Wagner on Player Organ: “The Britannic Organ, Volume 5”

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I’ve been listening to an oddball CD I got in the mail yesterday, volume 5 of an 11-volume series of two-CD sets called The Britannic Organ, which I’d read about in Fanfare magazine and assumed it was just an oddball title for a series of British organ performers around the turn of the last century. The history of this music – both the way it got recorded in the first place and the way it’s presented here – is a lot more complicated. In the 1850’s a German named Michael Welte had invented an elaborate variation on the hand-cranked barrel organ, the Orchestrion, which basically consisted of a small organ, a few ancillary instruments (mostly drums, cymbals and other percussion) and a metal drum with tabs on it to make the instruments sound, sort of like a giant music box. In the 1880’s, with the development of player pianos that reproduced music from perforated paper rolls, Welte decided to rework the Orchestrion so it too could use rolls, which had the advantages of much longer playing time and an easier way to change from one song to another. The Welte company also developed a remarkable improvement on the player piano, in which the notes were sounded by keys struck by pistons controlled by mercury, which allowed the system to record not only the notes the pianist performed but the dynamics and physical touch. Along with two cheaper but less effective rivals, Ampico and Duo-Art, the Welte system became so popular that by the late 1920’s most pianos sold had one of the three reproducing mechanisms attached to them so you could play the piano directly by striking its keys yourself (if you knew how to play a normal piano); you could use a standard Pianola roll (which supplied the notes but was driven through the machine by a pair of foot pedals and a hand lever to control the tempo and volume); or you could use a reproducing roll whose indentations supposedly recorded every detail of the original pianist’s touch.

Just how well this got recorded is a matter for debate – I remember finding a three-LP set the Book-of-the-Month Club released in 1963 of new recordings of Welte piano rolls, many of them by famous composers playing their own music, and I thought if I’d heard the record “blind” I’d have had no idea it was anything but a normal piano recording of a live pianist playing in real time. But more recent critics have suggested that rolls didn’t reproduce the actual pianists’ “touch” all that well and that, because they’re played back on an actual piano, the sound quality tends to fool us into thinking they’re more authentic than they are. By the 1890’s Michael Welte and his namesake son, who took over the business when his father died, were developing the “Philharmonie,” a full symphonic organ that could both record and play Welte organ rolls, and the company merchandised roll recordings as well as the expensive organs that played them. The one Welte “Philharmonie” organ that survives in playable condition was built for the R.M.S. Britannic, sister ship of the much more famous Titanic, The Britannic also sank relatively soon after it was built – in 1916, while it had been redesignated HMHS Britannic (“His Majesty’s Hospital Ship”) for use as a medical ship during World War I – but when it was originally outfitted it contained a Welte player organ. The organ was removed in 1914 so the ship could be recommissioned for war service, and the organ ended up at a museum along with the surviving Welte rolls for it.

The German Oehms label has issued 11 two-CD sets of music played on the Britannic organ by the Welte system, apparently containing all the rolls that still survive in playable condition, and I got Volume 5 because it was devoted to the music of my favorite composer, Richard Wagner. Wagner was the superstar composer of the last half of the 19th century (at least in the German-speaking world, Brahms was his only serious rival, and for years Brahms lay in Wagner’s shadow as the composer you listened to if you couldn’t stand Wagner; when Franz Liszt’s daughter Cosima left her husband, conductor Hans von Bülow, for Wagner, Bülow’s revenge was to stop conducting Wagner and start conducting Brahms), and there was a huge demand for his music. The problem was that virtually all Wagner’s pieces were operas, which demanded singers, choruses and larger than normal orchestras, so not many people could afford either to perform them or to get tickets to listen to them. Like earlier opera composers, Wagner saw his music excerpted and rewritten for smaller forces, including piano (Liszt was a huge Wagner fan even before his daughter married Wagner, and published a lot of quite intricate and difficult arrangements of Wagner music; and Wagner’s publishers, Breitkopf and Schott, issued simpler piano pieces based on Wagner’s themes to maximize their revenue from them).

When organ designs became more elaborate in the late 19th century and the so-called “symphonic organ” – an organ that supposedly put all the sounds of a symphony orchestra at the disposal of a single player – was introduced (largely by the French organ designer Aristide Cavaillé-Coll, whose instruments inspired French organist-composers to create what they called “symphonies” for solo organ instead of orchestra), organists began transcribing the great music of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Wagner and the other giants of classical music for organ. The Britannic Organ, Volume 5 is a program of about 2 ½ hours of Wagner music – mostly well-known bits from his operas but some of it relatively obscure: the song “Träume” from the five Lieder he wrote to poems by his adulterous lover, Mathilde Wesendonck; the “Heroic March” he wrote for his patron, King Ludwig II of Bavaria; and Der Liebesmahl der Apostel, “Love-Feast of the Apostles,” which Wagner wrote in 1843 as part of his job as music director of the opera in his native Dresden. It was a piece for a concert combining various male choruses and only in the last 10 minutes of this half-hour piece is an orchestra added to what is otherwise an a cappella work. Liebesmahl is an obscure piece that wasn’t recorded complete until 1978 (by conductor Wyn Morris on the Peters International label; and Morris, a notorious slowpoke, took nearly 37 minutes on a piece the conductors who’ve recorded it since have generally dispatched in half an hour or less), and because of its Christian content and its use of large male choruses (supposedly a total of 1,200 singers took part in the 1843 premiere, though the choruses on the recordings have generally been about one-tenth that size) it’s often been compared to parts of Lohengrin and Parsifal.

Kurt Grosse, who recorded a 13-minute adaptation of Liebesmahl for Welte, used bits and pieces of the original score and filled it out with considerably more familiar music from Wagner’s last opera, Parsifal (composed nearly 40 years after Liebesmahl, and the differences are obvious). The other pieces on The Britannic Organ Wagner collection are relatively familiar, though there are some surprising omissions, like the overture to The Flying Dutchman, the Act III prelude and Song to the Evening Star from Tannhäuser, the prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, the Ride of the Valkyries from Die Walküre, and the prelude to Tristan und Isolde. (The other main part of Tristan often heard separately as a concert piece, Isolde’s “Liebestod” – “Love-Death” – is included, played by Clarence Eddy.) And, despite the Parsifal insertions into Liebesmahl, there’s only one fairly obscure piece (the opening of Act II in Klingsor’s magic garden and the music of the Flower Maidens) from Parsifal itself, even though the preludes to acts I and III and the “Good Friday Spell” from the last act are frequently played in concert as excerpts. Maybe the Welte people were afraid of breaking the Wagner family’s embargo on performing Parsifal anywhere outside Wagner’s own theatre at Bayreuth: the Met had staged it in 1903, since German copyrights then didn’t apply in the U.S., but the Wagner family was so powerful they got the conductor, Alfred Hertz, blacklisted throughout the German-speaking world.

One quirk about the history of the Welte organ system was that they invented the reproducing player organ before they invented a machine on which organists could record their performances, so the first four pieces on this album – the overture to Tannhäuser, the Entry of the Gods Into Valhalla from Das Rheingold, Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music from Die Walküre, and the Parsifal excerpt – and the final piece, the overture to Wagner’s early opera Rienzi, weren’t actually recorded by live musicians. Instead they were hand-cut by artisans, including Michael Welte, Jr. and Franz Xaver Franz, who marked paper rolls and punched the holes in them that would play the right notes with the right organ registrations and add the special effects. A lot of pieces on this album way overuse the glockenspiel (one of the percussion instruments added to organs in the late 19th and early 20th century that weren’t part of the actual pipework but could be played by the organist hitting a key that caused them to strike) and give Wagner’s great music an oddly tinny sound. Also, as my husband Charles noted, part of the problem is the organ itself: the Britannic was designed as a cruise liner and therefore its organ was voiced to play the kinds of pop songs and light classics the passengers on an ocean cruise in the early 1910’s would have wanted to hear. That meant it really didn’t have the sheer weight and power of organs designed to play full-on classical music. Some of the voicings on this album sound pretty cheesy and don’t reproduce the full power of Wagner’s music (and I’ve heard enough Wagner on better organs to know what’s missing and that it can be done on a more formidable organ).

The tracks on The Britannic Organ, Volume 5 include five hand-cut rolls, one by a pianist (Emil Paur, playing the passage from Lohengrin in which Lohengrin warns his fiancée Elsa that she is not to ask what his name is or where he’s from – Friedrich Nietzsche famously ridiculed Wagner for being so hard on Elsa just for wanting to know exactly whom she’s about to marry) who cut it on the Welte piano system and Welte then tweaked it for organ, and 11 by actual organists playing on Welte’s recording system. The two standout tracks were the prelude to act one of Die Meistersinger and Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March from Götterdämmerung (the selection is labeled simply the Funeral March, but the last music the mortally wounded Siegfried sings just before he expires is included too) played by Edwin H. Lemare, a British organist born on the Isle of Wight who briefly had a vogue that made him the highest paid organist to that time (the early 1900’s) and who made a large number of transcriptions for organ as well as original compositions, notably the song “Moonlight and Roses.” Lemare’s playing here, despite the limitations of the player organ and the specific problems with the organ used, has an authority and power most of the rest of the album lacks and makes his huge reputation (and income) in his glory years understandable.