Orgelfuhrer Europa. (Diverse Topics).

Orgelfuhrer Europa. By Karl-Heinz Gottert and Eckhard Isenberg. Kassel: Barenreiter, 2000. [175 P. ISBN 3-7618-1475-5. DM 48.]

A recent essay by Timothy Garton Ash, entitled "The European Orchestra" (New York Review of Books 48 [17 May 2001]: 60-67), begins with a riddle: "Will Europe never be Europe because it is becoming Europe?" Despite considering many of the senses of the word "Europe"--the geographical continent and the European Union, to name but two--Ash never imagines the "Europe" of Orgelfuhrer Europa, a guide to some eighty organs, old and new, by Karl-Heinz Gottert and Eckhard Isenberg. Indeed, Ash would likely find their idea of Europe--a Europe without Germany--laughable. But not incomprehensible: Gottert and Isenberg have simply found themselves in a terminological muddle, one similar to that faced by those for whom "world music" means that of every here but Europe. Orgelfuhrer Europa is actually a companion volume to the authors' Orgelfuhrer Deutschland (Kassel: Barenreiter, 1998). The reader is alerted to this fact in small print on the backside of the dust jacket, and at the opening of the foreword, and elsewhere, yet it remains unfortunate that the front cover makes an initial impression that has to be dispelled. A larger question is how could one book, in less than three hundred pages, adequately survey the organs of Europe, even with Germany eliminated? That question can hardly be asked without also asking for whom would such a book be written.

Orgelfuhrer Europa is organized around brief discussions (of five hundred to one thousand words) of some eighty notable organs each illustrated with one or more photographs, almost always of the instrument's facade. These discussions are grouped by country or occasionally by region. Some of these regions make sense, such as drawing together the Scandinavian countries or the Netherlands and Belgium. Others do not, such as uniting Spain and Italy, whose organ building traditions are more diverse, while a catchall category for the four examples from Lithuania, Poland, and the Czech Republic is really no category at all. Specifications (that is, lists of stops) are included, but are not located within the text; they are all found together at the end of the book which could, perhaps, encourage comparisons.

The selection of the examples in a hook such as this may he inevitably arbitrary but Orgelfuhrer Europa is remarkably free from ideology. There are no (spoken or silent) refusals to include instruments by age (old or new), design (traditional or contemporary), or type of action (mechanical or electro-pneumatic). Indeed, an eclectic tone is established from the very beginning: on the cover of the dust jacket is one of the most familiar icons of classical organ building, the celebrated Muller organ of 1738 in Haarlem, while a monumental ...