Bread making, hot-air ballooning and clavichord making in Schleswig
2024-12-14 by Lance Whitehead
During the historical period, stringed keyboard instrument making seems to have been largely concentrated in urban areas – including Venice, Antwerp, London and Paris – towns with threshold populations sufficient to support specialist and generalist builders alike. In Georgian London, for example, an upmarket harpsichord might be procured from the likes of Kirkman and Shudi, bought or hired at a more modest cost from Longman & Broderip’s music shop, purchased from a specialist second-hand dealer, or acquired at a bargain-basement price from Robert Falkener, who also published popular songs and a book on music theory.
In smaller towns, it was even more likely for a maker to be double-handed, to be heavily reliant on tuning and repair work, and to spend many days tramping the hinterlands in order to eke out a living. Hartvig Jochum Müller (c1716–93), for instance, worked as church architect, clavichord maker and organ builder, providing instruments for Christians Kirke in his hometown of Copenhagen (1759), Larvik Kirke, Norway (1752), a distance of 600km from the capital, and Dreslette Kirke, Haarby (1787) some 190km away. Similarly, Ferdinand Weber (1715–84) provided organs for churches the length and breadth of Ireland, and when, towards the end of his career, he started to scale down his business, he advertised the sale of ‘a good Post Chaise, and an excellent pair of black horses […] used to the Hills of the County of Wicklow’ (Saunders’s News-Letter, 15 April 1779).
Jürgen Hinrischen Angel (fl.1759–1810) and Johann Christian Jürgensen (1744–1823) both worked in the borderlands between Germany and Denmark, and both were probably multi-handed out of necessity. Both makers have been largely overlooked, perhaps because so few of their instruments survive, but their fascinating lives helps shed light on regional instrument making that was arguably no less significant than that carried out in the larger metropolises.
Angel’s ancestry remains uncertain, although it has been suggested that the family name was originally Hinrichsen and that Angel is derived from the coastal region of Jutland known as Angeln, from where the family originated. He was apprenticed to the carpenter Joachim Schröder in Flensborg (now Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein), but the source of his musical instrument training is unknown. Some writers think he was self-taught. We do know that following his apprenticeship, Angel worked as a gravedigger, verger and organ blower at St Marien Kirke in Flensborg. From 1769, he also maintained the organ there, and in 1772 he was awarded a privilege to practice as an organ builder. He thereafter worked mainly in the Schleswig area, and the façades of several organs he built are known to survive, including those for St Nicolai Treia (1797) and Brahetrolleborg Kirke (1804). There is also one extant clavichord (BMO-18). His premises at 348 Kompagniestraße were adjacent to St Marien Kirke in Flensborg, and the 1803 Schleswig Census provides testimony that he employed two journeymen: his son Nicolai Angel (36) and Lorenz Gandrup (57). He died on 23 January 1810, the family business being continued by Nicolai.
In contrast, Johann Christian Jürgensen was the son of a baker and lived all his life in the town of Schleswig. He trained as a baker, and after his father’s death continued to run the family bakery with his mother until 1769, when he opened an instrument-making workshop. Again, he may have been self-taught. He apparently made a variety of keyboard instruments, including pianos (two survive), clavichords (one survives), and a Clavecin Royal with 12 Beränderungen or variations of tone. There is some evidence, too, that he constructed optical instruments, thermometers and lightning rods, and took a keen interest in hot-air ballooning. Moreover, he wrote papers on runestones, on Hans Brüggemann’s Bordesholm altarpiece in Schleswig cathedral, and reworked Nicolaus Helduader’s Chronik der Stadt Schleswig (Schleswig, 1822). Following his death on 8 November 1823, a short biography of him appeared in the Schleswig-Holstein-Lauenburgische Provinzialberichte.