The Schnitger organ of the “Grote of St. Michaelskerk” in Zwolle (1721)
The history and the fate of the Zwolle St.
Michaelskerk organ is quite typical of almost all important European
instruments: Built by the prestigious baroque organbuilding family Schnitger,
subject to alterations mirroring the changeable fashion of different
periods and finally restored back to its supposed baroque form.
In the beginning, the Grote church of Zwolle, also called St. Michaels
church, had three organs: two small instruments and a larger one. The first
note about the main organ, dates from 1505. At that time, Johannes Jacobsz
van Bilsteyn from Rhenen built a large organ with 3 manuals and pedal: the
Hoofdwerk (Great) was constructed as Blokwerk, with all 32 up to 34 voices
sounding at the same time, the Bovenwerk (Echo) with 4 or 5 voices and the
Rugpositief (Positiv) with 4 voices. In 1643, Jan Morlet III from Arnhem
modernized this organ and made the basic voices of the Blokwerk playable on
the Pedals. In 1669, the tower of St. Michaels (which at 128 meters was the
tallest in the Netherlands) burnt down after being struck by lightning, also
partly destroying the main organ. Because lack of finances for costly repair,
the organ was disassembled and stored. For more than 30 years, the
congregation worshipped without an organ, until in 1718 Bernard Hüte, physician and
town mayor of Zwolle donated 12.000 guilders for the construction of a
new organ. His brother Thomas added another 2.000 guilders.
At that time, a Zwolle merchant, in Hamburg on bussiness, met
Vincent Lübeck, organist at St. Nicolai, Hamburg, who recommended Arp
Schnitger to the Zwolle authorities as builder for the new organ. This
resulted in the assignment to construct a new organ in Zwolle. On January 3,
1719, Arp Schnitger signed a contract to make an organ with 46 stops,
consisting of Ober Manual (16 feet based), Unter Manual (8 feet based),
Rückpositiv (8 feet based) and Pedal (16 feet based). The agreed price was
11.000 guilders, on the condition that the city of Zwolle would deliver
the needed materials of stone, wood and iron. The unused Catholic church in Zwolle was given
to Arp Schnitger and his sons Frans Caspar Schnitger
and Johann Georg Schnitger as a workshop for the construction.
Because Arp Schnitger died in 1719, some months after the beginning of the
construction, his sons completed the new organ in 1721. It was examined by
three well known Dutch organists over the course of 12 days and they found
that the Schnitgers had delivered an organ of 63 stops (whereas the contract
of 1719 called for only 46 and the second contract called for a fourth
manual as a Borstwerk with 11 extra stops), in addition to other
improvements. In their report, they were full of praise for the organ, but
they also passed some criticism. Some of the voices were not strong enough
and others had not been modeled after the best ones in certain other Dutch
organs. They also objected to the pitch and temperament with regard to using
the organ with other instruments. The Schnitgers had tuned the organ to "chorton",
but the examiners asserted that a lower pitch was in general use in the
Netherlands. In their letter of October 6, 1721, the brothers Schnitger
refuted this criticism, resulting in the cancellation of proposed
modifications. Up to his death, in 1729, Frans Caspar Schnitger took care
for the maintenance of the instrument. This task was taken over by Albertus
Anthoni Hinsz, the successor in the family undertaking, who married the
widow of Schnitger. His stepson Frans Caspar assisted him and later on
Heinrich Hermann Freytag and his son Herman Eberhard also.
Over the course of time the organ experienced numerous detrimental
modifications. Especially notable are the extensive restoration and
modifications, carried out in 1837 by Petrus van Oeckelen
(Groningen), including changing the organ to equal temperament. Later on
modifications were carried out by J.C. Scheuer (Zwolle) in 1873, van
Oeckelen in 1883 (including the deplorable alteration of most mixture and
some reed stops), J. Proper in 1910 and Van Dam in 1925.
After the Second World War, a comprehensive renovation turned out to be
indispensable. After many discussions it was decided to return the organ
very close to the original situation in 1721, recovering also the original
high pitch ( a’= 502 Hz). In 1950, organ builder Dirk Andries Flentrop
(Zaandam), was charged with this task, which he carried out in the period
1953-1955. It appeared that the chaos of pipes over centuries, made by
different organ builders, still contained sufficient original material to
reconstruct the original Schnitgerian scales. The restoration plan included
repairing of the pipe work, attaching new ivory on the keys and the
construction of new pedals. Although some later introduced modifications
remained preserved, the disposition of Schnitger was restored as good as
possible by using the original materials, and, if necessary, also by new
pipes made by Flentrop. Given the Neo-Baroque ideals at that time frame, the
restoration has been carried out very conscientious. But later on ideas
about the ideal organ sound changed and knowledge about restoration of
organs improved. Therefore, Flentrop, in the last two decades carried out a
series of additional voicing corrections, in order to arrive more closely to
the authentic starting point. Especially, lowering the wind pressure to
approx. 78 mm and the voicing corrections based on this value had beneficial
effect on the timbre of the organ.
The restoration work is still in progress and this is where the
documentary function of the Sonus Paradisi project takes its place. In
October 2007, we were invited to do the acoustic documentation of the
present state of the organ so that its sound could be archived for future and
the comparison with the state after the proposed reconstruction is possible.
As the idea of linear progress of knowledge evaded with the end of
modernity, we are now more aware of the fact that our present state of
knowledge and the ideal of the organ sound may not be of a higher value than
that of our predecessors. In fact, every generation tried to maintain the
organ in good shape, but the ideas about the "correct shape" of the organ
sound changed much throughout the centuries. Speaking from the perspective
of the late 20th century scholars trained in the schools heavily marked by
the omnipresent historism, we would now like to see every piece of art in
its original form as it came out of the hands of its ancient author.
Therefore, we usually tend to see the alterations made to the organ during
the course of the centuries as detrimental. 19th century seems especially
"destructive" as almost all valuable baroque organs were drastically rebuilt
in the "romantic" or "symphonic" style of that era. Our present
restorations, therefore, tend to remove all such alterations and reconstruct
the original shape of the instrument. However, we must not absolutize our
present day ideal. First of all, after Karl Popper, we should not have
difficulty to admit that our cognition is always limited and therefore also
our restorations will be most probably criticized by our successors as not
authentic enough. Second, we must not take for granted that our ideal of
pure baroque organ sound matches that of baroque organbuilders. We
must abandon the silent presupposition that we "know" how the organ sounded
when it was built almost 300 years ago. Furthermore, with H.-G.
Gadamer, we should not be ashamed to acknowledge the constitutive role of
the "traditition", i.e. of the continuous maintenance of the instrument and
the struggle for its preservation by our predecessors, who handed the
instrument over to us. Every organbuilder who put his hands on the organ,
contributed to its sound as it appears today and this characteristics cannot
be removed to get the "pure" original sound. We ourselves with our
restorations become part of this story, contributing new and new (rather
than "original") interpretations of the Schnitgerian organ sound. Even after
an excellent restoration, we must be very cautious not to interchange the "Schnitger"
sound with our idea of the Schnitger sound. When listening to restored
instrument, we can never be quite sure, whether we hear Schnitger or its
re-builders. In fact, my view is that we hear both. As new restorations
(interpretations) of the given organ are coming, the goal of Sonus Paradisi
is to "stop the time" and to take a "snapshot" of the today's sound of the
instrument and to preserve it for future. |
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