Pulling Out All the Stops to Recover the Great Neapolitan Tradition of Organ Building & Restoration!

I’m not sure what I expected when I walked into the church of Santa Maria della Sanità. The belfry outside had been beautifully restored, but the rest of the façade was still cloaked in the cloths and scaffolding of painstaking restoration. Some day soon, one hopes, the church will again look like the jewel of the Neapolitan Counter-Reformation that it was when it was built in the early 1600s. The entrance was open; I walked in and found myself alone and mesmerized by the ornate marble double stairway, the pulpit above, and, above that, a magnificent organ (photo, above). I half-expected to see the half-masked visage of the Phantom of the Opera turn and leer over his shoulder at me as he struck up the infamously chilling opening of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (you know, the one that starts: da-da-DAAAAAH!).

This is not meant to be even a mini-manual on organs—their history, how they are made, how they are played, how they are restored, etc. (For that, I urge you buy The Cambridge Companion to the Organ by Nicholas Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber. Cambridge University Press, 1999, and read it. Get back to me when you’re done.) Suffice it to say that an organ has keyboards, pipes, ranks, pedals, stops, registers and, historically, any number of ways to move “wind” though the instrument; an organ can have one keyboard or many and it can have many thousands of pipes. Organ terminology is very technical, and none of it is accessible to the layman. (They speak of “pipe feet,” “pull-down seals,” “cone valves,” and “pallet magnets,” which to me might as well be parts of the Large Hadron Collider arom-smasher about to open near Geneva. “OK, Luigi, listen. Pull this knob and you open the 16-foot B-flat trombone stop; pull this one next to it and you open a black hole. Be careful.”)  All of this combines to produce a glorious musical instrument like none other in the history of the music of western civilization, one that moved Milton to these lovely lines:

But let my due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister's pale,
And love the high embowed roof,
With antique pillars massy proof,
And storied windows richly dight,
Casting a dim religious light.
There let the pealing organ blow,
To the full-voiced quire below,
In service high, and anthems clear,
As may with sweetness, through mine ear,
Dissolve me into ecstasies,
And bring all Heav'n before mine eyes.

In the church of Ascensione a Chiaia. This organ has 2,500 pipes
and is in working order. It appears to be of more recent construction,
probably twentieth century.

In a city such as Naples, where there are hundreds of churches, many of which were built in the hey-day of the Baroque (the 1600s), you would expect there to be at least a few dozen fine, ornate organs still up and playing. Alas, there do not seem to be. There are a few, but not many, and the real problem is that no one seems to know, or, until recently, to have cared much about preserving this rich part of the musical heritage of Naples, a city once called The Conservatory of Europe. Where are the instruments? When were they built and by whom? When were they restored (if ever)? What are the details of their construction (i.e. number and configuration of keyboards, pedals, stops, etc.)? At present, there is nothing even close to a catalogue of such things. The closest you might find is a 2-volume work by Stefano Romano called L’arte organaria a Napoli (The Art of the Organ Builder in Naples) published in 1980 (vol. 2 in 1990).

Most organs in churches throughout southern Italy are from the 1700s and 1800s but there is documentation of early organ building in Naples as early as the first half of the 1400s. The first truly prominent organ builder in Naples was Lorenzo di Giacomo, hired away from Bologne in 1471 by King Ferdinand of Naples. That was the beginning of a long string of prominent organ builders in the city of Naples and, indeed, the entire kingdom of Naples (including Sicily) that spans 500 years.

The church of S. Maria in Portico. The instrument is from the 1600s;
it is not in working order and there are no plans for restoration.

The details of it all, however, are obscure for many reasons. A lot can happen in 500 years. There are the natural ravages of time, not to mention earthquakes, volcanoes, bubonic plague, cholera, urban destruction/renewal, wars, revolution, vandalism and theft, all of which have caused entire churches to disappear, forget about the furnishings! Through all of this, even devout Roman Catholics—while no doubt concerned about their immortal souls—might be forgiven for not caring much about who was minding the organ. A new organization has arisen, however, to meet the challenge: the “Giovanni Maria Trabaci” Organ Association*, founded in 2006, is dedicated to filling in the blanks. They have already held one conference at Santa Chiara and are now at the beginning of a long process of cataloguing instruments and publishing the results on-line and in a print journal.

The organ that stirred my inner Lon Chaney in Santa Maria della Sanità is from the early 1700s and was last restored in 1940. That restoration was done by Pietro Petillo, a Neapolitan whose entire family was prominently involved in organ building and restoration throughout Italy in the last half of the 1800s and first half of the 1900s. (I am indebted for that information to Gian Marco Vitagliano, a Neapolitan restorer of such instruments.) The Sanità organ has two manuals (keyboards) and about 2,000 pipes. It is not currently in working order and plans for restoration are unclear.

A few other examples in Naples include the instrument in the church of Gesù Nuovo; it was built recently by Gustavo Zanin in 1986 but uses pieces of the earlier Balbiani organ in the church as well as of an unidentified instrument from the 1600s. The organ in the church of Sant’ Angelo a Nilo is by an anonymous (at least, so far) builder from 1700s and was restored in 1970. The organ in the church of the Madre di Buonconsiglio is by the Neapolitan builder, Domenico Antonio Rossi, and is from 1769—indeed, much older than the church, itself, which is only from the 1920s; the instrument was restored in 1994; the organ in the chapel of S. Restituta within the cathedral of Naples is from 1750 and was built by Tommaso Martino; it was restored 1994. And so the work of filling in this gigantic puzzle proceeds laboriously, step by step.