Liszt’s fascination with Bach’s organ works was closely tied to three organists: Johann Gottlob Töpfer, municipal organist in Weimar; Alexander Winterberger, who was to premiere the massive “As nos” Fantasy and Fugue; and Alexander Wilhelm Gottschalg, who became the Weimar court organist. Töpfer was the teacher of both Winterberger and Gottschalg, but he was best known as an influential organ builder, and Liszt particularly admired his novel ideas on registration in the midst of most German organists’ conservative style.

Liszt spent considerable time visiting church organs across Thuringia with Gottschalg and coached the younger man on playing Bach. Gottschalg published an account of these coachings, revealing that Liszt was puzzled by his playing of the Bach Toccata and Fugue in D minor with the full organ on one manual as was the German custom at the time. Surely Bach would never have done so with three manuals at his disposal, opined Liszt, and when Gottschalg played the work with new registration for Töpfer, his teacher said, “You should always play it like that.” Gottschalg also reported on Liszt’s shortcomings as an organist, saying he never became fluent with the foot pedals and even tried to initiate a notation system of stems up for the right foot and stems down for the left. However, even though Gottschalg himself found it practical it didn’t catch on in Germany.

Of Liszt’s original organ works, his first, the epic Fantasy and Fugue on “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam” (Come to us, to the waves of salvation) is considered his finest. Liszt composed it in 1850 based on the chorale sung by three Anabaptists in the first act of Meyerbeer’s opera Le prophète. Though it was commonly held that Meyerbeer had based the chorale on a traditional Jewish melody he had heard in his uncle’s synagogue, Meyerbeer confided to Liszt that he had made it up. Liszt dedicated the dedicated the Fantasy and Fugue to Meyerbeer, who wrote to Liszt that he was honored and pleased, though he mistakenly thought it was written for piano.

Five years later the twenty-one year old Winterberger premiered the several-times-revised version of the gigantic work for the inauguration of the new four-manual organ at the Merseburg Cathedral. As Liszt’s Toccata and Fugue on B-A-C-H was not ready, he had asked Winterberger to perform the “Ad nos” Fantasy instead, which had been published in 1852. Liszt traveled several times to Merseburg to help Winterberger prepare, in particular as to its complex registral colors.

The Fantasy states the Meyerbeer chorale theme, which Liszt masterfully transforms and manipulates into two grand climaxes. He then introduces the chorale theme in a hushed Adagio in F-sharp major, the key he considered divine. The final virtuosic Fugue employs a subject based on the chorale, and elements of the previous sections return in recapitulatory fashion, to which Liszt adds a triumphal full-organ coda.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe