Hooray, hooray for the Mozart trip—we are delighted at the prospect of another race through Europe with you!” So began the aerogram from E. Power Biggs that Georg Steinmeyer opened in Oettingen, Bavaria, one day in May, 1955. Biggs had sent it in quick response to Steinmeyer’s letter to him of May 20, in which he must have committed himself—at least in principle—to helping Biggs with a second expedition through his native countryside, this time with Mozart’s music, Mozart sites, and Mozart organs as its focus.
Steinmeyer’s first trip with the Biggses, one year earlier, had indeed turned into something of a white-knuckled road race. Piloting the overloaded Mercedes 180 he had rented for them (overloaded only because the “amateur tape recorder” promised by Biggs had strangely metamorphosed—with the bank of automotive batteries needed to operate it—into hundreds of pounds of gear), Steinmeyer had managed to keep Biggs on time for every one of his engagements, but the pace of the nine-day trip had meant skipping a few important stops—like a pause even to see, much less to play, the Riepp organs at Ottobeuren.
“300 years ago, a fine perfection”
The zigzag course they had traced from Frankfurt to Munich the previous spring constituted only one short segment of the 75-day concert tour that had carried Biggs through some twelve countries from Portugal to Norway. That eleven-week journey had introduced him to musical glories of the instrument he had never known before; and an Ampex 403 had helped him “bring ’em back aloud” (as he shamelessly quipped) for an American audience whose ears were ready to listen. It had been Biggs’s well-known “tour of revelation,” the trip that changed not only his own life but the life of the pipe organ in North America, when it launched him on his mission to center the organ once more on what he perceived to be its most essential, yet long lost, character as a musical instrument. Upon his return to Boston, Biggs had begun immediately to communicate what the European instruments had taught him, publishing by the spring of 1955 no fewer than three perceptively detailed—and persuasively argued—articles about the musical excellence of classic European organs.1 “Three hundred years ago,” he liked to declare, “the organ had reached a fine perfection!” For the rest of his life, Biggs celebrated the qualities of organs built like those that had inspired Bach and other great composers of the past, among them—he would soon argue—Mozart, despite the paucity of music Mozart had actually penned for the instrument.
Although much of their 1955 correspondence is lost, we know that Biggs must have invited Steinmeyer to help with some version of a Mozart project even before the end of March, for in a letter to his chief State Department contact in Washington, Mary Stewart French, dated March 29, he refers to Steinmeyer in the warmest terms and outlines an early conception of the plan:
We intend [in late summer] to visit Austria, and particularly Salzburg and Vienna for their Mozart associations. We’re in touch with Georg Steinmeyer, the organ builder of Bavaria, who proved such an excellent friend and guide last year. . . . There’s one event that we’d particularly like to give—namely to play the three Mozart Fantasias and the seventeen short sonatas for small orchestra and organ in Salzburg Cathedral, where Mozart was once organist! It would be wonderful if this could be given under [U. S. Information Service] or Amerika-Haus sponsorship, and, if the cost of the small orchestra (perhaps 20 to 25 players) were an obstacle, we’d be glad to take care of this.
Steinmeyer: “The experience of a lifetime”
For Steinmeyer, the second coming of the Biggses, like their first (which had coincided with his honeymoon!), was going to compete with another major transition in his life: emigration to America with his young family. He knew he would soon be accepting a job at the Estey Organ Company of Brattleboro, Vermont. Quietly foundering in the mid 1950s, Estey was hoping to reverse its fortunes by adding this young German builder to its staff, who would bring with him the bonus of a prestigious name. Steinmeyer could see that time for personal projects that summer (like helping Biggs with his) could grow short, especially since Estey seemed to want him to come as soon as possible. Furthermore, he knew that travel time with the Biggses would in some ways amount to “the least of it.” In advance of their coming, he would have to help research organs, lay out the route, time all distances, contact responsible persons, coax them into granting access to record, schedule overnights, book accommodations, procure a vehicle, and so on. But Georg and Hanne Steinmeyer had grown very fond of the Biggses (20 years their senior) during that first “race.” And Steinmeyer respected—because he so completely shared—Biggs’s unfailingly upbeat resilience as a traveler. He liked the notion that his freedom to shape the new plan would indeed give Biggs a chance to discover some of the treasures they had neglected on the 1954 tour. And last but not least (Steinmeyer may have reasoned), a young organ builder moving to America could do worse than to earn the advocacy of America’s best known organist! Thus, despite his own uncertain agenda for the coming summer, he put aside all concerns and signed on for what he can term today “the experience of a lifetime.”
In the months that followed, Steinmeyer would first help Biggs lay out a complex plan, then make all the logistical arrangements for it to succeed, and finally work at his side for five weeks to help him fulfill it. At the end of the undertaking, with all the notes sounded and captured “before they could melt into thin air,” as Biggs liked to put it (in reference to Prospero’s words in Shakespeare’s The Tempest), a pleased Biggs (and Peggy) flew home with 84 half-hour reels of tape imprinted at 15 inches per second with 942 “takes” and 612 “inserts” of music—music not only by Mozart but by some two dozen other composers as well—played on 21 different organs. The venture would advance by two more albums the paradigm Biggs had established with the pair of releases born of the 1954 expedition.2 These had already begun to spin on turntables across America as he and Peggy “enplaned” once more for Europe to produce the first of many sequels: Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues “played on eight famous European classic organs,” a single LP (ML 5078, to be released on April 2, 1956); and A Mozart Organ Tour (K3L 231, which would be released on July 16, 1956), a 3-LP album containing the 17 “Festival Sonatas” for organ and orchestra and Mozart’s complete works for solo organ played on 14 organs in Austria and southern Germany.3
A neglected dimension of Mozart
Biggs would find it easy enough, in the essay he wrote for the Mozart album, to formulate a high-minded justification for the project:
An anniversary should serve to enlarge our knowledge of a composer’s work. If Mozart the organist is a figure not too well remembered by us today, then his aspect of his genius should become better known.
Biggs himself had recorded six of the 17 sonatas for organ and orchestra in 1945 (78 rpm RCA Victor M 1019), and had played various solo works of Mozart from time to time in his weekly broadcasts from Harvard. But neither he nor anyone else had yet gathered so much of Mozart’s music for the instrument into a single release for record buyers. In an essay he prepared for High Fidelity Magazine, he added this further justification for the enterprise:
For about 150 of the 165 years that have elapsed since Mozart’s lifetime,” the only possible commentary on [Mozart’s letters about his travels] would have been further writing, in book or essay. Today, to our good fortune, we have other documentary means!4
He meant, of course, that modern tape-recording (which he liked to call “the photography of sound”) enabled a new dimension of biographical documentation. Furthermore, the essay continued, “. . . if an anniversary observance is to be worthwhile, it should serve to broaden our knowledge of a composer’s art, and not merely to prompt further recordings of already well-roasted chestnuts.” If the two exciting Fantasias in F minor have in the meantime become their own version of old chestnuts in the organ repertory, they have done so in part because Biggs put them on the map, literally as well as figuratively.
Today, thanks to the personal recollections of Steinmeyer and the abundant “retentions” of Biggs himself (“the man who never threw anything away”—in the not unappreciative words of Joseph Dyer, Chairman of the Organ Library of the Boston Chapter of the AGO), we can relive—in our 250th year of Mozart, 100th year of Biggs, and 50th anniversary of these two albums—the making of those memorable recordings.5
More than one Mozart project for Biggs
By the winter of 1955, as the Mozart year of 1956 beckoned ever more urgently for projects, Biggs had already begun to plan a wildly original one. Since that year would also mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of Benjamin Franklin, his favorite American hero, Biggs wanted to link Mozart’s music and Franklin’s invention of the glass harmonica. If Corning Glass could just blow harmonica glasses that would not keep breaking, and if Buffalo organbuilder Hermann Schlicker could somehow devise a reliable playing mechanism for a replica of Franklin’s instrument, the whole endeavor could culminate, Biggs hoped (as indeed it did, more or less), with a long-planned concert in MIT’s Kresge auditorium in the spring of 1956.6
But Biggs had also begun to nurse the idea of a more grandiose project: a plan to record Mozart’s seventeen sonatas for organ and orchestra at no less a venue than the cathedral in Salzburg, the space in which a teen-aged Mozart had composed and performed them. But there was more. Still aglow with the success of his 1954 odyssey linking composers and the territory of their Wirken, he could not fail to note the logical next extension of the concept he had invented on his tour-with-an-Ampex the previous spring. If he could find enough extant instruments to justify it, he would undertake a new tour of European organs, a “trail” of ones that Mozart had played or “might have played.”
At first he imagined that these would be confined mainly to the cities of Salzburg and Vienna. Although Salzburg’s cathedral enclosed a grand Mozartean space, its 1914 Mauracher organ preserved only a few ranks from an organ of Mozart’s day. Beyond these ranks, set now on an electro-pneumatic windchest, Salzburg housed only one reasonably authentic “Mozart organ,” the 1696 Egedacher instrument in the Chapel of St. Cajetan. And if Salzburg offered little, Vienna would offer nothing. The Austrian capital disappointed Biggs again and again! One year earlier, while on his grand tour, he had obtained no invitation to play a recital there; now he could come up with no playable—or at least accessible—organ of Mozart-vintage; and a few years later, when he sought an authentic instrument for his plan to record the Haydn organ concertos and redo the Mozart “seventeen” in stereo, Vienna would send him 30 miles to the south, to the Haydn-town of Eisenstadt, to find the right (actually perfect) instrument.7
The one bona fide “Mozart Organ” to which Biggs had already been introduced stood not in Austria at all, but 600 kilometers west of Salzburg in the Rheinland-Pfalz region of Germany. It was the 1745 instrument by Michael Stumm in the castle church of Kirch-heimbolanden. Steinmeyer had brought Biggs to see it for a few minutes on the first afternoon of their 1954 trip. When his long hours of research at Harvard’s Houghton Library in the winter of 1955 confirmed that Kirchheimbolanden would serve, in fact, as the perfect western terminus of a Mozart tour from the Rhineland to Salzburg, Biggs moved quickly to make plans.
The more he read the letters of the Mozart family, the better he saw that he would be able to contribute his own small (but for the organ world surely welcome) revision to the conventional image of Mozart. He discovered that Mozart had frequently improvised on organs for the sheer pleasure of it, that he had sought them out wherever he went, and that his hosts had often expressed amazement at his skill not only as a “clavierist” but as a “fuguer with pedals.” Best of all, Biggs liked the enthusiasm in Mozart’s surprisingly frequent remarks about the instrument—utterances like, “To my eyes and my ears, the organ is the king of instruments.”8 To the editor of the American Guild of Organists Quarterly, Biggs eventually remarked, “It would seem to me that organists may as well ‘claim’ Mozart, who today would practically have been an A.G.O. member.”9
“The whole thing has suddenly become clear”
In a letter dated May 1, it was time for Biggs to share his growing excitement with Columbia Masterworks executive David Oppenheim:
Our Mozart plans have suddenly come into focus. A reading of Jahn’s volumes on Mozart, and the composer’s own letters did the trick! Now we know just where Mozart went on his concert trips and what organs he played, and it’s interesting to find that he always asked to play the organ, and his playing absolutely fascinated people. . . . Mozart writes of his great love for the organ (he said, “the instrument is my passion”) but evidently he just played music out of his head and didn’t write too much down for publication, for the simple reason that there wasn’t a great demand for it at that period. Anyway, he wrote down just the right amount for our purposes! . . . We’re going over August 15, via TWA, and with Georg Steinmeyer, the organ builder, will follow the “Mozart trail” and play and record instruments Mozart played, ending in Salzburg. More details later—but the whole thing has suddenly become clear.
Now, too, he could send Georg Steinmeyer a more detailed proposal (we have no surviving letter, only these scraps of a draft):
Here are some plans, which will give you an idea of the time involved. . . The object of the visit [to begin on August 17] would be to retrace the routes traveled by Mozart, to visit towns and if possible to find the organs he once played. . . . There won’t be any concerts during this period, so we could give full time to the instruments to record a short piece or two on each, much as we did last year.
Then, at the beginning of September, we’d like to arrive in Salzburg, for a period of about two weeks. It’s possible that there might be concerts here, but in any case we would hope to do the same sort of thing as on the trip in and around Salzburg. . . . The general interest of the trip is of course to learn about instruments, the old, the restored, and some newer ones, and to play the music that belongs on them—some other composers, as well as Mozart. For we realize from last year’s visit what an enormous amount there is to learn, and we’d like to visit representative instruments in southern Germany, Austria, etc., as we did in the northern spots.
Do you think you could once again help us by choosing the best places and routes and making some preliminary enquiries about the use of the instruments? Also, in renting a car and coming with us as before, in any case, for the first two weeks and if possible for the Salzburg visit as well.
If it is possible for you to take these four weeks, we would very much like to have you come, and to ask you to do the preliminary work of arrangements for recording sessions, car rental, and planning the schedule. Also, this time we should practice what we preach and put the arrangements on a firm business basis—that is—all your expenses and the car costs, and in addition a weekly payment of say, $100 [perhaps the equivalent of a thousand dollars in 2006]. That is a total of $400.00 which we would be glad to deposit in an account here for you, with your family, or in Germany, since it might be useful for your westward journey.
The offer to remunerate Steinmeyer for the time he would spend traveling with them (but not, it seems, for all the time spent planning!) may have come partly in response to signals Steinmeyer had given about other approaching demands on his time. Or perhaps Biggs felt a twinge of guilt for having compensated his friend too meagerly (for nothing more than expenses) on the 1954 trip.
The trail lengthens
By May, Steinmeyer had accepted the job at Estey and could see that the mid-August date proposed by Biggs for starting the Mozart trip would present a problem. Better to begin sooner, he thought. And, given the ground to be covered, Steinmeyer wanted, if possible, “to do it right”; and so, before he knew it, and almost in spite of himself, he was soon encouraging Biggs to double the time allotted to the pre-Salzburg portion of the journey from two weeks to four weeks. Always ready for more adventure, of course, Biggs welcomed the expansion.
On July 3, only one month before the Biggses would arrive, Steinmeyer sent his first rough plan for the tour and expressed his belief that, with luck, he would be able to travel with them for the whole month of August, breaking away once they “settled” in Salzburg for the longer recording session. Perhaps in a subconscious effort to keep Biggs’s expectations somewhat in check, Steinmeyer let himself complete the letter of July 3 with, “We are terribly busy in the office at the moment. In the evenings we pack our trunks since we cannot pack in August.”
On his side of the Atlantic, Biggs was busy too, of course, corresponding with his diplomatic contacts in Vienna, Salzburg, and Washington with the aim of securing 1) Salzburg Cathedral as a recording venue for five days in early September, 2) an orchestra and conductor for recording the Mozart sonatas with him there, and 3) as many Austrian recital invitations as he could garner for the days just before and just after the recording sessions in Salzburg. Angelo Eagon, “Theater and Music Officer” at the American embassy in Vienna, was proving more helpful than he had the previous year, when he had in effect turned away Biggs’s solicitation of engagements to perform.
Between June 6 and 17, Biggs interrupted all correspondence to take himself, and as many members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra as he could recruit (seven), away to Iceland to carry out another of his projects of 1955: a ten-day series of concerts in Reykjavik and elsewhere that he had persuaded the U.S. State Department to sponsor as a counter-move to the Soviets’ own cultural courting of the small Scandinavian nation he had come to love on his 1954 tour. Upon returning to Cambridge, he found that Eagon had risen nicely to the challenge of opening doors in Salzburg and booking engagements for him elsewhere in Austria—none in Vienna, of course! One of the five bookings gave him special satisfaction: a concert with orchestra at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, scheduled for August 25. He saw it as a foot-in-the-door to winning access to the cathedral, a first step in rewarding the optimism he had expressed to David Oppenheim, two weeks earlier, in a letter of June 4:
We are asking permission for the use of Salzburg Cathedral, for our recording, through no less an avenue than the American embassy in Vienna. So I think we’ll take this little hurdle along the Mozart trail in good style!
Better than batteries?
And then there was the matter of better equipment. Long before commitments for the Mozart trip were made in any quarter, Biggs had broached the notion of upgrading the recording equipment they had used in 1954. On April 13, he wrote these lines to Columbia engineer Vincent Liebler:
I believe in the fall we’re to make a foray to another section of Europe, and this of course brings up the idea of taking along the Ampex. . . . Perhaps we could improve the results a good deal by better equipment, either the machine itself or the microphone or in the matter of cycle control. Or, for that matter, in having expert technical assistance on the spot! . . . It would be fun to discuss ideas with you, and I’ll phone Monday to see what time might be convenient.
Ever a master of the kind of diplomacy that bends people to one’s will yet leaves them grateful for it afterwards, Biggs had soon won the promise of elaborate new equipment from Columbia. As before, however, it would not arrive until virtually the eve of his departure. To accompany the new gear, Columbia engineers had prepared an eight-page, single-spaced document of almost hilariously complex instructions, binding it into a folio with the title, “PROCEDURE FOR ASSEMBLY AND OPERATIONS OF MR. E. POWER BIGGS [sic] 1955 RECORDING EQUIPMENT.” The cover bears the date, July 29, the Friday before the Monday on which the Biggses would wing away from Boston. That weekend, one of them (most likely Peggy, since she would be the one to operate the equipment most of the time) sat down at a typewriter to attempt to distill the essence of the instructions onto one clear page. Halfway down it, two lines of strike-outs are followed by, “(I just blew everything up).”
The new equipment would bring, if by no means simplicity, at least freedom from dependency on batteries. They would no longer need to rent and renew a brace of heavy car batteries, only to watch their power begin to fade almost immediately. This year they would simply test the nature of the local current, and, provided it was indeed alternating current, “re-cycle” it with their oscillator to feed the new professional-grade Ampex 350 the 117-volt 60-cycle current it required. The new hardware, with its oscillator in two heavy units, actually weighed three times as much as the previous year’s less sophisticated gear if one discounted the batteries. And at $4500 it also cost three times as much.10 Moreover, its delicacy would lead to repeated repairs in the field. Steinmeyer remembers well the number of times he found Biggs, to his horror, once more taking the back off of one unit or the other to fix its latest malfunction: “Oh no, he’s not opening that thing up again!” (See series of photos: Another repair 1, 2, and 3, and Repairs completed 1 and 2) Last but not least, the equipment would need to be grounded; they would have to carry a long coil of wire to reach the nearest outdoor, cable-to-earth from a lightning rod. In one of his personal jottings, Franklin fan Biggs wrote: “Greatly indebted to Ben Franklin throughout tour, since usually used lightning rod as ground.” And he could not resist bringing Franklin into his more formal account of recording Mozart at Salzburg Cathedral: “Even Benjamin Franklin entered the picture, for the huge lightning rod of the Cathedral (Franklin’s invention) afforded a solid and perfect ‘ground’ for all electrical equipment.”11
For the electrical technician in Biggs (his original field of training), the complexity of the equipment was a major part of the fun. In a note for the Mozart album about the session in Absam, a small town near Innsbruck where he recorded the third of “Bach’s little preludes and fugues,” BWV 555, Biggs wrote, “Electric current here was 165 volts and 50 cycles. We boosted this to 230 volts, then halved it to 115, then again transformed it to 117 and 60 cycles.” How he enjoyed the sheer “electrical-ness” of it all despite his well-known remark about current as “a perfect way to ring a doorbell, but a poor way to open a pipe valve”! On the day they picked up the equipment, it was surely his idea to lay it all out on the floor of a studio at Columbia to be formally documented by a professional photographer. (See photo: 1955 equipment.12) A few days later, on August 2, he would just as proudly pose beside it stacked on an industrial scale at the airport in Frankfurt, while the meter registered 310 kg. (680 pounds).13
New tasks for the Reiseleiter
As Steinmeyer had expected, the tasks crowded in as the day of departure approached. On July 14, barely two weeks before the trip was to begin, Biggs sent this list of wishes and requirements:
Dimensions of the equipment are enclosed. One thing that we must be careful to watch is that no tapes should ever be kept near the oscillator, and when the oscillator is in operation no tapes should come within six feet of it, or they will be magnetically affected. . . . We do need to rent or borrow a transformer (200–110 volt step-down transformer) capable of handling a load of approximately 1000 watts. The oscillator can handle voltages of 100 to 150 A.C., 45 to 90 cycles, so higher voltages will have to be reduced by a transformer. Can you arrange for this, and let us know in confirmation? . . . And if you can borrow a little porter’s cart, we can in this way move stuff very easily. . . . In writing to the various churches for permission, would you enquire about the line and current at each place? As far as we know, we will not be able to do any recording in places where only direct current is available. And thus we may find that some of the places will be impossible. . . . Also, could you let us know how you think we should go about making hotel reservations? I believe you mentioned some way of making arrangements through suggestions of ESSO travel bureau. We will have to stay somewhere!—and of course it will be wonderful if you have already made these arrangements.
On July 27, 1955—the day the Allies agreed to end their four-way occupation of Austria and partition of Vienna—Steinmeyer cabled Biggs, “Transformer is rented car arrangement will be settled Thursday.”
The vehicle Steinmeyer had rented for them this time was a deluxe Volkswagen Microbus, the passenger version of VW’s “Type 2” or “Transporter,” which, as long as one were in no hurry, would cope more easily with the 1200 pounds of passengers and baggage than last year’s sedan had. With its row of sky-lights to left and right of the sliding fabric sunroof and the “deluxe” color scheme of black-on-red divided by a wide strip of chrome, it was the fanciest version of the classic Microbus. The nimbleness with which the vehicle moved its load despite a piddling 36 horsepower (upgraded that model-year from 25, as if just for the Mozart tour) so impressed Biggs that he would soon purchase his own more spartan version of the VW bus for use in future recording expeditions on both sides of the Atlantic.
“On the trail” at last
Steinmeyer stresses that travel by automobile in postwar Germany and Austria was mostly a miserable business. Roads were poor, narrow, and much under repair. Usable Autobahn, at least on the routes they would take, remained essentially non-existent. The VW bus, while spacious, whirred along noisily and punished its passengers on the rough roads. Air conditioning was unknown. Accommodations and food were plain. (See photo: Somewhere on the Mozart trail, page 21.)
But the Biggses knew what they were in for and loved it. They had done it all before! Off they sped from Flughafen Frankfurt on Tuesday, August 2, perfectly on schedule and, within a day, were recording Mozart in the castle church at Kirchheimbolanden. In his essay for the Mozart album, Biggs would later paint this picture of the composer’s music-making visit and, through “the magic of recording,” our own aural one:
The church . . . today is just about as it was when Mozart climbed the organ stairs. The original organ, on one side, faces a gallery where the noblemen listened that cold January [day in 1778] to young Wolfgang and Maria von Weber. A great fireplace, still in this gallery, was the only source of heat for the whole building. Mozart must have been cold on the organ side. . . . Naturally, in this gallery—opposite the organ—we set our microphone. By the magic of recording, we may all crowd into the same gallery to listen to the sounds that Mozart heard.
Biggs judged the 1745 instrument by Michael Stumm to have remained reasonably true to its Mozart-era sonorities despite the replacement of its trackers (in 1935) with an electric playing action.14 (In the album notes, he declined, of course, to mention the instrument’s electrification.) And indeed it sets forth the first of Mozart’s two F-minor Fantasias (K. 594) with satisfying pungency, more successfully, one can argue, than the gigantic Steinmeyer in Passau (“the world’s largest church-organ”) renders the second (K. 608)—at least in Biggs’s over-large registration of it. On the other hand, it is hard to fault Biggs for wanting to give listeners their money’s worth in Passau, even if it meant taking the drama of the already wild K. 608 over the top. The performance of K. 608 became the only point of disagreement in otherwise glowing reviews of the Mozart album. The Diapason’s reviewer wrote, “The only disappointment . . . is the big Fantasia recorded at the Cathedral of Passau. The rather sluggish-sounding organ and the overly resonant acoustics remove much of the excitement from this brilliant piece.” In The American Organist, however, the reviewer wrote, “K. 608 is recorded . . . in Passau Cathedral [on] an impressive sounding Steinmeyer installed in 1928. To my ears this is the most exciting overall combination of music, instrument, and performance on the album.”
Biggs on the Mozart Fantasias
The two great Fantasias, Biggs decided, must have had their musical origin in the organ improvisations that Mozart had played “spontaneously, out of his imagination,” for many years. In his essay for the album, as well as in an article he wrote for the AGO Quarterly, he supplemented common knowledge about the mercenary origin of this hair-raising funerary music—in a cheap commission by Count Müller-Deym, the proprietor of a Viennese wax museum—with his own cogently argued speculation about their artistic roots:
That some of the extraordinary music that flowed fluently enough in improvisation from Mozart’s fingers is preserved at all on paper is due to the rather curious commission offered him . . . in what was to prove to be the final year of his life, pieces to be played by a little flute organ that functioned as part of a musical clock. . . . He chafed at the piping limitations of the toy organ, but he also completely disregarded them. . . . From the memory of years, Mozart set down music of matchless grandeur. The Fantasias, so fortunately preserved by this chance commission . . . afford us an image of Mozart’s own extempore organ playing style.15
Biggs went on to advance an even more intriguing theory about Mozart’s own likely performance of the two works, once he had put them on paper:
On his way south from Frankfurt, after setting these Fantasias to paper, Mozart stopped at Ulm and again played the organ. Who can doubt that this noble Cathedral echoed that day to the stirring strains of these Fantasias, set down for a clock to play, but conceived for just such a grand place? If only Count von Deym had asked for more! Please go to Part 3, Continued.
