M. Welte & Sons, Freiburg and New York was a manufacturer of
orchestrionAn orchestrion is a generic name for a machine that plays music and is designed to sound like an orchestra or band. Orchestrions may be operated by means of a large pinned cylinder or by a music roll and less commonly book music. The sound is usually produced by pipes, though they will be voiced...
s,
organThe organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more divisions, each played with its own keyboard operated either with the hands or with the feet...
s and reproducing pianos.
From 1832 until 1932, the firm produced mechanical musical Instruments of the highest quality. The firm's founder, Michael Welte (1807-1880), and his company were prominent in the technical development and construction of orchestrions from 1850, until the early 20th century.
In 1872, the firm moved from the remote
black forestThe Black Forest is a wooded mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany. It is bordered by the Rhine valley to the west and south. The highest peak is the Feldberg with an elevation of 1,493 metres ....
town of Vöhrenbach, into a newly developed business complex beneath the main railway-station in Freiburg,
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
.
They created an epoch-making development when they substituted the playing gear of their instruments from fragile wood pinned cylinders to perforated paper rolls.
M. Welte & Sons, Freiburg and New York was a manufacturer of
orchestrionAn orchestrion is a generic name for a machine that plays music and is designed to sound like an orchestra or band. Orchestrions may be operated by means of a large pinned cylinder or by a music roll and less commonly book music. The sound is usually produced by pipes, though they will be voiced...
s,
organThe organ is a keyboard instrument of one or more divisions, each played with its own keyboard operated either with the hands or with the feet...
s and reproducing pianos.
From 1832 until 1932, the firm produced mechanical musical Instruments of the highest quality. The firm's founder, Michael Welte (1807-1880), and his company were prominent in the technical development and construction of orchestrions from 1850, until the early 20th century.
In 1872, the firm moved from the remote
black forestThe Black Forest is a wooded mountain range in Baden-Württemberg, southwestern Germany. It is bordered by the Rhine valley to the west and south. The highest peak is the Feldberg with an elevation of 1,493 metres ....
town of Vöhrenbach, into a newly developed business complex beneath the main railway-station in Freiburg,
GermanyGermany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a country in Central Europe. It is bordered to the north by the North Sea, Denmark, and the Baltic Sea; to the east by Poland and the Czech Republic; to the south by Austria and Switzerland; and to the west by France, Luxembourg, Belgium,...
.
They created an epoch-making development when they substituted the playing gear of their instruments from fragile wood pinned cylinders to perforated paper rolls. In 1883, Emil Welte (1841-1923), the eldest son of Michael, who had emigrated to the United States in 1865, patented the paper roll method (US-Patent 287.599). In 1889, the technique was further perfected, and again protected through patents. Later, Welte built only instruments using the new technique, which was also licensed to other companies.
With branches in New York and Moscow, and representatives throughout the world, Welte became very well known.
The firm was already famous for its inventions in the field of the reproduction of music when Welte introduced the Welte-Mignon reproducing piano in 1904, which came onto the market in 1905. As a result of this invention by Edwin Welte (1876-1958) and his brother-in-law Karl Bockisch (1874-1952), one could now record and reproduce the music played by a pianist as true to life as was technologically possible at the time.
Welte Philharmonic Organ
From 1912 on, a similar system for organs branded "Welte Philharmonic-Organ" was produced. Thirteen well-known European organist-composers of the era, among them
Alfred HollinsAlfred Hollins was a respected English organist, composer and teacher who was a famous recitalist in Scotland....
,
Eugene GigoutEugène Gigout was a French organist and a composer of European late-romantic music for organ.-Biography:Eugène Gigout was born in Nancy, and died in Paris....
and
Max RegerJohann Baptist Joseph Maximilian Reger was a German composer, conductor, pianist, organist, and teacher.- Life :...
were photographed recording for the organ , distinguished organists like
Edwin LemareEdwin Henry Lemare was an English organist and composer who lived the latter part of his life in the United States.-Biography:...
,
Clarence EddyClarence Eddy was an American organist. He was married to singer Sara Hershey who established the Hershey Music School in Chicago....
and
Joseph BonnetJoseph Bonnet was a French composer and organist.One of the major French pipe organ players, Joseph Bonnet was born in Bordeaux. He first studied with his father, an organist at St. Eulalie. At the age of 14, he became official organist, first at St. Nicholas and almost immediately at St. Michael...
were recorded too.
Welte Inc.
In 1912 a new company was founded, the "M. Welte & Sons. Inc." in New York, and a new factory was built in
PoughkeepsiePoughkeepsie is a city in the state of New York, the United States, which serves as the county seat of Dutchess County. Poughkeepsie is located in the Hudson River Valley midway between New York City and Albany...
,
New YorkNew York is a state in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern regions of the United States and is the nation's third most populous. The state is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
. Shareholders were predominantly family members in the U.S. and Germany, among them
Barney DreyfussBernhard "Barney" Dreyfuss was a German-Jewish-American executive in Major League Baseball who owned the Pittsburgh Pirates franchise from 1900 to 1932....
, Edwins brother-in-law.
As a result of the
Alien Property CustodianAn Alien Property Custodian was an office within the Government of the United States during World War I and again during World War II. serving as a Custodian of Enemy Property to property that belonged to US enemies.On 11 March, 1942, President Franklin D...
enactment, during the First World War, the company lost their American branch and all of their U.S. patents. This caused the company great economic hardship. Later the
depressionThe Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...
and the mass production of new technologies like the radio and the electric record player in the 1920s virtually brought about the demise of the firm and its expensive instruments. Other companies with similar products like American Piano Company (Ampico) and
Duo-ArtDuo-Art was one of the leading reproducing piano technologies of the early 20th century, the others being American Piano Company introduced in 1913 too and Welte-Mignon in 1905...
also began to fade from the scene at this time.
From 1919 on, Welte built also
theatre organA theatre organ is a pipe organ originally designed specifically for imitation of an orchestra, but in latter years new designs have tended to be around some of the sounds and blends unique to the instrument itself....
s. With the introduction of
"talkies"A sound film is a motion picture with synchronized sound, or sound technologically coupled to image, as opposed to a silent film. The first known public exhibition of projected sound films took place in Paris in 1900, but decades would pass before reliable synchronization was made commercially...
around 1927, this need began to also diminish and by 1931 production of these instruments was severely curtailed. The last big theatre organ was a custom built instrument for the
Norddeutscher Rundfunk (NDR, North German Broadcasting)Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk was the organization responsible for public broadcasting in the German Länder of Hamburg, Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein and North Rhine-Westphalia from 22 September 1945 until 31 December 1955. Until 1954, it was also responsible for broadcasting in West Berlin...
studio in
HamburgHamburg is the second-largest city in Germany and the sixth-largest city in the European Union...
, still in place and still playing. Some other theatre organs of Welte are today in museums. One of these organs can be seen in the
Scotty's CastleScotty's Castle is a two-storey Spanish Villa located in northern Death Valley National Park, California, USA. It is also known as Death Valley Ranch...
museum in Death Valley where is it played regularly during museum tours.
In 1932 the firm, now with Karl Bockisch as sole owner, barely escaped bankruptcy, and began to concentrate on the production of church organs and other specialty organs.
The last project of Edwin Welte was an electronic organ equipped with photo-cells, the Lichttonorgel or Phototone-Organ”. This instrument was the first ever which used
analogAn Analog or analogue signal is any continuous signal for which the time varying feature of the signal is a representation of some other time varying quantity, i.e analogous to another time varying signal. It differs from a digital signal in terms of small fluctuations in the signal which are...
sampledIn music, sampling is the act of taking a portion, or sample, of one sound recording and reusing it as an instrument or a different sound recording of a song. This is typically done with a sampler, which can be a piece of hardware or a computer program on a digital computer. Sampling is also...
sound.
In 1936, a prototype of this type of organ was demonstrated at a concert in the
Berliner PhilharmonieThe Berliner Philharmonie is a concert hall in Berlin, Germany. Home to the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the building enjoys the rare distinction of acclaim for both its acoustics and its architecture...
. The production of these organs - in cooperation with the
TelefunkenTelefunken is a German radio and television company, founded in 1903, in Berlin, as a joint venture of two large companies, Siemens & Halske and the Allgemeine Elektrizitäts-Gesellschaft...
Company - was halted by the
Nazi-governmentNazism, known officially in German as National Socialism , is the totalitarian ideology and practices of the Nazi Party or National Socialist German Workers’ Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.Nazism is often considered...
because the inventor, Edwin Welte, was married to Betty
DreyfussDreyfuss is a surname of habitational origin originating in the German city of Trier. The Latin name for the city was "Treveris," which developed into its current pronunciation through sound shifts of /t/>/d/ and /f/>/v/. The spelling variants tend to correspond to the country the family was...
, who was Jewish.
The business complex in Freiburg was bombed and completely destroyed in November 1944.
This event seemed to obliterate the closely kept secrets of the firm and their recording apparatus and recording process appeared lost forever. But in recent years parts of the recording apparatus for the Welte Philharmonic-Organs and documents were found in the United States. It was then possible to theoretically reconstruct the recording process. The Augustinermuseum of Freiburg keeps the legacy of the company - all that survived the Second World War.
Media
- Ossip Gabrilowitsch
Ossip Gabrilowitsch was a Russian-born American pianist and conductor.- Biography :...
plays for Welte-Mignon on July 4, 1905 Johannes BrahmsJohannes Brahms , German composer and pianist, was one of the leading musicians of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna, Austria, where he was a leader of the musical scene...
Intermezzo in C major, Op. 119, No. 3 *
- Arthur Nikisch
Arthur Nikisch ; October 12, 1855 – January 23, 1922) was a Hungarian conductor who performed mainly in Germany. He was considered an outstanding interpreter of the music of Bruckner, Tchaikovsky, Beethoven and Liszt.- Biography :...
plays for Welte-Mignon on February 9, 1906 Johannes Brahms Hungarian Dance No. 6*
External links
Articles
Das Welte-Mignon-Klavier, die Welte-Philharmonie-Orgel und die Anfänge der Reproduktion von Musik by Peter Hagmann (1984)