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E. Power Biggs in Mozart Country, Part 2

July 24, 2006
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It is amusing to trace the metamorphosis of what was to have been little more than a concert tour of Europe in the spring of 1954—one already fiendishly long and tightly scheduled—into a recording venture without precedent. As the itinerary took shape for his first serious European tour, Biggs looked forward to becoming acquainted with many notable organs along the way (although it also seems clear that he had not yet developed any really visceral interest in historic organs per se, perhaps because he had not yet experienced the right one).1 By the end of January 1954, however, the idea of getting to know historic organs in Europe seems to have advanced to “actively recruiting” them for an exciting but still vaguely conceived purpose: a recording project of some kind—someday, somehow—that might link composer, instrument, and landscape.
Barely back in Cambridge after a month of concerts in California, Biggs headed straight for New York in the first week of February to test his “boss’s” interest in such a project. It was surely in this conversation—probably when Biggs spoke of “scouting” instruments—that David Oppenheim, director of Columbia Masterworks, made the innocently momentous, and in Biggs lore now famous, suggestion: “Take with you a small tape recorder and let it run while you play.”2 Oppenheim then continued, “Be sure to record one [same] piece everywhere. This will make [possible] an immediate comparison of all the different instruments you play.”3 Recalling this conversation two decades later, Biggs wrote, We visualized, as I remember, some little miracle-box about the size of a portable typewriter. For advice, we turned to the engineering staff of Columbia. After they had a good chuckle, they explained to us some recording facts of life. And by the day of air embarkment for Lisbon, our little typewriter-sized recorder had blossomed into 500 pounds of Ampex equipment. Excess baggage charges to Lisbon alone were astronomical.4
At twenty years’ remove, Biggs’s memory seems to have confused (or perhaps intentionally conflated) the relatively modest—if by no means trivial—162 pounds of equipment carried in 1954 with the much heavier and more sophisticated hardware they brought with them on the Mozart tour, one year later.5 In any event, Vincent Liebler, director of recording operations at Columbia Records, the engineer who must have been chief among the chucklers that day, agreed to oversee the creation of custom recording equipment suitable for use in the field. Liebler would try to have it ready a month before the Biggses’ departure in mid-April.6

More than “snapshots” of sound

The broadcaster in Biggs had leapt at the idea of capturing some “snapshots” of sound from Europe to insert in his Sunday morning programs. And, of course, he knew he would always have the D-Minor Toccata up his sleeve (like Bach, he imagined) to serve as the common denominator for Oppenheim’s “one piece” assignment. On the train back to Boston, Biggs must have rejoiced at the prospect of the recording equipment that he and Oppenheim had just commissioned. We can imagine his excitement to have been greatest of all at Oppenheim’s suggestion, before their conversation had ended, that they consider trying to do some formal recording already that spring. Oppenheim had even proposed that they contact Philips of Holland, Columbia’s affiliate on the Continent in the 1950s, to solicit their suggestions for possible locations and their assistance, perhaps, in making such recordings.
Biggs spent the weekend putting together repertory for three LP’s worth of Buxtehude, Pachelbel, and Hindemith. And on Monday morning, February 8, he sent the plan to Oppenheim with these lines: “It was fine to see you last week, and I think things are working out in a very exciting way. . . . It’s possible that Philips may know of some particularly magnificent organ along our route, and if so, I’ll make plans to record anywhere that you or they suggest.” And then he added, “If this ‘formal recording’ does not take place, we could take all this material in our stride ourselves.” With this, we have the first indication that Biggs was prepared, with the help of his wife Peggy, and using the equipment that Columbia was compiling for him, to act as his own producer and recording engineer in Europe regardless of what Philips decided to do (which, as it turned out, would be little).
In the same outgoing mail that Monday, Biggs sent Liebler a copy of his itinerary and quickly received this acknowledgement:
We will start investigation of the power facilities in these various cities, and from that we can determine what type of power supply to incorporate in your new tape equipment. We will do everything possible to expedite this equipment so that you will have it around the middle of March. However, it is entirely in the hands of Colonel Ranger, who is building the equipment. . . . As for your coming down to go to school, this can only be done when the equipment is ready, and I believe the best place for this schooling will be in Colonel Ranger’s office in Newark, N.J. I will keep you informed of our progress during the next few weeks.7
Progress on the equipment went slowly, however. And it appears that “Colonel Ranger” may have turned the whole task back to Columbia’s engineers at some point with the advice that they simply purchase a standard Ampex 403 and modify it for battery operation. The equipment that Biggs had expected to pick up in mid-March would be barely ready by mid-April, uncomfortably close to his day of departure. In the meantime, the ever-alert audiophile in him had caught wind of a smaller Ampex that was supposed to be introduced before long.8 On April 5, however, Liebler wrote to dismiss that possibility and summon Biggs to New York for a lesson in using his new equipment:
We will be looking forward to seeing you early Monday morning, April 12th. We are doing everything possible to get the equipment in at that time. It seems that most of this equipment is not generally available across the counter, and it has become necessary to send out scouts to pick up the units that we want. . . . We can find nothing regarding a new light-weight Ampex portable being released around April 15th. The one we have settled for is the lightest two-unit Ampex available, and it should give you professional results. The power battery supply has been assembled especially for this Ampex. . . . I am looking forward to seeing you on Monday for lesson # 1.
With a long list of pre-departure errands still to be run in the few remaining days before the Biggses’ flight from Boston, lesson #1 in New York City probably remained the only lesson. But the electrical technician in Biggs—his original calling, after all—no doubt felt confident that no further schooling would be needed. As he and Peggy prepared to depart on Sunday, April 18, “the notes of his Easter morning CBS broadcast still echoing in his ears,” Biggs dashed off this quick note to Oppenheim: “Here we go! The equipment is certainly wonderful, and we are going to make every effort to make the most of it. Unfortunately, overweight payments to the airlines [for its 162 pounds] will come to about a thousand dollars, around the circuit, but there is just no alternative.”9 Oppenheim immediately cabled this (undated) reply to Biggs in Lisbon, his first station on the “circuit”:
SORRY ABOUT EXTRA TRANSPORTATION COSTS FOR EQUIPMENT WILL GLADLY PAY HALF OF COST OUTRIGHT AND OTHER HALF ADVANCED AGAINST ROYALTIES GREETINGS DAVID OPPENHEIM
Wonderful as Biggs judged the equipment to be, he nevertheless needed to cable New York for advice from time to time. Two weeks into the tour, S. E. Sorensen, one of the engineers at Columbia Records, responded to some of Biggs’s queries with this letter directed to him en route in London:
Dear Mr. Biggs: We are delighted to hear of your good progress. Keep it up. . . . Regarding the -1/2db level when playing the standard 1000 cycle tape, we feel that this is nothing much to be concerned about. Leave well enough alone. . . . Your difficulty with fuses may have been caused by starting the generator without its normal load. . . . We found it safer to leave the Ampex tape machine switch ‘ON’ and then starting the generator. In this way we are not subjected to a high voltage starting surge. . . . We are sending you five fuses immediately via this letter. Should you require more please advise. . . . We are all anxiously waiting to hear your recordings. We will report our comments at the first opportunity. . . . Best of luck from us all here in New York.10
And seventeen days later, he wrote this to Biggs in Copenhagen:
Dear Mr. Biggs: From your letter of May 17, we have concluded your principal trouble to be in your basic battery supply. Your entire success hinges on the use of good if not perfect batteries. For your future protection specify and order at least four (4) batteries connected in parallel for 12-volt operation. . . . Regarding your problem with the frequency meter, we can only confirm your suggestion of maintaining the 60 cycle reed at the 60 cycle point and by a very careful anticipating of the adjustment maintain it at its maximum excursion. Other than this we cannot advise you. . . . We have not yet listened to your recordings. We are looking forward to this experience. . . . Lots of luck.11
Between the laconic letters from Sorensen, however, came this upbeat and amusing note from the boss himself, dated May 13, mailed to Frankfurt, and addressed to both of the Biggses:
Dear Mr. and Mrs. Biggs: I just want you to know that I am delighted that you are making such progress and that we can offer you both contracts as recording engineers upon your return to the United States. I am certainly looking forward to hearing the results of your work, and I trust that there will be some tapes on the way within short. . . . Please try to do a little relaxing, at least three minutes a day, and think of us here in the United States, from time to time, glued to our television sets watching the great Washington circus, of which you no doubt are made more than aware. . . Excelsior! David [Oppenheim]
(Oppenheim’s “Washington circus” surely refers to the Army-McCarthy hearings, which Oppenheim and his wife, the actress Judy Holliday, must have followed with keen interest, given Holliday’s investigation by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, four years earlier.)

700 “takes” and counting

Recording at every opportunity “around the circuit” between 40 concerts and broadcasts in eleven countries, Biggs filled 65 reels of tape (of the 71 they carried) with more than 700 individual “takes.” Peggy Biggs quickly became her husband’s expert monitor of meters and keeper of recording logs—not to mention his chief assistant in hauling all the equipment. The hardware to be carried in and out of every recording venue included the 58-pound Ampex 403P (P for portable—in two units, luckily), to which Columbia’s engineers had added circuitry and accessories to regulate the potentially unsteady 110 volt AC power produced by the special motor-driven generator they had designed (a 64-pound device that would in turn receive its power from a minimum of two—but ideally four—full-sized, lead-acid automotive batteries to be rented on the ground at each stop along the way), a twelve-pound microphone, and finally a utility bag containing several pounds of tools and connecting cable. Upon his return, Biggs wrote to Liebler, “Very many thanks for all your interest and wonderful cooperation in the whole venture. We both acquired blisters on our hands from lugging the stuff around, but it was fun.”12 (See photo: “Recording engineer” Peggy Biggs, 1954, on page 22.)
Philips played only an indirect role in the 1954 project. Its home office in Baarn, Holland, served first as the receiving station for a shipment of blank 3M tape from New York (sent from there, presumably, because the Ampex had been calibrated for the characteristics of that tape alone) and later as the depot through which most of the completed reels were shipped back to New York. Philips did no recording with Biggs until the following year when (as we shall see) its white-smocked engineers recorded the Mozart sonatas in Salzburg Cathedral alongside Columbia’s two “engineers in mufti,” Georg Steinmeyer and Peggy Biggs.
For the previous six months, Biggs and Steinmeyer had corresponded about concert arrangements (set, finally, for Heidelberg, Frankfurt, Nuremberg, and Munich, in that order), as well as about recording possibilities, car rental, and organ itinerary. Three years had passed since Steinmeyer had last seen the Biggses. Home in Oettingen again by the end of 1951 (after completing his one-year apprenticeship at Aeolian-Skinner in Boston and an adventurous auto tour of the United States), Steinmeyer first worked on his father’s project to restore the large Steinmeyer instrument at Nuremberg’s St. Lorenz-Kirche following its wartime destruction. It was there that he made the acquaintance of the “light of his eyes”: a young Nürnbergerin named Hannelore. For better or for worse, the Biggses’ schedule would place them in Steinmeyer’s responsible hands a scant five days after his wedding on May 8; and the bride and groom would in effect “honeymoon with the Biggses.” Steinmeyer’s last letter to the Biggses before their arrival had included this poignantly couched request concerning his bride:
If Hanne can get a few days off because of our wedding, would you mind if I ask you if she can join us for a few days? Hanne speaks English fluently since she is a German language teacher at an American school and since she has a diploma as an interpreter for English. She also loves music—and I think, besides all that, she is a nice girl. But I don’t know how much luggage you have and if you like to travel with a stranger. You will have so many impressions and so much to do, to see, and to hear on your trip that I would understand if you like to travel alone with me. Please do not hesitate to write me what you think. It is rather arrogant to ask you such a question—but I hope you will forgive me and see it as a matter which happens when people are in love.13
The Biggses sent an enthusiastic affirmative of course; and at their first recording session (in Heidelberg) Biggs would even tape an interview with the newlyweds.

Bringing the Mercedes to its knees

Steinmeyer stood waiting at the gate in Frankfurt when the Biggses’ flight from Berlin landed, shortly after noon on Thursday, May 13. He had made the five-hour drive from Oettingen that morning in the Mercedes 180 that Biggs had agreed to rent for the week, and had brought with him the two heavy, 12 volt, 125 ampere-hour, automotive batteries that Biggs had asked him to rent along with the car, for powering the AC generator. Half an hour before landing, the Biggses had flown over Eisenach, the town of Bach’s birth, and a destination beyond easy reach by Westerners in the years of the Cold War. Steinmeyer thus became the first to be told, under hugs and over handshakes, the story that Biggs would retell again and again, and eventually include in the booklet that accompanied The Art of the Organ:
On our way to Heidelberg from Berlin, we flew to Frankfurt, passing over Eisenach and gaining an unforgettable picture of this city, with its red roofs clustered together and sheltered by the hills. At this moment we were just one mile from Bach’s birthplace, yet with no chance to visit this historic spot. For we were in the Russian controlled area of East Germany, and—fortunately—one mile up in the air. Flying down the “corridor,” following the concert in Berlin, the pilot had allowed us to go up to the cockpit to watch the historic city of Eisenach approach. As the little village appeared ahead and passed gradually beneath the plane, the pilot asked my wife, “Were you born there?” “No,” Peggy replied, “but a friend of ours was, almost three hundred years ago.” “Must be an old friend,” was the pilot’s comment.
As the travelers claimed their baggage—more a matter of freight—Steinmeyer discovered that he had not been wrong to worry about how much his guests would bring, for when the combined weight of the recording equipment, the passengers, and their normal bags had been added to that of the two huge batteries in the trunk, it was enough to bring the Mercedes to its knees. At this point, Biggs was still carrying 56 reels of tape in metal containers (15 of the original 71, imprinted with Purcell in England and Sweelinck in Holland, had already been shipped homeward). In letters to his European contacts before he came, Biggs had almost laughably minimized the size of the tape recorder he would bring, still calling it “our own little amateur machine” long after he knew it would amount to far more than that. His aim, no doubt, had been to minimize fears of disruption and to deflect in advance any fees that some authorities might have been tempted to levy for formal recording. As late as March 11, for example, only five weeks before his departure and even as Columbia’s engineers were adding yet more weight to the Ampex, Biggs had appended this seemingly casual postscript to one of his letters to Steinmeyer: “P.S. We hope to bring our own amateur tape machine (instead of a Leica), and we hope to take a few musical snapshots of some of the organs we play.” Of course, he may not have been completely disingenuous in minimizing the nature of the equipment at that point, for we know that he was still hoping for the sudden introduction of a new lightweight machine by Ampex.

Rural color at Amorbach

If the weight of the recording equipment had come as one surprise to Steinmeyer, nothing had prepared him, either, for the countless hours they would all spend using it. To him (and no doubt to Peggy—not to mention to Hanne), the number of takes in each recording session seemed endless. On the long Sunday afternoon at Amorbach alone, they recorded 45 takes, averaging five apiece for each of the nine variations in Pachelbel’s partita, Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan. It is not that Biggs would flub his playing, Steinmeyer explains; rather, he simply wanted the luxury of several options from which to assemble (like Glenn Gould) one best version of each piece. And given the nature of the instrument, of course, he liked to carry away more than one set of registrations to have at his disposal when the time came to edit. Yet to Steinmeyer it often seemed that each new take was as good as the last—provided that no one had slammed a door or dropped a broom or sneezed or buzzed past the church on a motorcycle. Biggs’s final directives penciled in the margins of the recording logs (kept during the sessions by Peggy in small spiral notebooks and later typed up with more generous space for Biggs to add his editing notes) show that he nearly always combined two or three takes to make the definitive one: usually the beginning of one take, the middle of a second, and the final bars of a third (the latter, often, for nothing more than a better-sounding die-away). As he edited the Pachelbel partita recorded at rural Amorbach (for The Art of the Organ) Biggs delighted in retaining the peal of the abbey’s bells at one point and the crow of a rooster before one of the variations.
When scheduling recitals, Biggs liked to have at least one full day to get to know each instrument. On the days between the concerts in Heidelberg’s Heiliggeist-Kirche on May 15, Frankfurt’s Gnaden-Kirche on May 17, Nuremberg’s St. Lorenz-Kirche on May 19, and Munich’s St. Markus-Kirche (the church of Karl Richter) on May 21, Steinmeyer drove the Biggses to various instruments of note in the same countryside that they would be exploring more thoroughly one year later—although none of them knew it then—with the “recorder set on Mozart.” For now, however, the focus was on recording Johann Pachelbel, Nuremberg’s native son, and on adding more Bach D-Minors to the growing collection. Biggs recorded in four south German locations on the 1954 trip: in Heidelberg on Friday, May 14, playing the Bach Toccata (5 takes) and various pieces by Pachelbel (14 takes) on the 1948 Steinmeyer organ in the Heiliggeist-Kirche; then in Amorbach on Sunday afternoon, May 16, playing the Pachelbel partita (with its total of 45 takes) on the 1782 Stumm organ in the Abbey Church there; next in Nuremberg on Tuesday, May 18, playing further pieces by Pachelbel (22 takes) on the large 1952 Steinmeyer organ in the St. Lorenz-Kirche; and finally in Weingarten on Thursday, May 20, playing another Bach D-Minor (5 takes) and more pieces by Pachelbel (15 takes) on the 1737 Gabler organ in the vast Benedictine Abbey that looms on a bluff above the town.

The day at Weingarten

The log of their day of recording at the Baroque basilica of Weingarten, the largest church of its kind north of the Alps, offers a typical glimpse of both the frustrations and the satisfactions Biggs encountered while taping in the field. Through Steinmeyer’s “connections” (since he himself had been a member of the team that had just completed a major renovation of the organ), he had been able to gain access for Biggs to the fabled instrument for most of that Thursday. Steinmeyer had booked rooms at a small hotel only a few hundred feet below the abbey’s pompous façade, and Biggs, who had long ago learned that the dress of an English gentleman caused doors to open more briskly before him than did lesser attire—especially in places like Weingarten—wore his best pin-striped suit that day, complete, as always, with vest-pocket handkerchief. No public performance had been scheduled for Weingarten, but he dressed for the day as if he were to give one. (See photo: Biggs at the console at Weingarten, May 20, 1954.)
By shortly before 11:00 a.m., the equipment had been set up in a sunlit gallery to the south of the organ, and Biggs had finished exploring the resources of the imposing but gently voiced instrument, the prospect of which may be the most famous in all the world. (See photo: Ready to record at Weingarten, May 20, 1954.)
Peggy had donned her earphones, and Steinmeyer had taken his post at the main entrance to urge silence from entering visitors. Biggs drew his registration for Pachelbel’s Toccata in D Minor, and barked, “Take one!” In Peggy’s log, we read: “Take 1—with one note clock struck 11.” Then, “pitch variation at end of this—but no indication on dials”; and further, “Take 2—with door crash and mob of people.” Nevertheless, the combination of these two takes, plus one “insert” to make a repair, became Band 1, Side 2 of The Art of the Organ. (See photo: Peggy Biggs records at Weingarten, May 20, 1954, page 24.)
Despite the hazards of trying to make a formal recording under informal circumstances, Biggs reveled in the luxury of spending the better part of a day with the fabulous instrument. As the afternoon wore on, Steinmeyer recalls, the sun streaming through the great west window at Biggs’s back grew uncomfortably warm, but he played on and on. “We recorded until ten minutes to six,” Biggs wrote in his album notes, “and had microphone and all equipment down by six for the Monks’ Evensong.” In an article he would soon write for High Fidelity Magazine, Biggs promised hi-fi buffs that they, like him, would marvel at “the rich carpet of sound that rolls from the Weingarten organ.”14 And in that essay his own early electrical training would give him an elegant metaphor to explain the character of that sound: Gabler would never voice a pipe to the upper reaches of its tonal capacity. To achieve full and yet mellow sonorities, he would instead make stops of double pipes—two pipes speaking, one might say, in parallel. This produces a rich “amperage” of sonority on an unforced “voltage.”15

Back to the lowlands

After the concert in Munich that ended their week with Steinmeyer, the Biggses and all their equipment—minus the batteries, of course—flew off to continue six more weeks of recitals, broadcasts, and recording sessions. They traveled to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland, then southward again to Paris in anticipation of a recital at Notre Dame that had been scheduled for Sunday, June 13. Immediately upon their arrival, however, on June 10, they learned that the event would have to be cancelled because of the sudden death of cathedral organist Count St. Martin. In one respect, the cancellation in Paris proved fortuitous for Biggs. For it enabled him to add still more days to the free time that had already opened in his schedule when Vienna and Salzburg proved barren of opportunities to perform that year. Upon learning of the cancellation, he wasted not a moment before cabling the new friends he had made in Holland and northern Germany two weeks earlier, to let them know that he would return even sooner than anticipated to take advantage of their readiness to help him explore further—and further record—the organs that had beguiled his ears first: those of the Dutch and German north.16
We, too, can be grateful for that expanded week of “study time” for Biggs. For it was in those ten days between June 11 and June 22 that he deepened his appreciation of the organs that would determine more than any other the course of his own aesthetic development: the sparkling Schnitgers at Steinkirchen and Neuenfelde, the robust “Böhm” organ in Lüneburg (a note survives from the organist there authorizing him to record as long as he wished on the evening of June 15, provided he played any composer but Böhm!), the bright “Buxtehude” instrument in the Jakobikirche of Lübeck, the 1736 Moreau organ that so “splendidly disturbs,” as Biggs put it, the vast space enclosed by the cathedral at Gouda, and the modern Flentrop at Amstelveen. Given Biggs’s predilection for clarity and “Apollonian individuation” in every realm of aesthetics, we can easily understand that he would be “bowled over” (a favorite expression of his) by what he heard—and felt beneath his fingers—while playing these organs. To him, the music seemed to spring from the instruments as if from living organisms. In them, he had found at last “the welcome feeling of on-the-beat accuracy” at his fingertips for which he had been waiting a lifetime.
Near the end of their journey, during a week of appearances in Iceland, the Biggses received good news from Vincent Liebler:
Just a line to let you know that we finally cleared the first shipment of tapes containing reels numbered 1 thru 8. I checked them with Mr. Oppenheim and they appear to be well recorded. If all the rest of the places have been recorded as well, I am sure you have achieved an excellent batch of material.17
Buoyed by Liebler’s report, a gleeful EPB and Peggy amused themselves on the final leg of their Loftleidir flight to New York by estimating “the total weight of pipes, wind chests, consoles, and other music-making material” that the Ampex had recorded: “Our guess was that the equipment had gobbled up the sounds of some two or three million pounds of organ weight. No wonder we became enormously fond of the machine!”18 Most of what the tapes had captured, of course, would be deemed unusable for one reason or another; recording on the fly had guaranteed that take after take would be marred by some great crash or other non-musical blemish. But there would be enough wheat among the chaff to enable two albums in 1955, while leaving some of the choicest material for cuts on the “Eight Little Preludes and Fugues” LP that would be released one year later as a companion to the Mozart set of 1956.

“May we start urgent inquiries?”

Biggs had hoped to begin editing his miles of tape the moment he got home. A letter to David Oppenheim dated July 5, the Monday after his return, provides a wealth of insight into his view of the trip, his hopes for the projects, and his tally of recording-related costs—in 1954 dollars:
It was nice to chat with you by phone on our return to New York last week, and here’s the promised outline of the music done and the places in which we recorded. . . . First choice for release, undoubtedly, is the three-record set Sweelinck-Buxtehude-Pachelbel, which carries out the idea of European music recorded in the very places in which these chaps lived and worked. It also brings an impressive list of famous organs and other notable cities. . . . I feel quite sure we’ll be ahead of any competitors, both in the musical plan and choice of places, but I guess we do have to move fast, in order to be first in the record market with the idea. . . . All tapes—nos. 1 through 71 plus six small tapes—should be here by now. . . . If they have not arrived, may we start urgent inquiries? . . . I have to bring down the Ampex that we used. It runs, but evidently went out of adjustment in the last week of the trip. If it can be adjusted, perhaps I can bring it back here [to Cambridge] and do a lot of the preliminary editing right away. . . . I’d like to discuss the general financial arrangement for the whole project. Air excess ran to just over $1000.00. Direct costs of handling equipment—taxis, some long distance car trips, contributions to churches, battery rentals, and other inescapables (which I have all itemized) add up to another $1589.00. There are also bills on hand for $1730.00 from Columbia Records for cost of equipment, all incidentals, and for tape shipments.
But where were those tapes? They had not arrived, and an anxious Biggs typed this note to Liebler, on July 8:
Since everything hinges on getting the rest of the tapes safely over here, and as soon as possible, I thought you’d like these [attached] complete details of the shipments. . . . I’m coming down to see David Oppenheim next Tuesday, and I will bring the Ampex machine for examination. . . . If there’s a studio free, I could even start work on editing some of the tapes—before seeing Oppenheim at 3:00 p.m. . . . On the other hand, if the Ampex can be restored to condition, and if I may bring the tapes back here, we can do all the preliminary editing without taking up any more of your studio time. . . . Although we can make a start with what we have, we do need all the tapes in order to extract the musical sequence of compositions we’re after—so here’s hoping your cables produce speedy shipments!
Liebler’s cables did produce speedy shipments, but the frustration had only begun. Declaration papers incorrectly prepared by Philips caused the shipments to be held in customs for weeks. At the end of August, fully two months after his return to the U. S., Biggs was still struggling to get his tapes. On August 29, he wrote to Jay Goeller at Columbia Records to announce that he would make a special detour to New York City on his way home from Toronto within a few days, specifically to retrieve more of the tapes:
I’ll pick up the tapes you already have, Nos. 61 through 63, 71, and 6 small tapes, plus the bulk shipment of 15 through 44 which surely should be delivered by then. If it isn’t, we’ll just have to badger the customs people, for they have had the tapes for six weeks now and it is outrageous that they should be held up this way.
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