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E. Power Biggs in Mozart Country, Part 4

September 18, 2006
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The author can be reached at .@union.edu>

From Ochsenhausen, Biggs and company moved on to the jaw-dropper of all the Baroque places they would visit: Ottobeuren. Like a great white ship plowing across the sea of agriculture that surrounds it for miles, the Benedictine monastery at Ottobeuren begins to rise from the horizon of the Allgäu region many kilometers before one arrives at its portal. As Biggs later wrote to David Oppenheim, in a letter dated December 26, 1955, “It’s really quite a feather in our cap to have the Fantasy heard in—of all places—Ottobeuren, for this is just about the most remarkable example of rococo [anywhere], with a magnificent organ and spacious echo.” The “Fantasy” here is not by Mozart but by Bach: his Fantasia in G Major, BWV 572, for which, as Biggs wrote in the album notes, “the baroque splendor of Ottobeuren affords a perfect acoustical setting.”
Not the least of the rococo furnishings in the vast swirl of the church’s interior are the two extravagantly ornate choir organs completed by Karl Riepp in 1766 and renovated by the firm of Steinmeyer in 1914 and 1922.1 For this particular piece by Bach, the French accent of the larger, “Trinity” organ (four manuals, 49 registers) suits perfectly. And the recorded performance Biggs delivered as the ninth cut on the 1956 “Eight” album was a jaw-dropper in its own right. The coda alone, with fiery manual flourishes over the chromatically descending buzzsaw of a 16' Bombarde “to an insistent dominant,” was itself worth the price of the album. Among countless recorded performances of Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue (including certainly his own rather plain one in Volume Five of “Bach Organ Favorites” played on the Harvard Flentrop), the performance he achieved at Ottobeuren on Friday, August 12, 1956, remains a stunner, easily the equal of its amazing setting. (See photo: Biggs at Riepp console, Ottobeuren.)

Recording cut short at Ottobeuren

Riepp’s “Trinity” organ stands on the “Epistle” side of Ottobeuren’s broad chancel, his smaller “Holy Ghost” organ on the “Gospel” side. On Steinmeyer’s many trips past the high altar under the gaze of visitors to the basilica (a three-star destination—“worth a journey”—in the Michelin Guide) to position and then to adjust his microphone, which he and Biggs had decided should be hung on the opposite side of the choir, in front of the lesser organ, Steinmeyer remembers feeling that decorum required him to genuflect at each pass. Had he failed once to do so? The sudden failure of a critical part in the Stanis-Hoffman oscillator that afternoon brought the Ottobeuren recording session to a cruel halt just as Biggs was moving from Bach to Brahms. It meant that for the rest of the tour they would have to perform a tricky, manual monitoring of cycle-control during each session, a major nuisance.2 (See photo: Finished too soon at Ottobeuren, page 27.) Ironically, they would soon receive this note from “boss” David Oppenheim, posted two days before the breakdown: “I am happy to hear that the Mozart trail is proving to be a negotiable one and that the equipment has settled down to doing its job.”
A half hour’s drive farther to the east on Saturday morning, August 13, brought them to a third example of baroque splendor, the monastery church at Irsee. The recording log entry for that visit consists of only one cryptic line: “the famous Irsee wobble.” And so they pressed on to examine organs at “Mozart sites” in Landsberg and Augsburg that weekend (not yet recording any) and arrived in Oettingen in time to dine bei Steinmeyer on Sunday evening. There, at the midpoint of their odyssey, they could slow the pace for two days, enjoy three nights of the Steinmeyer family’s hospitality, view the Steinmeyer organ shop—and finally get some laundry done.

An all-time favorite organ for Biggs

While the travelers recuperated from their two-week whirl of new places, Oettingen served as a point of departure for two day trips. On Monday, August 15 (the date Biggs had originally proposed for beginning the whole journey!), Steinmeyer took Biggs “down the road” to examine a 1948 Steinmeyer at the church of St. Georg in nearby Nördlingen, one of a trio of much-visited medieval towns along the Romantische Strasse. Biggs played some Brahms and Ritter on it, which they recorded to give themselves a chance to practice the “work-around” on the hobbled oscillator—nothing very inspiring for Biggs that day.
Tuesday, August 16, however, would present Biggs with one of the highlights of the trip. That morning, after another short drive from Oettingen, they came to the small monastery of Mönschsdeggingen, very much off all beaten paths. Here Steinmeyer introduced Biggs to an organ that he would later number among his 20 favorites of all time: the little seven-rank liegende Orgel (horizontal organ) of 1694, built by the Saxon (Lausitzer) Paulus Prescher (then working in Nördlingen). The instrument lies on, and partly below, the floor of the chancel, centered between the choir stalls on either side. In the manuscript of an unpublished (and undated—but probably post-1970) essay about his best-liked organs, Biggs wrote, “The pipes point away from the player “en chamade,” like so many guns on a battleship; the organ [thus] gains wonderful tone projection and accent.”3 It is precisely these qualities of course that Biggs most appreciated in any organ; and we hear them in full measure in the tuneful Little Prelude and Fugue in F-major, BWV 556 (accompanied, unfortunately, by a faint whistle that sometimes bedeviled the Ampex). Biggs’s choice to pluck this music from his portfolio that morning was a small stroke of programming genius, as fitting for the Prescher instrument as the selection of BWV 572 had been for the Riepp at Ottobeuren. Biggs must have carried a vast library of sheet music with him; but where did he keep it all? Steinmeyer has no recollection of any supply beyond the slender folder Biggs brought with him each day.

From Oettingen to Salzburg

Nine days remained before Biggs was to appear for his concert with orchestra at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, now rescheduled for the evening of Friday, August 26. After that initial “pass” through Salzburg, another week of Mozart-touring would follow, before a return for the sonata project in Salzburg Cathedral that would begin on Monday, September 5. On their way to the first Salzburg engagement they would spend August 17 and 18, Wednesday and Thursday, recording (along with pieces by Brahms, Reger, and Purcell) Mozart’s Prelude and Fugue in C Minor, K. 546, at both Ulm and Augsburg. (Condensing geography for the Mozart album, Biggs locates the prelude at Ulm, played on the Cathedral’s Walcker organ, and the fugue in the Pfarrkirche, Heilig-Kreuz, Augsburg, played on another Steinmeyer.) The party of four—Hanne Steinmeyer had joined the expedition at Oettingen—spent the afternoon and evening of Friday, August 19, playing (and recording to their hearts’ content) the automated musical instruments in the collection of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, to which Steinmeyer had persuaded “Verwaltungsdirektor Bäßler” to give them free access. There Biggs filled two reels of tape with such mechanical novelties as “Vierundzwanzig Trompeten und zwei Pauken,” followed by five more reels with numerous takes of the organ sonatas of Josef Rheinberger, his perennial favorite among “later” composers. He played the Rheinberger on the large Steinmeyer in the Festsaal of the museum.4 By noon on Saturday, August 20, the group had reached Innsbruck and environs where, for the rest of the weekend, they would explore possibilities for recording and make final arrangements to do so at Fügen, at Absam, and in Innsbruck’s famed “Silver Chapel” the following week, when they were to pass through the area again.
On Tuesday, August 23, the quartet reached Salzburg and settled in for the three days before Biggs’s Mozarteum “debut.” Between practice sessions with the orchestra for Friday’s concert, Biggs and Steinmeyer made a half day’s excursion eastward into the Salzkammergut for a recording session of little consequence at Bad Ischl; and later in the week Biggs recorded Brahms, Mozart, and motorcycles in the Church of St. Cajetan at the center of Salzburg, on the single most “authentic” Mozart organ he would find in his travels. In one of his notes, Biggs muses that he was hearing music exactly as Mozart had (except for the traffic noise), complete with the annoying sound of church’s strangely unmusical bell.

Playing Bierdeckel in Passau

With the Mozarteum engagement behind them, and with all arrangements completed for starting to record the sonatas a week later, the travelers set forth once more on the morning of Saturday, August 27. Steinmeyer drove them 200 km. northward, to the easternmost corner of Bavaria where, in the picturesque city of Passau, “piled” on an ever narrower tongue of land at the confluence of the Danube, the Inn, and the Ilz, they would keep their 3:00 p.m. appointment to record Brahms chorales and Mozart’s dramatic K. 608 on the huge 1928 Steinmeyer organ in Passau Cathedral, another grand baroque space. After dinner on their second evening in Passau the four of them played “if you drop the coaster, you drink!” at a local Gaststätte. (See photo: Bierdeckel game in Passau.) The next morning, the Steinmeyers found themselves delivering curt messages between the two Biggses at breakfast: from Peggy, “tell Biggsy, please . . . ,” and from Biggs, “Well, please tell Peggy . . . .” Had one or the other dropped the beer coaster too often and downed too many draughts the previous evening? Had Peggy finally had enough of living out of the single suitcase they shared between them—only a fraction the size of the collection of gear they hauled around every day? Had all those noisy takes of K. 608 on “the world’s largest church organ” simply driven her over the edge? Steinmeyer has no recollection of the issue that morning but remembers that relations warmed again soon enough—probably long before lunchtime.

Repairs at Lambach

In any event, no visitor could stay angry for long at their next Mozart stop, on Monday, August 29: the monastery at Lambach, Austria, 100 km. southeast of Passau. “It is a beautiful place,” Biggs wrote, “with the courtyard buildings painted a jonquil yellow so that the whole place seems filled with sunshine whether or not the day [is] bright.” After the trip, Biggs remembered it as one of their happiest sojourns, despite some frustrating moments:
In the process of recording, we somehow dropped a minute screw vitally important to our equipment. [Steinmeyer: “Nothing less than the screw that held the recording head in place!”] After several fruitless hours of search for it we gave up, and returned disconsolate to the hotel. Next morning we were greeted by the smiling Abbot. He “couldn’t sleep” he said, and had arisen at four and searched the floor foot by foot by candle light and—minor miracle—he had found the missing part. Later that day, the microphone cable parted, necessitating metallic connection. A monastery soldering iron was produced, plugged in at the altar (where often is to be found the only electrical outlet) and repairs made right there.5
(See series of photos: Soldering at Lambach, pages 28–29.)

Up the valley of the Inn

On Tuesday, August 30, the travelers’ path led them southwestward, again toward Innsbruck. By the end of the week, Biggs needed to reach Feldkirch, at the extreme western tip of Austria near the border of Liechtenstein, where he was to play a concert on Saturday, September 3 (the second of the five that the American embassy in Vienna had arranged for him). On the way to Feldkirch, they would carry out plans laid the previous week for recording sessions at Fügen, Absam, and Innsbruck—located in a convenient row along their route up the valley of the Inn. In the parish church at Fügen (famed for Franz Gruber’s first performance of his carol “Stille Nacht”), Steinmeyer recalls everyone’s amazement at finding the seven-year-old son of the organist playing the “Mozart organ” with the virtuosity of a seven-year-old Mozart himself. (See photo: Another young Mozart?) Playing a handsome eighteenth-century organ in the Pilgrimage Church of St. Michael at Absam, Biggs recorded BWV 555, the last of the four “Little Eight” for which he had wanted to produce more “authentic” realizations than the ones he had carried home in 1954. And at the Silberne Kapelle in Innsbruck he competed with ceaseless traffic noise to record Mozart’s Adagio “for glass harmonica,” K. 356 (included in the Tour album), played on the chapel’s Italian organ of 1580, as well as music by Italian composers (never released). On the day after the recital in Feldkirch, Sunday, September 4, the Microbus with its precious cargo would retrace the long route eastward through the Alps to Innsbruck and then on to Salzburg. During that 350-kilometer grind across half of Austria, Biggs must have savored some sense of triumph at all that had fallen into place for the climactic week to come: a prestigious Mozart orchestra, an expert Mozart conductor, and permission to record in the most splendid of all Mozart spaces.

“An experience never to be forgotten”

On Monday morning, September 5, when Biggs and his team of “amateurs” carried their recording gear into Salzburg Cathedral (see photo: Arrival in Salzburg, page 30), they found a crew of hyper-professional engineers from Philips already at work, officiously setting up their fancy two-track equipment to record the project in stereo. Next to these Profis in their starched white laboratory coats, Georg Steinmeyer remembers feeling like a brash upstart.
That day he would be placing the microphone for the last time. As planned, he and Hanne would now peel away from the venture and go about the business of their move to America. With everything “set to record,” the two Steinmeyers wished the two Biggses Lebet wohl, sped away in the Microbus (without that load, how it could fly!), and reached Munich that evening. On September 11, Steinmeyer found time to send his friends a letter:
Dear Biggses, finally I have the time to write to you after being away from Salzburg almost a week. We arrived safely in Munich on the 5th in the evening. . . . On the 6th it took us from 8:30 a.m. until 4:20 p.m. to get through the whole visa procedure. With the baby it was not too much fun. We went back to Oettingen on the same evening, since a letter from Estey Organ Corporation was waiting for us. . . . We are finishing our packing at the moment and shall ship our trunks probably next week.

He went on to explain that Estey wanted him to come immediately, that the airline tickets the company had sent were expected any day, and that he would thus surely not be available to drive the Biggses from Salzburg to Frankfurt at the end of their Austrian circuit.
In Salzburg, meanwhile, Biggs found himself in his element:
There in Salzburg Cathedral, with acoustics on the same ample scale as Ulm, in the organ gallery where Mozart himself had once played the Sonatas, we recorded all 17 of these enjoyable works. The orchestra (the Camerata Academica of Salzburg) duplicated that used by the composer, and the director was Dr. Bernhard Paumgartner, leading Mozart authority. To complete the picture of authenticity, as far as possible only the organ stops in the present instrument that derive from the organ Mozart played were used. . . . The drama of recording there in the darkened cathedral through long evening sessions, with the Cathedral Square cleared of all traffic by the Salzburg police, is an experience never to be forgotten.6

Rehearsing during the day, the players mastered each piece so well (reading scores provided by Biggs) that they needed no more than a take or two in the evenings, and rarely an insert. The Diapason’s reviewer wrote, “The authentic atmosphere captured here apparently inspired all concerned to great heights—the results approach perfection itself!” And the reviewer for The American Organist agreed: “Playing and recording are uniformly excellent. . . . I feel increasingly indebted to Mr. Biggs for his outstanding contributions of this type.”
That the recording taken with a single microphone, placed by one who felt himself almost an interloper at the scene, should have been chosen by Columbia over what the crack team from Philips had produced still makes Georg Steinmeyer beam with pride. “Of course,” he concedes, “Columbia may not have had the means at that time even to process a stereo recording.” And yet it seems likely that Philips could easily have provided a monaural version if Columbia had asked for one. In any event, Columbia Masterworks was happy enough to release what the “Biggs team” had produced, with no further ado. And the reviews seem to have justified their decision.

“Salzburg Festival Tempo

All in major keys, the sonatas differ from the two Fantasias, in their unsettling key of F minor, as day does from night:
Every one perfect in form, all seventeen are nonetheless quite varied in character. Some are of rare expressive beauty, as if for Christmas. Many are for festival occasions, particularly those with trumpets, oboes, and kettle drums. . . . It was in fact a remark of Dr. Paumgartner that led us to rechristen these engaging works “Festival” Sonatas. For Dr. Paumgartner accepted a compliment on his choice of tempo (in the C major Sonata that opens our recording) with the remark, “Yes, that’s the Salzburg Festival Tempo!”7

How grateful the un-churchy Biggs felt to be given a designation for these works beyond the customary “epistle,” or “church,” or even “short”! “Having noted their church origin,” he mischievously wrote, “one may as well forget it, for here is music to be enjoyed not only on Sunday but all through the week!”8 Finally, Biggs the connoisseur of “tonal clarity in the midst of reverberation” offers this characteristic observation:

It is worth noting how very cleverly Mozart writes for the spacious length of Salzburg Cathedral. Themes are strong and chordal in outline, so that the sound of orchestra and organ may pile on itself with fine effect yet without confusion.9

The measured tempo of the Paumgartner/Biggs performances sets them favorably apart from other recorded realizations of the pieces, especially considered as a collection. Most of the others sound almost frenetic by comparison, too over-energized to be enjoyed for more than one or two sonatas at a time. The graceful “swing” of the 1956 readings lets the seventeenth sonata fall as refreshingly on the ear as the first. Like Biggs in solo performance, these players seem to be listening closely to the music as they perform it. We can bet that the compliment by “someone” about the tempo Paumgartner set came from Biggs himself.

Homeward with his trophies

With the seventeen sonatas literally in the bag by the end of the day on September 9, the Biggses set off on Saturday, September 10, to keep their three remaining Austrian concert engagements (September 11 at St. Florian’s, near Linz, September 16 at Klagenfurt, and September 17 at Graz) and to continue exploring Mozart sites along the way. The far-flung concerts Angelo Eagon had arranged would take them, almost amusingly, to the most distant corners of Austria. For the one at Feldkirch, they had already journeyed far to the west. Now it would be 150 km. north, to the Monastery of St. Florian, for a recital on its “Bruckner” organ, then down the Danube to Vienna (200 km.), and finally to the southeastern provincial cities of Klagenfurt and Graz, close to the Yugoslavian border. The concert at Graz cathedral, on September 18, would place the Biggses 15 hours of travel time distant from the plane they were to board in Frankfurt for the flight home on September 21, according to calculations scribbled by Biggs as he planned their schedule for the final days.
Biggs kept the Ampex and all 84 tapes with him as the journey continued; but he must have sent the oscillator and all its accessories home at some point, possibly already from Linz following two post-Salzburg recording sessions: one at Kremsmünster on the way to Linz and one at St. Florian’s (in both cases, music of Brahms and Bruckner, none of it ever released). To avoid a repeat of the previous year’s nightmare (tapes long delayed in shipping and customs), Biggs wanted to bring his trophies home this time as part of his personal luggage. And it seems to have worked. Although he would still have to pay duty on the tapes’ contents, and leave them in the possession of U.S. customs in Boston for a week, payment could wait, it appears, until a final determination was made (by him) of the extent of the value of their contents.10 In the meantime he would have them to edit.
For travel from Salzburg to St. Florian’s and on to Vienna, the Biggses were accorded the services of an embassy car (a 1952 Plymouth station wagon) and driver. (After Graz, we can hope that they traveled by train, since it would have been more comfortable by far than by automobile, given the roads of the day and the mountainous terrain to be traversed. Steinmeyer points out that today’s ubiquitous car-rental agencies were unknown in the Europe of 1955; his own two rentals had been by special arrangement with dealers.) On their way from St. Florian’s to Vienna via Melk, Krems, and Klosterneuburg, the Biggses stopped to view Mozart’s reversed initials on the organ case at Ybbs, carved by him at the age of eleven. Biggs snapped a picture (see photo: Mozart’s initials at Ybbs, page 29), made his own pencil-tracing, and later began one of his essays about the trip by citing this curiosity:

M A W 1767—So reads the penknife signature on the organ case of the little church in the . . . town of Ybbs, on the Danube. Apparently Mozart was fond of inverting the order of his name—to Mozart Amadeus Wolfgang—and to announce himself as “Trazom.”11

As they had begun their tour with music-making at Kirchheimbolanden, so would they end it. On September 6, Biggs had received a sudden, irresistibly cordial invitation to return to Kirch-heimbolanden and play a recital there on the eve of the flight home from Frankfurt. He happily assented—in part, perhaps, because he liked the symmetry of it. On that flight home, he may have begun to compose the essay that added the symmetry of one last, very Biggsian, justification for his latest recording venture, now completed:

But why travel 15,000 miles with some 850 pounds [Biggs here ups the weight by 200 pounds!] of electronic equipment to record all this music? The spice of curiosity and the search for authenticity are the reasons, coupled with the conviction that the union of modern recording techniques with the arts of the classic organ builders is a particularly invaluable coincidence of the new and the old. By this happy coupling we hear music with new character and authenticity and we learn of organ building arts that have become almost forgotten.12

“Fifty miles of tape” Two weeks later, on October 8, he could already send this report to David Oppenheim:

I’m ploughing right into the 84 tapes, which are now safely through customs . . . and know that we have safely in the bag all items for the expected groupings: 1) All the Mozart music (“Down the Mozart Trail”), 2) the Bach “Eight little fugues and preludes” on eight historic European organs, 3) the Brahms “Eleven Chorale Preludes,” Opus 122 and some Bruckner—in eleven European Cathedrals.13

And on October 30 Biggs would write to him once more:

At last I’ve sorted out some fifty miles of tape and ploughed through stacks of photographs of last summer! And, as soon as convenient to you, I’d like to bring down the following for your consideration.

In “the following,” however, Biggs had replaced the Brahms and Bruckner with a program he proposed to entitle “Musical Fun in the Munich Museum,” with the sounds of all the automated instruments: “I think you’ll be tickled when you hear them,” Biggs wrote to Oppenheim, “In fact, you’ll grin from ear to ear at the ‘Twenty-four Trumpets and Two Kettle Drums.’” Oppenheim may have smiled, all right, but probably more at Biggs’s enthusiasm than at the prospect for any profit from the release of such a recording.
It would take less time to get the Bach album ready for release than the three-LP Mozart compendium simply because most of it was ready to go. Biggs had brought recordings of all eight of the little preludes and fugues back with him the previous year. But four of them dissatisfied him. He had wanted to replace these with versions to be played on more appropriate organs as he happened upon them on the Mozart trip. Notably, he tried each one of the four on only one organ, found the results pleasing, and put the piece away for the rest of the trip. The four replacements were these: No. 1 played on the Andreas Silbermann organ at Ebersmünster (replacing the big Schnitger in Hamburg), No. 2 played on the 18th-century Fuchs/Mauracher organ at Absam, Austria (replacing a modern Flentrop at Amstelveen, Holland), No. 4 played on the small Prescher organ at Mönchsdeggingen (replacing a modern organ in Hilversum, Holland), and No. 5 played on the Gabler organ at Ochsenhausen (replacing the Schnitger at Stein-kirchen). The others heard on the final LP, all recorded in 1954, were No. 2 at St. Jakobi, Lübeck, No. 6 at St. Jan’s, Gouda, No. 7 at Neuenfelde (hence no need for another Schnitger?), and No. 8 at Lüneburg (on the “Böhm” organ once played by Bach). Rounding out the album (some choice for “filler”!) would be Bach’s G-major Fantasia recorded at Ottobeuren.
Barbara Owen has rightly written that this album (fully entitled, Bach: Eight Little Preludes and Fugues, “played on eight classic European organs,” and released as ML 5078 in April of 1956, three months ahead of the Mozart collection), “deserved more attention than it received at the time.”14 Despite the sense one often has of hearing the music through a tunnel (or from the vestibule or outside a window) the easily discernable variety with which the nine organs speak makes for a rich collection. This album stands apart from the other three in the 1955–56 quartet in demonstrating how enormously different, yet uniformly appealing, older organs can sound from one specimen to the next.?>

“Bitten by the multi-track bug”

Until he heard an organ recorded in stereo, Biggs had not grasped the value of binaural recording for the instrument. He had assumed that any solo instrument would benefit little from spatial expansion. What he could not have known was that the space itself into which an organ speaks, more important for that instrument than for any other, would be precisely what stereophonic miking dramatically expands. It was, in fact, just before he began to edit his monaural Mozart recordings in late September that Biggs happened to experience the revelation of stereophonic sound. October 1 found him once more typing an excited note to David Oppenheim:

It’s certainly dangerous to go to the Hi-Fi Fair! One gets bitten [by] the multi-track bug! I didn’t believe that dual track recording meant much with the organ, but some of the demonstrations are very convincing. There are wonderful possibilities with some of the places we know in Europe.

Within two years, Europe would indeed provide the locus for Biggs’s first recordings in stereo. By then, he and Peggy would be exploring “Flentrop country” in their own VW bus, coming to know as many early instruments as they could find, and capturing Bach on the Schnitger/Flentrop organ at Zwolle for Bach at Zwolle, KS 6005, released in July 1958 as one of Columbia Masterworks’ earliest stereophonic LPs. For Biggs, real Bach country would have to wait at least another decade—but how it already beckoned to him!

Perhaps like Mozart

It should be easy enough to forgive E. Power Biggs (if forgiveness is in any sense required) for marketing himself and his instrument as successfully as he did. For the fundamental motivation behind his entrepreneurship was his own pure joy at music-making—and on the pipe organ no less! Yes, he made a living at it, and by all accounts a handsome one. But Biggs was one of those lucky few for whom the remuneration for “what they do” would also have been largely beside the point. The point for him was the music: making it the way he liked to make it, and sharing it on its own terms—as he saw those terms—with anyone who cared to listen. That legions became willing to pay good money to listen simply gilded the lily.
For Biggs, the music and the instrument were “the things,” and the church association of both nearly nothing. It must have been with some sense of identity with Mozart that he wrote for the A.G.O. Quarterly, “Once Mozart’s years as an organist at Salzburg were past, he did not seek a church position. Yet all his life he played organs all over Europe, and he did so for no other reason than that it gave him pleasure.”15 So, too, did Biggs “never again seek a church position” once he no longer needed one, and so too did he play organs all over Europe as much because it gave him pleasure as for any other reason.
Whether valid or not, the appearance of a kind of perpetual youthfulness in Mozart’s genius may have come to influence Biggs in his own development; for one can easily argue that he became more youthful in the application of his own special genius the older he grew. It is as if a Bach-like younger Biggs became more and more a Mozartean older Biggs. Whether Mozart enjoyed his own music-making more, or less, than Bach did his, no one can say. But the flourishes of exuberance that repeatedly erupt in his music—certainly in those “festival sonatas”—allow us to infer that Mozart might now and then have let out a whoop of glee at what he was creating, while we imagine Bach permitting himself merely a quiet smile of satisfaction (even as we may agree that Bach surely deserved to jump for joy at the excellence of nearly every bar he composed). Despite those seemingly “contrived-to-be-Bach-like” Biggs countenances that glare at us from so many of the Biggs/Bach album covers, we know that Biggs himself found a level of joy in his own music-making that seems to have been most akin to what convention, rightly or wrongly, imagines for Mozart. We know that Biggs, at least, saw in him the most joyful of music-makers and felt a kinship.

A third coming of the Biggses

After leaving Salzburg, Georg and Hanne Steinmeyer would not see their friends again until the day, one year later, when the Biggses’ Studebaker convertible, top down, rolled into the driveway at their first apartment in Brattleboro, Vermont. It was a sunny day in October, 1956 [editor’s note: 50 years ago to the month, of this issue of The Diapason]. Biggsy and Peggy had “motored” (as one did in those days) across Massachusetts on “The Mohawk Trail” from Cambridge to the Berkshires, to view the fall foliage and to deliver a special housewarming gift. From the back seat of the Studebaker Biggs produced a brand new Columbia phonograph, the latest model, and from the trunk a set of his current albums—foremost among them, of course, the ones Steinmeyer had helped him make.
Georg Steinmeyer still marvels at the magic of that record player: “It sounded absolutely wonderful to us. We listened and listened and listened. It was such a treasure—like nothing else we knew.” None of the excellent stereo equipment he has owned since has delivered quite the same level of psycho-acoustical excitement. We understand! The intervening decades have produced countless fine recordings of the same music played on the same, and similar, instruments. Technically, they sound ten times better than those old mono LPs—yet not one-tenth as thrilling.

 

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