By H.H. HOWZE August 2007
Traugott Wandke’s 140-year-old cedar pipe organ never sounded better than it did Thursday afternoon, July 26 at the Bethlehem Lutheran Church in Round Top.
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Goosebumps
abounded in the scattered audience as the sonorous
tones of “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” Martin
Luther’s great hymn, resounded from the treasured
organ, its first performance since being restored.
First dedicated on Jan. 13. 1867 and hand-built
into the balcony of the 1866 church, Wandke’s
wonderful instrument is one of only three
survivors of his making. A smaller one is now in
the chapel at Festival Hill. The third is in a New
Braunfels museum.
Wantke was related to several prominent early German emigrant families in the Round Top area, including the Bauers and Schuddemagens. The organ isn’t the only reminder of his presence here. His stone home and work shop still stands, mostly unchanged, in its original location near the church. A foot-powered turning lathe he built and used is in the Round Top Historical Society Museum.
But it’s the organ that week after week binds a European heritage through the Texas frontier past to appreciative modem listeners. I fell in love with this old German church when I walked by here on my first visit to this area 10 years ago,” organ builder and restorer Friedemann Buschbeck recalled.
Now he’s played a pivotal role in getting Wandke’s wooden masterpiece into better shape than ever. Some restoration work to the historic organ had been done for the church’s centennial in 1966 by Ruben Frels of Victoria. This time around the congregation, under the leadership of church council president Elsie Schulze, decided to pay for a complete restoration to save the instrument for posterity and still be able use it.
It was not an inexpensive under taking although Schulze declined to give an exact figure. Whatever it cost, it was worth every pfennig. The organ spent over a year disassembled in Buschbeck’s Florida workshop. Buschbeck, a consummate crafts man himself, first worked on the organ in 1998, replacing the bellows and making minor adjustments to keep it playable.
“It took 10 years for them (the congregation) to trust me enough to take it completely apart and transport it to my workshop in Tampa for restoration,” he said. Before the restoration the organ was “badly out of tune and hardly playable.”
This time, Buschbeck restored the pipes and actually finished work Wandke had left undone.
“The trumpet stop was only half- finished and never functioned. The tremulo was built but never installed,” he said. “Today was the first time in its 140-year existence that it has been played with a full register.”
The honor of the instrument’s first airing in a fully functional and re-tuned state went to organist Jack Wiederhold who usually plays the organ at the St. Paul Lutheran Church in Serbin. Wiederhold was delighted. “It’s nice, It sounds like Wandke did it,” he said.
The congregation has missed their old instrument. And Schulze says they next hope to find a church organist to play it regularly at worship services. “It feels good to have it back,” she said. “I never realized how pretty it was.”
That may be because Buschbeck stripped two layers of old paint off the decorative wooden screens framing the cedar pipes and gilded them with gold leaf in the manner of other historic organs of the period.
Buschbeck is originally from Dresden, the great city in eastern Germany which was largely destroyed by Allied bombing during World War II. He made his first visit to Round Top a decade ago. “It is so different from Houston where I got off the plane. With the white picket fences and little roads it reminded me of Germany.” Ancient treasures are being refurbished on both sides of the Atlantic. Buschbeck said the restoration of the Frauenkirche, Dresden’s great medieval cathedral, was recently completed. “It’s amazing that they could still find people there to do that kind of work.
It was one good thing to come out of the economic backwardness of the former East Germany, Buschheck said. “People kept their trades. The old crafts have been kept alive.”Buschbeck himself is just such an old world craftsman, relocated to the United States, who found an opportunity to practice his craft in the restoration of Bethlehem Lutheran’s precious and historic Wantke organ.