Should I be so cursed as to live longer than Old Parr (who, his tombstone tells us, was born in the reign of K. Edw. 4 and died in that of the first K. Charles) I shall never understand the rationale for German geographical nomenclature. Saxony proper is down in the southeast corner of the Democratic Republic, but LOWER Saxony is up in the north of the Federal Republic. I suppose it all has something to do with elevation, but I keep thinking, No wonder they lost the war!
Apparently Lower Saxony is a jimdandy place for organ hunters. Organ hunters are, almost to a person, organists, and they spend their vacations tootling away, like the Phantom of the Opera, at the keyboards of cobwebby old organs in forgotten churches and off-the-track cathedrals. Actually, I suppose I am being unfair, for the organs they pursue are mostly those built by notable builders in notable periods of organ-history. My organ-playing having been limited to an Estey reed organ in the country church of my childhood, I can only dimly comprehend their enthusiasm, though, in the interests of my ongoing education, I am always delighted to hear the results of such explorations when they get waxed, as here. However, I suppose I must admit· another of my many musical weaknesses here: I have a curious theory that organs are meant to be heard in place, rather than on records. There is something missing on the records, and I suspect it is that my miniaturized living-room does not have the acoustical qualities of a Gothic cathedral. Well, someday I shall build me a Gothic vault , for listening to organ records.
The present organ-tour involves four towns. Luneburg is a city of some 60,000 located about thirty miles southeast of Hamburg. It has--or had before the war--several Gothic churches of the high Middle Ages. one of them being the five-aisled St. John's. The organ thereof was built by the sixteenth century Hollander Hendrik Niehoff (though it has had to have work, as they say.) It is highly appropriated that the Bohm variations be used to demonstrate it, for it was Bohm's instrument while he was employed there from 1698 until his death in 1733.
Some sixty miles to the south lies the town of Gifhorn, a third the size of Luneburg and apparently possessed of no distinguishing feature other than the organ of St. Nicholas. This was the work of Christian Vater, star pupil of the legendary Arp Schnitger. The work chosen to demonstrate the organ is an unusual one--a set of "treatments" of the chorale "Allein Gott in der Hoh sei Ehr" by Sweelinck and three of his pupils, Andreas Duben, Peter Hasse, and Gittfried Scheidt.
Moving still farther south, and within hollering distance of East Germany, we come to Grauhof, a northern suburb of Goslar, a city intermediate in size between the other two and noted for its beer and a tower called the Zwinger with walls twenty-three feet thick. But then beer and zwingers go hand in hand. The Grauhof organ (builder not named) has apparently suffered little change since the early eighteenth century. The Walther variations seem to have no historical connections with it. The little cabinet organ, or positiv, is described only as "very old," but it is given three very different works (by Andrea Gabrieli, Orlando Gibbons, and Bach) to show off its transparent sound.
Nothing is said of the performers, whom I have not encountered before, except (presumably) where they are stationed. If that is what the appended town-names mean, Messrs. Gwinner and Piper play the organs they are accustomed to, whereas Messrs. Oehms and Rovatkay were imported from Trier and Hannover respectively.
