I’m not
sure what I expected when I walked into the church
of Santa Maria della
Sanità. The belfry outside had been beautifully
restored, but the rest of the façade was
still cloaked in the cloths and scaffolding of
painstaking restoration. Some day soon, one hopes,
the church will again look like the jewel of the
Neapolitan Counter-Reformation that it was when it
was built in the early 1600s. The entrance was open;
I walked in and found myself alone and mesmerized by
the ornate marble double stairway, the pulpit above,
and, above that, a magnificent organ (photo, above).
I half-expected to see the half-masked visage of the
Phantom of the Opera turn and leer over his shoulder
at me as he struck up the infamously chilling
opening of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (you know, the one that
starts: da-da-DAAAAAH!).
This is not
meant to be even a mini-manual on organs—their history, how they are made, how they
are played, how they are restored, etc. (For that, I
urge you buy The Cambridge Companion to the
Organ by Nicholas
Thistlethwaite and Geoffrey Webber. Cambridge University Press,
1999, and read it. Get back to me when you’re
done.) Suffice it to say that an organ
has keyboards, pipes, ranks, pedals, stops, registers
and, historically, any number of ways to move “wind”
though the instrument; an organ can have one keyboard
or many and it can have many thousands of pipes. Organ
terminology is very technical, and none of it is
accessible to the layman. (They speak of “pipe feet,”
“pull-down seals,” “cone valves,” and “pallet
magnets,” which to me might as well be parts of the
Large Hadron Collider atom-smasher about to open near
Geneva. “OK, Luigi, listen. Pull this
knob and you open the 16-foot B-flat trombone stop;
pull this one next to it and you open a black hole.
Be careful.”) All of this combines to produce a
glorious musical instrument like none other in the
history of the music of western civilization, one that
moved Milton to these lovely lines: But let
my due feet never fail
In the church of Ascensione
a Chiaia. This organ has 2,500 pipes
Most organs in churches throughout southern Italy are
from the 1700s and 1800s but there is documentation of
early organ building in Naples as early as the first
half of the 1400s. The first truly prominent organ
builder in Naples was Lorenzo di Giacomo, hired away
from Bologne in 1471 by King Ferdinand of Naples. That
was the beginning of a long string of prominent organ
builders in the city of Naples and, indeed, the entire
kingdom of Naples (including Sicily) that spans 500
years. The church of S. Maria in
Portico. The instrument is from the 1600s;
* The eponym, Trabaci
(1575-1647), was an organist and prominent composer
for the instrument who for many years was active at
the Oratorio of the
Filippini in the church of the Girolamini in
Naples. The organ that stirred
my inner Lon Chaney in Santa Maria della Sanità
is from the early 1700s and was last restored in 1940.
That restoration was done by Pietro Petillo, a Neapolitan whose
entire family was prominently involved in organ building
and restoration throughout Italy in the last half of the
1800s and first half of the 1900s. (I am indebted for
that information to Gian Marco Vitagliano, a Neapolitan
restorer of such instruments.) The Sanità organ
has two manuals (keyboards) and about 2,000 pipes. It is
not currently in working order and plans for restoration
are unclear.
In
the church of San Domenico Maggiore
The instrument shown above is a
double-organ, the two components of which are situated
on either side of the nave in the recently restored
church of Santa Maria
dell'Aiuto. Double organs were not particularly
rare, but this is the best-restored one I have seen.
Literature on the church simply describes it as "a
17th-century instrument"—not particularly helpful. I am
making enquiries, but I have a feeling that the
otherwise very successful restoration of this church
stopped short of restoring the organ such that it can be
played.
Organs in the Naples
Cathedral
The musical instruments within the Naples cathedral are
well-known, so they are not really within the "the lost
organs" premise of this entry. Yet, for the sake of
completeness, one should know something about their
history; also, as we shall see, organ construction in the
cathedral may bear on the presence of organs in other
churches in the city.There are organs (1) in the main nave of the cathedral; (2) in the left-hand chapel (known as the Basilica of Santa Restituta; and (3) in the chapel of the Tesoro [Treasure] of San Gennaro.  —(1)
The main nave displays the instrument that one sees upon
entering the cathedral: the Grand Ruffati Organ from 1975.
It consists of two identical organs facing each other, one
on the left side of the nave (photo) above the episcopal
throne and the other directly across from it, above the
pulpit. Even in a house of worship as splendid as the Duomo of Naples, they
stand out and are what many people first notice, even if
they are not particularly scouting for organs. The
instruments are played from a console located near the
front of the cathedral. I include here and gratefully
acknowledge the following comments from Larry Ray (who has
other material on this website).
Besides being an expert on Underground Naples, a
helicopter pilot, a broadcaster, print journalist and an
artist, he obviously knows a lot about organs (Leonardo da
Vinci, eat your heart out!):The Ruffati organ is essentially the last in a series of rebuildings that go back to 1767 when cathedral organist, Fabrizio Cimino, removed two older organs and replaced them with a new twin instrument, two identical unit organs exactly the same in sound and appearance. Besides 1975, rebuildings of that 1767 instrument occurred in 1843, 1931, and 1963. Such work is not just simple modification, but entails adding pipes, stops, manuals (keyboards) and, most importantly, converting the controls and mechanisms from earlier mechanical systems to electrical ones. The 1767 Cimino organ was itself, however, a replacement for the first grand organ in the cathedral, the first element of which was the 1549 organ, built by G.F. de Palma, set on the right in the main body of the church and, then, a second unit, set on the left and built in 1652 by P. and M. de Franco. Those large components faced each other (the same way the modern ones do) on either side of the nave and were termed "the magnificent twins." (Indeed, they both bore decorative art by Luca Giordano.) Before that, there is no reliable documentation of instruments in the cathedral, but one assumes there was some sort of organ in place to accompany the choir by the second half of the 1400s. The separate small choir organ at the front was from 1782 and had a long life, remaining in use until as late as 1950. It was removed in 1963. —(2) In the Santa Restituta section of the cathedral, there are two instruments: the historic 1750 de Martino organ and the Frescobalda organ built in 1975 (although it was built to look older). The latter is free-standing, relatively small and mobile; the fine wooden case housing the pipes features a small, historic keyboard; the case is mounted on wheels and the entire affair can be repositioned if necessary. (3) The Royal Chapel of the treasure of San Gennaro, contains the 1640 de Franco twin organs. The unit on the right was rebuilt in 1902 by Petillo. To my knowledge, neither of them is currently in condition to be played.  As
noted above, the cathedral may have to do with organs
elsewhere in the city. When Fabrizio Cimino built the
"new" twins in 1767, he removed the original "magnificent
twins," and no one seems to know exactly what happened to
them. They were highly regarded and almost certainly would
not have been destroyed. In the opinion of some
researchers,*they
may
have wound up in the church of Santa
Maria La Nova, where the organ has traditionally
been regarded as somewhat of a mystery in terms of origin.
That church was built in 1596 and had a small instrument
there for many years. The two large unit organs that one
sees today, however, on the right and left (the left organ
is shown in the photo, above) are not recorded in early
church documentation and do not seem to have been there
until sometime in the 1700s.*This includes Graziano Fronzuto, from whose article on the history of the organs in the cathedral of Naples I have drawn much of my information. to main index to music portal |
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In
a city such as Naples, where there are hundreds of
churches, many of which were built in the hey-day of
the Baroque (the 1600s), you would expect there to be
at least a few dozen fine, ornate organs still up and
playing. Alas, there do not seem to be. There are a
few, but not many, and the real problem is that no one
seems to know, or, until recently, to have cared much
about preserving this rich part of the musical
heritage of Naples, a city once called The
Conservatory of Europe. Where are the instruments?
When were they built and by whom? When were they
restored (if ever)? What are the details of their
construction (i.e. number and configuration of
keyboards, pedals, stops, etc.)? At present, there is
nothing even close to a catalogue of such things. The
closest you might find is a 2-volume work by Stefano
Romano called L’arte organaria a Napoli
(The Art of the Organ Builder in Naples) published in
1980 (vol. 2 in 1990).
The details of it all, however, are
obscure for many reasons. A lot can happen in 500
years. There are the natural ravages of time, not to
mention earthquakes, volcanoes, bubonic plague,
cholera, urban destruction/renewal, wars, revolution,
vandalism and theft, all of which have caused entire churches to disappear, forget
about the furnishings! Through all of this, even
devout Roman Catholics—while no
A few other examples in Naples include the
instrument in the 
