Philipp Maintz has focussed more intensively on the organ in his output in recent years. In a conversation, reproduced here in excerpts, he answered questions from his editor Robert Krampe.

Krampe: You once said in an interview that your love for the organ dates from a visit to one which you made as young as the age of five or six. What was it that fascinated you then, and what continues to fascinate you today about the instrument?

Maintz: It was after a Mass in our Parish Church. I had asked my father whether we could go up to the organ loft – and the organist, with whom I later had my first piano lessons, switched the organ on again and played something for us. This enthralled me and didn’t let me go.

What fascinates me about this instrument to this day is the sound which you can feel as with no other instrument. The fact that you can have acoustic command over large spaces such as a cathedral. And of course also the opportunity of mixing colours in endless combinations and inventing each piece afresh every time. However, I can’t hide the fact that I also continue to find the technical aspects incredibly exciting. In fact, there is no instrument which combines such great technological advances with a centuries-old building tradition. When you’ve clambered through an instrument which is the size of a family house, that’s a really impressive experience.

Somewhere else you wrote that the organ was the reason you began composing. Is it true that your first attempts at composition were for this instrument?

My immediate reaction to this experience as a six-year-old was that I felt I had to write organ music. My enthusiasm had to be channelled somewhere. I couldn’t play the piano, and definitely not the organ, so composing was the next best thing. Anyway, I could read music and I knew from my father that you probably needed three staves (right and left hand plus feet). So I drew some staves and got going.
But it’s true for me that this instrument is still the basis of playing and music-making to this day. And making music is probably also something which for me is always associated with a sacred connotation, with great seriousness and therefore also with a demand for perfection.

At the age of twelve you had your first organ lessons and straight away you wanted to become a professional organist. What dissuaded you from that?

Actually it is quite simple: I didn’t want to become an organist just anywhere, but at St. Sulpice in Paris, where Charles-Marie Widor and Marcel Dupré had been organists. Stupidly these positions were already occupied, so then I had to think of something else. I was also (unfortunately) also always too lazy to practise properly. That might possibly have also got in the way.

Why did it finally take so long until your first “official” organ piece was written?

I can no longer remember exactly. I had drifted away from the organ for several years, because it seemed to be at odds with my musical language after my studies and at the beginning of my developing my own style. With the first version of “ferner, und immer ferner” I found it very difficult to compose. At that time, I had very much immersed myself in the organ theme, but it didn’t quite work out. But by coincidence I was living in Paris at that time and got to know Jean Guillou. At his invitation I spent many Sunday afternoons with him in Saint-Eustache at the organ. At some point I ventured to ask whether I might also play the organ. I was allowed to! I have been allowed to spend many nights in this wonderful church and to experiment on the organ. I really fell in love with this instrument and its sonority. There I then unpicked “ferner, und immer ferner” like a pullover and knitted it together afresh.

 “ferner, und immer ferner” was composed in its original version for the old organ of St. Martin’s Church in Kassel, followed by “in nomine: coronæ” for St. Michael in Munich and “septimus angelus” for St. Sebald in Nuremberg. Each of these instruments is different. How did you approach composing? What kind of sound world are you aiming for when writing?

If I’m honest, when I’m writing I still hear the sound of the grand organ of Saint-Eustache in my head. But I’ve also succeeded in forgetting it: for example, when I wrote a piece for the Silbermann organ in the Dresden Court Church. Together with the organist Maximilian Schnaus, we decided to try out sounds there and explored what you can play – a fully mechanical Baroque instrument is indeed quite different from one with all kinds of electric and electronic controls which do everything.

At the end it almost doesn’t matter what kind of sound world I have in my head when I’m writing. As a composer I can only deliver half of it; a black-and-white sketch, so to speak, which the performer “colours” in the location with the instrument available, and in fact has to invent afresh. The first time this is quite an effort, but thereafter some sort of routine seems to develop. It is fun for me to help with the registration (when the “kind of sound” is often less important than the urge to see which sounds you can produce and mix together there). But I also find it great to allow myself to be surprised. We should allow organ works to have their own life! And the more someone makes the work their own, the more beautiful I find it.

With your organ pieces, it is the extra-musical references which are striking above all: in “ferner, und immer ferner” it is a text by George Bataille, in “septimus angelus” and “de figuris” the cycle of engravings “Apocalipsis cum figuris” by Albrecht Dürer etc. Where does this tendency towards extra-musical influences come from, and what effects does it have on your organ music?

The tendency to be inspired by the extra-musical is actually there in every piece which I write. Witold Lutosławski once said that composers only ever heard what they wanted to hear at the moment – always with regard to what is currently preoccuping them. I believe I perceive the whole world this way. Everything which comes from outside leaves behind a resonance. Often it is very diffuse and for me, at first not really tangible. For such references to the extra-musical are probably a kind of particle of dust in the air around which the clouds crystallise and can shed their moisture.

When I really think about it, I realise that Bataille’s quote is about a world which God has turned away from, in “in nomine: coronae” Bach’s chorale arrangement of “O Mensch, bewein dein Sünde groß” wanders around, and Dürer’s cycle of engravings conjures up the apocalypse. To be very brief, it is apparently always about the end of the world – that wasn’t so clear to me previously. Probably every artist is a child of his or her time and cannot detach him or herself from it.

“de figuris”, your “concerto for organ and large orchestra” can be regarded as a high point in your organ works. Were there particular challenges in the task of combining the organ, with its orchestral specification, with a large symphony orchestra?

Actually, the organ concerto combines two things which I love and also bring me great joy: the orchestra (I very happily puzzle out instrumentations) and the organ. It was always like this when writing, like when I ran and jumped into a great big puddle as a child. All at once! And plenty of it!

What is special about “de figuris”?

An organ in the concert hall sounds different from one in a church. I took this into account from the beginning: the orchestra partly assumes the function of the reverberating space. Out of the idea of the organ and orchestra working together, a piece developed which is full of colour like a great panorama. The organ part offers the soloist a wealth of opportunity to exploit their art of registration and thus to include some delightful effects which are rather unusual within a piece half an hour long.

Since 2017 you have been working on a large-scale project of 63 chorale preludes which you have divided into three sections with corresponding subsidiary points: the church year, occasions and liturgy. You originally began the project just for your own fun (“one each Sunday evening”, as you put it – how long did you keep this up?), in the meantime there are now 14 fully-developed pieces. Which criteria did you use to choose the chorales?

Well yes, I lasted two Sundays: “So nimm denn meine Hände” and “O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden” were each written in one evening. The third then took more than one Sunday – it was initially quite free in style and without a real plan. In order to give some kind of form to the whole cycle, I asked a friend who is a Catholic priest and very keen on music to make a plan for me. Two days later I had a to-do list with 62 chorale melodies. As an “Öcher Printe” [Aachen gingerbread] I then added a 63rd on the Aachen Charlemagne sequence “Urbs Aquensis, urbs regalis” – this redolent scent has to be there!

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote his comparable “Orgelbüchlein” project so that “a beginner organist can be given direction in all ways of executing a chorale”. Are you pursuing similar “pedagogical” aims with your project?

For the first two I was still thinking of liturgical use. These are pieces with a very handy duration of around three minutes. Since then, these works have developed into fully-fledged concert pieces which are considerably longer and have also become truly virtuosic. It also gives me great pleasure (and I draw a good part of the inspiration from this) to respond to the wishes and requirements of the performers giving the first performances, or the situations of the organs they play. The concert organist Angela Metzger asked for a chorale prelude in which she could create a firework of colours (no. XXXII, “Wer nur den lieben Gott läßt walten”); Hansjörg Albrecht asked for something easy, because he thought of premiering the piece at very short notice (no. XIX, ”Wie schön leucht’ uns der Morgenstern”); Marcel Andreas Ober wanted “the full panoply with lots of notes, preferably pianistic” (no. XIII, “O filii et filiae”); on the other hand, Martin Lücker requested a trio of Christmas pieces (nos. III, IV and VI), and we worked closely on their composition which I found very exciting. There is in fact a little story about the creation of each of these pieces. But my aims were not really “pedagogical”.

Bach gave up working on his “Orgelbüchlein” after about ten years and left it incomplete. What are your future plans for your project?

I have in mind to finally complete the project in about ten years’ time. In this respect my plan is to continue writing, to simply continue writing until I’m finished! The whole thing has developed an interesting dynamic, so that at least one of these pieces is permanently on my desk.

As well as the chorale preludes, you are now planning a new cycle of pieces which are explicitly to be for “organs in the concert hall”. How do concert hall organs and church organs differ? Are there differences in composing and what will distinguish these pieces musically and stylistically from your chorale preludes? How extensive will this cycle be? And are there plans about when you will start this?

I have devised this idea with Angela Metzger: in many European concert halls, fantastic new instruments have been built in recent years, but which are hardly ever used. And if they are, then it’s in programmes which one would prefer to hear in a church. A concert hall doesn’t sound like a church, and even worse, an organ in a concert hall doesn’t sound like the instruments in an orchestra. If you take your finger off the key, the sound is cut off. This in turn presents opportunities which would simply blur beyond recognition in a church acoustic.

This cycle will be decidedly quite secular: small, handy pieces which don’t last long, which can easily be integrated into a beautiful programme, and which emerge either as a contrast or even better, as a small, glittering praline. Let’s see how extensive the cycle will be. Here lies the great fun of tailoring the pieces to work for Angela Metzger. She has such a masterful virtuosity, at the same time a sensuous-sounding musicality and she has also expressed precise wishes about what she would like to have. Something like this immediately sparks my imagination! This will be a very special collaboration which I’m greatly looking forward to! It will start at the end of September 2024.

The list of performers of your organ works reads like a “Who’s who” of the German organ scene. Does it influence your composing when you know which instrument, but also which organist you are writing for?

I am really amazed who is in this line-up – and there an interesting tendency can be seen: through these chorale preludes I have become immersed in the world of organists. I have to say that it is a really unusual parallel universe. The fact that the organ and new music have few meeting points is also due to a generation of organists for whom Marcel Dupré represented “new music”, and Olivier Messiaen the most strident avant-garde. They are the ones who don’t want to take any risk. Unfortunately, this is how musical tradition stands still and gathers dust. Alongside this, there is a younger generation who enjoy modern pieces, who want challenges and with whom I can plan exciting adventures. Collaborating with them is enormous fun.

When I receive a commission to write a piece which is to be premiered on a particular organ, I look at the details of the particular instrument. But I start from the point that the pieces can also be played on other instruments with different specifications. In this respect, yes and no – I only allow myself to be influenced by this to a certain extent. One special case was when I wrote No. LIII “Allein Gott in der Höh sei Ehr” for Maximilian Schnaus: he premiered this on the historic Silbermann organ in the Court Church in Dresden. That means short octaves, a smaller compass than with modern instruments, fully mechanical, no swell – that set very narrow limits. On the other hand, to make something out of that was very inspiring.

Is there an ideal organ, a favourite instrument for you? And do you have a dream of which organ you would still like to compose for?

The ideal organ sound that I always have in my ear is the great organ of Saint-Eustache in Paris. It combines a French romantic sharpness with tonal possibilities which sound almost electronic and range from ethereal enraptured rustling and whispering to a monumental rolling thunder. And this instrument has such a stable wind supply that a cluster played tutti with both arms – with no limitations on volume – can stand in the space like the trumpets of Jericho.

A dream instrument doesn’t in fact exist. Rather, it would be a dream if my Organ Concerto were awoken from its deep sleep and played again!

The interview took place in July 2023.