FRANK MORANA
AmerOrganist 37/2

ROBERT SCHUMANN, Toccata, op. 7 für Orgel bearbeitet von Klaus Rothhaupt (1997). Carus 18.063. A pianist friend once remarked that someday she’d like to perform Schumann’s frenetic op. 7 coming onto the stage wearing running sneakers––and the question looms as to whether that might now take place at the organ. This arrangement consists largely of Schumann’s piano part retained intact, with pedal part added in a manner not much different from what any good organist is accustomed to doing normally with respect to music originally scored for two hands. A good transcription has an irresistible allure of its own that attracts the player to the music irrespective of the relations between transcription and original, but here it is hard to imagine anyone wanting to perform this work who had not already acquired the Toccata under their ten fingers at the piano. There is, furthermore, something strangely coincidental between the manner in which this transcription comes across, and the state of organ design during the 1830s, when Schumann was writing most of his piano music. During that period, organ design fell uncomfortably between an 18th-century mechanics and sonority that had already seen its heyday, and the 19th-century mechanics and sonority that was yet still in its infancy. This dichodomy could be a striking stylistic trait in the work of an inveterate organist like Mendelssohn, a classicist with romantic leanings; but for Schumann––a romanticist with classical leanings, and a non-organist––it is not. Perhaps this is why Schumann wrote expressly for Pedal-Flügel rather than organ, even though that repertory has since necessarily been appropriated by organists. Schumann’s op. 7 piano score happens to reside mostly within a single dynamic plane, and the effect of this in the organ arrangement is to suggest a “classical” instrument to which the writing is otherwise unsuited; in the one place where Schumann does introduce brusque dynamic changes (from pp to ff at m. 212–13, and implicitly at mm. 214–28), the effect at the organ is ludicrous, and the repeated-note formulation in the development section at mm. 114–40 fares little better.