Author: Aristide Cavaille-Coll

Publisher/Date: The Netherlands: Frits Knuf (1980) facsimile of a mid-1800s book on organs and organ building.

Format/Condition: Small softcover booklet with flaps, [NOS] new old stock, faint musty odor; 7” X 10”; unpaignated.

Description: This is volume # 74 in a series of facsimiles of rare books on organs and organ building. This volume being a series of letters and sketches for an large organ in Amsterdam. Introduction is in English, facsimile text is in French.

From the introduction: Not only our own volume (Bibliotheca Organologica 41, The Complete Theoretical Works of Aristide Cavaille-Coll, ed. Gilbert Huybens) but articles in the international journals (Organ Yearbook, Acta Organo/ogica, ISO Information) are all bearing witness to the recent interest shown outside France itself to the work of Cavaill-Coll.

Of greater musical potential than the German builders of the time, and matched perhaps only by the Englishman Henry Willis, Cavaille-Coll built organs contemporary with and in many ways prompting the musical development of the biggest single organ-school to emerge since the high Lutheran peaks of Buxtehude and J.S. Bach. His instruments therefore have associated with them a type of music and a homogeneity of musical expression unique to themselves: organs and music offer an almost uniquely unified front, and it is impossible to think of Franck or Dupre or Widor or Langlais or even Messiaen without the sounds created by Cavaille-Coll and vice-versa.

While a full appraisal of this remarkable man is still to be written, and while a whole mass of material is still waiting to be explored, it is our pleasure to offer members of the ISO an hors-d’oevre in the form of a group of letters concerning an organ projected by Cavaille-Coll in Amsterdam, an organ alas never built (for reason that can only be guessed from the correspondence here) but nevertheless offering some important insights into the way he worked. The date is sufficiently late for the master to be extolling the virtues of remote action (pneumatique lever), and it is always instructive to see how a fine builder gauges his own priorities: what it is that he feels he can take out of a large stoplist if finance makes a smaller/cheaper project desirable.

Particularly interesting is the projected casework for this organ: an old Dutch design, typical of the beautiful almost clock-like shapes current during the seventeenth century, only now with added pedal towers and side-urns, the whole united into a most successful compromise or, rather, compendium-design. This drawing alone establishes Cavaille-Coll (or his drawing-office) as a sensitive artist, aware of the virtues of old organ-cases, which indeed came into way curiously seldom. His was a career spent amongst church-designers who allowed themselves extreme liberty in the designing of all church furniture, not least organs whose eventual shape and decorative detail must (one can venture to conjecture) have offended the sensitivity of a man capable of the Amsterdam case illustrated here. Can he really have had sympathy with the loathsome gothic and pre-gothic designs he was so often to work with?

In addition to such speculations, these few pages give the modern builder food for thought in some other areas: into the way a great figure in organ-building conveyed his grasp and professionalism to the buyer, into the need a creative artist must have for combining personal modesty with sellability, into the workings of his office (model-letters written by clerks, etc), into the private correspondence that usually flitters behind the formal approaches for any new organ anywhere, into the then customary practice (now mostly given up by the better builders) of printing favourable critiques, and so on. May we offer this to ISO members in the hope that they will find it as instructive as interesting, remembering that it is in North America (Seattle?) that the first Cavaille-Coll copy to be built by another form may well be heard one day.