21 Elder Statesman

All art exacts its price, certainly much hard work and possibly economic hardship. But whatever pressure you have—you must, as I’m sure you do—enjoy your profession. Fight the good fight!

Biggs addressed these words to a group of organ builders in 1975, and they applied as much to his own life work as to theirs. Now in his sixties, he continued with undiminished enthusiasm to work hard, fight for his ideals, and, certainly, to enjoy his chosen profession.

Biggs’s last engagement in 1973 was an appearance with the Symphony Orchestra of Corpus Christi, Texas, conducted by his friend Maurice Peress. On the program were three works for organ and brass and a Rheinberger concerto, all of which Biggs had previously recorded at St. George’s with Peress, plus the perennially popular Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony. He began 1974 by playing Strauss and Rheinberger with the Minnesota Orchestra, along with two solo works. Roy M. Close of the Minneapolis Star, who seems to have been lukewarm to Rheinbergers music in general, found the Organ Concerto No. 2 a cut above his expectations:

Biggs’s interpretation was thoughtful and appropriate. . . . His playing was sufficiently warm to convey the spirit of nobility so many of Rheinberger’s themes seem designed to evoke. But it was also attentive to nuances and became admirably lyrical when the score called for it.

Biggs gave several concerts in California at the end of January, but he had to cancel a March engagement when he slipped and broke his arm. This was not his first fracture, although it was the first to necessitate the cancellation of a scheduled appearance. Biggs’s physicians advised him to call off the few remaining spring concerts, but the form letter sent by Johanna Giwosky in reply to inquiries concerning concerts stated only that because of “the pressure of various recording commitments” Biggs was not accepting any more engagements in 1974.

Biggs did in fact have a heavy load of work to do for Columbia. Although he did no actual recording in 1974, there were jacket notes to be written for the Freiburg and the second Joplin releases, a great deal of editing to be done (some of which had been delayed by the repairs to his equipment), and much correspondence to be carried on with regard to future projects. Clearance had been received to record in Leipzig again, and a firm date was set in 1975. This album was not to be another solo performance, but the Bach cantata sinfonias that Biggs had been recommending to Columbia for some time. As the American bicentennial was just around the corner, another Americana album was also high priority, and Biggs began making exploratory trips to potential recording sites in the fall of 1974.

Of the six Biggs albums released in 1974, three were reissues. The other three were the Freiburg Bach album, Walther on the pedal harpsichord, and Bach Organ Favorites Vol. 6, which was really a piecing together of some previously recorded but unreleased Trio Sonatas and Concertos. Whether new or reissued, all received favorable reviews, the Freiburg quadraphonic recording drawing the most attention. It was so successful that Biggs was already rounding up material for a second Freiburg foray. By November Biggs’s “idea lists” included more Rheinberger, possibly done in the composer’s own church in Vaduz, and some of his favorite Sowerby and Piston pieces, including two major works with orchestra: “I’m listing these but not urging them, for costs would be pretty steep. However the Piston [Prelude and Allegro] would fit very well on an ‘organ and strings’ record.” In the way of new recording sites, Biggs was casting interested glances in the direction of Washington’s Shrine of the Immaculate Conception, a spacious building with a large Möller organ, and New York’s Alice Tully Hall, with its new Kuhn instrument.

Although Biggs had said he would accept no further recital engagements in 1974, he did take part in the dedication of a rebuilt tracker-action organ in the small town of Sharon, Connecticut, in October. And, although he did not perform, he was present at the dedication of the new Flentrop organ in Oberlin College’s Warner Hall on November 22, where he participated in a symposium on “The Organ in the Twentieth Century.” Numerous presubmitted questions were discussed by the panel, which included Biggs, Fenner Douglass, Charles Fisk, Marie-Claire Alain, George Taylor, Harald Vogel, Hans Steketee of the Flentrop firm, and the writer. The subject of electronic instruments was raised, giving Biggs the opportunity to deliver, in no uncertain terms, his opinions on what he called “the carnage at Carnegie”—an allusion to the refusal by New York’s Carnegie Hall of the gift of a large Flentrop organ and the subsequent installation of an unimpressive electronic instrument. Asked his opinion of swellboxes (possibly not a totally serious question), Biggs shot back, “Why, there ought to be a law against them!”

As part of the ceremonies at Oberlin, Biggs was awarded an honorary doctorate. As a trustee slipped the hood over Biggs’s head, Peggy muttered, sotto voce, “He’s already got a closetful of those at home!” The Biggs closet did indeed already contain tokens of honorary doctorates bestowed by Acadia University, Coe College, and the New England Conservatory. Other honors accumulated during his career included fellowships in the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Organists, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; citations for service from the Handel and Haydn Society and the National Association of American Composers and Conductors; and the title of Knight-Commander of the Order of Isabella the Catholic, bestowed by the Spanish government in recognition of Biggs’s work on behalf of historic Spanish organs.

Good reviews and honors were the bright side of the fall of 1974, but in September a very dark shadow fell across Biggs’s path with the death of the harpsichord maker John Challis. Challis, just one year Biggs’s junior, had succumbed to a long and debilitating illness, although he had managed to work almost to the end. Biggs, who felt a strong debt of gratitude to Challis for building and maintaining his pedal harpsichord, as well as for his support and willingness to assist in research projects, was moved to write a short but appreciative account of Challis’s life and work, which appeared in Harpsichord the following spring.

As an almost exact contemporary of Challis, Biggs could identify strongly with the harpsichord maker’s efforts to popularize “old music, played on appropriate instruments” back in the 1930s and 1940s. He himself had been working toward that same end, at a time when most keyboard performers still unquestioningly accepted the modern grand piano and the romantically voiced electric-action organ as suitable vehicles for the keyboard works of the Renaissance and the Baroque.

Other parallels emerged in Biggs’s account. Challis had returned from his four years of apprenticeship with Dolmetsch in 1930, the same year that Biggs became a permanent resident of the United States. In the late 1930s, when Biggs was encouraging G. Donald Harrison to build more organs of classical tonal design, Challis was making clavichords and harpsichords over his father’s jewelry shop in Ypsilanti and barely selling enough instruments to make ends meet. In the 1940s and 1950s, when Biggs’s career as a performer was reaching its peak and the type of instrument he advocated was becoming more popular, Challis had to move to a much larger workshop in order to serve his growing clientele. Biggs and Challis finally met in the 1960s, when their paths crossed over the pedal harpsichord. Both were committed nonconformists who loved their work and believed strongly in what they were doing; their mutual respect was instantaneous and enduring. The loss of this kindred spirit affected Biggs quite deeply, but it was not in his nature to brood long over such events when there was work to be done.

A number of plans were in the formative stage for 1975, but first there was another medical problem to be taken care of. Biggs had been having problems with cataracts, and his left eye was operated on only a few weeks before his Oberlin appearance. He had been concerned that he might have to wear an eye patch, but he showed up patchless if a bit bloodshot. Shortly afterward he wrote to Dr. Alfred Scott, his surgeon, “I’m delighted with my bright new eye! Thank you very much! The January 17 and 19 concerts in Los Angeles appear quite possible.” However, he was eager to have the surgery on the other eye as soon as convenient (“My objective would be to try to be all right for some special events—New York on April 13th, and recording in Leipzig later . . .”). The second operation was scheduled for early February. Biggs was thus able to perform in Los Angeles—two concerts with orchestra at First Congregational Church—and to give a late-January recital at the Busch-Reisinger Museum.

By this time Biggs had cut back rather substantially on concert tours. He was always willing to schedule concerts close to home, however, including the Museum event and another in March at King’s Chapel, in which he performed some of the Bach Sinfonias he planned to record at Leipzig. He also made an appearance, as he had for several years, during the annual “Bach Birthday Bash” of the local National Public Radio station, WGBH. In 1975 he gave only two performances away from home, but they were major events, with orchestras.

Of greatest import to Biggs, perhaps, was his part in the inauguration of the new mechanical-action Kuhn organ in Alice Tully Hall, part of the Lincoln Center complex. Some of its significance for Biggs had to do with his outspoken stand concerning pipe organs in New York’s concert halls. A few years earlier the organ world had been stunned to learn that the generous gift of a Flentrop organ to Carnegie Hall had been refused for suspiciously vague reasons. Officially, it was said that the organ would spoil the acoustics, but no scientific authority was ever cited to support this premise, and, as Biggs and many others had pointed out, most of the acoustically finest halls in the world already contained organs. To add insult to injury, the large Aeolian-Skinner organ, which had caused its builders such misery, and which Biggs had dedicated, had been removed from Avery Fisher (formerly Philharmonic) Hall during the most recent of a seemingly interminable series of remodelings. This left New York bereft of organs in any of its major halls, but thanks to the generosity of arts patron Alice Tully, a good-sized organ from the Swiss firm of Th. Kuhn had recently been installed in one of the smaller halls. Biggs and most of the other organists hastened to put their stamp of approval on it.

Four concerts were given to open the new organ; two solo recitals (by André Marchai and by Karl Richter) and two concerted ones. Biggs took part in the second of these, performing a Haydn concerto and one of the Bach sinfonias with the Musica Aeterna Orchestra. Reviewer Allen Hughes, commenting on the “professionalism and integrity” of Biggs’s performance, thought his presence on the program especially fitting “to celebrate this symbol of triumph of the cause he has served so well for so long.” Biggs, who was quoted in the New York Times as proclaiming that “This is the way God intended organs to be built,” shared honors in this concert with two other organists, Catherine Crozier and Thomas Schippers. Afterward, he wrote appreciative letters to the builders, commending their work, and to Alice Tully, to whom he predicted that “This organ is going to cast a long shadow—an illuminating shadow.”

Biggs’s next concert was to have been on May 14, with the Kansas City Orchestra under Maurice Peress. Biggs flew out, began preparing for the concert, collapsed, and had to be hospitalized. His appearance with the orchestra was cancelled; and the Leipzig trip, scheduled for the first week in June, seemed in jeopardy. But within a few days he was allowed to return home, where he rested and carried on his correspondence and trip preparations as though nothing had happened.

With Peggy, Biggs departed for Leipzig on May 29, 1975. Rehearsals with the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Thomaskantor Hans-Joachim Rotzsch began the next day, and the following seven evenings were given over to recording. Biggs played on a five-stop Schuke positive organ instead of the large instrument he had recorded on in 1970, and the music represented a very different facet of Bach’s genius, one perhaps even more closely linked to the Thomaskirche. It was music Biggs had been wanting to record for some time, the six Cantata Sinfonias having an obbligato organ part. These works are unique in the literature of the period. “In effect, they are one-movement organ concertos,” wrote Biggs, who wondered if Bach might even have intended them to form an independent set of pieces. To fill out the remaining space on the record, Biggs added the beloved “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” and the ebullient Sonata to Cantata 31 (the Easter Cantata).

As usual, Biggs provided his own articulate jacket notes. There he ventured the opinion that these unique works might have been designed as display pieces for the organist, either Bach himself or one of his sons or students. The organ parts are indeed quite extraordinary. They sparkle and laugh their way through the orchestral fabric; they are heartbreakingly happy and full of the juice of life. Of one of them, Biggs wrote, “Though the title ‘We must through great tribulation enter the kingdom of heaven’ is formidable, the music of Sinfonia 146 is pure joy.”

Biggs always appreciated the work of his collaborators in concerted programs, but a greater than usual empathy developed between him and the East German performers on this particular occasion. “They could not have been more cooperative throughout, nor made us more welcome,” Biggs wrote afterward to Pamela Ilott of CBS News. “There is something deeply moving in this, and I am sure it is their basic religious feeling—unaffected by whatever politics may be.” Cantor Rotzsch was singled out for special praise: “He was a tower of strength, a great chap, and an excellent conductor,” wrote Biggs to Paula Scherr of CBS Records, and he insisted that Rotzsch’s picture appear on the record jacket. Biggs was also moved by the “rare sense of wonder and devotion” that permeated the instrumentalists’ performance. But it is also possible that these fellow musicians responded as they did partly out of admiration for Biggs’s own honest devotion to Bach, as well as for his grit and enthusiasm in the face of obviously increasing frailty.

Biggs’s last recording session, Methuen Memorial Music Hall, 1975

Biggs’s next recording project—and, as it turned out, his last—likewise lacked nothing in the way of vitality, but it was of a definitely more rollicking and secular nature. The recording sessions for the Bicentennial album were scheduled for late September 1975, and Biggs was winnowing out program ideas. He had decided that the public was probably getting tired of Ives’s “America” (or at least would be by the time 1976 ended) and was searching for works of equal interest to replace it. A visit by the writer to the Library of Congress in the spring of 1975 turned up the lively score of The Battle of Manassas, composed by a popular nineteenth-century black pianist known as Blind Tom. It was added at the last moment to a stack of photocopies of other material, largely because it was certain to appeal to Biggs’s sense of humor. That it did, but Biggs also saw the possibilities of rearranging it for the organ, and it made a good foil for two other large works he had already chosen—Dudley Buck’s Variations on “The Star-Spangled Banner” (a quite worthy replacement for the Ives) and a transcription of John Philip Sousa’s Stars and Stripes Forever, which gave the album its title.

Although Biggs had investigated a number of possible organs for this recording, from the Tannenbergs of Pennsylvania to a large 1876 Hook & Hastings in Buffalo which had originally been part of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the final choice boiled down to three organs that were close at hand. The small Brattle Organ, an early eighteenth-century chamber organ in St. John’s Church, Portsmouth, New Hampshire (which had been unplayable at the time the first Americana record was made, but was restored by Fisk in 1965), was used for two short pieces, but everything else was played on the rebuilt Boston Music Hall organ in Methuen Music Hall or the new Fisk organ in Boston’s Old West Church. Some trial and error was involved in deciding which pieces would go best on which instruments. Early in September, after a visit to the various organs, Biggs reported to Kazdin,

As you see, the emphasis has shifted back to Methuen. Because, whatever the problems there, I believe we will obtain in Methuen more of a slam-bang concert atmosphere than in Old West Church. Old West is, however, quite ideal for the perky Colonial airs and marches, and also—curiously enough—for Manassas.

The “problems” at Methuen had to do with the organ’s slow response and the difficulty of hearing its sound properly from the console. Otherwise there was a distinct advantage to this well-insulated hall: since no other uses were scheduled for the fall, recording could go on without interruption at just about any time of day. Old West Church, on the other hand, was a heavily used building, and street noise made it impossible to record there at any time other than late at night.

Stars and Stripes Forever was as different from the earlier Organ in America release as night from day. Biggs threw any stuffy pretense of authenticity to the winds and produced the most “slam-bang” version of The Battle of Trenton he had ever played. The other big pieces on the disc are in the same uninhibited vein. The little “Colonial airs and marches” are, as he said, “perky.” That word might not readily have been applied to Biggs by anyone who observed him laboring up the stairs to the organ gallery at Old West Church, yet once seated at the console he bent to his task with astonishing vigor.

The same vital spirit animated Biggs’s one public speaking engagement in the fall of 1975, an address given in October at a convention of the American Institute of Organ Builders in Albany. Most of the ideas in his speech were not new, but in restating them Biggs summarized some of his own basic tenets. His theme was the absolute importance of good organs—real organs—to the proper realization of fine music. That good organs encourage good playing almost goes without saying, but Biggs felt also that the great organs of history were the inspiration for some of the masterpieces of organ literature. He then offered his own imaginative reconstruction of the way the young Bach, as a student in Lüneburg, might have been inspired to create his monumental Toccata in D minor:

How did this masterpiece come into being? Certainly not by sliding down a shaft of light from above. Rather, I believe, by the young Bach sneaking up to the organ gallery of St. John’s Church, where there was an organ already 150 years old, and—experimenting. He’d try that famous opening twiggle on the chief manual and enjoy the six-seconds’ echoes that followed. Then, an octave lower on another manual, complete with echo—and yet another. Then, that wonderful low pedal and the spread chord, melting into major. The whole Toccata exploits in the simplest of musical language almost every grand effect of which an organ is capable, and is the most perfect instance where we may certainly believe that a great organ inspired a great composition. Of course, it’s an advantage to have a great composer at hand.

Biggs warmed to his subject, bringing up the matter of the “synthetic object” in Carnegie Hall. He had attended Virgil Fox’s opening concert on the electronic instrument and observed that, despite the size of the instrument and the virtuosity of the player, “the electronic sound is still pudgy, inarticulate, the flutes without character (unless you consider the tremolo to be character) and the ensemble becomes more turgid as it gets louder.” If there was little for the ear, there was nothing for the eye: “Where is the symmetry of organ pipes, the beauty of an organ case, where, in fact, is any identity?”

Electronic science had its uses in the reproduction of musical sound, as no one with as long a history in broadcasting and recording as Biggs could possibly deny, “but not for the creation of sound. Synthetic sound cannot equal the richness, the complexity, the natural glory of sound emanating from rank on rank of pipes. Electronically produced sound seems second hand. It quickly becomes tiring.” This was not where the future of “Bach’s Royal Instrument” lay. “Rather, the past is the future of the organ. . . .” By this Biggs meant not necessarily the literal copying of historic instruments but the study of them, the absorbing of the lessons they had to teach. “It means that you have a foundation of centuries to build on.”

Biggs’s talk was published in Music, and reader reaction was warmly commendatory. In a letter to the editor, Richard Ditewig of San Francisco summed up the general reaction succinctly:

Mr. Biggs’s life has been one of dedication, service, and uncompromising standards. . . . In his latest statement Mr. Biggs is challenging all who hear him to never settle back for mediocrity but to strive for artistic perfection in all we say and do.

Biggs’s outspoken advocacy of the pipe organ was certainly not new, but at a time when massive advertising campaigns were being aimed at convincing potential organ purchasers that a counterfeit was as good as the real thing, his words gave heart to colleagues who shared his convictions but lacked his visibility. He was invited to give a similar talk to the New York chapter of the American Guild of Organists in June 1976. The Manhattan organists made a gala event of it by following Biggs’s address with a dinner to which Alice Tully, critic Allen Hughes, Guild of Organists President Roberta Bitgood, and other dignitaries were invited.

In his New York speech Biggs again delivered his opinions on the Carnegie Hall situation, but not without a liberal touch of humor. Having related an anecdote about a village Strawberry Festival in which a shortage of strawberries had caused prunes to be substituted, Biggs demanded to know “WHAT WAS THIS PRUNE DOING IN CARNEGIE HALL?”

Again, Biggs willingly admitted the usefulness of electronic science in the reproduction of musical performance. “Electronics with attached keyboards,” as he called them, might even be handy “for occasional purposes, such as opening the World Series, for taking on a concert trip to Timbuctoo, and they are said to be prevalent and popular in cocktail bars.” But, “In Carnegie Hall we are dealing with music and the integrity of music.” He backed up his views on the integrity of the organ with a technically knowledgeable comparison of the manner in which pipe organs and “electronic devices” produce their respective sounds, effectively countering the few shopworn arguments against organs in concert halls, and concluding with the warning that “imitations have a very short shelf life.”

Allen Hughes reported the event in the New York Times for June 9, quoting Biggs at length and referring to him as “an elder statesman of the music world, whose indefatigable labors over nearly half a century have made his name synonymous with organ playing.” He also noted that Biggs was cutting back considerably on his concert activities. “I’m not averse to recitals,” Biggs had told Hughes, “but I’m gradually dropping that. I want to communicate now through recordings.”