The organ, Mozart’s “queen of instruments”
The craft of organ building has a long and rich history, and the world’s most famous master organ builders are based in Germany.
Some 2,000 years ago, an engineer in Alexandria is believed to have constructed a new instrument. Using water pressure, it blew air through a pipe causing it to make a sound. Nowadays, organs aren’t just a single pipe: they can number 10,000 or more.
They’re not just impressive to look at, either. The organ can create the widest range of pitches of any instrument and the greatest range of dynamics. From a faint whisper to a thundering roar, organs make spaces from rooms in houses to sacred cathedrals reverberate with sound. Mastering the organ was always a great test of a musician or composer’s ability, and Mozart called it the “queen of instruments”. Long before Johann Sebastian Bach, the organ was the cornerstone of instrumental music in Christian churches, but Bach’s virtuoso fugues revolutionised the music and techniques of his 17th century predecessors.
The craft behind the music
Making such a complex instrument work takes a great deal of skill. The craft of organ building, maintenance and tuning has a long and rich history, and the world’s most famous organ builders are based in Germany. Take the Johannes Klais Orgelbau firm from Bonn, for example, which built the organs in Cologne Cathedral and more recently the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. It also takes orders from the US and Taiwan.
The team from the Orgelbau Mayer firm of master craftsmen in Heusweiler in the Saarland are also world leaders in their trade. They regularly travel the world to install instruments, such as in South Korea, Kazakhstan and previously Russia. Joëlle Wedig works for Mayer as an organ builder and site manager. “In some industries you move around a lot while you’re training, but as there aren’t many organ builders left now, you go where you’re needed,” she says. What Wedig values about her career is the variety of the trade. “While you’re still an apprentice you learn to work with the many different materials used in organ building. It’s not like being a carpenter, where you mainly work with wood. You have an enormous range of areas such as electrics, woodwork and metalwork, and the intonation of the musical pipes.”
Even though fewer churches are being built nowadays, the industry is certainly not in decline, as traditional skills are still needed to maintain and tune church organs, and new organs are needed for concert halls. “The organ has been around for over 2,300 years, so I think it’ll still be around in the future and the craft of organ building will be too,” says Joëlle Wedig. And Bach’s organ fugues will be treasured for as long as people go on listening to music.