“E. Power Biggs, Concert Organist”
Every instrument you approach is different. A pianist can be reasonably satisfied that most pianos will be about the same. An organist has to climb up to his instrument; he’s got to make friends with it.
Biggs made these comments in May 1954, in an interview with a London correspondent for Time magazine. He was on the first leg of a backbreaking three-month concert and recording tour that was to take him through a dozen countries, from Portugal to Iceland, and give him the opportunity to make many new friends—both organs and people.
The trip was at first intended solely as a concert tour. But David Oppenheim of Columbia Records had a “brilliant idea,” as Biggs was later to recall. He suggested that the Biggses take with them “a small tape recorder, and let it run while you play.” They thought that a lovely idea, visualizing a tidy little “miracle-box, about the size of a portable typewriter.” While such machines are now a reality, they were not in 1954, and the Columbia engineers soon demolished this pleasant fantasy with “some recording facts of life.” As a result, Biggs and Peggy found themselves embarking with 500 pounds of excess baggage in the form of tape recorders, generators, cables, and microphones. It was a lot of extra work, and it was definitely a gamble, for no American had done such a thing before. More than a gamble, it was an adventure, and Biggs had a decided taste for adventures.
The last notes of the Easter Sunday broadcast had barely died away when Biggs and Peggy were on their way to the airport bound for Lisbon, where Biggs gave a late-night recital at the National Conservatory. He then had a few days to make friends with some 2oo-year-old Iberian organs—“very playable, though often in need of a good tuning,” as he later observed in a Diapason article about the trip. He was charmed by the gentle foundation stops and the fiery horizontal reeds.
From Lisbon they went to London, where Biggs gave a recital on an “old friend”—the Westminster Abbey organ—and was introduced to some new ones, a pair of small but pleasing antiques by Willis and Snetzler, recently restored by the London builder Noel Mander. In London and in several other places Biggs programed the Sowerby Symphony in G. The London critics were not enthusiastic over its dissonances, but at least they did not mistake the piece for jazz, as a Norwegian reviewer did. Biggs also gave concerts at Leeds and in Birmingham City Hall, where his old teacher, G. D. Cunningham (“of whom I am proud to have been a pupil”), had for many years been municipal organist.
The next stop was Holland, in tulip season. The beauty of the countryside was not wasted on the two travelers, as they journeyed to The Hague for a concerted program. But it was the monumental old organs of Amsterdam, Leyden, and Gouda that made the most profound impression on Biggs: “What a tremendous revelation these Dutch organs are! Here surely in the organs of Holland . . . is the great tradition of organ building in its clearest form.” Biggs was moved by the thought that the steep steps he climbed to reach the organ gallery of Amsterdam’s Oude Kerk were the very steps trod by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. “How magnificent are the sonorities of Sweelinck’s music as heard in his own church! One seems never to have heard the music before.”
In Holland Biggs met for the first time the organ builder Dirk A. Flentrop, whom he saw as an inheritor of the tradition he was rapidly learning to admire. This meeting would have far-reaching consequences for Biggs and his audiences, and indeed for Flentrop himself. Both old and new Dutch organs possessed qualities Biggs had not encountered before, in either England or America. The articulate, unforced voicing of the pipes made an indelible impression on him, as did the sensitivity of the mechanical key actions and the reverberation of the massive old masonry churches. The trip was truly turning out to be a voyage of discovery, and Biggs soaked up every new sight and sound like a sponge. He also made certain to document as much as he could for future reference—the sights with his camera, the sounds with his tape recorder.
Across the border in northern Germany, Biggs gave a recital on the great Schnitger organ in the church of St. Jakobi in Hamburg. The instrument, which had recently been taken out of its wartime storage place, was temporarily set up in a side aisle of the church while restoration of the organ gallery was being completed. Biggs then visited two more of Arp Schnitger’s masterpieces, in Steinkirchen and in Neuenfelde, where Schnitger is buried and where his house still stands. Biggs did not fail to observe that here at least was one town that honored its organists and organ-builders, even to the point of naming streets for them.
Schnitger country led to Buxtehude country—Lübeck and Lüneburg. In the latter city Biggs played an organ that Bach, presumably, “had a whack at” when a student there in 1700. From there the route led to Berlin, where Biggs gave a concert in the Martin Luther Memorial Church in memory of the recently deceased Fritz Heitmann, whom Biggs had come to know and respect during his visit to Boston in 1950. On the plane from Berlin to Frankfort Biggs caught a glimpse (from a mile up) of the red-roofed village of Eisenach, Bach’s birthplace. Heidelberg was next, then Nuremberg, where Biggs proved that he still remembered the servicemen of his radio audience: after completing a recital on the large modern organ in the Cathedral, he played another at the Army base—on a chaplain’s folding reed organ.
Then it was off to Scandinavia, with concerts in Denmark on organs ranging from the 1610 Compenius organ in Frederiksborg Castle (Biggs’s first encounter with the old meantone tuning) to modern Frobenius and Marcussen instruments. In Trondheim, Norway, Biggs concertized in the world’s northernmost cathedral, St. Olaf’s. The scenery was breathtaking, and “the weather was warm and the sun shone brilliantly until practically midnight.” At the request of the Norwegian Society of Organists, to whom he brought greetings from the American Guild of Organists, Biggs played an all-American program at the Cathedral of Nidaros.
Sweden followed, with concerts on both modern instruments and on an organ by the Swedish baroque builder Hans Heinrich Cahman, a disciple of Schnitger. Then it was England again, where Biggs performed on Harrison & Harrison’s new neo-baroque instrument in Royal Festival Hall. While he felt that the organ was a step in the right direction for the British, its sound came off second best to the gentler and more cohesive sounds of the old Dutch and German organs, which were still very fresh in his memory. Biggs wondered if it were not better, if one wished an organ built to certain concepts, “to deal with a builder brought up and trained in this tradition.”
The last stop on the journey was Iceland. Its Viking history, rugged scenery, and friendly, appreciative people, made a lasting impression on Biggs and Peggy. At the invitation of composer and organist Pall Isolffson, Biggs gave two concerts in the “smallest cathedral in the world,” in Reykjavik, and recorded a program of American music to be broadcast over Icelandic Radio on the Fourth of July.
In three months Biggs had given thirty concerts in fourteen countries. That would have been activity enough for most people, but Biggs and Peggy still found time for sightseeing, recording, searching out new European music, and collecting souvenirs. And they made friends: organists, composers, organ builders, music lovers—even a Dutch driver named John Sebastian Bach.
Biggs’s tour had been largely arranged through the International Educational Exchange Service of the Department of State, and Biggs probably did little better than break even on concert fees. The excess baggage charges for the recording equipment, taxi fares, battery rental, and gratuities to churches and sextons added up to a whopping $2,739.95, according to Biggs’s meticulous accounting, but this expense was absorbed by Columbia Records.
The recording equipment had been specially designed by Columbia’s engineers for field recording, but communications from Biggs at various points in his progress reveal that not all of the “bugs” were out of it. It did not always perform as it was supposed to, and there was a constant problem in getting sufficient fresh 12-volt batteries to provide even power for the motors. At the trip’s end, many boxes of precious recorded tapes were held by the United States Customs Service for an aggravatingly long time while Columbia unsnarled the red tape. Biggs returned in July, but it was not until the end of the summer that Biggs and Columbia could be certain that they did, indeed, have material for an album.
And what a maverick album it was! Biggs’s previous Columbia releases had all been essentially virtuoso performances, consisting largely of big works with which Biggs had a long familiarity, played on American organs of a type with which he was thoroughly at ease. The programs had been carefully prepared and meticulously recorded under ideal conditions, and, while the best organs were invariably used, the player and the music were the intended center of attention. The Art of the Organ (David Oppenheim’s title suggestion) is very much a field recording. The quality of both the playing and the recording is noticeably uneven. Despite much diddling with the tapes in the Columbia studios by Biggs and the engineers, some parts are simply not as good as others, and much footage proved unusable. With little time to practice on organs, which, however much he may have liked them, presented Biggs with unfamiliar and sometimes awkward console arrangements, some of the playing emerges strangely wooden and labored. Registrations, too, are not always ideal. But Biggs wanted to show off as much of these organs as he could—what other reason could there be for using a lumbering (if impressive) 32’ Pedal reed stop in a Pachelbel partita?
Biggs the virtuoso does appear in the performances of familiar works on modern organs in Trondheim and in London, but the attraction of this album is not so much the playing as the sonorities of the instruments themselves. That indeed was the purpose of the recording, for Biggs was not so much intent on showing off his own considerable abilities as he was in impressing his listeners (as he had himself been impressed) with the unique sounds of the best European organs, both new and old.
Nearly two decades later, in his Smithsonian tape of 1973, Biggs recalled the strong impression that the 1954 tour made on him:
Playing the great historic organs of Europe had, for me, the impact of a revelation. For the first time, I became aware of the enormous reservoir, the sum total, of the art of the organ in its building and tonal aspects from five or six centuries. The sound of these instruments was so enormously different and superior to what we were accustomed to, and the instruments, despite their age and different playing dimensions of the console and pedalboard, were so much more responsive. Many things thus suddenly came into focus—the importance of tracker action, of articulate voicing, of the organ case, of the windchest, and so on and so on; and particularly the complete interaction of playing action and pipe sound. One suddenly realized the truth and enormous vitality of all that Schweitzer had written about many years before. Everyone reads his books and pamphlets about the organs, but the truth of what he says doesn’t percolate until you hear and preferably play these older organs.
Many ideas were generated by that exploratory trip, most of which had to do with future recordings, such as A Mozart Organ Tour, which Biggs accomplished the following year. And there was also the barest germ of an idea that the Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Germanic Museum should be retired to make way for something more representative of the organs that had stretched Biggs’s ears during those frenetic months abroad.
While The Art of the Organ was the most important album to come out of the 1954 tour, there was sufficient material on Biggs’s tapes for two additional discs. One, issued at the same time as The Art of the Organ, was aimed at the hi-fi buffs: Bach’s Toccata in D minor played on fourteen different organs (the fourteenth with the fugue attached). The other, released in 1956, featured Bach’s Eight “Little” Preludes and Fugues played on eight historic organs, a record that deserved more attention than it received at the time.
What did the critics think of these recordings? Were their ears stretched too? Apparently so. A review in the New York Times for April 17, 1955 commended Biggs’s programing of works by composers having geographical and chronological ties to the organs played, and observed that “The older organs . . . take the laurels from the new ones when it comes to beauty of tone.” In November the same reviewer covered A Hi-Fi Adventure (the Bach Toccata disc) and was again captivated by the beauty and variety of the organs. A review in the May 1955 issue of High Fidelity also caught the point that Biggs wanted to get across, “that baroque music is heard in its true colors and glory only on the kind of instruments for which it was written.” And the critic conceded that these instruments were “superb.”
One of the most thoughtful reviews appeared in The American Organist for May 1955. The Art of the Organ was judged “one of the outstanding issues of the year,” and although the reviewer took exception to some of the modern organs in the album (singling out the Royal Festival Hall instrument as “decidedly disappointing”), he was enchanted with the older organs and what they revealed:
Heard on the type of instrument their music was conceived for, Sweelinck, Pachelbel, Buxtehude seem in their best work more vivid in expressive coloration, more ship-shape in tonal architecture than ever before. It is as if three centuries of grime had suddenly been removed from a roomful of paintings that had always commanded respect but that now communicate the full force of their vibrant spirits.
In the presence of such a transformation, many new thoughts leap to mind: An entire body of musical literature may be rehabilitated through recordings of such instruments. It is possible we have underestimated Biggs and other American organists in their previous efforts to play baroque music on instruments incapable of producing the sounds 17th-century composers had in mind.
Such reviews must surely have encouraged Biggs to plan future recording trips, and fortunately his enthusiasm for these projects was shared by his producers at Columbia.
Save for the European tour, 1954 was just another typically busy year for Biggs. The radio broadcasts went on (Biggs arrived back from Iceland just in time to do his traditional “Americana” program on the Fourth of July); and he had a heavy domestic recital schedule, including a West Coast tour that involved him in master classes at Pomona College in California and a recital at the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City.
When Biggs’s fingers were not busy on the organ keys, they were rattling the keys of his old typewriter. Early in the year he had completed a large commissioned article on the organ for the Encyclopedia Britannica, which he researched carefully and rewrote innumerable times. A near-final draft was at last submitted to various friends for critical scrutiny. The organ builder Walter Holtkamp liked it, but gently reproved Biggs for what he felt was a bit too much propagandizing, generating yet another revision. After the European tour, more writing was in order, not only for the extensive jacket insert that accompanied The Art of the Organ but also for various periodicals. Here Biggs could (and did) propagandize to his heart’s content.
Even before his return from the 1954 tour, Biggs was incubating plans for international jaunts in 1955. The first of these was a concert tour of Iceland, partly motivated by new friendships there and partly by patriotism, for Biggs was intensely loyal to his adopted country, the United States. For economic reasons Iceland was being wooed by the Soviets, who, among other things, had initiated a cultural exchange and had sent musicians of the calibre of Aram Khatchaturian to give concerts there. The United States had an Army base in Iceland but seems not to have concerned itself with cultural offerings until Biggs suggested the idea. Thus, with State Department backing, Biggs revisited Iceland in the spring of 1955, this time accompanied by seven members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
Iceland had no organ builders, but it did have a number of organs, mostly good modern instruments of Scandinavian manufacture. In one handsome contemporary edifice, however, in Iceland’s second largest city of Akureyri, Biggs discovered that the authorities had succumbed to the blandishments of American advertising and had purchased an electronic instrument. Biggs was distressed, for he felt that such a splendid building deserved better. On his return to the United States, on his own initiative, he attempted to stir up interest—first in a Scandinavian-American organization, then in the Ford Foundation—for a gift of an American pipe organ to the Akureyri church, but unfortunately to no avail.
Biggs’s second 1955 trip, in August, followed what he dubbed “the Mozart trail.” His interest in Mozart was of long standing. Over the years Biggs had often programed Mozart works in recitals and broadcasts, had recorded a few shorter pieces in 1947 and 1950, and had even attempted to revive the glass armonica, for which Mozart wrote. But 1956 was the Mozart bicentennial year, which gave high priority to the recording of Mozart’s complete organ works. Biggs’s major focus was Salzburg Cathedral, where Mozart had been organist at the age of 21 and had even carved his initials (backwards!) into the organ case. The Cathedral organ still contained many stops from the 1705 Egedacher instrument Mozart had known, and the building had splendid acoustics. The setting was ideal in every way for recording Mozart’s seventeen “Epistle” Sonatas for organ and chamber orchestra (called “Festival” Sonatas on the record jacket, possibly because Biggs did not care for the “churchy” connotations of the original title).
But Mozart wrote other works for organ (if one includes the mechanical self-playing organs popular in his day), and he played other organs. Fortunately for Biggs, he left a detailed record of them in his letters, for Mozart might have been called the original “organ tourist.” While Mozart’s total written output for the organ is small enough to fit on three long-playing discs with room to spare even with a few transcriptions thrown in, Mozart enjoyed improvising on the organs he encountered in his journeys as a Wunderkind pianist, and a number of these organs were still extant. What better excuse for putting more historic organs on records than to follow quite literally the trail Mozart himself had blazed across Austria and Germany?
Peggy Biggs once remarked that during these early recording trips “we spent quite a few nights in churches” and wondered if she would even recognize some of them in the daytime. Night was undoubtedly the best time for recording, especially in cities, where normal daytime street noises, amplified by the resonance of large masonry buildings, created an intolerably high level of background noise on sensitive tapes. The major effort of the Mozart project, accounting for three of the six record sides, was the seventeen “Epistle” Sonatas. They were recorded in Salzburg Cathedral with the Camerata Academica under the noted Mozart conductor Bernhard Paumgartner. “Cathedral authorities and the Salzburg police obligingly rerouted all traffic from the Cathedral Square so that we could have complete quiet,” wrote Biggs in The A. G. O. Quarterly for October 1956, “and the drama of the great Cathedral at night during these evening performances is something long to remember.” Also memorable was the “splendid reverberation” of the Cathedral and other old buildings, which added “a mantle of magnificence to the wonderfully articulate organs.”
After finishing in Salzburg, the Biggses, with Bavarian organ builder Georg Steinmeyer as their guide, began checking out some other places where Mozart is known to have played the organ. Some, such as the great cathedrals of Ulm and Passau, had modern instruments. But in other places—Kirchheimbolanden, Mörlenbach, Fügen, Lambach, and the Church of St. Cajetan in Salzburg—they discovered fine old instruments “still just about as Mozart played them.” To these were added historic organs in Ebersmünster, Innsbruck, Absam, Monchsdeggingen, and Ludwigsburg—places Mozart is known to have visited and where he might have played the organ. But the supply of Mozart organ music ran out before the supply of Mozart organs, so part of the sixth side of the three-disc album consists of what Biggs called “snapshots in sound” of some of the organs and bells Mozart (and Biggs) heard in their travels.
Biggs learned some important lessons from his 1954 European venture, and was not slow in putting them into practice. He quickly realized that no good purpose was served by spreading himself too thin or by tiring himself out. The Mozart trip and all subsequent ones concentrated on well-defined musical and geographical areas, and, with one exception, were of shorter duration. For a while Biggs continued to bring his own equipment for some of the field recording, but as time went one he relied more and more on local engineers and their equipment for major projects. In the mid-1960s, when Hellmuth Kolbe of Zurich became CBS’s staff recording engineer in Europe, Biggs was entirely relieved of this extracurricular responsibility.
The changes in Biggs’s approach are clearly evident in the Mozart recording. Biggs the virtuoso is back in full measure, most notably in the Fantasia, K. 608, and the Adagio, Allegro, and Adagio, K. 594, for organ solo. The “Epistle” Sonatas could not have been better technically or musically if they had been recorded in Columbia’s own studios. The album was highly praised by the critics and was considered by many to be the definitive recording of Mozart’s organ works.
In 1956 another specialized tour captured the sounds of the Spanish and Portuguese organs that had so impressed Biggs at the outset of his 1954 trip. The resulting record was one more in what would become a long list of “firsts,” for outside of a handful of determined organ tourists, few Americans had ever heard the sounds of these remarkable instruments.
As on nearly all his recording tours, Biggs worked in a few concert appearances, one of these being at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. There he also found time to record Rheinberger’s Organ Sonata No. 7 on the large Steinmeyer organ. Biggs had lived with this work for a long time; one of its movements had been his audition piece when he applied for entrance into the Royal Academy of Music. Since the Rheinberger work took up only one side of a disc, Columbia filled the flip side with Hindemith’s Concerto for Organ and Chamber Orchestra, taped four years earlier with the Columbia Chamber Orchestra under Richard Burgin. Except for the release in 1957 of another “icebox” tape of Biggs playing the Saint-Saëns “Organ” Symphony with the Philadelphia Orchestra, it would be three years before Biggs would again be heard playing an American organ in a recorded performance.
The European recordings continued to surprise and delight audiophiles and critics alike. The Diapason for June 1957 praised both Organ Music of Spain and Portugal and A Mozart Organ Tour, noting in the case of the former that music that seems uninteresting on modern organs “takes on new meaning” when heard on the Iberian instruments. With regard to the Mozart release, the reviewer took exception to the “sluggish-sounding” organ in Passau Cathedral, but was otherwise impressed with the album: “the results approach perfection itself!” Biggs’s well-illustrated and informative jacket booklets also received their share of praise. The Hindemith/Rheinberger package, however, was considered something of a mixed blessing in the March 1958 Diapason: Hindemith was “pure joy”, while Rheinberger, with allowance for a “fine interpretation on an instrument ideally suited,” was “pompous and dull.” Biggs’s advocacy of Rheinberger was not so easily dampened; some years later Biggs made a recording that admirably vindicated his faith in this composer’s music.
Next to their first tour, in 1954, the recording trip made by Biggs and Peggy in 1957 was the most ambitious, even though all its objectives were not achieved. Lasting from May through August, it was the longest tour Biggs ever made, but the pace was more comfortable than in 1954. Traveling was considerably facilitated by the use of Biggs’s new Volkswagen Microbus, loaded with new two-track equipment, for Biggs was now recording in both monaural and stereo. Save for a few “sound snapshots” there was not much field recording scheduled for this trip, and in both Holland and England technicians from the Philips firm stood ready, by prior arrangement with Columbia, to assist in any way necessary.
The first stop was Zwolle, in The Netherlands. On previous visits Biggs had admired the “inexhaustible resources” and “tone of unique splendor” of the recently restored 1720 Schnitger organ there. With the cooperation of Dirk Flentrop and the genial organist, J. J. van der Waarde, he recorded three major Bach Preludes and Fugues on this instrument. A handsome old map of the city graced the cover of the resulting album, entitled simply Bach at Zwolle.
The troubles that were to plague the entire trip began in Zwolle. The new recording equipment refused to function properly: Thyratron tubes burned out at an “alarming rate,” and much tape footage was spoiled by unexplained noises and incomplete erasure. Unable to locate the trouble himself and getting behind schedule, Biggs took the machines to the Philips technicians in Baarn. Then there were difficulties with microphones, and a buzzing speaker had to be replaced. But with perseverence Biggs was finally able to get what he later described to his producers as “some exciting Bach tapes.” In addition to Bach at Zwolle, Biggs also recorded d’Aquin at Gouda, but either there was not enough usable tape or Biggs was dissatisfied with the result, for the latter was never released, and Biggs later re-recorded the d’Aquin Noëls on the new organ at the Germanic Museum.
The Biggses arrived in Germany in late June, and there they encountered problems of a different sort. Concerts had been booked in both East and West Berlin, as well as in Leipzig, Halle, and Freiberg in East Germany; and arrangements had even been made with an East German recording company to make some tapes in Leipzig and Freiberg. At the last moment, with Biggs already in Berlin and the East German concerts publicized, the whole project became hopelessly bogged down in bureaucratic red tape. Biggs was denied his East German visa, and all but two West Berlin programs had to be cancelled. Biggs was frustrated and angry. On July 8 he wrote to Debbie Ishlon of Columbia Records, “Instead of making a record on this trip to Germany I’ve broken one! And that’s the record of never having missed an announced concert or broadcast. Now I’ve missed three. ‘Editorial comment’ would be easy, but I’ll refrain from it.” Friends in East Germany wrote to express their disappointment, and Biggs graciously wrote apologies to the organists of the churches that were to have sponsored him. Biggs had no intention of giving up his ambition to play and record in Bach’s own church, but it was not until 1970 that he actually achieved it.
In mid-July Biggs and Peggy retraced their steps through Holland en route to England. The major project there was to record the sixteen Organ Concertos of G. F. Handel with members of the London Philharmonic under Sir Adrian Boult. A Mendelssohn recording at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London was also scheduled.
Biggs had expended no small amount of effort in getting the Handel project set up. He felt it important to use an authentic “Handel” organ for this recording, one built during the composer’s lifetime, and, if possible, one he is known to have played. Research by mail and investigations on previous trips turned up what seemed to be the ideal instrument. A well-documented two-manual chamber organ built around 1749 for Handel’s librettist Charles Jennens, to a specification recommended by Handel himself, was found to exist intact in the Parish Church of St. James in Great Packington, on the estate of the Earl of Aylesford. The Earl’s son, Lord Guernsey, was cooperative, and the setting was ideal—an acoustically favorable masonry church in the quietest location imaginable. But even in the planning stage there were a few obstacles to overcome. Columbia at first balked at the cost of hiring the London musicians, and the church building lacked electricity. But Columbia’s reticence was soon overcome, Lord Guernsey persuaded the Electric Board to lay an underground power line to the church (paid for by Columbia), and it appeared for a while that the Handel project would have smooth sailing.
Biggs soon found that this was not to be. He rarely neglected the smallest detail in his planning process, but he had overlooked a rather significant one here. He knew from a previous visit that the organ was not tuned to concert pitch, but he had the impression that it was about a half-step sharp. That did not concern him unduly, for he knew that orchestral musicians were in the habit of playing a little sharp, and that their instruments could be tuned a bit sharper if necessary. But the organ was not sharp; it was in fact nearly a half-step flat, and that posed serious problems indeed. Biggs first considered transposing the organ part, a difficult but not impossible exercise, but Handel had written his organ parts to the extreme limits of the keyboard, and in transposing Biggs would run out of keys. The orchestral players tried to flatten their instruments, but the strings would not stay in tune, and the woodwinds could not flatten sufficiently to tune with the organ.
Clearly something drastic would have to be done to keep the whole project from being scrapped. In desperation Biggs consulted with the organ builder Noel Mander in London, and between them they came up with a solution. Although he was in the midst of preparations for an impending meeting of the International Congress of Organists in London, Mander came to Great Packington with one of his men, removed the pipes from the organ, and took them to his workshop in London. There they were cleaned, repaired, regulated, shortened slightly to sharpen them, and fitted with tuning slides so that the original flat pitch might later be restored. From Biggs’s standpoint the operation was a success. The organ was in excellent tune and regulation, and its sound was all the brighter for the pipes having been cleaned. An electric blower was also installed, much to the relief of Peggy and the engineers, who had up to this point been taking turns at the instrument’s two bellows handles (“handles Handel handled,” quipped Biggs). The recordings went on with no further hitches, and the resulting album is still in print and still regarded by many as one of the finest and most authentic of all Handel Concerto recordings.
The ensuing Mendelssohn recording session at St. Paul’s went smoothly, but Biggs’s worries were not yet over. Word about the tuning alterations at Great Packington had gone out along the grapevine, and when Biggs returned home in late August he was confronted by letters from some fairly influential people deploring the “vandalism” he had committed in altering the pitch of a historic organ. The critics were all members of England’s “early music” circle, and in fairness it must be said that at the time this group was well ahead of the organ world in its concepts of restoration and conservation. Biggs answered the letters as diplomatically as he could, explaining that the organ could be returned to its original pitch any time Lord Guernsey or the rector of the church authorized it. As added insurance against further repercussions, he aired the matter himself in an article in The Diapason for December 1959. But the “teapot tempest” proved more difficult to quell than Biggs had anticipated. A few years later it cropped up again in a Dutch publication, and Biggs had to prevail upon his friends in The Netherlands to defend his good name. Fortunately for Biggs the matter seems never to have troubled those in actual charge of the organ, and he was welcomed back warmly when he returned to make further Handel recordings in 1970 and 1971.
One other record album resulted from these European tours of the 1950s. Entitled simply The Organ, it was issued in the fall of 1958 and was both a sequel to The Art of the Organ and a progress report on the development of Biggs’s views on organ tone and design over the previous four years. These thoughts first began to take shape in an article in the March 1956 issue of The Diapason. Here Biggs expressed the opinion that “our modern organ building must be measured by the degree in which it approaches the best of the classic models. Rarely do our modern instruments measure up, and almost certainly never do they excel the best examples of the old.”
But Biggs knew it was not enough just to talk and write about organ tone. A sound, like a picture, could be worth so much more than mere words. In this rather lavishly packaged album, Biggs combined words, pictures, and sounds not only to sketch out the musical and technical history of the organ but also to hammer home his concept of the ideal organ, a concept that had ripened considerably in four short but eventful years. On the record (dubbed the “talking dog record” by Biggs and the Columbia staff), Biggs’s voice, backed up by numerous taped examples, propounds the credo of a new movement in organ building, already begun in Europe and in its infant stages in America: No organ chambers, no “classic cabooses” on orchestral organs, no baroque stoplists rendered in Romantically voiced pipes; no unification, remote-controlled electric action, inarticulate speech or dead acoustics. No compromise whatever of the time-honored principles of organ design and construction. Heard at a quarter century’s remove, Biggs’s voice is the voice of a prophet—one who, fortunately, lived to see his prophecies come to pass.
But prophetic voices are not always heeded or agreed with in their day. By 1958 Biggs was not the only organist who had been to Europe, but he was surely the most visible. In the period Melville Smith and Arthur Howes were conducting tours that introduced many American organists to historic European organs. Other organists were touring on their own, and some of the younger ones were obtaining Fulbright scholarships to study at European conservatories. Nearly all of these travelers came to share Biggs’s views in whole or in part. But many who stayed home did not, and during the 1950s the trade journals were enlivened by articles and letters pro and con such things as tracker action, articulate pipe speech (“to chiff or not to chiff,” as one editor expressed it), Werkprinzip designs, organ cases, and live acoustics. The “pros” had an eloquent champion in Biggs, the only major recitalist who cheerfully and enthusiastically went out on a limb for his, and their, views. The “talking dog record” was a persuasive milestone in the controversy. “Biggs stumps for the restoration of the classic style organ and demonstrates most dramatically the advantages of such an instrument over most modern church or theatrical monsters,” wrote critic Paul Affelder in the Newark Sunday News for October 5, 1958.
Biggs stumped not only for the classic organ but for the album itself. Articles and interviews in such prominent magazines as Newsweek, Time, and The New Yorker, gave Biggs the opportunity to bring his message to the world at large. “Does Biggs expect to convert others to the classical organ?” asked Newsweek’s interviewer. “One sound is worth a thousand words,” replied Biggs.
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