“E. Power Biggs, Concert Organist”
I had heard of Mr. Biggs, but was not at the time acquainted with his playing. When he approached me in an interval of a recording session with the Boston Symphony with an invitation to hear the baroque organ [in the Germanic Museum], I was candidly more interested in the instrument than I was in Mr. Biggs. I readily accepted his invitation, after which I was more interested in Mr. Biggs than the instrument. We made arrangements then and there to record with him and the Germanic Museum organ, and shortly afterward I put before the artist certain long-range projects which I am happy to see are being moved forward.
Charles O’Connell was director of Victor Red Seal Records from 1930 to 1944 and later chronicled his experiences in The Other Side of the Record, published in 1949. In it appears the above description of the circumstances that led to Biggs’s being engaged, in 1939, as an exclusive artist with a major recording company. O’Connell could on occasion be acidly critical of the foibles of many of the performing artists he worked with, but his relationship with Biggs was always cordial. He lauded Biggs as “a scholar, a virtuoso, and an artist of the first rank. . . . One can believe that Bach himself was such an organist.” His one criticism was not of Biggs the organist but of Biggs the driver (“a nerve-wrecker”). Biggs, who had managed to overturn his first car in a ditch while still in Newport, had had a decade to acquire the legendary skills of the typical Boston driver by the time O’Connell met him. While he was never involved in an accident more serious than the typical Bostonian “fender bender,” his image as a driver was probably not enhanced by his penchant, even at the height of his career, for driving superannuated autos until they almost literally fell apart.
Most of the 26 recordings made by Biggs for Victor—all 78s—were done at the Germanic Museum. A few, mostly of works demanding a larger instrument of more Romantic resources (as well as one involving the Harvard choir), were recorded across the street on the 1934 Aeolian-Skinner organ in Harvard’s Memorial Church. Still others, which combined organ and orchestra, were recorded on the old Hutchings organ in Boston’s Symphony Hall.
In recollections taped in 1973, Biggs described the making of his first Victor recordings at the Germanic Museum, early in the fall of 1939:
After recording the Boston Symphony one day, Victor brought over their machines. These were the old wind-ups; they had heavy weights which had to be cranked up, and which in their downward fall, turned the cutting table. Needles cut into a heavy platter of soft wax. You had one go at playing a piece, and just possibly a second or third. But that was that; you had to choose. And you heard no playback, for to play the wax would have been to ruin it for later pressing.
As soon as his contract with Victor was signed, Biggs produced the first of his long series of “Five Year Plans” for future recording projects. This one was divided into three sections: repertoire, suggestions for order of recording, and suggestions for album series and publicity. The repertoire section was chronological and ranged from pre-Bach to contemporary. A lot of concerted music was included for a wide variety of instrumental combinations, and below Sowerby’s Concerto for Organ and Orchestra Biggs wrote: “A SUPERB WORK, WHICH SHOULD BE RECORDED AT THE FIRST OPPORTUNITY.” Neither Victor nor, later, Columbia ever rose to the challenge that the large Sowerby work presented, but even in the last year of his life it appeared on a list of future projects in the last “Five Year Plan” Biggs submitted to Columbia, touching proof of his convictions concerning the work’s worthiness. Victor did, however, record Sowerby’s Symphony in G for organ solo, which appeared as an album in 1942.
Biggs’s plans were peppered with his own ideas for the promotion of his recordings. An emphasis on “name” composers—Bach, Brahms, Handel, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Liszt—was suggested because they “are already known to record fans, and in many cases this completes their composition listing in the catalog.” And a series on modern American composers “could be done with appropriate patriotic fanfare.” Organ records would make “a particularly great gift for music lovers,” many of whom, Biggs theorized, had never heard a really good organ first hand. But “church associations” should be avoided in publicity, and the organ should be treated as a “straightforward musical instrument.” Biggs knew the value of the visual, and for accompanying photos he recommended multiple keyboards, pipes (they “lend themselves to very striking shots”), candid shots of recording sessions, and pictures of “other musicians with the instrument, thus relating it to the stream of music as a whole.”
From the beginning, Biggs, unlike most other artists, wrote most of his own jacket notes and promotional material. Much of the latter could be found in the RCA Victor Record Review during the 1940s. The purpose of the publication was, of course, to “plug” new Victor releases, but in his articles Biggs usually managed to do more than that. Biggs the missionary and teacher continually appear side-by-side with Biggs the record salesman.
A good writer of prose, Biggs had a talent for succinctness and a nice instinct for the right proportion of anecdote and erudition needed to sustain a reader’s interest. In a 1944 article entitled “The Organ Comes into Its Own,” Biggs entered a plea for restoring organ literature to the organ, citing with mild condemnation an unnamed “eminent conductor” (presumably Stokowski) who “has raided this musical storehouse for his orchestral transcriptions. . . . There is nothing obscure about fine organ music. It is as colorful and as full of interest as that for the orchestra.” In the course of his short article, he whetted the reader’s interest in organ music of the classical, Romantic, and contemporary periods, mentioning, by way of examples, three of his own recent releases—Bach’s Orgelbüchlein, Reubke’s monumental Sonata on the 94th Psalm, and Sowerby’s Symphony in G major. Of course his articles helped to sell Victor records. But they also helped to “sell” organ music, and Biggs’s brief commentary on each work (as well as his jacket notes) was intended to educate the listener painlessly.
In a 1946 article entitled “Organ Music—from Hydraulis to Bach,” Biggs summed up the colorful early history of the organ in nontechnical language (including a simple and understandable description of organ-pipe physics) and rounded it out with eye-catching illustrations taken from old prints. He seemed a bit concerned, however, that the average music lover might be put off by “early music” and “baroque organs.” The latter term was beginning to be bandied about a bit too freely for Biggs’s taste, since it was tending to polarize both music lovers and organists into “pro” and “anti” camps. In an obvious (if low-key) attempt to pour a bit of oil on the troubled waters, Biggs concluded:
With the present day renaissance of organ building, people frequently inquire about the distinctive characteristics of a “baroque” organ. Really there are none, at least none in the sense that would set such an instrument apart. The progressive trend to design modern instruments on eighteenth century tonal lines has resulted in such organs being nicknamed “classic” or “baroque.” The adjective is actually superfluous, since such instruments are simply good organs, a parallel to any modern violin which succeeds in recreating the sound of a Stradivarius.
While such appeals to reason may have helped to broaden the outlook of the music-loving public, they seem to have had less effect within Biggs’s own professional circles. Two years later, under direct attack from a minor music critic who had dismissed organs such as the one in the Germanic Museum as “museum pieces,” as well as from the organ builder Ernest M. Skinner, who deplored the recent trends of his former company (by this time known as Aeolian-Skinner, and under the direction of Biggs’s friend Harrison), Biggs retaliated feistily in The Musical Digest for March 1948: “Does Mr. Skinner think that everyone is out of step but himself? Does he really believe that the fine art of organ building came to full flower in himself and the instruments he built? And that others are now engaged merely in tearing down that perfection?” With inexorable logic, Biggs then proceeded to defend Harrison’s tonal concepts, put Skinner’s “orchestral” philosophy in its proper historical perspective, and, coincidentally, to demolish the critic (“Perhaps it’s rather hard on Mr. Gunn to introduce the eloquent writing of Robert Schumann. . . .”). Gunn, who damned the harpsichord as well as Harrison’s organs, was also, it turned out, a proponent of orchestral transcriptions of organ music. Biggs seized the opening and administered his knockout punch: “The poor organ, he claims, is not worthy of its own literature!”
In his recordings during the Victor years, 1939-1947, Biggs took pains to keep his repertoire as eclectic as that of his recitals, which were gradually increasing in frequency in the late 1940s, and his broadcasts. There were, of course, large helpings of Bach (notably the Orgelbüchlein and Art of Fugue, the latter in Biggs’s own organ arrangement), Handel, and other Baroque composers such as d’Aquin, Corelli, and Felton; but there were also Mozart, Reubke, Dupré, Sowerby, and Piston. Several recordings of concerted music were made with the Fiedler Sinfonietta, a chamber orchestra made up of Boston Symphony players under the direction of Arthur Fiedler, which also made occasional appearances on the radio programs. And one recording, the last on the Victor label, was not made on the organ at all, but on the celesta. It was of music which would later be recorded again under very different circumstances—Mozart’s little Adagio and Rondo for glass armonica.
Recording was by no means Biggs’s only activity in this period. There were the weekly broadcasts to prepare, recital tours, teaching, church work, and a newer enterprise, the editing of music. During the 1940s H. W. Gray published Biggs’s realization of Bach’s Art of Fugue as well as his famous arrangements of Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” (used for many years as theme music on his broadcasts and referred to by Biggs simply as “Sheep”) and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” His music editions were often closely related to his recordings. In 1942 Victor released Biggs’s performance of William Felton’s Concerto No. 3 in B flat, and in the same year his arrangement of the Andante from that work was issued by Gray.
Biggs’s editions also began to appear in other publishers’ catalogs. In 1947 Mercury Music Corp. published his Treasury of Early Organ Music, which quickly became a standby among church organists and is still in print. In it were a number of works by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century composers popularized by Biggs in broadcasts and recitals. In 1943 B. F. Wood published his edition of Bach’s Fugue in C Major (BWV Anh. 90), nicknamed the “Fanfare” fugue and long a Biggs recital staple. Although it is not usually included among Bach’s authentic organ works (it is thought by some to have been conceived for the pedal harpsichord), it was always convincingly performed as such by Biggs.
During the early 1940s World War II placed restrictions on both travel and cultural activities, and the conversion of the organ factories to war production resulted in a moratorium on organ dedication recitals; yet Biggs continued to record, teach, broadcast, and maintain a fairly active if somewhat reduced recital schedule. In the fall of 1940 he gave a series of Bach recitals on the Aeolian-Skinner organ in St. Paul’s Chapel of Columbia University in New York City, and during the summer of 1941 he took part in the Boston Symphony Orchestra concerts at Tanglewood. Many of the recitals he gave in 1942 and 1943 were in the greater Boston area or in a relatively nearby location such as Middlebury, Vermont. In 1944 Biggs participated in the famous Bethlehem (Pennsylvania) Bach Festival, and he premiered Walter Piston’s Partita for organ and strings in Washington.
During this period Biggs’s marriage to Colette Lionne had become increasingly troubled, and in 1944 it ended in divorce. But Biggs was never without female companionship for very long and was soon seen in the company of a tall, attractive chestnut-haired young woman who sang alto in his choir at the Harvard Congregational Church. In March 1945 Biggs was in Chicago for a performance with the Chicago Symphony when he heard that the government was considering drafting unmarried nurses. He lost no time in telephoning a certain nurse in Brookline, who responded by boarding the next train to Chicago, where she and Biggs were married by a justice of the peace. The Army thus lost a skilled and compassionate nurse, but in Margaret Allen—better known as Peggy—Biggs gained a witty and energetic companion who would come to play an increasingly important part in the development of his career.
Biggs’s 1945 concert schedule carried him not only to Chicago but also to Montreal, St. Louis, and Raleigh (where a critic called his playing “both regal and vigorous”). Some of his appearances were becoming annual events, including those at Tanglewood, the Bethlehem Bach Festival, and the concerts of the Société Casavant in Montreal. For the Casavant program in October 1946 Biggs brought along Boston Symphony trumpeter Roger Voisin, a frequent collaborator in broadcasts and Boston-area concerts. Early in 1947 Biggs embarked on his first transcontinental tour since before the war. In Los Angeles, the Times reviewer observed that his “virtuosity and genius for effective registration were expected, but equally appreciated were his finesse, his cleanness of fingering, and his minimizing of the overwhelming forte qualities of the modern organ.” On the four-manual 1915 Austin organ in the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City Biggs played a largely Romantic program that included Liszt, Karg-Elert, and Reubke, as well as a chorale prelude by the host organist, Alexander Schreiner. Other stops on the tour included Louisville, Naperville, Nashville, Birmingham, and Syracuse. Later in the spring Biggs, with Roger and René Voisin, presented a concert of music for organ and trumpets as part of the Spring Festival of the Massachusetts chapter of the American Guild of Organists. Mary Crowley, one of Biggs’s most promising pupils, also performed in this series of concerts.
The last few records Biggs made for Victor contained a considerable amount of music that he would record again later in his life, notably, some of the Mozart Sonatas, recorded at Symphony Hall in 1945 with the Fiedler Sinfonietta. In 1946 he recorded a varied group of Bach works and Dupré’s Variations on a Noël at Harvard’s Memorial Church. His last Victor records were released in March and June 1947, after which RCA decided that it was no longer feasible to renew his contract as an exclusive artist. Nothing daunted, Biggs, who already had tenuous connections with the Columbia enterprise via his broadcasts for CBS, appeared at the office of Goddard Lieberson, vice president of Columbia Records, armed with another “Five Year Plan” for new recording projects. Lieberson is said to have responded “Why not!” and Biggs’s recording career thus continued virtually uninterrupted.
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