The Organ in Central and Northern Europe

In the 1770s, Charles Burney visited the Cathedral in Frankfurt am Main, and reported that the organ was “not ill-toned, but … the touch [was] so heavy, that the keys, like those of a carillon, severally required the weight of the whole hand, to put them down.” Burney is a notorious complainer about some aspects of the German musical aesthetic. Occasionally, things he said were refuted or ridiculed in his translator’s footnotes, which Burney missed because he could not read German. Perhaps unwittingly, though, Burney describes an instrument—typical of those in the mainstream of the Central German organ tradition of Bach’s day—that simply does not function with a finger technique alone, unlike the lighter-actioned English organs to which Burney was accustomed and which he unabashedly thought were superior. But, in fact, the English, French, Spanish, and Italian organ-building traditions all had comparatively lighter manual actions than the organs built in Central and Northern Europe.

Pedal clavichords were not built everywhere in Europe during the eighteenth century—as far as we know, they were built only in central and northern Europe and Scandinavia. And, as it turns out, that is exactly where organs with large pedal boards and where a tradition of more elaborate pedal playing developed first. The heavier actions of these organs probably provide a clue to the role of the historical pedal clavichord. If the clavichords were to serve as practice instruments for organists, the touch characteristics of the clavichord and the organ would need to have been closely related. What may be considered an impossible amount of mass by a modern clavichord player (or an eighteenth-century Englishman) could have been reasonable to an eighteenth-century German organist.

The great organ at Alkmaar, the Netherlands, is well preserved and in perfect working order. Because it is one of the few large early eighteenth-century organs with its original action, it served as an important study reference for the action of the North German Organ Research Project in Göteborg.