The Pipe Organ, Queen of Instruments!

The late Mozart biographer, Wolfgang Hildescheimer, claimed that Mozart hated the pipe organ, most likely due to the fact that when Mozart was young, one of his primary duties while he was in service to Salzburg's Archbishop Colloredo was that of Cahthedral Organist. This duty required that he be at the Cathedral several times a day for an hour or two each time to play for morning, noon, and evening services, cutting into the young composer's day and interrupting any and every activity in which he might be engaged. However it was Mozart himself who wrote to a friend that the pipe organ was "die Königin der Instrumente" (the Queen of instruments), indicating that it wasn't the organ that Mozart despised so much as the schedule that was imposed upon him to play it.

Today I begin a series of posts entitled, The Queen of Instruments, featuring the world's most famous composers for the organ from Bach & Buxtehude to Saint Saens & Durufle, starting off with the final movement from Charles-Marie Widor's Toccata from Symphony No 5 Op.42 on the Klais organ in Wurzburg Cathedral, played by German organist, Hans Musch.

The Klais organ was built in 1969 and was completely new, since the last Klais organ (built in 1937) was destroyed in 1945 when the cathedral sustained heavy damage. The choir and transcepts were rebuilt to their baroque splendour but the nave was rebuilt into a more Romanesque style with a flat wooden ceiling. As you can see from a few photos in the video, the console is a five manual beast modelled on Cavaille-Coll's great examples in Notre Dame and St Sulpice but totally finished in black, even to having black naturals on the keyboard with white sharps. It contains 6,654 pipes and 86 speaking stops. There is a small 'swallows nest' choir organ of 20 stops, but this is to be joined by another choir organ of 52 stops to be built by Steinmeyer in 2010! To me it has a characteristic Klais sound, although nowhere near as overbearing as its organ in Cologne Cathedral with its unusual mixtures and recent bombastic reeds.