“Diess herrliche, imponirende Instrument”: Die Orgel im Zeitalter Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdys ed. by Anselm Hartinger, Christoph Wolff, Peter Wollny (review)

In October 2007, the Bach-Archiv, Mendelssohn-Haus, and Schumann-Haus in Leipzig held a symposium in that city devoted to those composers, all of whom had strong Leipzig associations. Concentrating on the organ, the gathering’s discussion touched on history, genre, and reception as well as practical matters of performance, editing, and organology. The presentations shared at that meeting are here brought forth by Breitkopf & Härtel in this volume of nineteen essays, all in German. This collection is third in the series Beiträge zur Geschichte der Bach-Rezeption, which is presented by the Bach-Archiv.

While Wolff, Wollny, and Hartinger are all well known as musicologists, the contributors to the volume include not just scholars but also organists and music editors. This variety of perspectives, coupled with the rich potential of exploring the intersection of one city, one instrument, and three composers, gives the book as a whole a winningly vivacious unevenness. Some essays are long, expertly argued, and amply illustrated with facsimiles and transcriptions; others are terse to the point of being a little awkward. The cumulative effect of so many approaches to such an inventive assortment of topics generates a propulsive liveliness.

The book is organized into five sections whose boundaries are sometimes only loosely observed, as befits an ambitious and original endeavor: the aesthetics of nineteenth-century organ music; the legacy of Bach; Mendelssohn as organist; practical concerns of nineteenth-century organists (training, careers, instruments); and the nineteenth-century Bach revival. This structure is thematic rather than chronological. That the book’s title highlights just one composer is perhaps misleading as Mendelssohn is the principal subject of only seven essays.

The three essays in the first section engage with nineteenth-century attitudes toward the organ. Arnfried Edler asks what prompted Schumann to try writing organ music, terrain that was foreign to him before the Sechs Fugen über den Namen: Bach, op. 60, composed in 1845 when he was thirty-five years old. Mendelssohn’s personal sentiments concerning the organ are explored by Burkhard Meischein, who mines the composer’s huge prose legacy. The ambitious designs executed by organ builder Carl August Buchholz (1785–1843) are surveyed by Kristian Wegscheider.

Jean-Claude Zehnder, whose essay on rhythmic concepts between 1700 and 1900 opens the second section, asserts that organ music is a particularly good milieu in which to investigate this aspect of musical interpretation because of the mechanical peculiarities of the instrument. A micro-biography of the German organist, composer, and Kantor Gottfried August Homilius (1714–1785) by Uwe Wolf stands as an example of the church music landscape for the generation immediately after Bach. Jumping off from an 1829 letter in which the twenty-year-old Mendelssohn lists his polyphonic inspirations and fails to mention Bach, Peter Wollny asks how Mendelssohn learned counterpoint. Wollny’s essay is brief, matter of fact and filled with many points of consonance between the composers, with seven examples showing how organ works by Mendelssohn subtly (texture, register) or overtly (melodic contour) refer to organ works by Bach. Rudolf Lutz, an organist and an instructor in historical improvisation, writes on the so-called Oxford fragment, an unfinished organ composition attributed to Mendelssohn on the chorale tune “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden”; Mendelssohn is thought to have improvised on the theme at his Bach concert at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig in 1840. R. Larry Todd transcribed this fragment in his 1981 edition of Mendelssohn’s chorale cantata on the same tune, but Lutz analyzes it and, in a fifteen-minute accompanying compact disc, performs his expansion of the fragment into a sonata convincingly written in the style of Mendelssohn. (A score is available from A-R Editions.)

The accessible third section “Mendelssohn als Organist” begins with not one but...