Admittedly: In the expression “funeral service” the word “celebration” contained therein lacks the association with “happiness” that it normally arouses. The term “mass celebration”, however, can be assumed to mean that this can also be a happy gathering of a religious community. One that is even celebrated in some circles with correspondingly joyful gospel music. But the sublime organ music, which mostly accompanies masses in this country, has something solemn about it, which sometimes underlines the happy aspects of a church service. In the St. Margaret’s Church in Munich, it has often happened that the Catholic community present thanked the church musicians for their particularly inspiring performances with euphoric applause at the end of a service. The organist and conductor Christian Bischof, for example, who has been enriching musical life in the Sendling community with exciting church concerts since 2013. Again and again, there was fruitful cooperation with the no less musical Protestant community in Sendling, whose Church of the Assumption is regularly used as a recording studio for good reasons.
The high point of such musical coexistence in this Munich district also includes the Sendlinger Organ Days, where visitors to both churches, the Protestant Church of the Assumption and the Catholic Church of St. Margaret, meet in music that the Persian poet Rumi in the Middle Ages called the ” Creak of the Gates of Heaven “had described:” I want to sing like birds sing, who don’t care who listens or who could think what, “wrote Rumi. Eight hundred years later, the French organist Olivier Messiaen tried to note the song of the birds and incorporate it into his compositions.
—After the masses he often got applause for his playing: the church musician Christian Bischof at the organ in Sankt Margaret.
(Photo: Norbert Latocha)
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For three years the big organ of Saint Margaret had been silent, the longest pipe of which is over eleven meters long, while the smallest of its 4160 organ pipes is just over 10 millimeters. Because the late Romantic organ, built in 1915, was badly damaged by an air raid during World War II, it first had to be repaired in the post-war period. The decision was made to build a partially new building using the undamaged pipework. The organist Christian Bischof says: “Back then you had little money, it had to be done quickly. You had also experimented with new material that turned out to be not very long-lasting. And on the other hand you had a different sound perception, you wanted to get away from it Romantic. So over the years the organ became a piecemeal that fell apart tonally. “
Now that the organ was completely refurbished on Bischof’s recommendation, the sound of the organ was also brought back to its romantic roots. In Advent 2020 the big organ finally shone again in the new old sound on the west gallery of the single-nave church built in the style of the Italian Baroque. However, without the religious community that is otherwise so numerous here, of which only a few are allowed to take part in the local church service due to the risk of infection in the pandemic. Concerts are currently completely excluded because of the pandemic, regrets Bischof.
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