9 - What He Thought, How He Played

Summary

Bach Interpretation

To trace the origins of Anton Heiller, the artist, we have to begin in his adolescence. He played on the organ at the parish church in Dornbach (an incomplete organ torso) and on the old Walcker organ at Saint Stephen's Cathedral. That means, amazingly, that he played exclusively on tracker action organs right from the start—given the era, the years between the two wars, that makes him part of a minority. “What was typical for Heiller was that, right from the beginning, he based his playing on the physiology of the mechanical slider chest organ. The organists of that generation identified with an electro-pneumatic or electric playing style and that is based on completely different tone production.” It was during these early years that Heiller experienced one of his most important revelatory moments, and that concerned the interconnectedness of articulation and accentuation. He related the following story many years later. He remembered hearing Bach's Prelude and Fugue in G Major (BWV 541). When he subsequently checked out the score, which he had never seen before, he knew instantly that “this had to be done differently if one was to make the correct accentuation audible.” And indeed, this fugal subject is ideal for demonstrating how easy it is to shift accentuation if one slurs the first interval that can be slurred (ex. 9.1).

At the start of the twentieth century it was widely accepted that organ touch is synonymous with legato touch and this situation continued until the middle of that century. All printed organ methods were based on this principle and the first fifteen pages usually concentrated on instructing aspiring organists in the art of moving from one note to the next as seamlessly as possible, in all parts, and with all fingers. This of course meant that accents occurred somehow automatically and as a mere by-product. The rigid, continuous tone of the organ, by its very nature, resists dynamic shading; once a key is struck, the sound cannot be made softer or louder.