Department of Organ Works
Kioka Eizaburo plays through Bach for the first time on Mitsukoshi Department Store's Wurlitzer Organ
Japanese curiosity, like that of academics everywhere, gets particularly exercised by two words: first and complete. The first performance; the first person to graduate; the first encounter, etc. And understandably so, for human life (as opposed to that of other species) is every bit as driven by memes as it is by genes. We like to know where things came from, and, as heirs of the humanists, we prefer to go ad fontes. At least that’s what we say.
That is doubly so in Japan, and part of the reason Bach is popular: as the Father of Music he resides at the pure origin of classical music. Reality is, of course, much more muddled. It might be better to say that Bach was a consummate musical omnivore, taking in a dizzying array of influences and weaving of them a tapestry so rich as never seen before. In this, he seems to follow in the steps of his compatriot, the indefatigable Lucas Cranach, who, though often seen in the shadow of the more purely renaissance Albrecht Dürer, was in many ways the Nuremberger’s superior.1
I’ve written previously about the first performance of Bach in the foreign settlement of Yokohama. Bach was played extensively as part of the growing musical education offered at the early Tokyo Music School. And as pipe organs began to be built, his organ works, too, were played.
Last fall, I attended the second of Mari Ohki’s planned fourteen-concert series to play through all of Bach’s organ works. She stands in a long line of Japanese to do this, the last of whom was her own teacher, Yuichiro Shiina, who accomplished his own complete set about ten years ago.
Shiina and Ohki had the privilege of performing on very high quality instruments. Ohki’s hometown Aoi concert hall’s Alfred Kern (Strasbourg) organ is quite fine. But Shiina did all of his work on the double-sided behemoth built for Tokyo’s Performing Arts Center by Marc Garnier in true Arp Schnitger style.
The very first Japanese to play through all of Bach’s organ works, in the 1930s and 1940s, had a less noble venue: Mitsukoshi’s renovated department store in Tokyo. Inspired by the Philadelphia Macy’s (and others, mentioned here), the up-and-coming retailer wanted to provide a fun experience for the shoppers, one more reason to come inside and buy something. So they installed a Wurlitzer organ.
Wurlitzer was a booming company at the time, specializing in organs for theaters, then still in high demand (though soon to collapse with the advent of the “talkie.”) But they had more prestigious lines, and it was one of these (model 2099) that was installed in the large 7th floor atrium in 1930.
A 2016 article by Junko Uchida unearthed the details of the first concert in May 1930 from store and newspaper reports. We don’t know the contents of the very first concert to be played on it—it might have been using the automatic player function, which that organ is known to have had. But less than two weeks after the organ’s inauguration, Japan’s most intrepid organist of the age, Kioka Eizaburo, offered up a live performance that contained just what we might expect: Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, along with Franck and Widor.
The latter’s disciple, Louis Vierne, was actually Eizaburo’s teacher. According to my colleague Takumi Kato, Eizaburo just showed up in Paris, walked into Notre Dame, and insinuated himself upon the master, who was understandably perplexed and probably annoyed [correction thanks to faithful reader Marie Baltazar: Apparently this was a common way for students to encounter masters at the time. See more here]. How long he tolerated his Japanese interloper we don’t really know [correction: he was in Paris for about a full year, Nov. 1924–Nov. 1925]. But Eizaburo was always renowned in Japan as Vierne’s “student.” He seems to have done the same thing to Karl Straube in Leipzig’s Thomaskirche.
Over the next decade, the popular Eizaburo worked through the entirety of Bach’s catalog on the Wanamaker organ during noontime and other concerts, many of which were broadcast on the radio as well as recorded.
Despite this showmanship, Eizaburo was primarily a church musician. He spoke English, French, and German, read Latin, and spent his career translating, writing, and publishing dozens of volumes of and about choral and organ music. He remains towering figure in Japanese church music history, ending his long life a Catholic and playing regularly at Tokyo’s new, very modern cathedral.
[Please see the following articles for corrections and additions about Kioka Eisaburo.]
See Steven Ozment, The Serpent & the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).