Author: Oliver Hilmes
ca. 3 minutes
The organ of Berlin's Philharmonie is not just an acoustic marvel; it is also visually astonishing. Its expressive and elegant design is intended to complement the hall’s internal architecture. It has more than 6,5000 pipes, allowing it to create an almost infinite range of tone colours. For more than sixty years, this instrument has watched over the main auditorium of the Philharmonie, but its journey through time has not always been a smooth one.
When the Austrian organist Anton Heiller sat down at the console of the new Philharmonie organ on Tuesday 16 November 1965 to play the very first notes on the instrument for the public, Karl Schuke felt only relief. The instrument sounded magnificent, and it blended well with the Berliner Philharmoniker at this inaugural concert. The programme included Paul Hindemith’s Organ Concerto, one of composer's late works, lasting around half an hour. This was the concerto's first performance in Berlin; Joseph Keilberth conducted. But the journey that had led to this successful inauguration had been effortful, and had no doubt also been traumatic for Karl Schuke, head of his family’s organ workshop in Berlin, who was 51 years old at the time.
Schuke’s opposite number was the architect Hans Scharoun, who had chosen a spot for the organ that worked well in the context of the hall’s revolutionary design, but which proved unfavourable from an acoustic standpoint. According to Schuke, the instrument was too high up in the hall and too remote from the podium. At this point, Herbert von Karajan could have exerted his authority, but Schuke could expect no support from him, as the maestro had no interest in what Mozart had once called “the king of instruments”.
“The organ is causing me so much trouble”
As early as September 1963, Schuke had poured out his heart to Wolfgang Reimann, a church musician whose son was the well-known composer Aribert Reimann: “The organ is causing me so much trouble; I’ve never known anything like it. It’s not easy to reconcile Herr Scharoun’s architectural ideas with the requirements of an organ,” he lamented.
In the end, Schuke and Scharoun agreed that the organ would be designed in two sections: the main organ would be high up in the hall, visible to everyone, while a smaller choir organ would be on the choir platform, with its pipes positioned behind marble-clad shutters to the left and right. These pipes are visible only when the organ is being played and the shutters are opened. This smaller instrument serves as a link between activities on the stage and the main organ.
The plans for an organ in the Philharmonie were beset from the outset by the proverbial dysfunctionality of Berlin's authorities. It was so late in the day when they awarded the contract to Schuke that it was impossible for him to complete the large instrument in time for the Philharmonie's official opening in October 1963. In order to preserve appearances, these same authorities had around sixty of the main organ's larger case pipes installed, but the remaining pipes – more than 6,000 of them – could only be added in the autumn of 1965. During these first two years, a mere dummy organ graced the new hall.
Stimmung der Orgel der Philharmonie Berlin
A shadowy existence
“I understand that the organ cannot have the sort of individual inauguration that is normally held in a church,” Schuke wrote to an acquaintance in January 1966. “A philharmonic orchestra views an organ from a different perspective than that of the organ world.” Schuke was being diplomatic. The truth of the matter is that the orchestra’s general manager, Wolfgang Stresemann, really did not know what to do with the new and extremely valuable instrument, and more than two years were to pass before the organ was to be used at another Philharmonic concert: in May 1968, Eugen Jochum conducted Toccata Festiva for organ and orchestra by the American composer Samuel Barber.
It was Hans Adler’s Berlin-based concert agency that organized the first solo organ recital in the Philharmonie in January 1966, only a few weeks after the Hindemith concerto. The soloist was the blind organist Helmut Walcha, 58 years old at the time, who was famous all over the world for his Bach performances. Many music-lovers continue to regard his complete recording of the Thomaskantor’s organ works as the finest in existence. But even the organisers were surprised to discover that every last seat in the Philharmonie had been sold. From then on, Walcha returned to Berlin at the beginning of each year, leaving an indelible impression on audiences with his performances of Bach’s music. In February 1970, Walcha returned for a fifth time to give a recital in the Philharmonie, but on this occasion, a review in Der Tagesspiegel accused the organist of performing in a way that was “arid, featureless, and fit only for a museum”.
The author of this savage critique was Wolfgang Burde, who held a chair in musicology and was regarded as an expert in the field of twentieth-century music; Baroque music was not his field. A wave of indignation flooded the paper’s arts pages, and one of Walcha’s admirers insisted in a letter to the editor that Burde hadn’t a clue about Bach: “In order to prevent Der Tagesspiegel from making a fool of itself in future, the editor is advised to order all critics holding such views and demonstrating such abilities to attend a concert by Udo Jürgens or some other popular entertainer.” Another reader wrote to appeal to Walcha to continue the tradition of his annual recitals, but Walcha would never return to the Philharmonie.
In December 1971, Hans Adler’s organ series returned with a recital by the forty-five-year-old Karl Richter, a well-respected Bach interpreter who was regarded as the aesthetic opposite of Walcha. His playing was more extroverted and expressive than that of his older colleague, and he offered his audience a degree of showmanship that had previously been conspicuously absent. During virtuoso pedal solos, for example, he would fling his arms demonstratively into the air. After Richter’s fourth concert in March 1978, this series, too, came to an end, and the Philharmonie organ was increasingly silent, perhaps dreaming of better days.
Organ matinees
Without specific funding, restoration work on the organ was neglected, leaving the instrument's condition to deteriorate steadily; by the early 1980s, it was in a truly deplorable state. In September 1981, Karajan and his Berliners were scheduled to record Saint-Saëns’s Third Symphony – the famous “Organ Symphony” – for Deutsche Grammophon, but the Philharmonie instrument was unusable. Instead, the conductor peremptorily ordered that the organ part be recorded on the organ of the Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris, and the orchestral soundtrack overlaid on it.
In 1984, the Sender Freies Berlin radio station broadcast a segment about the organ’s increasingly dilapidated state, giving the programme – titled “The Silent Queen” – a prominent slot in its evening schedule. Only then did the authorities react. But although the most critically necessary repairs were carried out on the instrument, which was now twenty years old, the organ remained relegated to the shadowy fringes of the venue’s performance schedule.
It was only in 2008 that the situation changed. This was the year in which the long-standing general administrator of the Berlin Festival, Ulrich Eckhardt, spoke to the then general manager of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Pamela Rosenberg, and persuaded her to give serious thought to his idea of holding regular organ recitals in the Philharmonie on Sunday mornings at eleven o’clock. Since then, many of the world’s leading organists have appeared at these recitals: Jean Guillou, Dame Gillian Weir, Wolfgang Rübsam, Olivier Latry, Cameron Carpenter, Els Biesemans, Zuzana Ferjenčiková and Ton Koopman, among others. These recitals have proved immensely popular, often attracting an audience of 1,000 or more. Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker often join them.
Thanks to the generous support of the Friends of the Berliner Philharmoniker, the Philharmonie organ has been thoroughly overhauled in the course of the last few years. Technical improvements have been introduced, and cautious steps have been taken to modernise the instrument's sound world. Several of the Romantic tone colours frowned on by organ builders in the 1960s, initially missing, have now been added.
Pipes measuring between eleven millimetres and ten metres
Many of the tonal hues of the instrument’s ninety-two stops are borrowed from the orchestra. There are flutes, oboes and clarinets, trumpets, trombones and tubas, as well as stops named after stringed instruments, and so-called “mixtures” to evoke sounds like the high-pitched voice of a piccolo. Other stops have poetic names such as Doppelflöte, Voix céleste and Zartbass. The longest pipe is around ten metres long and weighs 300 kilos, producing a note that vibrates sixteen times a second. The shortest pipe is barely eleven millimetres long, producing a note that vibrates 15,600 times a second.
Most of the stops are accessed from the manuals, with only the low notes being played by the performer's feet on the pedalboard. The organist can produce these tones individually on each of the four manuals and pedals, and can call them up at a moment’s notice by means of the most modern computer technology; this process is known as “registration”. This enables the Philharmonie organ to create an entire cosmos of magical sounds. It can produce the most delicate and ethereal sonorities, recalling a string quartet or a harp, but it can also create the impression of a full-throated brass ensemble. If all the stops are pulled out, the result is so loud that the whole hall reverberates. Above all, however, it is the beauty and variety of its sound that make the Philharmonie organ – now celebrating its sixtieth anniversary – one of the most important concert organs in the world. Today, no one who regularly attends performances at the Philharmonie could imagine this space without its unique organ.
