Charles Zeuner (1795–1857) was the best organist in the United States from the time he emigrated from Germany in 1830 into the 1850s when his work was eclipsed by other European immigrant organists. In 1830 he published the first American collection of music specifically intended for the organ with his Voluntaries for the Organ. The volume presented here, Zeuner's Fantasies and Fugues for Organ and Pianoforte, presents a compilation of thirty of his introductions, fantasies, and fugues for organ, though some can easily be performed on the piano. Fourteen of the works require double pedal—a rare feature then and now. Several do not require independent pedal parts; they could easily be played on manuals alone on the organ, or on the piano. Although numbers 4–6, 8–9, 12, 15, 17, 21, 24, and 25 do not give any instrumental preference in the source titles, the three elaborate fantasies and fugues at the end of the volume include “for organ” in the title and have active and challenging pedal lines.
The organ works in this volume are significant for two reasons. These are the first professional organ compositions written in the United States, and several remained the most difficult organ works penned in the United States until Dudley Buck returned from Europe in 1862 and wrote his first Sonata in E-flat. In addition, the volume presents a fascinating snapshot of antebellum organ music in transition from generic keyboard writing to idiomatic organ composition.
J. Bunker Clark and A-R Editions have done an excellent job with this new volume.Footnote 1 Like most of the A-R Editions publications, this edition shows intelligence, accuracy, and care. Following Clark's death in late 2003, the editorial staff of A-R Editions completed the manuscript, which is based on sources found in manuscripts in the Newland/Zeuner collection at the Music Division of the Library of Congress. Bruce Bengston corrected some inconsistencies, and the A-R staff rechecked the edition against the sources and revised the prose somewhat. The published work, however, remains mainly unchanged from Clark's original materials.
In preparing this volume, the editors have modernized the original scores. The opening essay (ix–xii) covering Zeuner, the sources, the organ in antebellum America, and the music is informative and thorough. The Critical Report (193–98) explains the numbering and ordering of the works, titles used, rescoring of the right/left hands and pedal (which is moved to its own staff from the lowest part of the two-staff manuscript), stemming, clefs, meter and key signatures, registration indications, and overall page layout.
The pieces in this collection represented an ambitious leap forward in American organ music. The first organ music published in the United States was in the form of simple instruction books consisting of voluntaries and variations intended more for practice than performance. Little need for independent organ music existed. Not until around 1830 did most churches have organs, due in part to Calvinist proscriptions against worldly entertainments, at least in some Protestant churches. Even as churches added them to help support the lagging congregational psalmody, organists maintained their continental heritage and improvised the unaccompanied parts of the service. When the organ was used as a solo instrument—often seen as its least important role—it was limited to brief, uncomplicated service voluntaries, which required little original music.
It was in this environment that in 1830 Charles Zeuner wrote the first organ voluntaries intended for organ performance rather than the service, Voluntaries for the Organ, and, ten years later, Organ Voluntaries. He arrived in the United States from his birthplace in Saxony in 1830 after having studied with Johann Nepomuk Hummel (1778–1837) and Michael Gotthard Fischer (1773–1829). His U.S. debut as organist, pianist, vocalist, and composer on 13 February 1830 at Boylston Hall, Boston, impressed members of the Handel and Haydn Society enough to appoint him organist for the Society. In 1838 he was elected President of the Society, but he was forced to resign his position the next year owing to his difficult personality. He moved to Philadelphia and in 1840 assumed the organist position at St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, remaining for five years, and in 1852 he moved to nearby Camden, New Jersey. Increasing mental instability caused him to take his life with a gun at Smith's Woods, West Philadelphia, on 7 November 1857, at the age of 62.
Zeuner's compositional style in these fantasies, fugues, and introductions shows a considerable advance over anything written in the United States previously. Whereas most earlier organ music derived from the basic chordal structure of Protestant hymnody, Zeuner composed in an advanced, intricately contrapuntal idiom practiced in mid-eighteenth-century Germany. (The Moravians had organs and regularly used organ music in their services in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and Spanish New Mexico had organs in the early seventeenth century.)Footnote 2 His fugal writing especially shows an uncommon mastery of Baroque musical style. He also proved progressive in his use of enharmonic shifts and movement to distant key areas, and expanded the musical range as well. Because European standards for contemporary organ keyboards had C as the lowest note, Zeuner's writing for manual notes descending below C suggests that he composed the works in this edition after he left Germany. These pieces also make a direct connection to the German organ heritage of a century earlier. Although they contain no clear “American” touches or influences, Clark's fine edition of Zeuner's Fantasies and Fugues for Organ or Pianoforte does much to deepen our understanding of the chronicle of the organ in the United States. The volume also broadens our insight into how European music was transmitted to the United States and how it laid the foundation for later nineteenth-century American keyboard composers.