Building a French Organ
Hellmuth Wolff
 
After my apprenticeship with Metzler in Switzerland and subsequent years spent in other organ shops in Holland and in Austria, the French organ was completely unknown to me. It was in the early 1960s, when I worked in Gloucester, Massachusetts, that I heard the sound of a French organ first for the time. Charles Fisk made me listen to his friend Melville Smith’s recordings of French Baroque organ music, as played on the Andreas Silbermann organ in Marmoutier, in Alsace.
 
When I arrived a few months later in St-Hyacinthe, my first task at Casavant Frères was to work out the plans for a three-manual organ for the church of St-Pascal, in lower Québec.

(see: http://www.uquebec.ca/musique/orgues/quebec/spascalk.html).

Antoine Bouchard was consulting the parochial church and led us into a most exciting adventure of building an organ in the French Baroque tradition. The Casavant firm has an original edition of Dom Bédos’ “L’art de la facture d’orgues”, but in 1963, some eighty years after its foundation, it was the first time that an organ was built according to the scholar’s prescriptions. We did not build yet an organ with all the typical French design features, such as suspended key action, but the reed stops were made with U-shaped shallots and I remember well the excitement these pipes created when Fr. Bouchard visited the shop and heard the sound coming out of these trumpets.
 
After a couple of years spent at Casavant, I returned to Switzerland, this time to the French speaking part, from where I could visit the Baroque organs in nearby Burgundy as well as in Alsace, but several years passed until I had again the chance to build an organ in French style. My first organs reflected certainly my admiration for these instruments, but it had to be an English university that was giving me the chance to build a truly French Classic organ. The Redpath Hall organ was to be one of the first “authentic” French Classic organs on the American continent ; another was built by Gene Bedient for a church in Michigan, but it has been moved to the University of North Texas in Denton, (see http://www.music.unt.edu/organ/), where it will be “competing” with one of our future instruments.
 
Building the Redpath Hall organ has been a wonderful experience. It remains one of the best examples representing our work and continues to make us friends among musicians and colleagues.