The Groß Gievitz village church organ was made by a master of the art of organ building. It still has its original tin pipes.
The organ in the gallery above you was made by a noted German organ builder, Friedrich Hermann Lütkemüller (1815-1897),
who was active most especially in Mecklenburg and Brandenburg. It has only one manual, or musical keyboard to be played with the hands, with seven stops, making it one of the smaller organs.
Despite that, the Lütkemüller organ, which dates from 1858, has an astonishingly rich sound. That is due mainly to its pipes: they’re made of tin and were not melted
down during the First World War for the armaments industry, as was usual at the time. So the pipes are still original. In 1967 the organ was moved to one side, to open up the view of the frescoes on the wall behind it. In 2008 an organ builder from Berlin, Jörg Stegmüller, completely refurbished it.
Friedrich Hermann Lütkemüller was born on February 16, 1815 in Papenbruch, a district of the municipality of Heiligengrabe in the province of Brandenburg. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor. When he was fourteen, Lütkemüller watched the royal master organ builder Johann Friedrich Turley install an organ.
That inspired him with the desire to become an organ builder himself. After his apprenticeship he became a journeyman.
Those he worked for included Eberhard Friedrich Walcker in Ludwigsburg, one of the most innovative organ builders of his time, who even supplied the Vatican.
In 1844 Lütkemüller established his own workshop in Wittstock, on the River Dosse. A year later he married a Berliner, Laura Marie Tondeur, daughter of a royal captain. The couple had six children, two of whom died young.
In the course of his life, Friedrich Hermann Lütkemüller made about 200 organs, most of them relatively small, which were delivered to country churches in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg. Some 140 have survived to this day; many were destroyed by the depredations of war.
Lütkemüller died at the age of 82 in Wittstock.
<- Back | Forth ->(1) The organ in 2021, Picture: Heidi Goerlt
(2) Lütkemüller name plate from 1858 on the organ in Groß Gievitz, photographed in 2011. Source: Peter Schmelzle, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0.
(3) Signature of the organ builder Friedrich Hermann Lütkemüller, undated. Source: Friedrich Drese: “The Organ Builder Friedrich Hermann Lütkemüller and his Work in Mecklenburg”, Malchow 2010.
(4) Friedrich Hermann Lütkemüller, undated. Source: Friedrich Drese, “The Organ Builder Friedrich Hermann Lütkemüller and his Work in Mecklenburg”, Malchow 2010
