“Why not just one more?”
The great number of takes and inserts in the recording sessions at Kirchheimbolanden reflect the typical tally for any stop on the trip—in total, more than 1500 separate segments and snippets amassed by the time Biggs flew home. At Kirchheimbolanden they consumed six reels of tape with 84 takes and 13 shorter inserts, most of them represented by the 68 takes of various sections of the F-Minor Fantasia, K. 594: four for the opening adagio, 50 for the allegro, and 14 for the concluding adagio. Biggs would play a piece all the way through once or twice, and then systematically work his way through it again, making several takes of each section. Then, having sprung from the bench to listen to parts of the recording, he would return to play a few additional inserts, sometimes of only a few bars, to have available if he should decide he preferred them when the time came to edit. Aside from extraneous noises, most of the takes would have nothing “wrong” with them. It is just that the advent of magnetic tape recording (still an exciting novelty in the early 1950s) enabled the luxury of so many easy takes that Biggs the “techie”—in parlance of today—could not resist the temptation to give himself every possible choice.16
Steinmeyer, without much to do at recording sessions once he had 1) dashed in to announce their arrival, 2) with Peggy and Biggs himself, carried all the equipment in (see photo: Ready to lug gear), 3) helped Peggy hook it all up while Biggs investigated the organ, 4) searched out and secured an electrical ground, and 5) stationed himself at the door to minimize interruptions, could only try to listen with interest and wait the session out. Everyone quietly rejoiced when Biggs would suddenly pull out an odd piece by Schlick, Murschhauser, Paumann, or Scheidt—among more than two dozen composers whose music he recorded on the trip—because they knew it meant the session would soon conclude. How did Biggs keep going for hour after hour? Steinmeyer offers one answer: at breakfast on the day of a recording session, he would ask the kitchen to fill a foot-high thermos half with coffee and half with hot water. “Sometimes that would be his only sustenance until the afternoon.”
Many a take did get spoiled by noise of course: traffic rumbling under the Silver Chapel in Innsbruck, a local train clattering next to the church in Mörlenbach, planes over Munich, radio interference at Ebersmünster and St. Florian’s, a pneumatic hammer at Lammbach, and even a town crier at Ochsenhausen. Everywhere they had to reckon with the hazard of barking dogs, bells at the quarter hour, and above all, of course, the visiting public. These were mostly Roman Catholic churches, to be kept accessible to the faithful at all times. Steinmeyer laughs aloud in recalling how often visitors would nod promisingly at his request for silence “because a recording is being made in there,” ease a massive door shut behind them without a sound, and then break into a great attack of coughing, “probably their first in months”; or perform an extravagant display of entering on tiptoe in big boots before clumping noisily across the floor to get a votive candle. Countless takes in the log bear the notation, “crash,” “great crash in die-away,” “three crashes.”
After two sessions at Kirchheimbolanden, on August 3 and 5, one on each side of their appointed day at the St. Bartholomeus-Kirche in nearby Mörlenbach on Thursday, August 4, to record a small organ presumed to have been played by Mozart before its removal to that neighboring town from Heidelberg Castle, they journeyed on to record, on Friday, August 5, a Fischer organ that had been played by Mozart in the castle chapel at Ludwigsburg, near Stuttgart. In their session at Mörlenbach, they had found themselves recording almost as many railroad sounds as notes by Mozart and repeatedly chasing away the children who swarmed over the Microbus. Apologetic nuns finally collected their kindergartners, seated them on a curb, and “played hush-hush games with them” until the recording session had ended. “Then the nuns even helped coil all the cables.”
Sparrows at Ebersmünster
The party of three (Hanne Steinmeyer would not join them until the second half of the trip) spent the first weekend in Strasbourg, essentially confirming their assumption that their next recording session should take place not in the Alsatian capital at all but at bucolic Ebersmünster, half an hour’s drive up the broad Rhine Valley to the south. The westernmost example of south German baroque architecture, the splendid abbey church at Ebersmünster houses one of the region’s three well-preserved organs by Andreas Silbermann (the others are at Marmoutier and Arlesheim). Of Ebersmünster, where Mozart might have played, Biggs, in his first (later to be shortened) essay to accompany the 1956 Bach album, writes the following:
After we had found the little village, hardly more than a crossroads, with the great abbey building visible for miles around, and had spent the necessary time investigating the instrument and working out the music, it became clear that we had some assistants in the building. The music had stirred up a family of church sparrows, living in their nest built high on the vaulted ceiling of the church! They joined in the recording. Fortunately they were interested or courteous enough to be quiet whenever we were playing, yet as soon as music finished they would begin their discussion of the performance. Even in the few seconds of die-away between the prelude and fugue [in C major, BWV 553, first of the “Eight Little”], they squeeze in a few chirped remarks. Naturally these comments are left on the record. Not for a moment could we think of editing them out.
That family of sparrows may be as enduring as the 1730 Silbermann. They were still cheeping at Biggs when he returned to record “historic organs of France” in the late 1960s and continued to greet visitors throughout the 1990s. If any of the countless small clear window panes is missing at this moment, the sparrows of Ebersmünster are surely chirping there today.
After the morning’s session at Ebersmünster on Monday, August 8, the travelers drove eastward, crossed the Rhine near Freiburg, and climbed through the Black Forest to the “Mozart town” of Donaueschingen, at the source of the Danube. There Steinmeyer had arranged some recording time for them late in the afternoon on an instrument by his family’s firm more suitable for Reger and Karg-Elert than for Mozart. Biggs gamely recorded a few pieces by both of the moderns.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, August 9 and 10, the trio looped southward into Switzerland to view a few contemporary instruments that Steinmeyer thought Biggs might appreciate, then straight north again, skirting Lake Constance at the Rhine Falls, to begin their visits to a few of the scores of baroque churches that rise fabulously from the meadows of Swabia and Bavaria, and much of Austria. The spectacularly “baroquized” monastery church of Ochsenhausen became the first of these stops, on Thursday morning, August 11. Biggs’s choice of music to record on the visually stunning instrument (the first to be built by Joseph Gabler, in 1738, and his chief credential for earning the commission for his magnum opus at Weingarten), as colorful to the eye as to the ear, was the fifth of “Bach’s eight little preludes and fugues,” BWV 557, in G major. “Steinmeyer’s” microphone (see photo: Hanging the mike at Ochsenhausen, in Part 1) captured the clatter of the worn pedal trackers as faithfully as any lover of organ antiquity could have wished.17 (To be continued)
