20 - Movements in Time

Summary

A final strand in the counterpoint of Straube's “treadmill” concerns the nexus of loosely coordinated, quasi-antiquarian initiatives commonly called Orgelbewegung (organ reform movement). The dominant image has been the one offered in Wolgast's seminal 1928 biography, published so to speak in medias res, where an “ever young” Straube was intent on embracing new knowledge with open arms. “It is wonderful,” enthused Wolgast, “with what energy and elasticity Karl Straube promotes the new Orgelbewegung not only as an organizer, but also as an artist. This is all the more so in that it amounts to a renunciation [Abkehr] of the ideal that had informed the entire glorious era of his virtuoso years.” The problem with this view is not that it shows its subject as keeping up with trends in the organ world, or even that it affirms the cantor's robust ethical nature, spawning advocacy for new aesthetic impulses where they appeared worthwhile. Rather, the flaw lodges with the fact that Straube was not good at constructing his world as a series of mutually exclusive options, as a zero-sum game in which the striking of one path meant the all-out disavowal of another. The drawn-out hesitancy with which he had embraced the cantorate itself is but the most vivid example. Categorical renunciation or Abkehr was not his game.

The tensions in Straube's personality meant that on virtually every level— career advancement, political allegiances, aesthetic, and historical assessments—conflicts and contradictions abounded, some of them downright debilitating and intensifying with age. His interactions would always be subject to a propensity for indecision, a need to think things through from multiple perspectives, never granting one solution the absolute upper hand over another. Further, his frequently expressed anti-materialism sensitized him to the transience of human striving. “I say again and again, vanitas, vanitas vanitatum,” he would declare to Manfred Mezger in 1945, bringing the words of Ecclesiastes to bear upon the open-ended task of the Bach edition. That sentiment was already much in evidence during the 1920s, when he pondered if and how to go forward with the project. “He often has been approached to complete the Bach organ edition,” wrote Wolgast.