Finally, by mid-September, Biggs had everything safely in hand; and, within a few weeks, he had distilled the countless takes into a program for The Art of the Organ that would fill four LP sides. (See photos: Biggs editing . . . and editing . . . and editing.) In the second week of November, he received the proofs and, after giving them a critical listen, sent this exuberant note to Howard Scott, music director at Columbia Records: “The proofs are grand, and it’s certainly a wonderful achievement to get so much on the sides. Hooray, hooray!”19
And yet there was trouble. Repeatedly, Biggs detected mysterious pitch variations and other gremlins creeping in at the mastering stage, and a hold had to be placed on production even after the album’s announced date of release, February 21, 1955. From March 3, we have this letter from Biggs to Howard Scott:
Many thanks for your phone call. Here’s a line to try to help solve matters! (1) Mr. Liebler has all basic unedited tapes, or he will know where they are stored. Record side 2 begins on spool 3. (2) The edited tape for record side 2 (prepared by Lothrop and Graham) must be under someone’s blotter! Basically it’s solid in pitch, and I’m certain that the considerable pitch ‘upsweep’ at the very end of Band 1 is not on the tape. (3) It would be grand if you can restore the tone quality of Record Side 2, since distortion (not present in the first test pressing) has crept into the current version.
In the meantime, the D-Minor project had gone smoothly forward. Already on January 13, Biggs had sent David Oppenheim copies of the two 25-minute tapes he had compiled (one for each side of the LP) with this note to accompany them:
Just a line to report that the D Minor collection turned out even better, I believe, than we had hoped. In fact, it’s a simply wonderful assortment of 32¢ bass notes, massive chords, contrast of manuals, and ear-catching die-aways. How enormously clever JSB was to create such effect from such simple musical means! . . . I think you may find that the D Minor could prove to be a unique hi-fi demonstration record, which might very well catch the fancy of people and exploit to the full the possibilities of speakers and equipment. Anyway, I hope you’ll like it!
Oppenheim did like it (it had, after all been more or less his idea). The masters were cut in no time, and the album released on February 2, with the title, Bach: Toccata in D Minor (A HI-FI Adventure), Columbia Masterworks ML 5032. Text on the album’s cover would aim to make it irresistible to the era’s new breed of high fidelity hobbyists: “Bach’s Toccata in D Minor recorded in matchless High Fidelity on 14 of Europe’s finest organs.” And Biggs’s own compelling essay on the back cover would offer this likely clincher:
So—here’s the “D Minor,” clothed in the sonorities of some five centuries of organ building. . . . With wonderful effect, the D Minor stirs up the latent echoes of the splendidly reverberant European cathedrals and churches, with a thrilling assortment of thundering bass notes, of discord resolving to concord, and of fascinating and lingering die-aways.
More weeks were to pass, however, before a glitch-free Art of the Organ album could finally make its way into the record stores as Columbia Masterworks SL 219. On March 26, already more than a month after its ostensible date of release, Biggs wrote to Oppenheim’s administrative assistant Florette Zuelke, one of his favorite contacts at Columbia: Here is the list [of addresses to which review copies of Art of the Organ should be sent]. It probably was not needed before, since SL 219 has gone into hiding. Incidentally, the suspense is terrific, and I do hope the album can burst forth again no later than early this week, for a huge response from all over the country and in Canada has resulted from our inclusion of European fragments in the CBS broadcasts. But it’s accompanied by a chorus of moans that no records are available!
The album’s strangely dark and gloomy cover (typical of many in the 1950s) superimposed a transparent map of Europe highlighting the cities in which Biggs had recorded upon a photograph of the traveler himself garbed in trench coat and scarf, clutching a military flashlight and a portfolio (of sheet music?). Presumably Biggs was to look the part of a cold-war adventurer or spy, but the hand-cropped photograph against a black background conveys more the sense of a latter-day Count Dracula on the prowl.
One must again wonder why, when photographs of Biggs himself were chosen for his albums, they reflected a personality so different from that of the real “Biggsy.” Only late in his career was the mismatch almost ludicrously corrected when Biggs appeared as a grinning dandy on the covers of his two albums of Joplin rags played on the pedal harpsichord, and as a costumed American patriot on the cover of his rousing Stars and Stripes Forever album, released in 1976 (the fruit of the last recording session of his life, conducted at the great organ in Methuen, Massachusetts).
The boxed Art of the Organ album contained, besides the two LPs of music by Sweelinck, Purcell, Buxtehude, and Bach, a glossy, 16-page booklet of photographs and anecdotal observations by Biggs about his adventures along the way. It also included an essay by Edward Tatnall Canby entitled, “King of Instruments: Supreme High Fidelity Test,” that celebrated the “record-ability” of classically voiced organs, thanks, as Canby put it, to their “tonal vigor and extraordinary intelligibility”:
The great stone spaces that house many of these organs create die-away times of more than four and five seconds, but in every case the notes of the music are distinct and clear, no matter how complex the counterpoint nor how rapid the figuration. The more closely you listen, the more revealing is this extraordinary clarity of detail in the midst of reverberation.
A generosity to the music
Much of the credit for the clarity that Canby praised must go to Biggs for his style of playing, which favored, as always, clean accent and transparent delineation of structures. And yet, as always with the “recorded Biggs,” it was something more than that, too: it is as if, while he played, he listened more critically than many another player to the real-time effect his fingers were producing, and adjusted the tempo and touch to apportion the musical space between notes and phrases to match the acoustical circumstances. We might fairly interpret this “giving” manner of playing as one more aspect of the man’s famous generosity—in this case to the music itself. He simply liked to give each note its just due, letting it register without compromise in its acoustical space before launching the next one upon it, no matter how lively the tempo. Over and over in his recording logs Biggs wrote “hurried” next to the takes that were to be rejected.
In another way, however, some of Biggs’s playing in these first two “field albums” falls below his normal standard. One gets a sense, understandably enough, that he is literally feeling his way through the older instruments, so very different from the ones to which he was accustomed. Barbara Owen has written, “With little time to practice on organs, which, however much he may have liked them, presented Biggs with unfamiliar and awkward console arrangements, some of the playing emerges strangely wooden and labored.”20 His bland choice of registration for the Sweelinck variations at the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam pales beside the delightful sequence of colors he would give us eight years later, playing the same music on the lively Flentrop at Harvard.21 And some of the Pachelbel variations at Amorbach suffer from a similar lack of variety in registration (it is no wonder that Georg Steinmeyer may have wearied a bit of them on that long May afternoon).
But these are trivial quibbles indeed in the context of the sonic excitement that these two albums delivered in countless other ways. And the great adventure for our ears was about to continue. As Biggs nursed The Art of the Organ through its difficult birth in the winter of 1955, he found himself reading—with growing interest—the letters of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Soon he was plotting the route of the young composer’s travels on a map. Hopp—it was time for a letter to Georg Steinmeyer!
(To be continued)
