Peter van Dijk

Johann Heinrich Mundt and the organ in the Church of the Virgin Mary before the Tyn at Prague Het ORGEL 98 (2002), nr. 3, 9-18 [summary]

On 17-22 September 2000 the completion of the restoration of the Mundt organ in the Church before the Tyn at Prague was celebrated with a series of festivities.  The organ was built in 1673 and is one of the most representative 17th century organs in Europe.

Johann Heinrich Mundt (1632-1690) was born in Köln, Germany.  He built his first organs in cooperation with Matthaeüs Köhler.  As an independent organ builder he built instruments at Prague (Church before the Tyn and St. Nicholas, 1685), Vyssí Brod (1679), Plasy (1684), Sazavá (1688) and Velvary (1689).

The City Council of Prague contracted Mundt in 1670.  Neither the contract nor other archival material is preserved.  Some of it, however, has survived via secondary literature.  At the examination of his work in 1673, Mundt was criticised: he was, for instance, forced to change the specification of the organ.  At the second examination, Mundt was confronted with additional wishes.  At the end of 1673, the organ could finally be inaugurated.

In 1682 Mundt repaired the organ; a great fire in the church had damaged it in 1679.  'Court Organ Builder' Josef Gartner restored the organ in 1823: he moved the organ backward, moved the bellows, lowered the pitch and retuned it in equal temperament.  In 1843, Gartner restored the organ again; he revised the Salicional of the Great at this occasion.  Emanuel Petr restored the organ in 1895.  It is not clear what he did; the organ shows that other organ builders worked on it as well.  In 1990, the organ was tuned in a Werckmeister temperament.

In 1998-2000 the German organ building firm Klais (Bonn) restored the organ with German money; a condition was that the restoration should be carried out by an organ builder from the same region as Mundt.

Under supervision of an international commission (Marek Cihar, Peter van Dijk, Jürgen Eppelsheim, Rupert Gottfried Frieberger, Jan Kalfus, Martin Poruba en Harald Vogel), Klais reconstructed the state of the organ in 1823.