18 Historic Organs and a
Grammy

It is fascinating to play a composer’s music on the organ he played. You feel that you have touched the lifeline of history.... Beethoven’s orchestra, Bach’s choir are all gone, but the same organs on which great musicians played are still available.

Biggs made these comments to an interviewer at Erskine College in South Carolina, where he had inaugurated a new Holtkamp organ on September 29, 1966. Two days later he was off to Sion, Switzerland, to give a recital on one of Europe’s oldest extant organs.

Biggs had taken a few years’ respite from European recording, his 1962 marathon there having provided Columbia with a good stockpile of releases. Late in 1964 he received an invitation to play the opening concert at an organ festival in Ravenna, Italy, to be held early in July 1965. He was already discussing with John McClure his ideas for a Historic Organs of Europe series, with each album devoted to the music and organs of a single country, in the manner of his 1957 Organ Music of Spain and Portugal. Biggs had never visited Italy, but the Ravenna engagement gave him the opportunity to look into historic organs there. He wrote to the noted organist and musicologist Luigi Tagliavini in Bologna, asking for suggestions of eight or ten historic organs he might visit: “I’m not looking for recitals but merely for the privilege of trying their tonal qualities.” Not untypically, things began to snowball. Before long Biggs had added Spain, Portugal, and Switzerland to his exploratory itinerary.

Reviews of the Ravenna concert, played on a large modern organ in the Basilica of San Vitale, praised Biggs’s musicianship and command of the instrument. One paid Biggs a signal compliment by referring to him in the headline as “voce dell’organo.” While his program would not have been unfamiliar in the United States, it probably contained much that was new to the Italian audience, and, interestingly, it included no Italian works. “Encores were demanded” reads a somewhat stilted translation of one of the reviews.

Biggs gave no other concerts abroad, but made a whirlwind investigative tour of potential recording sites in Italy, Spain, and Portugal. On his return to the United States at the end of July, he firmed up plans for a fall trip built around a Swiss recording session and a major engagement in London’s Royal Festival Hall, followed by a lecture for the Royal College of Organists. Biggs had sent the Royal Festival Hall management one of his typical mixed-bag touring programs, only to have it censored. The committee intimated that certain works by Purcell, Soler, and Bach (movements from the Anna Magdalena Book, which Biggs was preparing to record at the Museum) were “below the Royal Festival Hall’s usual standard.” Also rejected was a Mozart work that had already been programed by another organist. Peggy forwarded their missive to Biggs, who was on a concert tour, with the marginal note, “I hope this strikes you as VERY FUNNY, for it is!” His reaction is not recorded, but he sent the Londoners a substitute all-Bach program that should have been heavy enough for anyone’s taste. It too proved unacceptable, since it again duplicated some works already programed by other organists in the series. Finally he managed to come up with one that the committee liked. Biggs had good reason for wanting to include a few familiar and easy pieces in his recital, for he would be facing a critical London audience right after coming from the Swiss recording session, with little time to rest or practice.

When Biggs went on his first European recording tour in 1954, he had to contact the churches and arrange for tuning and other services himself, as well as make his own hotel and travel reservations and bring his own equipment. Later he had some help in making these arrangements and could hire equipment and engineers. By the mid-1960s, the Columbia empire had expanded, and permanent offices of CBS Records were located in most European countries. They served a number of functions, including the recording of European and American artists and the distribution of records. They were also a kind of ad hoc concert bureau for visiting Columbia artists, for since Columbia records were now distributed throughout Europe, local performances by these artists helped promote record sales. The European offices provided recording engineers and relieved Biggs of a lot of irksome paperwork, but they also required him to dovetail more concerts into his recording schedule.

The first record of the Historic Organs series was made in Switzerland, and it included the Gothic organ in the mountain village of Sion. At the time, it was commonly thought that this small instrument was built in 1390. More recent research now places it in the first half of the fifteenth century; it is still one of the world’s oldest organs, even though some of its pipes are from the eighteenth century. Biggs admired the brave sound of its antique principals and used them to record some of the earliest organ literature known. Other organs in the album reflected the ethnic diversity of Swiss culture: an Italian instrument in Mendrisio, a German one in Sitzberg, and an organ in Arlesheim by the Alsatian builder Andreas Silbermann, to which Biggs took a particular liking.

The resulting record, the first of several such joint issues, was released simultaneously in the United States and Switzerland in 1967. Promotional concerts in Switzerland were in order, and in March 1966 Biggs returned to give a recital in the Cathedral of Zurich. He received considerable press, radio, and television coverage for both his concert and the forthcoming record.

Elated by the good publicity generated by Biggs in Switzerland, the various CBS Records branches in Europe scrambled to arrange more concerts for Biggs’s next trip. The situation seems to have gotten out of hand, and in July Biggs found it necessary to write to Michelette Menthonnex of the Paris office, laying down a few ground rules:

In many ways phonograph records are the very best ways of bringing organ music to people, for they bring the organ (maybe a very famous and historic one) along with the music. Thus, in general, even though a live concert has an immediacy that a record lacks, it’s worth while giving a concert only if it can definitely publicise our records.

Biggs suggested choosing one or two important cities, which would provide maximum exposure in each country, and using the best organs whenever possible (“The organ in Lucerne is perfectly awful! Yet one has to take it, or else refuse the festival.”) He also pointed out that it was necessary for him to arrive on the site a few days early to practice and choose registrations. But, “Of course any TV appearances, or Radio interviews . . . are excellent—maybe the best publicity of all.” These remarks do not imply that Biggs preferred recording to concertizing at this particular point. He liked both and continued to carry a heavy concert schedule in the United States (where he could also command better fees). But time was at a real premium on the European tours. Because of commitments at home the trips could not be open-ended, and Biggs did not want to compromise the quality of his recordings. They were, after all, the major purpose of the tours, the concerts being only incidental.

Columbia was beginning to take a more active hand in Biggs’s programing. In the past Biggs would present the powers-that-be with one of his “Five Year Plans”; they would rubber-stamp it and then leave him pretty much to his own devices. In due time most of Biggs’s ideas would be converted into recordings, which Columbia would then release at suitable intervals. Biggs continued to propose his own record ideas, most of which were still sooner or later realized, but around 1965 Columbia began to involve Biggs in some of its own schemes, among them the Christmas records and Holiday for Harpsichord.

All were agreed, however, that the Historic Organs series was an excellent idea, and Biggs was encouraged to carry his plans forward as expeditiously as possible. He had to defer his Spanish trip until the spring of 1967, however, for the important organs at Toledo were still being restored, and Biggs felt that they were an absolute “must” for a recording. Another English album was also taking shape in Biggs’s mind, and he still had ideas about recording in East Germany, having persuaded the CBS Frankfurt office to reopen investigations there.

The year 1967 opened busily and remained so. Biggs performed and recorded Copland’s Symphony with the New York Philharmonic during the first week of January, appeared with the Boston Symphony in February, and played his usual round of late-winter concerts. In the spring he headed for Spain, where he was the first to record the just-restored “Emperor’s organ” at Toledo, as well as historic instruments in Segovia, Salamanca, and Madrid—about all that could be found in usable condition, but fortunately all good examples. Hellmuth Kolbe hauled his recording equipment from Switzerland, the Spanish organ builder Ramón de Amezua provided helpful assistance, and the recording sessions were relatively problem-free. As a result of the trip Biggs, in his self-appointed role of “good-will ambassador,” agreed to help solicit American funds toward the restoration of the small organ in Salamanca Cathedral. Unfortunately, despite appeals to large corporations, he was able to secure only $500 from a private benefactor.

On his return to the United States, Biggs played a concert with the Boston Symphony Orchestra as part of its summer series at Tanglewood and recorded Bach Organ Favorites, Vol. 3 at the Busch-Reisinger Museum. Columbia wanted another Christmas record, and the harried Biggs agreed to do it only if Columbia obtained the musical arrangements themselves and took care of the rest of the details. Potential recording sites ranged from Zurich to Cambridge, but for the sake of convenience, since a chorus and a brass group were involved, it ended up being recorded in St. Michael’s Church in New York, where the live acoustics and the von Beckerath organ contributed to a pleasing result. Biggs still preferred to make solo recordings on the Flentrop organ in the Museum, and continued to do so, but in September 1967, just before leaving for Italy, he very quietly did something that few people knew of at the time—he donated the organ to Harvard University.

A spectacular Gabrieli recording project in Venice still lay ahead. It had the proverbial “cast of thousands,” and sometimes it was hard to tell who was in charge. It was truly an international effort, although, as it turned out, nearly all the performers were American. The British musicologist Denis Stevens was engaged to research and orchestrate the scores; Americans Gregg Smith and George Bragg were to handle the choral resources; Swiss engineer Hellmuth Kolbe was to record; and John McClure, with the help of Sylvio Cerutti Rosatti of CBS Italiana, coordinated and arranged the many details. Special clearance was needed just to use Gabrieli’s own church, since the hierarchy had previously banned “mechanical reproductions.” Biggs was responsible for the organ accompaniments and for obtaining an organ, since San Marco in Venice did not have a usable instrument.

By midsummer a good deal of confusion had set in, and Biggs made a stab at straightening it out. In a memo to all principals, which began “S O S, maybe,” he tried to get some consensus on the program. He listed the scores sent by Stevens, and what the various other parties had suggested and might even be rehearsing. “We certainly can’t do everything! But we have to get together once and for all, so that we’re all preparing the same music!!!” At the same time he approached the Austrian organ builder Josef von Glatter-Götz of Rieger Orgelbau concerning the possible loan of an organ. Fortunately, there was a nearly completed two-manual “stock” instrument at his factory that he was willing to voice along Italian lines. Getting a temporary import permit was something else again, but that was by no means the only problem to be faced. McClure later summed up the whole Gabrieli experience in the words of Virgil: “Futuram non cognoscere melior est”—or, in McClure’s own rather loose translation, “It is better not to know what is lurking around the next bend.”

The recording sessions were scheduled for September, but at the end of August there were still a distressing number of loose ends, and for every problem solved, two more seemed to materialize. The search for a conductor and instrumentalists finally and fortuitously settled on Vittorio Negri, the Edward Tarr Brass Ensemble from Germany, and a local string group, the Gabrieli Consort La Fenice. Deciding where in the huge building to station the various musical forces for optimum recorded effect was another knotty problem. Cerutti (who is always referred to by his middle name) was having trouble with the Basilica authorities and begged the Swiss to come down and back him up. McClure and Biggs, who two years earlier had innocently thought it would be a dandy idea to record Giovanni Gabrieli’s music in the composer’s own church, were beginning to realize that the enterprise had somehow turned into the most colossal project Columbia had ever attempted to stage overseas.

The schedule was tight. Not only did Biggs have other commitments, but so did Bragg’s 43-voice Texas Boys Choir, the Gregg Smith Singers, and the Ithaca College students Smith had recruited to beef up the adult portion of the chorus. As the participants began to arrive, so did more complications. The Basilica authorities had to be humored and bargained with on almost every point. They could not see why Columbia wanted to place the musicians in the two widely separated choir galleries, when all previous concert performers had stood in the nave. Columbia, however, had two very good reasons for the divided placement: historical authenticity and stereo. They finally got it because of the tourists. The authorities did not want the equipment cluttering up the nave by day, so everything, including the organ, ultimately went up into the galleries.

Then there was the matter of transportation. One cannot truck 4,000 pounds of recording equipment into a city where everything moves by water, but one of Cerutti’s friends came to the rescue here. The organ was anxiously awaited, but days went by and it did not appear. Word came that there were problems with customs, and Biggs sent a panicky telegram to Glatter-Götz: “UNDERSTAND THERE ARE PROBLEMS CONCERNING TEMPORARY IMPORT ORGAN INTO ITALY BUT PLEASE MOVE HEAVEN AND EARTH TO ACCOMPLISH THIS. WE ABSOLUTELY NEED YOUR INSTRUMENT OTHERWISE WHOLE PROJECT MAY BECOME FIASCO.”

Although a straight drive from the Rieger workship to Venice took only about seven hours, the organ was fourteen days in getting there, since the only way the customs problems could be overcome was to bring it in over the Swiss border. It arrived just 48 hours before recording was to start and was hurriedly assembled in the gallery by workmen from the nearby Ruffati factory. Tuning, like recording, could be done only at night. During the day the Basilica was thronged with tourists, and frequent masses were said. Meanwhile, risers were being set up in the galleries for the singers, and 3,500 feet of cable was laid from the church to a control center in a nearby building. The day before the recording began, Kolbe, his assistant, and a half-dozen Venetians were still struggling to get all this equipment installed, along with a dozen microphones and an intercom system.

Then Smith and his singers arrived, and the Basilica authorities noted that more than half of them were women—some of them in mini-skirts! Only then did the Columbia people learn that not in nine hundred years had a woman set foot in the sacristy, and women had never been permitted in the building after sundown. But the recording sessions were scheduled between 8:00 P.M. and 2:00 A.M., and it was necessary for both singers and personnel to be able to move freely about the building. The solution concocted by the Columbia people was pretty ludicrous, but it mollified the authorities: the women were allowed to stay in the building at night if they were garbed in hastily procured long-sleeved, chin-to-ankle surgical gowns.

The first night was spent recording unaccompanied music and adjusting microphones. During the day rehearsals were held in a room at La Fenice, where tempi were settled, mistakes were corrected, and revisions were made. Then, as John McClure related,

Hours later in a dark cathedral after the tourists had been cleared away, we would engage a whole new set of problems which were probably routine to the house group four hundred years earlier. Since Gabrieli had written for every combination from single six-part chorus to two or three five-part choruses . . . our corresponding groups were placed in separate galleries eighty feet apart on either side of the main altar. This was as exciting for us as it was for the awed visitors in olden days, but it also meant that each group would hear the other a split second late, making for fearsome problems in ensemble. Poor Vittorio Negri had to train himself to ignore the evidence of his ears since when the ensemble was perfect for the microphones, the “other” group would necessarily sound late to him. As an added annoyance, any performance hints he had for the exiles [in the galleries] had to be shouted across the void slowly in several languages through cupped hands to surmount the relentless beast of reverberation which coiled around us all.

McClure figured that Gabrieli himself must have had to put up with some of these problems, but he presumably had the support of the church. The present authorities seemed to regard the twentieth-century musicians who were trying to reconstruct a part of Venice’s musical heritage as little more than a nuisance. They considered suspect even such innocent breaches of decorum as Peggy’s shedding her shoes in order to tiptoe silently on some errand. But in the end, as McClure noted, even they seemed slightly softened by the magic of Gabrieli’s music, “full of the love of God, but fuller of the love of life and quite free of all false piety.”

For nine nights The Glory of Gabrieli wound onto the tape reels, and when they stopped turning McClure, Biggs, Negri, and all the rest knew that they had captured something worth all their work and frustration. On the final night of recording the chorus finished early and descended on a local trattoria for a victory feast while Biggs and the instrumentalists completed a few final Canzonas. “By two we were through,” recalled McClure, “Biggs, as usual, fresh as lettuce, the rest of us bleary-eyed and drooping.”

Biggs and Peggy swung home via England, stopping briefly to discuss the forthcoming English tour with Quita Chavez of CBS’s London office. Biggs seems hardly to have slowed down. He showed up at the New York office in October to listen to the tapes, and he was so enthusiastic about the results that he telephoned the choral directors to share his elation. By the end of the month he was off for two recitals on a new Bosch tracker-action organ in St. Mark’s Church of Portland, Oregon—almost halfway around the world from St. Mark’s in Venice.

Somewhere during the busy year of 1967 Biggs found time to act as program chairman for a mid-winter conclave held by the Boston chapter of the American Guild of Organists. He appeared on the program himself, in a concert at the Museum featuring both the organ and the pedal harpsichord and including a Handel gamba sonata in which his old friend Alfred Zighera was soloist. The conclave ended December 29, on New Year’s Eve Biggs played a concert at St. George’s Church in New York, and on New Year’s day he finally took his doctor’s prescription and flew off for a quiet three weeks in Curacao. Not that he spent all his time loafing on the beach—he had arranged to practice on the Flentrop organ in the Fortkerk, and, as was his usual practice, he gave the church a free recital to express his appreciation.

Rehearsal at St. George’s Church, New York, ca. 1967

The first of the Venice albums, entitled The Glory of Gabrieli, consisted of choral music interspersed with organ intonations. It appeared in January 1968, simultaneously with the recording of the Copland Symphony. A second Gabrieli album (containing Canzonas and Sonatas for organ and instruments) came out in July, and the Christmas record, What Child Is This, appeared in October. For some reason the third Gabrieli disc (more choral works and intonations) did not reach the public until late in 1971.

Reviews of the initial Gabrieli release were almost unanimous in their praise. High Fidelity called it “the greatest marriage of music and acoustics in history,” and everyone seemed impressed with the stereo effects and the sheer opulence of the sound, except for a reviewer in The Gramophone, who wrote the whole project off as a “vast publicity stunt.” Frank Cunkle in The Diapason objected mildly to the use of modern brass instruments by Edward Tarr’s players, but admitted that they did “little to lessen the impressive and exciting results.” He praised conductor Negri for his grasp of the musical style and observed that “Mr. Biggs is heard alone on a small Rieger in six intonations but his presence is felt throughout.” Cunkle also had good words for Biggs’s Copland release, suggesting that the record “should serve to rekindle interest in this original version with its effective organ part”—a reference to the fact that Copland later rewrote this youthful Boulanger-influenced opus, without the organ part, as his Symphony No. 1.

But it was the second Gabrieli release, the album of Canzonas and Sonatas played by Biggs with the Edward Tarr Brass Ensemble and the string players from La Fenice, that won the coveted Grammy award of the National Academy of Recording as the best chamber music performance of 1968. Strangely, this quite beautiful recording was glossed over fairly lightly by most of the reviewers, who had perhaps expended all their best adjectives on its predecessor. Vernon Gotwals in Music declared it “indeed a prize winner, a marvelous record!” On this disc Biggs is involved in all the ensemble music and makes one solo appearance in a crisp and spirited Ricercare.

In the 1930s Biggs had performed and recorded on the then new Aeolian-Skinner organ in Harvard’s Memorial Church. Because of its chambered location in an acoustically dead building and orders from organist Archibald T. Davison to suppress the upperwork, the instrument had never given complete musical satisfaction. By the 1960s its electro-pneumatic action was deteriorating alarmingly, and organist John Ferris formed an advisory committee, of which Biggs was a member, to study the alternatives. Eventually they recommended that the acoustics be improved and that the Aeolian-Skinner organ be sold and replaced by a new four-manual Fisk mechanical-action organ, encased and free-standing in the front of the room. Early in 1968, shortly after his return from Curaçao, Biggs played the first of a series of inaugural recitals on the new organ; included in his program was the premiere of Daniel Pinkham’s A Prophecy.

Following the Harvard concert, Biggs devoted himself to the editing of the Gabrieli Canzonas and to the preparation of a successor to the original “talking dog” record, to be called The Organ in Sight and Sound. Accompanied by an illustrated booklet and an article on organ design by Flentrop, it followed a completely new script. It contained numerous new musical examples, many of them especially recorded in Arlesheim, Zurich, and on the new Harvard organ, plus others culled from recent recording expeditions. The album, issued late in 1969, is a monument to Biggs’s meticulous editorial skills, and as a layperson’s guide to the organ it has not been equalled.

Columbia declared March 1968 E. Power Biggs Month and released six Biggs albums with appropriate publicity. Only two were new, however: Bach Organ Favorites, Vol. 3, and Historic Organs of Spain. The rest were reissues of previous Bach and Handel albums, plus a “sampler” disc called A Biggs Festival, consisting of excerpts from several earlier recordings. Reissues and reshufflings of this sort became a fairly regular thing after this time, despite the fact that Biggs continued a heavy recording schedule. A year later another potpourri entitled E. Power Biggs Greatest Hits was released, the only new item on it being Ives’s Variations on “America,” recorded on the new Fisk organ at Harvard.

Biggs seems to have liked these collections. The Greatest Hits album was put together by Peter Munves of the Columbia staff, and it afforded Biggs the opportunity to record the popular Ives work on a good-sized modern organ. “How wonderful of you to cook up this special round-up record!” he wrote Munves in January 1969. “And I’m delighted to have this opportunity to pop in the new Ives Variations on America. It is bright and gay, far better than the previous version.” He also gave his opinion of Schuman’s orchestral transcription, first setting the scene with the sixteen-year-old Ives “having a devil of a good time” on a hot Fourth of July. “Personally, I don’t think that William Schuman’s recent orchestral version catches all this. This Ives belongs on the organ, just as much as JSB.”

In the early summer of 1968 Biggs again went abroad. The hectic schedule of the Gabrieli sessions had precluded doing the planned Historic Organs of Italy recordings on the same trip, but Biggs had his itinerary mapped out, as well as plans for a Historic Organs of France tour. There were some problems with arrangements for the former, but the way seemed clear for a short excursion to the Andreas Silbermann organs of Alsace in May, despite the fact that engineer Kolbe was hobbling around on crutches as the result of a skiing accident. The Italian recording tour became a part of a second trip in the fall, and the organs recorded were the cream of historic Italian instruments. Frescobaldi is heard on the almost magical sound of the twin organs—one from the fifteenth, the other from the sixteenth century—in the acoustically perfect Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna. Instruments by Antegnati, Callido, and Serassi, dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, round out the album.

The fall trip included concerts in Switzerland—at Vevey and at the Montreux Festival—but the largest part of it was spent in England. Most of Biggs’s appearances there were with orchestras—three with the London Philharmonic and three with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Save for an Elgar work, most of the pieces were drawn from the repertoire of Biggs’s recent American orchestral appearances. Two solo programs were given, one on a new Mander organ in London’s Merchant Taylors’ Hall; the other, in which Biggs was assisted by oboist Leon Goossens, on the recently restored “Handel” organ in Great Packington, where Biggs had previously recorded the Handel Concertos.

The year 1968 ended with another round of domestic concerts, and 1969 began with a tour in completely new territory: Australia. Biggs’s recordings had been selling well “down under” (although Biggs claimed that he did not understand how they could play them upside down!), and it began to look as though an Australian tour would be worthwhile. Early in February Biggs and Peggy packed their bags and departed wintry New England for the summery antipodes.

The tour, sponsored by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, occupied the entire month. Biggs played his way from one end of the country to the other, one of his first appearances being at the Perth Festival of the Arts. A good part of the time he was wrestling with some of Australia’s famous (or infamous) town hall organs. He made no appearances in churches and played no large tracker-action organs, although he did play part of one of his Sydney Town Hall concerts on a little tracker-action organ positive by Ronald Sharp, the rising young Australian builder who was soon to begin work on a mammoth instrument for the new Sydney Opera House.

Biggs made something of a hit in Australia, not only with his audiences, but with the press. When his commitments made him unavailable to reporters, they sought out Peggy and plied her with questions about her background, her work, and, of course, what it was like to be married to a busy concert artist. She complied with information about her part-time work with foreign visitors in the Harvard University Protocol Office, human interest bits about their country farmhouse retreat and how she met Biggs while singing in his church choir, and anecdotes about copying music and bandaging ailing organs on recording tours. She conceded that things were pretty hectic much of the time, but that,

Biggs is fortunate. His work is his hobby—not like a lot of people whose lives begin at five o’clock. It does mean that Biggs’s work begins when we get up and stops when we go to bed, that letters and things come to meals and there are no holidays.

Biggs himself had plenty of press coverage, of course. His encounter with what one reviewer called “that dear old superannuated noise machine,” the Sydney Town Hall organ, was not, by either his or the reviewers’ accounts, an unmitigated success. What saved the day was his imaginative programing and insistence on using the Broadcasting Commission’s Ronald Sharp positive for a group of delicate early works. Thus, while the critics tended to disagree on the effectiveness of works by Bach, Franck, and Hindemith rendered on the huge organ, they all (in contrast to the Canadians) loved the irreverent Ives Variations, were favorably disposed toward Pinkham’s Prophecy, and were clearly charmed by Biggs’s performances on the little positive organ, which included, as an unprogramed bonus, the Anna Magdalena pieces rejected by the Londoners.

Unfortunately there was no clear-voiced positive to give relief from the Town Hall organ in Melbourne. A reviewer there blamed the instrument’s “blunt attack and foggy tone” for hindering Biggs’s music making and contrasted the “pallid and monochromatic” effect of Soler’s Emperor’s Fanfare played on the Melbourne organ and the brilliant impact of the same piece on Biggs’s Historic Organs of Spain disc. At a party following the concert, when someone asked Biggs what ought to be done with the organ, he offered three options: “Burn it. Have it thrown in the sea. Or give it to anyone willing to take it away.” Biggs usually did not make such blunt statements within earshot of the press, and when his comments were published, they stirred up a fairly predictable response. A letter to the Melbourne Herald from seven young organists enthusiastically endorsed Biggs’s dictum and called on the City Council to replace the old instrument with a “new mechanical action, well-made instrument of eclectic design.” It was quickly followed by one from an older organist defending the Town Hall organ and caustically putting down the young upstarts.

Another recalcitrant Town Hall organ faced Biggs for one of his final concerts in Adelaide. When he was told that the organ had first been used at a governor’s swearing-in ceremony in 1877, Biggs expressed the hope that his concert would be its “swearing-out” and admitted that working out registrations on the instrument had caused a certain amount of swearing on his own part. But the situation in Adelaide was more hopeful than in Melbourne, for the instrument was already scheduled for a major rebuilding. The Adelaide reviewers were divided in their opinions of the concert. One disliked the Ives and was generally a bit bored with it all; the other called it a “popular success,” thought that Biggs had worked wonders with the decrepit organ, and noted that the audience in the sold-out house had asked for three encores.

It was a successful tour, and despite the difficult instruments he had to work with, Biggs liked Australia and its inhabitants. Certainly the Australians liked Biggs, and perhaps found Biggs in person to be something different from Biggs on records. Meredith Oakes in the Sydney Daily Telegraph summed up this impression nicely:

He has been brought here as a “heavy,” when in fact he is something different and, in a way, more appealing. He is, in fact, an extremely musical man who loves to play the organ.