19 Bach and Handel

Handel was born in 1685, a circumstance he shared with J. S. Bach. The two are often compared, usually to the benefit of neither. Both were prolific composers, but Bach composed for his own satisfaction, for a relatively small group of hearers. Handel composed on a grand scale for the largest of audiences.

Biggs generally wrote his own jacket notes, and while he was working on a recording it was his habit to jot down random ideas for them in spiral-bound student notebooks from the Harvard Coop. The above quotation, written around 1970, is from one of these notebooks. Bach and Handel had been Biggs’s musical companions from his student days; their music dominated the content of his earliest recordings and is woven in an unbroken thread through a lifetime of recitals, radio broadcasts, and records.

Perhaps it was the very differences between these two masters that fascinated Biggs: “Bach lived his life in a succession of German towns. Handel ranged throughout Europe, and took the British nation by storm.” But their differences transcended geography: “Bach’s mind was in the clouds, oriented to the hereafter. . . . Handel’s heaven is more earthly—here and now.” Such statements crop up repeatedly throughout these notes, as though Biggs could not resist turning over in his mind the paradox of these two composers who appealed to him so strongly, yet in such different ways. “But one turns from the complexities of Bach to the more frank and outgoing melodies of Handel. And then, refreshed, one listens again to Bach with renewed. . . .” Biggs apparently could not find the right word to complete the sentence, but the key thoughts are there: Handel “refreshed”; Bach “renewed.” Both were good for a musician’s soul.

Bach got his due in 1969 with the recording of Bach Organ Favorites, Vol. 4 (in a letter to John McClure, Biggs suggested that this album might be “the most punchy and varied of the series”), as well as the pieces from the Anna Magdalena Book, intended for the still unfinished Biggs Bach Book (which was not released until 1971). The year 1969 also saw the release of Bach’s Greatest Hits, another Columbia assortment drawn from a variety of sources and including Biggs’s arrangement of “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.” But Handel was also very much in Biggs’s plans.

With the European and Australian tours as well as a full recital schedule, Biggs had been burning the candle at both ends for the past two years. His health broke down shortly after his return from Australia, and he was hospitalized with pneumonia. By late spring, however, he was back on his feet and rested, ready to plunge into his usual activities. His concert calendar continued to be full, and it included a dedication recital on the rebuilt organ in Emmanuel Church, Newport, Rhode Island, where he had found his first employment in the United States. A major recording tour, scheduled for the fall, was to include two new Handel recordings with orchestra at Great Packington and a Historic Organs of England album.

The “tempest in a teapot” over the Great Packington organ refused to be laid to rest. A Dutch reviewer had tried to stir it up again in the December 1966 issue of Luister. His worst allegation was that the pitch of the organ had been raised an entire half-step. This morsel was quickly siezed upon and quoted in the jacket notes of a rival Handel Concerto album issued by Deutsche Grammaphon Archiv as proof that their recording was more “authentic.” Noel Mander and Dirk Flentrop came to Biggs’s rescue by examining the pipes of the organ and determining that the actual pitch difference between the old and new tunings was considerably less than a half-step. Columbia demanded a retraction, but it did not appear in print until nearly eight years later.

The retuning and repairs made to the Great Packington organ in 1957 were, of course, “first aid” to make the organ usable for recording, as was the electric blower that Biggs had donated to the church. By 1968 it was discovered that the instrument was critically damaged by woodworm, and, under a grant from the Pilgrim Trust, a full-scale restoration was carried out by Noel Mander, who kept the altered pitch. Biggs played the reopening concert, and the organ was once more in the public eye. A new rash of letters pro and con the restoration appeared in the Times (London), Musical Opinion, and Musical Times. The “cons” were mostly those who had criticized the 1957 retuning; the “pros” included Sir William McKie and Cecil Clutton of the Organs Advisory Committee of the Anglican Church, and the organ builders H. John Norman and Cuthbert Harrison. The Diapason, looking for a circulation booster, reprinted this correspondence, much to the annoyance of Biggs, who was just then deep into preparations for another recording session with the organ in question. Subsequent letters to The Diapason were largely supportive of the restoration, however, and included one from McKie, who noted that the Great Packington church authorities were “entirely satisfied with the integrity of the treatment given to the organ and the way in which the work has been carried out.”

At the suggestion of Peter Munves, Biggs had begun early in January 1969 to dig out material for some new Handel recordings. A re-recording of the Concertos had been decided against, so Biggs ensconced himself in Harvard’s Widener Library to search for other suitable pieces. While the Organ Concertos are almost the only works scored specifically for orchestra with obbliga- to organ, Biggs found a plethora of other material for orchestra and continuo buried in the scores of Handel’s many operas and oratorios: overtures, marches, curtain tunes, ayres, sinfonias, and a Sonata from The Triumph of Time and Truth, which, with its obbligato organ part, seems almost a prototype for the later Concertos.

Nor were Handel’s more-familiar melodies neglected. Two orchestral concertos containing instrumental versions of choruses from Messiah were included, along with such popular favorites as “Where’er you walk” from Semele and the ubiquitous Largo. All of this was grist for Biggs’s programmatic mill and resulted in two nicely varied albums, released in 1970 and 1972 under the title of The Magnificent Mr. Handel. Biggs found that, with a few exceptions, it was feasible to use Handel’s own instrumentations for the music. “Where’er you walk” and the Forest Music were tastefully arranged for organ and orchestra by Daniel Pinkham. With his briefcase filled with useful scores, Biggs departed for England in September 1969.

John McClure and Hellmuth Kolbe were on hand in Great Packington to take care of the technical end of things. They were snugly if a bit damply ensconced in the crypt of St. James’s Church, where McClure, who probably thought he had seen everything in Venice, was startled by a visit from some curious sheep. A visitor of another sort was Anthony Hicks of Musical Times, who interviewed the musicians, later reporting that

Biggs emphasized that he was not out to prove anything by his choice of programme; he had simply picked out of the H[andel]-G[esellschaft] some numbers which he thought too good to lie gathering dust, and which he wanted to put on record.

Considering that Biggs had spent most of the spring sifting through material, discussing it with associates, and sketching out innumerable program combinations, this statement was certainly an oversimplification. Hicks liked Biggs’s choice of conductor: “Like Biggs’s previous partner, Sir Adrian Boult, [Charles] Groves is able to bring out the nobility inherent in Handel’s music. . . .” He hoped that the earlier Concerto recordings would be re-issued (they already had been, in 1968, but apparently only in the United States) and mused, “How odd that it takes an American (albeit British born) to remind us what fine Handelians two of our conductors are!”

After wrapping up sufficient material for the two Magnificent Mr. Handel albums, Biggs stayed at Great Packington long enough to record seven short selections from Handel’s little-known Aylesford Pieces—a highly appropriate choice for this organ since the church housing it stands on the estate of the Earl of Aylesford, in whose home, Packington Hall, the music had originally been discovered, and where the organ itself had once been located. These pieces became part of the Historic Organs of England album. Biggs and the recording crew set off to do the rest of it in places like Adlington Hall in Cheshire, where an important seventeenth-century organ had recently been restored by Noel Mander.

The English recording tour ended with a London dinner party for Biggs, the CBS staff, and reporters, and Biggs returned to America and to a busy concert schedule. In less than a week he was making his appearance in the familiar Poulenc and Saint-Saëns works with the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, playing the recently completed Aeolian-Skinner organ in the Music Hall. Early December found him following a northerly route, which included another orchestral program in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and a solo recital in Regina, Saskatchewan. By New Year’s Eve he was back at St. George’s Church in New York for his annual program.

“The parallel lives of Bach and Handel. . . mark the height of the baroque, but their music is as contrasted as the poles of a magnet, and must be enjoyed in different ways.” Biggs had been having a thoroughly good time with Handel, but by 1970 he was ready for Bach again. Ever since his first European tours in the 1950s he had wanted to record in Bach’s own church in Leipzig, yet thus far all his attempts even to cross the East German border had been frustrated. But with the gradual thawing of travel restrictions to Communist countries, plus the extra pull the European CBS affiliates could muster, it began to look as though his plans might at last be realized. Biggs hardly dared to hope. At the bottom of a memorandum sent to McClure in May 1969 regarding projects in the works, is “LEIPZIG, 1970—if they let us in. Repertoire as previously listed, or as modified. And . . . how about thinking of using the St. Thomas Choir?! One could do a fully authentic ‘Jubilee’ type record.”

In July Biggs wrote to McClure again, noting that another record company had gotten onto the “historic organs” bandwagon, something Biggs was not going to take lying down: “The fact that Telefunken copies our ideas and even our titles makes me want all the more to try to prevent them from getting ahead of us!” He then listed Columbia’s Swiss, Spanish, and Italian albums already out, plus the soon to be issued French and English ones, noting that the Golden Age set had already covered northern Germany and Holland. “And if we are lucky enough to get to East Germany next summer, 1970, we would have the finest Gottfried Silbermann at Freiberg.” In Biggs’s opinion, the repertoire on the Telefunken releases was a bit on the pedestrian side anyway—“let’s hope our records are more cheerful and interesting!”

By November 1969 things appeared promising, and at the top of Biggs’s “McClure Monster List” was “Bach at Leipzig,” all neatly timed and scheduled for late August 1970, followed by a tentative program for Freiberg.

In early 1970 things were looking very rosy indeed for the East German project. Hans Stracke and his colleagues in the West German CBS office had received a bona fide invitation from VEB Deutsche Schallplatten of East Berlin. Biggs could record in Leipzig and Freiberg with the understanding that two master tapes would be made, one for the East German firm, the other for CBS and Columbia. In a six-page autobiographical outline he wrote for publicity purposes in 1974, Biggs listed under the heading of “Honors” his various honorary doctorates and fellowships and added at the end, “Though it is not something with a ribbon around it, I regard as a very great honor the spontaneous invitation from VEB Deutsche Schallplatten . . . to visit Leipzig and Freiberg to make recordings.”

Even with the East German invitation Biggs still had to have approval from the State Department in Washington, and by the time he had completed a round of domestic concerts in March it still had not come through. He finally got some action after writing to Massachusetts senators Kennedy and Brooke (“I am sure you will understand that an invitation to record in Bach’s own church is the very highest honor for an organist . . .”).

A brief rest in Curaçao in April preceded Biggs’s first European jaunt of the year. In May, after taking care of some recording loose ends in Switzerland (where he also did a television spot) and England, he picked up engineer Hellmuth Kolbe and crossed the East German border for a brief exploratory trip. In Leipzig and Freiberg he tried out the organs and met with Reimar Bluth, director of the Eterna division of VEB Deutsche Schallplatten, who would be in charge of the recordings. In a letter written to a CBS official late in 1976, Biggs described that occasion:

I remember vividly our first exploratory visit to Leipzig. . . . We were met at check-point Charlie in Berlin, and driven to Leipzig. The director (Reimar Bluth) was in the front seat. As we came near the center of Leipzig, Herr Bluth turned and said, “In a moment you will see the Thomaskirche.” He had sung there as a choir boy, and he knew the place inside and out, yet he could not have said it with more excitement—not even if he were proposing to show us the celestial regions.

Back in the United States at the end of May, Biggs was able to report to McClure that it had been “a very productive two weeks!” Enough material had been recorded at Arlesheim to complete The Biggs Bach Book, a good tape had been obtained of the historic organ in Staunton Harold to round out the English album, and the Eurovision TV appearance had been successful. Best of all, the East Germans had proved most friendly and cooperative, and Biggs now had a good idea of what he wanted to record in August. His plans included six large Bach works on the new Schuke organ in the Thomaskirche, and the six Concerto transcriptions of J. G. Walther in Freiberg. Biggs would have liked to record Bach there as well, but was discouraged from it by the Eterna people, probably because it would conflict with their own ongoing series of Bach recordings made by German artists on all of the extant Silbermann organs.

Biggs then spent June and July editing, writing jacket notes for the English album, and pulling together loose ends. The French album, featuring two splendid Andreas Silbermann organs, was released, but it failed to make as much of a splash as the Spanish and Italian issues had. Save for the d’Aquin Noëls, Biggs had never really felt comfortable with the French classic literature, and there is a certain uncharacteristic stiffness in some of the playing on this disc.

In August Biggs finally realized his long-held ambition to record Bach in Bach’s own church. A year later he wrote in Music,

One enters the historic Thomaskirche of Leipzig with an intuitive sense of having been there before. . . . The scene is already in one’s imagination, a picture gained even before a first visit from the writings of Bach’s biographers and from old engravings.

Today the church and a few of the older buildings surrounding it are isolated in a kind of historic district, appearing much as it did in Bach’s day, although it is but a few blocks from modern business buildings and one of the busiest railroad stations in all Europe. Bach, whose final resting place is beneath a simply inscribed stone slab in the middle of the chancel floor, would not recognize either of the two organs now in the Thomaskirche, but somehow that is not really important:

This is the place, you feel. This is where so much happened. This is where Bach’s auditors, privileged beyond their comprehension, experienced the first hearing of the powerful music that has encircled and convinced the world.

Later Biggs was to remark that just experiencing the same acoustics that Bach knew—and they are indeed wonderful for music—was worth all the waiting.

The recordings, made on the modern three-manual mechanical-action organ by Alexander Schuke of Potsdam, went smoothly, and every night Leipzig police rerouted the traffic in the streets leading to the church to ensure quiet recording conditions. Although Kolbe assisted, the recordings in both Leipzig and Freiberg were made on East German equipment from Deutsche Schallplatten, since Kolbe could not bring in his own. Biggs did bring his camera, though, and spent some of his spare time photographing the church, the Bach window, and the bronze statue of Bach outside the south door of the church.

Returning to Cambridge in September, Biggs reported back to McClure at Columbia:

As you know, there are two excellent records awaiting you in East Germany. Playing at the Thomaskirche, Leipzig, was really high drama, and I feel the record will catch this! The instrument records quite impressively and the Thomaskirche acoustics are fine. The Walther Concertos on the Silbermann at Freiberg will have lots of sparkle. . . . Though I practiced and registered all the six Bach works previously discussed, it was quickly evident that for this “special occasion” the war horses . . . were much more effective and appropriate than the alternates. . . .

There had been some problems with voltage fluctuations, but Biggs felt Kolbe could correct them in the editing. The wide Silbermann pedalboard and somewhat irregular action of the unrestored Freiberg organ had also posed minor problems, “but the sound is just fine. . . .”

Biggs’s Leipzig album contains four large Bach works, the familiar Toccata and Fugue in D minor, the Passacaglia, and the Preludes and Fugues in C major (“9/8”) and G major (“Great”). War horses they may have been, but Biggs had lived a lifetime with these pieces, and he could still make them run like young colts. The record was released in the summer of 1971, and in Stereo Tape for December 1971, Igor Kipnis wrote:

The power of Bach’s music on the instrument in these authentic surroundings is undeniably impressive. So, too, is Biggs’s playing. It has real propulsion, power, and drive, and I am inclined to think that this is the American organist’s finest recording of his long career.

At the conclusion of the Passacaglia Biggs employed the cadenzas first used somewhat experimentally in his pedal harpsichord recording of the same work. High Fidelity called this “marvellously effective,” praising the freshness and warmth of all the performances on the record. “In short, there’s not a thing to criticize, and Biggs has re-established himself in my mind as one of the world’s foremost organists and Bach players.” The review expressed concern that Biggs might be becoming something of a “lightweight,” playing short, easy pieces to the neglect of the big ones that many listeners still wanted. In an earlier review, the same writer had even gone so far to suggest that Biggs was in his “twilight years.” Biggs claimed not to be affected by reviews, noting that they never seemed to alter record sales and observing that “the reviewer reviews himself.” But reviews are one way of feeling the pulse of the public, and there are indications that Biggs was paying attention. In a list of notes on future projects sent to McClure in February 1970, he wrote, “In general, we should graduate back to large instruments—window rattlers—Trondheim, Weingarten, etc.” The enthusiasm generated by the Leipzig release, coming on the heels of rather half-hearted reviews of the English record (full of short pieces played on small organs), probably confirmed the wisdom of this.

Biggs at the console of the Gabler organ, Weingarten, 1955

There was, however, one other reason for turning again to big organs and big pieces for recording: quadraphonic sound. Columbia had only recently begun to record quadraphonically, and the hi-fi aficionados were quickly tooling up with new playback equipment. Biggs had begun asking his friends if they knew of any churches with four organs. Recording the pedal harpsichord and the Flentrop organ at the Museum in quad had already been done. But the audiophiles were awaiting an organ spectacular to show off their new equipment. Biggs was going to give them one if he could, and they were going to hear Bach and Handel as they never had before.