Kuhn Organ Builders Ltd, 2009
Restoration
www.orgelbau.ch/ope=801400
II/P/20
Germany, Bavaria
Egedacher-Orgel in der Pfarrkirche Mariä Himmelfahrt
A very complex organ puzzle
One of the most important organs in Bavaria protected by listed buildings legislation may, due to its restoration, take its place again in the organ landscape. Looking back, we realize how thorny the way was to reach this goal. The Egedacher organ was one of our most demanding restoration projects of the last few decades. The special quality of this project was that for earlier modifications old material had been used every time. Egedacher himself already reused old pipe material for the construction in 1732.
Unexpected facts made it necessary for Egedacher himself to modify some new parts. Almost 280 years later these are hard to distinguish from the modifications of the following 100 years, especially because elements were used which could have been obtained from other Egedacher organs. All this was literally a labyrinth which we had to work through ourselves before we could determine a restoration plan.
First of all, the actual defects had to be corrected. For example, the crooked pipes which were also too close together, a situation which resulted from lowering the pitch in 1828. Their pitch now is once again 465 Hz at 15° which corresponds to the old marking. We left the specification unchanged and tuned the organ to an unequal temperament according to Werckmeister III. We reconstructed the wind system with four wedge bellows with several folds and pumping pedal, the manuals with a lower broken octave (without C#1, D#1) and the pedal action, whilst preserving the old manual actions.
Altogether, we kept all the high quality constructions - even the quite recent pipe material dating from 1957 - in order as far as possible to preserve the condition of the organ as it had developed over the years.
Translation: RS 2009
