HISTORIC ORGANS IN SLOVAKIA
ROY WILLIAMSON
There is, sadly, no organisation equivalent to BIOS in Slovakia. Most, if not all, of the knowledge about Slovakia's historic organs lies with Dr Marian Alojz Mayer who has researched the subject for many years. Whilst he is chiefly a historian and theoretician in this field, Dr Mayer has acquired useful skills in organ-building, but that is another story.
Slovakia is a Catholic country and most villages have their own parish church. However, Lutherans make up about fifty-four per cent of the population and are therefore less well represented outside of the towns. Both confessions own numerous historic church buildings, most with pipe-organs in the 'west' gallery. The number of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century organ cases is impressively high but too often the instrument inside is of later date.
It is an uphill struggle in this economically poor country to retain old organs in use, let alone to have them conservatively restored. Professor Jan Vladimir Michalko (chairman of the Association of Concert Artists) recently summed up the present situation thus:
So far it has not been possible to take, and especially to put into effect, measures which would lead to systematic protection and restoration (not just repair and so-called 'maintenance') of historic organs and prevent their spoliation and in many cases their removal and destruction.
In the whole of Slovakia there is, I am told, only one organ-builder who can be trusted to restore a historic instrument sensitively.
Every year since 1992, an international festival of historic organs has been staged in various parts of the country. Dr Mayer organised the first ten of these and continues to provide the appropriate historical notes.
This year's festival took place in the eastern area around Poprad under the majestic High Tatra mountains. The festival consisted only of recitals (by leading organists); no papers are given and no inspection of the instruments is encouraged so the visitor is confined to Dr Mayer's historical summary and the specification (both sometimes hamfistedly edited) as presented in the festival programme. The organs featured this year were:
·Spisská Nova Ves Catholic church. Rieger (Krnow) 1888, Op. 216 , 2M+P 10/6/4, mechanical action, cone chests.
·Kezmarok Catholic Basilica. (Positive) Bartolomey Froriun (Spisská Nova Ves) 1651, 1M C-c3, short octave, 9 speaking stops.
·Poprad-Spisská Sobota Catholic church. Tomas Dobkowitz 1663 (rebuilt 1692 and 1815), 1M+P C-c3, short octave, 9 speaking stops, Pedal C-a0, short octave, 4 speaking stops.
·Poprad-Vel'ka Lutheran church. Joseph Seyberth (Vienna) 1856, 2M+P 7/5/6, Manuals have slider soundboards, the Pedal a cone chest.
·Kezmarok Lutheran church. Lorentz Tchaikovsky 1720 (altered several times subsequently), 2M+P 6/10/2, original ten-stop chest has two independent sets of pallets.
·Spisská Nova Ves Lutheran church. Friedrich Deutschmann (Vienna) 1822, 2M+P 12/5/6, later tonal alterations, pedal compass enlarged from C-A (short octave) to C-d1 chromatic.
I attended recitals in the second, third and fourth of the locations listed above. Lack of space precludes discussion of instrument and recitalist. It is however worth mentioning the 1651 Fromm Positive, which sounded well from its choir gallery position. It had been tuned to an unequal temperament, whether on the basis of research or whim was not clear. Despite careful measurement of scales for required replacement pipes by the (amateur) organ-builder responsible for the instrument's restoration, the pipe-maker decided his own scales were more appropriate, so a large question mark hangs over this restoration. Apart from his own fugue, Vladimir Ruso chose music from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to demonstrate the capabilities of this important relic.
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