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Taste, therefore, is only relative. The “rediscovery” of Bach’s music since the beginning of the nineteenth century – thanks to Mendelssohn, in particular – happens to have had a considerable impact on European organ building. Once the master works of the German organist were known, it had to be possible to play them everywhere. Most instruments belonging to other schools of organ building were then gradually transformed so as to adapt them to the particular requirements of that music, in particular by installing “German” pedal-boards where previously there had been none. However, the idea that one had of the organs used by Bach himself was sometimes rather whimsical and vague.
Now the question of what “Bach’s organ” was like is not as simple as one might think. The difficulty comes partly from the fact that the scores themselves are rather sparing of information. Contrary to the great French classical tradition of Couperin and de Grigny, in which each piece is written for one precise registration specified by the composer (Plein-Jeu, Fugue sur la Trompette, Récit de Cromorne, Tierce en taille, Dialogue sur les Grands-Jeux, etc.), Bach hardly ever indicated the sonorities he had in mind on his scores. What is more, none of the three instruments of which he was the organist – those of Arnstadt, Mühlhausen and Weimar – has remained in its original state. Besides, these three organs were rather small ones, with only two manuals and fewer than 30 stops, while Bach knew the large North German instruments in Halle, Dresden and Hamburg and some of his pieces seem to have been intended for such large organs.
From November 1706 to January 1707, Bach had indeed travelled to Lübeck in order to listen to Dietrich Buxtehude. In Hamburg, he had discovered the organ built by Arp Schnitger in St. Nicolai (1682-7), which with its 67 stops, was then the largest instrument in the world. In a way, Bach was therefore the heir to a tradition that can be traced back to Sweelinck and that, through Buxtehude, had spread in northern Germany. This school was the most influential one in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, developing a virtuoso pedal technique and spawning outstanding instruments. North German organs are endowed with a very complete pedal ranging from 32’ to 2’ (or even 1’) stops which could therefore be considered as a fully-fledged “keyboard” in its own right, equivalent to a “third hand” that could play the alto part, while the right hand could play the soprano on the Rückpositiv and the left hand could play both tenor and bass on the Hauptwerk, as Samuel Scheidt stipulated in his Tabulatura Nova in 1624. Apart from the plenum that can be found both in the Netherlands and in central Germany, North German organs also had a variety of flute-stops, reeds and mutation-stops and it was possible to blend the trumpets with either of these (contrary, for instance, to the French organ, where the various families of stops could not be mixed so freely). The diversity of reed stops on the manuals also marked this North German type of organs from its Southern equivalent.
Though he knew such organs, Bach himself would however regularly play instruments corresponding to rather different aesthetic criteria, as we shall see. Only patient organological and musicological research can therefore enable one to understand how his organ music should be, as it were, “orchestrated” – the study of the instruments that Bach is likely to have known or that were built by contemporary organ-builders, of manuscript sources, of reports on organs by Bach himself, and of course of all the local performing traditions at the time. Lastly, the music itself “speaks” and the character of a given piece – which, in the case of the chorales, is determined by the text illustrated – enables one to deduce elements of registration. The famous Schübler Chorales, for instance, which were transcribed from well-known pieces from cantatas – and which, incidentally, bear witness to all the links that united vocal and instrumental music at the time – also reveal the intentions of the composer as far as sound colours were concerned through a study of the original orchestration of the pieces.
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