Gottfried Fritzsche (real name Frietzsch) (1578 – 1638) was a German organ builder.

Life

Born in

Meissen Meissen (in German orthography: ''Meißen'', ) is a town of approximately 30,000 about northwest of Dresden on both banks of the Elbe river in the Free State of Saxony, in eastern Germany. Meissen is the home of Meissen porcelain, the Albrecht ...

, Frietzsch wrote himself with a stretched IE. Research in the 20th century, however, consistently referred to him as "Fritzsche". He was born the son of the goldsmith Jobst Fritzsche (died 1585). His grandfather Johannes Fritzsche (1508-1586) was cathedral syndic in Meissen. Before 1603 he probably learned organ building from Johann Lange in Kamenz. Fritzsche was an organ builder in Meissen until 1612, then in Dresden. There he was appointed court organ builder to the Elector of Saxony around 1614. From 1619 to 1627, he worked in Wolfenbüttel and from 1628 to 1629 in Celle, before coming to

Ottensen Ottensen () (old name: Ottenhusen) located in Hamburg, Germany in the Altona borough on the right bank of the Elbe river, is a former town. It is a now one of the 104 quarters of Hamburg. History The first record of Ottensen dates from 1310. In ...

in 1629. He succeeded Hans Scherer the Younger and remained there until his death. His first marriage to a woman who is no longer known by name produced three sons and three daughters, including the organ builder

Hans Christoph Fritzsche Hans Christoph Fritzsche (before 1629 – 1674 in Hamburg) was a German organ builder from Dresden who worked in northern Germany, Denmark and southern Sweden. Life Fritzsche was the son of the organ builder Gottfried Fritzsche from his first ...

. Through his second marriage in 1629 to Margarete ''née'' Ringemuth, widowed Rist, he became the stepfather of the poet

Johann Rist Johann Rist (8 March 1607 – 31 August 1667) was a German poet and dramatist best known for his hymns, which inspired musical settings and have remained in hymnals. Life Rist was born at Ottensen in Holstein-Pinneberg (today Hamburg) on 8 Marc ...

. His pupils (and later sons-in-law) were

Friederich Stellwagen Friederich Stellwagen (baptized 7 February 1603 – buried 2 March 1660) was a pipe organ builder active in the region of northeast Germany between Hamburg and Stralsund in the mid 17th century. He learned with Gottfried Fritzsche and eventua ...

and Tobias Brunner.

Work

Fritzsche stood on the threshold from the Renaissance to the early

Baroque The Baroque (, ; ) is a style of architecture, music, dance, painting, sculpture, poetry, and other arts that flourished in Europe from the early 17th century until the 1750s. In the territories of the Spanish and Portuguese empires including t ...

. He further developed Brabant organ building and introduced numerous innovations, for example, on the Zungenregister the

rackett The rackett, raggett, cervelas, or sausage bassoon is a Renaissance-era double reed wind instrument, introduced late in the sixteenth century and already superseded by bassoons at the end of the seventeenth century. Description There are fou ...

regals such as dulzian, regal,

sordun Sordun is a family of archaic wind instruments blown by means of a double reed (sordone or sordun, etc.) Etymology Sordun originates from the Italian word Sordino. The primary Italian word in use in these specialised terms is a feminine noun: ''so ...

and the long-beaked crumhorn. Fritzsche not infrequently placed stops of the same stop family but with contrasting scales (wide and narrow) in one work or chose unusual foot pitches. In the Brustwerk and pedal he regularly used one-foot voices, which were still unknown with Scherer. Also characteristic is his double zill, which takes the place of Scherer's high-lying Scharff, as well as the use of various as single voices. For example, the simbel installed by Fritzsche in 1635 in the organ of the St. James' Church, Hamburg was the first of its kind in northern Germany. He also liked to use secondary stops such as

tremulant __NOTOC__ A tremulant (from Latin: ''tremulus'', "trembling"; french: tremblant, it, tremolo, es, temblor) is a device on a pipe organ which varies the wind supply to the pipes of one or more divisions (or, in some cases, the whole organ). Thi ...

and "drum", which do not yet appear in Scherer's work, and Effect stops such as "Cuckoo", "Birdsong", and "Nightingale". While hammered lead pipes had been the rule in northern Germany until then, Fritzsche planed the pipes and used an alloy with a higher tin content; for the cups of the trombones and trumpets he added marcasite. Compared to Scherer, the use of Subsemitones (double upper keys) was new. During his time in Hamburg, he carried out alterations to the organs of all four main churches. Fritzsche's extensions made the organs in St. Jacobi and St. Katharinen among the first organs ever to have four manuals.Fock: ''Arp Schnitger und seine Schule.'' 1974, . Fritzsche died in

, modern-day Hamburg.

List of work

References

External links

* Christian Lobback
''Hanseatischer Orgelbau im Licht des 21. Jahrhunderts''
particularly the chapter ''Die Reformorgeln Gottfried Fritzsches'' * Dorothea Schröder
''Orgeln und Orgelbau im Herzogtum Wolfenbüttel 1580–1650''
(PDF-Datei; 427 kB) {{DEFAULTSORT:Fritzsche, Gottfried German pipe organ builders 1578 births 1638 deaths People from Meissen

Life

Work

List of work

References

Further reading

External links