceivably in Italy, too, the totalitarianism of that period could have provided a “climate” for a certain degree of “norm-fixing,”14 _{and yet no new}

explicit organ movement emerged there. It seems that neither is conformity itself a sign of incipient Nazism nor did the Orgelbewegung, however much it coerced organists into conforming with what certain musicologists told them, lead to uni- formity. It took another war to reduce German organ builders to a repetitious and dismal utility in their instruments, reflecting both the impasse that German organ

music had reached and the fact that for so long afterwards the enterprising builders of the West were cut off from the old masterpieces of Saxony.

The “kernel of truth” behind the “fashion” for rethinking the organ, as it showed itself in central Germany in the 1920s, was both international and by no means new. There had been signs pointing in this direction for some time. Shortly after 1900 Italian journals were carrying appreciations of the old Italian organ (particularly its ripieno and mechanical action),15 _{and it would be difficult}

to find a more suitable summary of ideas in the Germany of the 1920s than those published in an English book of 1915:

The [old] church organs ... had that power based on sweetness which con- stitutes majesty. The change came on, and for the sake of louder tone, pressure of wind was doubled and trebled. The same pressure acting on the valves which let the wind into the pipes made them too heavy for the fingers to move through the keys. A machine was then invented which did the work at second hand ... Personal touch, which did so much for phrasing and expression, was destroyed.

Then fashion decreed that the organ should be an imitation of the orchestra ... but without the life that players instil into their instruments ... Modern compositions are intended for this machine, and all is well with them; but it is a revelation to hear Handel’s or Bach’s music on a well-pre- served old organ.16

An important element in Arnold Dolmetsch’s pathbreaking book is that his remarks on the organ come third in his overall survey of “the musical instruments of the period.” He was enabled by experience and skill to view the organ in a context of other instruments, but this ability was virtually unknown to the Orgelbewegung and is still by no means common in German thinking. Nevertheless, Dolmetsch already identifies two of the themes that were characteristic of the Orgelbewe- gung: the dislike of higher (i.e., unnatural) wind pressure17 _{and the complaint that}

organs imitated orchestras—which, as Mahrenholz later pointed out, was nothing new for organs.18 _{Dolmetsch’s remarks were also aimed at performance itself, but}

what he said concerning sensitive action, like Raugel’s emphasis on the quality of workmanship in old French organs, took many years before finding echoes in Germany.19 _{Earlier still, Schweitzer was speaking of the contrapuntal clarity given}

by older styles of organ voicing (see below, concerning the Kronenburg organ of 1908), but it took a Dolmetsch to see the picture in the round.

The tentative moves towards historical performance practice in the Germany of the 1920s rarely if ever became as focused as they were for Dolmetsch. Such a focus must have sprung from Dolmetsch’s practical experiences as both a maker and player, a combination not often found. On the contrary, in Germany in the 1920s the humanist academic-musicological training for men of influence was not practical in the same way and would tend instead to encourage broad

philosophical overviews that can appear vaguer the more they are contemplated. Arnold Schering (“today’s most prominent representative of German musicol- ogy,” according to Gurlitt in 192920_{) was not alone in saying such things as:}

As the music of our period approaches in many details the principal feature of baroque music ... the old organ becomes the symbol of a musical concep- tion whose consequence lies in the future.

Schering’s “music of our period” must be far removed from most of the German repertories of the post-Great War period and gives the impression that his read- ers knew nothing of the advanced music of the 1920s.21 _{Was he thinking of the}

dead-end contrapuntalism of a Hindemith, as during the interwar years were so many of the advanced organists and church-composers, such as Hugo Distler in Lübeck?

Quite what a German musicologist of the 1920s such as Schering would call a “principal feature” of “baroque music” other than a certain kind of counterpoint and a certain regular phraseology characteristic chiefly of German music, is not always clear. But Schering certainly thought of the organ chiefly in connection with Protestant church practice, as is clear from another remark he made at that period:

For if we compare the near-to-earth sound of a Baroque organ with the far-from-earth of a Romantic, then it has to be inevitably accepted that the Protestantism of the Romantic period was to just the same degree as far from that of the Baroque in decisive points of the religious experience as the one sound-ideal was from the other.22

Such an attractively broad view belongs to the same national flair for the wide aperçu that would soon produce an Adorno—indeed, it is a view that helps to illustrate the culture that could produce the phenomenon Adorno. But in their lack of specificity—in their leaving the mere practical details to the artisan (Bauer, Restaurator)—such remarks give little guidance. Those craftsmen are left to their own devices, while academics are encouraged to survey grandly landscapes they themselves have never mapped on the ground. By no means has this situation much changed in the last ninety years, and insofar as a few recent organ builders have set standards for the restoration and understanding of old instruments (such as Jürgen Ahrend in East Friesland), little credit can go to any Bewegung theorists of the 1920s except as they eventually provided something for later, better edu- cated builders to react against.

Meanwhile, however, it was not least in their language that the Orgelbewe- gung’s writers effectively influenced the future in a subtle way, in particular with the term “baroque organ.” It was and is a phrase that would otherwise have been barely conceivable—except in some art-historical or metaphorical sense—to

native English, French and Italian users. The Orgelbewegung’s “baroque organ” and “romantic organ” are good examples for any theory one might have that period labels have been invented to help with two of the music historian’s great problems: to develop a good grass-roots knowledge (actually getting to know the label-defying range of instruments and music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries) and to have to deal with vastly diverse amounts of music (a need to marshall under a label what it is one does know). Dolmetsch did not call and would never have called his book The Interpretation of Baroque Music.23

Even if a “kernel of truth” in the Orgelbewegung is that it helped alert musi- cians of one particular profession and one particular country to issues arising in the new historicism, it could be that its writers (Gurlitt, Mahrenholz) and players (Straube, Ramin), plus the new performance-practice scholars (Schering, Haas), did in effect promote a received canon of acceptable attitudes. And these attitudes would not only hold back development but would contribute to that division of labor characteristic of much German music study. Now one could claim that division of labor—keeping to one’s specialism—leads to the fullest development in the long run. Early specialized experimental work in England on the history of pitch24 _{has turned out to contribute directly or indirectly to the best of today’s}

understanding of crucial aspects of instrument history.25 _{Or the specialized posi-}

tivistic coverage of details in Curt Sachs’s handbook on instruments,26 _{written and}

revised exactly over the period of the Orgelbewegung, forms a firm basis for today’s detailed monographs written by professional organologists.27 _{Or any professional,}

technical study open to subsequent detailed revision can at least lead directly to later interpretation and “truer” understanding.28 _{But in the broad field of per-}

formance practice studies, division of labor could lead to too small a base from which to draw useful conclusions: neither a performer nor a scholar simpliciter would have enough experience for authoritative interpretation.

A good example of this can be found in certain coverage of figured-bass play-