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Notes 58.3 (2002) 607-608



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Book Review

Orgelführer Europa


Orgelführer Europa. By Karl-Heinz Göttert and Eckhard Isenberg. Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2000. [175 p. ISBN 3-7618-1475-5. DM 48.]

A recent essay by Timothy Garton Ash, entitled "The European Orchestra" (New York Review of Books 48 [17 May 2001]: 60- 67), begins with a riddle: "Will Europe never be Europe because it is becoming Europe?" Despite considering many of the senses of the word "Europe"--the geographical continent and the European Union, to name but two--Ash never imagines the "Europe" of Orgelführer Europa, a guide to some eighty organs, old and new, by Karl-Heinz Göttert and Eckhard Isenberg. Indeed, Ash would likely find their idea of Europe--a Europe without Germany --laughable. But not incomprehensible: Göttert and Isenberg have simply found themselves in a terminological muddle, one similar to that faced by those for whom "world music" means that of everywhere but Europe. Orgelführer Europa is actually a companion volume to the authors' Orgelführer Deutschland (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1998). The reader is alerted to this fact in small print on the backside of the dust jacket, and at the opening of the foreword, and elsewhere, yet it remains unfortunate that the front cover makes an initial impression that has to be dispelled. A larger question is how could one book, in less than three hundred pages, adequately survey the organs of Europe, even with Germany eliminated? That question can hardly be asked without also asking for whom would such a book be written.

Orgelführer Europa is organized around brief discussions (of five hundred to one thousand words) of some eighty notable organs each illustrated with one or more photographs, almost always of the instrument's façade. These discussions are grouped by country or occasionally by region. Some of these regions make sense, such as drawing together the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands and Belgium. Others do not, such as uniting Spain and Italy, whose organ building traditions are more diverse, while a catchall category for the four examples from Lithuania, Poland, and the Czech Republic is really no category at all. Specifications (that is, lists of stops) are included, but are not located within the text; they are all found together at the end of the book which could, perhaps, encourage comparisons.

The selection of the examples in a book such as this may be inevitably arbitrary but Orgelführer Europa is remarkably free from ideology. There are no (spoken or silent) refusals to include instruments by age (old or new), design (traditional or contemporary), or type of action (mechanical or electro-pneumatic). Indeed, an eclectic tone is established from the very beginning: on the cover of the dust jacket is one of the most familiar icons of classical organ building, the celebrated Müller organ of 1738 in Haarlem, while a monumental neoclassical instrument, a 1965 Marcussen in Copenhagen, appears as the frontispiece. Nonetheless, some of the omissions are baffling. It is hard to imagine a survey of English organ building in eight examples that fails to include the instrument of Westminster Abbey, not to mention that of Royal Festival Hall. It is even harder to imagine a survey of French organ building in a more generous thirteen examples that does not include the organ of Poitiers Cathedral, [End Page 607] universally recognized as the masterpiece of French classical organ building, and that of Sainte-Clotilde in Paris, made famous by César Franck.

The informal tone of the text reaches out to a general audience. Announcing a breezy style is the introduction of each discussion by what amounts to a kind of moniker. Some of these are merely colorful ("Evensong" for York Minster) while others are in some way informative ("Zurück zur Mechanik!" for the Grossmünster in Zürich). Others, such as "ein Mekka der Orgelkunst," could apply to just about any instrument in the survey, while all of them strive for a popular touch and suggest the prose style of travel brochures. The discussions themselves begin by specifying...

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