Whoever crosses Alexanderplatz in Berlin, walks unknowingly past one of the city's oldest places. Right below the Fernsehturm, between the skyscrapers and tourist crowds, stands the Marienkirche: Berlin's oldest still-functioning church, containing an organ that has been sounding for more than three hundred years. The person in charge of it is remarkably young. Xaver Schult has been organist of the Marienkirche since his twenty-fifth, and that was almost seven years ago now. I met him during an organ tour that I reported on Klassiek Centraal in April. Reason enough to have a more extensive conversation with him.
An organ to touch
Every Thursday between April and October, anyone can enter free of charge and without an appointment for a tour of the Marienkirche organ. For Schult, these moments are more than just a fixed task on the agenda. "The organ has fascinated me since my earliest childhood," he tells me. Where exactly that fascination comes from, he finds difficult to explain afterward: "The fascination for the organ was there first, the explanation for it I would have to search for afterward." Incidentally, he also thinks other instruments are wonderful – "I just can't play them, unfortunately."
At a tour, most of the public have never seen an organ up close, experienced it, and only then discover how versatile the instrument is: "It gives me pleasure when my enthusiasm rubs off on the audience, and from that moment on they experience the organ differently." What exactly he shows depends on who is standing before him. "Is the audience more interested in the history? Or in the technology? Or do people mainly want to hear music?" Often the impression is greatest when visitors get to see the inside of the instrument, or get to operate the bellows themselves.
From Northern Germany to Alexanderplatz
Who Xaver Schult is, according to him, can be answered in multiple ways. "Locally: I was born and raised in Northern Germany. Church-wise: I grew up in the Evangelical Lutheran tradition. Musically: early music is my true home." According to him, many more backgrounds could be mentioned. He grew up in a musical family: his parents and brothers and sisters all play instruments and sing. Becoming an organist was not a later discovery, but a childhood wish that he has realized without much detour: "I wanted to be an organist, for as long as I can remember. It was my great childhood dream."
Decisive was his time at Schwerin Cathedral, where Jan Ernst was not only his first organ teacher but also his choir director, later one of his professors at the Hochschule in Hamburg, and to this day friend, colleague and sounding board. After his final exams in Schwerin, Schult moved to Hamburg to study church music, with Wolfgang Zerer as his principal organ teacher – he too is a great role model for him, both musically and personally. After his graduation, he spent four more years studying improvisation in Berlin with Wolfgang Seifen and Dirk Elsemann, parallel to his appointment at the Marienkirche.
His inspiration, by the way, comes not only from musicians. People from different generations can inspire him in very different ways: musically, humanly or philosophically. Outside the organ, cooking is a growing passion, alongside a broad interest in technology – trains, planes, ships – and in graphic design and architecture.
Young in an age-old tradition
When the vacancy for organist of the Marienkirche was advertised, Schult was still in the middle of his final exams. "I was just twenty-five. I tried it, and it worked." An assistantship during his studies at the Hamburg Hauptkirche St. Katharinen – "a wonderful place to work" – certainly helped him with that.
Schult notices little tension between his age and the age-old tradition he represents: "Maybe it's even the opposite: the younger you start, the more natural the relationship with that old tradition becomes." In a time that seems rather turbulent to him, he experiences the centuries-long – sometimes even thousand-year-old – background of the tradition rather as a reassuring anchor. That his generation deals with organ and church music differently than previous generations, he does believe, though he adds pragmatically that every new generation is simply different from the previous one.
He continues to encounter surprised reactions to his age, though he relativizes it himself: "After almost seven years in office, I'm also not exactly young anymore. I'm just younger than the image that apparently many people have of an organist in such a position." What the position really requires of him – reliability, organizational talent, creativity, musicality – according to him has nothing to do with age. Concretely, being an organist at the Marienkirche means much more than playing the instrument: Schult is also responsible for the care and preservation of the organ, organizes concert series, deals with music mediation and manages much behind the scenes. Collaboration and networking with other partners in the city are also part of his work.
Early music, living improvisation
As a musician, Schult has been shaped primarily by early music, performed on period instruments. He places great importance on differentiated, polyphonic articulation that is guided by text and speech patterns. There are works he has been playing for half his life and which still make him "fall in love anew every single time". Improvisation forms an essential part of his work: most of what sounds from the organ during a church service is improvised. "With improvisation you can respond extremely precisely to a situation and influence how words are interpreted." In concerts, however, he improvises less frequently.
An organ from 1721
The organ at Marienkirche was built in 1721 by Joachim Wagner – strictly speaking, it was only officially approved in 1723, although the inauguration took place earlier. It was Wagner's very first organ, the beginning of a long organ-building career. His style is regularly associated with Johann Sebastian Bach, who actually found Gottfried Silbermann's organs rather outdated and preferred builders from his school, such as Zacharias Hildebrandt and thus Joachim Wagner.
Over more than three centuries, the instrument has of course changed, but it now stands, with few exceptions, close to the original of 1721. What is particularly remarkable is that the front pipes are still authentic – a stroke of luck that many historical organs did not have, because their front pipes had to be surrendered for the war industry during the First World War.
Playing an instrument with so much historical and symbolic weight, in a church with such a turbulent past, could be intimidating. Fortunately, Schult does not experience it that way in Marienkirche: "It actually allows me to play freely and bring my own personality into the way I shape my work." Marienkirche has important stories to tell, and they weigh all the more heavily because Berlin has few places with central historical significance from before the nineteenth century, "but it also doesn't have the weight of a Thomaskirche in Leipzig."
Berlin as a cultural city
On an ordinary weekday evening, an estimated two thousand events take place in Berlin – an enormous range, in which an organ concert is just one of many. According to Schult, this makes it difficult to reach an audience, but that same diversity is precisely what makes the city so attractive.
Yet Marienkirche has something that is lacking elsewhere in Berlin: an organ from 1721, in the oldest church in the city, in the most central imaginable location, on the Alexanderplatz, just below the Fernsehturm: "We offer culture at prices that as many people as possible can afford, and at a very high level. And we try never to lose sight of the people who visit us and remain accessible."
According to him, the organ remains a musical niche in any case, and Berlin is not necessarily more progressive in that regard than other cities. Moreover, the city is so large that he himself often doesn't find out what colleagues on the other side of Berlin are doing.
A new audience, without social media
Bringing young people – and by this Schult does not mean his own generation, but babies, children, teenagers – into contact with music, he calls vital. Learning music, for him, does not simply mean being able to read a musical staff, but developing skills and a relationship to yourself, your body, your soul and the world. He finds it problematic that young people miss this opportunity because music, art, theater or sports education is cut from schools, or because a family cannot afford a music school.
For the organ audience of Marienkirche itself, he prefers not to target one specific age group, but rather wants to be there for people of all ages. He hopes that high-level concerts, with human involvement and reliable planning, will inspire people with a love of music – "perhaps they'll come back someday, perhaps they'll go to a concert somewhere else, perhaps they'll remember forty years from now that they once heard beautiful organ music in Marienkirche."
For those who find organ music "difficult" or "distant", he has complete understanding: "The organ stands far away, you see no movement or human action, you are thrown back on pure listening." Moreover, organ compositions differ fundamentally from orchestral or piano music: the organ was never a parlor instrument and is not inherently accessible.
What is striking for someone of his generation: recordings and social media play no role whatsoever in his work: "I don't appreciate social media, nor the recording of a fleeting art like music." In his private life too, he rarely listens to music from recordings – at most in a focused way, to look something up or find inspiration.
Looking ahead
At the moment, Schult is working on the schedule for the coming two seasons – "drawing the first lines in a new, blank notebook," as he calls it. In addition, a major task awaits: the organ at Marienkirche will soon need to be cleaned and restored. Much work, but also a chance to get to know the instrument even more intimately – and that makes the project something he is very much looking forward to.
Regarding the future of the church organ, he prefers not to make bold predictions. "If I knew that, life would be simpler in some respects." What he does notice week after week is how much enthusiasm the instrument can still generate: "The church organ will probably be around for a long time yet."
He is reluctant to give advice to young colleagues – "don't pieces of advice have a lot to do with ourselves and our own biography?" – but he generously shares stories about his own life and experiences, in the hope that someone will recognize themselves in it. He himself would, after all these years playing magnificent historical instruments, like to spend more time with French symphonic organs – a field that has somewhat fallen short in his career so far.
As the Fernsehturm casts its shadow over an Alexanderplatz that is constantly changing, an organ from 1721 continues to sound in the Marienkirche – played by someone who is just at the beginning of what promises to be a long organist's life. Xaver Schult tells that story with as much love for tradition as for the still unwritten pages that lie ahead of him. Being young need not be a contradiction with a centuries-old tradition. On the contrary, it can be the most natural continuation of it.