Following the Activity of Lithuanian Late-Baroque Organ Builders

Abstract

This chapter focuses on organ builders who worked throughout the Grand Duchy of Lithuania in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in order to establish the spread and impact of foreign traditions of craftsmanship and display the development of the Vilnius organ building school more precisely. During the latter part of the eighteenth century, Vilnius attracted a significant community of organ builders: Gerhardt Arendt Zelle and his sons Paulus Gerardus and Michael, Joachim Freidrich Scheel and his son Johann Friedrich, Nicolaus Jantzon and his son Friedrich Samuel, Ludwik Jozef Klimowicz, and others. Their work shared some common stylistic features and a similar approach to constructional and musical elements of the instrument; the masters’ organ building practices were later adopted by their apprentices, who were both foreign and local organ builders. Unfortunately, there are very few references to organ builders’ work outside Vilnius as masters rarely left their name on the organs they built. There is no evidence about the apprentices and successors to Scheel and Klimowicz. At a similar time, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the organ master Gerhardt Arendt Zelle settled and worked in Vilnius and its outskirts, cultivating a row of successors, among whom Nicolaus Jantzon in his oeuvre emerged as the main figure representing the Vilnius school of organ building.