The Organ
in Riga Cathedral as viewed by the Walcker firm
Gerhard Walcker-Mayer March 2003
By the time when Eberhard Friedrich
Walcker, the doyen of the
Ludwigsburg organ building firm, passed away in
1872, three of his sons had already become
firmly integrated into company activities for quite some time: organ
builder Fritz (Johann Friedrich),
organ builder Heinrich (Eberhard Heinrich)
and qualified merchant Karl (Carl).
The two younger sons Eberhard and Paul,
also organ builders, were already in the
midst of obtaining their own
final qualifications. Thus, the Swabian firm, which had become a
world-renowned enterprise ever since it
had erected the Boston Music Hall
Organ in 1862 (68 stops, IV manuals), continued to employ five highly
qualified sons of Eberhard Friedrich Walcker from his death in
1872 until the year 1893.
This team of brothers, the third Walcker generation of organ builders,
landed their first success at Vienna World's Fair in 1873, where four
Walcker organs were put on display with
the distinction of an honorary diploma.
This resulted in the commissioning of a
new organ for St. Stephen's
Cathedral in Vienna (HI/90 stops, built in 1876) and of an organ for
the Votive Church in Vienna III/61 stops, built in 1878).
Subsequently, the project emerged of building an organ for Riga Dom Cathedral
Church. Commissioned in 1881, it was first completely installed for a trial
run in the Ludwigsburg assembly hall. Mr.
Bergner, the Riga Cathedral organist, traveled to Germany in order to play
the instrument there. He was so
happily impressed that he donated
a commemorative plaque in
expression of his gratitude and appreciation for the efforts of
the father, Eberhard Friedrich Walcker.
The plaque can still be seen on the outside
of Walcker's birthplace home in Bad
Cannstatt (now part of Stuttgart).
The organ was finally installed in Riga in 1883. It had 124 stops on four
manuals; thus, at that time, it held the rank of largest organ in the world.
It continued to be the largest in all of
Europe until Paul Walcker built an even
larger one in Breslau (Wroclaw).
In the Walcker firm's first promotional brochure published in 1902, the
Riga instrument is the first one mentioned under the heading "New Organs"
(as opposed to renewals). It had thus come to hold first place as the
Walcker firm's most representative organ.
This position had been formerly held by the organ in Ulm Cathedral,
where, by the way, Eberhard Friedrich's
sons had made manifest for the first
time that they held views quite
different from those of their father, since the organ
which he had originally built there
in 1856 (VI/100 ranks) was subsequently
subjected to a number of changes
in terms of outer form, re-disposition
of the windchests, removal of double pedal, removal of Manual VI
(for playing the reeds) and alterations
in specification.
Eberhard Friedrich Walcker had at least
designed the specification for the
Boston Music Hall Organ himself, and
we know for certain that the
Boston organ featured Barker levers (the Walcker
term was "pneumatic levers"). Furthermore,
we know that the Walcker firm carried
out a number of experiments in the area of pneumatic tracker action on
that organ; the results, however, were unsatisfactory and not applied
in the end.
The Boston organ was installed and
voiced by Fritz Walcker, and his brother
Paul was also temporarily involved in
that project. This same team also
worked on the Riga organ together: Paul
Walcker installed it when he was 37 years old, and Fritz Walcker was
54 when he did the voicing. Both brothers
had received a technical
education at the Polytechnikum institute in Stuttgart.
Oscar Walcker
once described his father as having
possessed the following traits:
Fritz was a Swabian through and
through, a staunch believer, simple and
sincere, more natural than artificial,
quite strict towards himself as
well as towards others. The
first thing he expected from
employees was precise, punctual
work. He was a specialist in the voicing
of reeds.
The Walcker firm finally started experimenting
with electro-pneumatic
tracker action and with different types
of windchests at a relatively late date: the
ties to the father's former directives
were still too strong. Not until 1890 did the workers become
convinced that a certain technique which they had developed for a
pneumatic cone-valve chest was good
enough to qualify for a patent application-which the patent office then
rejected, nonetheless. Subsequently, pneumatic tracker action was
installed in the organ in Ulm Cathedral
in 1899. Many attempts at such
innovations were made, particularly by Paul Walcker. This, along with
other circumstances, caused a violent
quarrel with his brothers which finally led to a rupture between
Paul and the others in 1892. Paul Walcker started working for the
Sauer firm, where he was offered the job
of "managing director", and of which he
finally became the owner in
1910. All of these circumstances entailed, however, that the organ in
Riga Dom
Cathedral was still built in the traditional manner of Eberhard Friedrich
Walcker and of its predecessor in Boston. Both organs were equipped with a
mechanical cone-valve chest and with Barker levers; both organs feature the
typical Walcker register crescendo with its round numerical watchface
display, and the consoles have a straight horizontal stop jamb (as opposed
to the semicircular one which was used for the first time by Walcker in the
St. Petersburg organ in 1838, long before Aristide Cavaille-Coll). The
keydesks on both organs have only one pedal keyboard (normally, two pedal
keyboards on large organs had been a typical Walcker specialty, enabling the
player to make rapid changes in dynamics with the feet
alone).
Organ building in Germany was about to
undergo some radical changes which had still not had their effect on
the Walcker firm: when this finally happened,
the firm's reaction to these upheavals
turned out to be much more restrained than that of its competitors.
Yet, apart from the Boston Music Hall Organ, another further predecessor of
the Riga organ must be mentioned here:
the organ built for Mulhouse in
Alsace in 1866 (III manuals, 61 ranks), which
was also voiced by Fritz Walcker. This is
the instrument which led Albert
Schweitzer to his lifelong interest for and mastery of the organ, and
"it was magnificently voiced", as he
wrote in a letter to my father in 1961. In other texts, Schweitzer
indicated that the Walcker organ in
Mulhouse and the organs of Andreas Silbermann were those
instruments which most perfectly fulfilled his own ideal of what an organ
should be. He particularly pointed out
the Walcker organs mellow reed timbre, which he found was lacking in
Cavaille-Coll organs.
The great Walcker organs from this
period were built according to the timbre
ideal of Eberhard Friedrich Walcker: the first manual always
corresponds to the Hauptwerk, based on 16' or on 32'
lower case, with full-compass principal
chorus all the way to the 1' pitch and featuring 8' Cornet, 4'
Mixture and 1 I/ 3' Scharff as uppermost
crowning timbres; diverse tone color registers lie in between.
Manual III is conceived as a kind of Echo or complementary tone
color division with principal chorus capability
(the swell-capable Vox Humana
reed stop or, as here in Riga, the corresponding 4' Oboe is found on
Manual II). In view of its function as
Echo division, Manual III is only equipped with a Mixture and with
the Cornet. Riga's Manual II is a Choir
Organ with principal chorus reaching up to the 1 3/5'
third-sound rank, whereas Manual IV, a
division created for tone color purpose only, is enclosed in the
swell box. The free reeds (here:
Physharmonica) had always been equipped with their own wind scoops.
The two pedal divisions reflect the makers' original intention of creating
two pedal keyboards. Here, in Riga, the final result was a 32'-based main
pedal and a Piano Pedal in the swell
box, which can nevertheless only
be played by one pedal keyboard. In this case, Walcker did not make the
Baroque distinction between wide and narrow stops, but he replaced
that historical trait with a wide array
of tone color registers. This was the manner of specification as
used by the Walcker firm until the end of the Late Romantic period,
besides the use of further, finer Late
Romantic nuances and degrees as applied
here in the organ of Riga Cathedral. The
basis for all of those specifications could be found in the Walcker
organ built for the Paulskirche in Frankfurt between 1827 and 1833 (III
manuals, 74 stops), which, however, had still been made
with slider chests. The cone-valve chest
or Kegellade was used for the first time
by Walcker in the town of Kegel in 1842
(this unusual coincidence between the town's name and the new device
surely had a certain influence on that innovation; Walcker, nevertheless,
originally referred to this new type of windchest
with the archaic term Springlade-spring
chest-and not Kegellade, as it would be called in the future).
The manner of specification as applied by Eberhard Friedrich Walcker and,
later on, by his sons, originated in the
thought of the Abbe Vogler, the first
musician ever to have distinguished organ registers in terms of
quality and quantity and who specifically
demanded that the harmonic rows
be extended all the way up to 1' pitch. Eberhard
Friedrich met Vogler in Bad Cannstatt.
He studied the master's theories thoroughly
and applied Vogler's principles in
re-voicing the organ in that town's municipal
church.
The aforementioned Frankfurt Paulskirche organ was the instrument
which made Walcker's name world-famous.
One person who heard it, however, found
that it was not loud enough-that person was Aristide Cavaille-Coll
himself. What would that master have
said if he had been able to hear the organ in Riga Dom Cathedral,
based on the same principles yet
reflecting 50 further years of
technical innovation?
The organs in Riga Dom Cathedral and in
the Votive Church in Vienna are the only instruments stemming from
the great age of the Walcker firm in the
1800's which are still preserved
in their original state. Both organs have undergone restoration of
outstanding quality and they represent the culmination of
the art of Eberhard Friedrich Walcker's
sons. Just as the Frankfurt Paulskirche
organ inspired composers of the likes of
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the
Riga organ also served as inspiration for the
musical creativity of Franz Liszt and of
Max Reger. The latter composer
played on many Walcker organs,
among which particular mention can be made of the Gewandhaus organ in
Leipzig, built in 1884 (III manuals, 54
ranks), where the voicing was also carried out by Fritz
Walcker.
Fritz Walcker died on 6 December 1895; with his parting, the world lost a
man who possessed a unique culture of timbre which is still kept alive in
Riga. Let us hear Albert Schweitzer in
his own words once more: "When I
was a child, I played on Walcker
organs which were built during the halcyon days of that great house:
the 1860's and 1870's." In this text,
pertaining to his short book "A 1927 afterword to the art of German
and French organ building", Schweitzer
goes on to regret the fact that the same house, the Walcker firm,
rebuilt the Mulhouse organ in 1899 in such a way that its original,
beautiful sound was lost. This should
serve to us all as a reminder that a certain timbre is associated, in
the end, not with a firm or with its name, but with a vision as carried out by one unique human
being.
Gerhard Walcker-Mayer
Fritz Walcker (1829 - 1896)
