Adrien Joseph Pottier

Adrien Joseph Pottier (* before 1742 , † after 1767 ) was an organ builder. He worked in southwest Germany and Switzerland.

Register buttons of the Moudon organ

Life

Adrien Joseph Pottier came from Lille . 1742–1763 he lived in Burkheim am Kaiserstuhl . Up until 1750 only immigrant organ builders were active in southern Baden. Pottier is also mentioned as Potier , Potié and Bodié . One of his pupils was Blasius Bernauer from Staufen im Breisgau , who, alongside Johann Baptist Hug, became the first local master on the Upper Rhine. In 1763, while a renovation project was under way in St. Peter , Pottier emigrated to French-speaking Switzerland, where works by him up to 1767 can be traced.

Works

The following remains of the documented work are still known, with the current locations being given:

The Pottier organ in Niederrotweil

The Moudon organ

The Yverdon organ

Niederrotweil

The story of the Pottier organ in the St. Michael in Niederrotweil in the Kaiserstuhl is confused. In 1758 he rebuilt it for 250 guilders for the church of St. Nikolaus in Oberrotweil. As a result, various repairs had to be carried out on it; among other things, Nikolaus Schuble worked on the instrument for 27 days in 1814 . The Church of St. Nicholas then had to be demolished in 1833 due to the risk of collapse. The organ was therefore initially mothballed. The church of St. Michael in Niederrotweil was actually already given up; her choir roof had already collapsed. Now it had to become a parish church again in order to have a place of worship at all. After its repair, the organ was rebuilt there. 1835–1838 a new church of St. Johannes in Oberrotweil with a new organ was built; In 1844 the parish office also moved there. St. Michael and with her the organ fell into neglect again. An intended sale of the organ failed due to a lack of interested parties. In 1917 the prospect pipes (25.2 kg of organ metal) of the metal collection for the First World War fell victim, in 1923 the parish sold other registers made of tin as scrap. During the Second World War soldiers were billeted in the church. After all, the organ was finally ruined. In 1944, however, the parish administrator Wilhelm Burth recognized the value of the torso, which had become unplayable, and had the instrument dismantled on his own and stored in the church warehouse. Hermann Brommer discovered it there by chance in 1969 and ensured that the organ was finally restored in 1983/84 by organ builder Johannes Klais from Bonn, with grants from numerous sources. Bernd Sulzmann initially thought it was a work by Johann Georg Fischer . Only in the course of the restoration work was Hans Musch able to establish a connection between the instrument and the contract with Pottier. The organ is the oldest in Breisgau and one of the oldest instruments of its kind in Baden. It has a manual (10 registers) and a pedal (3 registers). Except for the cornet in the manual and the trumpet , the registers are mostly original, as is the entire mechanism of the instrument, as far as possible, the original inventory. In addition to the electric drive, the wind turbine can also be operated by hand with three bellows.

Munster Valley

In the parish church of St. Trudpert in Münstertal in the Black Forest, the organ maker Joseph Schütt (Joseph Schiedt) from Laufenburg completed a new organ with 22 registers in 1722. In 1760, Pottier made a renovation and built a new housing that has been preserved. Today there is a work by Orgelbau Klais from Bonn with 38 registers.

Moudon

Pottier's organ in the Saint-Etienne church in Moudon in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland was originally single-manual and had 14 registers. The instrument has been rebuilt and expanded several times. In 1974 it was restored by Orgelbau Kuhn , whereby the original condition was restored in the old case. The Rückpositiv from later times was retained. This oldest still playable organ in the canton of Vaud therefore has a pedal and two manuals with 21 stops, of which the 14 in the main organ are historical - it is Pottier's most completely preserved organ alongside the one in Niederrotweil.

Yverdon

The organ in the Reformed Church of Yverdon-les-Bains , also in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland, was the largest of the instruments that Pottier built. After its completion it had 19 registers with two manuals and one pedal. It was rebuilt in 1925/26 and today has 46 stops and three manuals. The case, two registers and some fragments are still original. "The delicate ornamentation, the curved cornice lines, the movement of the pipe labia, the contrast between the main work and the Rückpositiv in the arrangement of the towers, all this looks like music set in architecture."

Recently the hypothesis has been put forward that an organ in Pinerolo could also come from Pottier (1771–1773?).

List of works

Organ expert Bernd Sulzmann (1940–1999) researched Pottier's work and listed it in an essay. In addition to repair work, Bernd Sulzmann lists the following new buildings:

year	place	church	image	Manuals	register	Remarks
1742	Rubella	Röttler Church		I / P	8th	not received
before 1755	Tegernau	Protestant church				Transferred to the Evangelical Church in Riedlingen in 1757 , not preserved
before 1755	Loerrach					not received
before 1755	Bahlingen am Kaiserstuhl	Mountain church				not received
before 1755	Basel					not received
1755	Weisweil	Ev. church			9	not received
1755	Rust					extension
1757	Oberschopfheim	St. Leodegar				not received
1758/1759	Oberrotweil	St. Nicholas		I / P	13	transferred to Niederrotweil, St. Michael
1760	Munster Valley	St. Trudpert Monastery Church		II / P	23	Remodeling and new housing that has been preserved
1761	Kirchhofen	St. Mary of the Assumption			10	Today's organ is in a case by Nikolaus Schuble , whose reverse positive is possibly the upper case of the Pottier organ.
1761	Bad Krozingen	St. Alban				not received
1761	Freiburg in Breisgau	St. Martin				Rückpositiv; not received
1762	Schliengen	St. Leodegar				not received
1762	Ortisei	Parish Church of St. Ulrich				not received
1764	Moudon	Église de Saint-Etienne		I / P	14th
1765	Tuna	City Church Thun		I / P	12	not received
1766	Hilterfingen	Ref. Church				not received
1766	Yverdon	reformed Church		II / P	19th
1767	Aarberg	Ref. Church		I / P	10	not received

literature

• Bernd Sulzmann : Sources and documents about the life and work of the organ maker family Bernauer-Schuble in the Markgräflerland. In: Acta Organologica . Volume 13, 1979, pp. 124-192.
• Hans-Wolfgang Theobald : The organ by Adrien Joseph Pottier (1759) in the St. Michaels Church in Vogtsburg-Niederrotweil. In: Acta Organologica. Volume 22, 1991, pp. 249-278.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bernd Sulzmann researched them: The oldest organ in Breisgau , supplement to the record "Der gerettete Klang", Südwestfunk, Landesstudio Freiburg, 1985. Theobald, p. 249 f., Summarizes these findings. They are presented again in the Badische Zeitung of December 19, 2014. online .
2. ^ The original of the contract is printed in Sulzmann, 1979, p. 167 f.
3. ^ Theobald, p. 252, note 6.
4. ↑ Illustration on the private bell page Quasimodo online .
5. ^ Stefan Kagl, review of the CD Bach à Moudon . In: Organ - Journal für die Orgel Heft 4, 2014, page 55 online ( Memento of the original from February 26, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. . 
6. ↑ Orgues & vitraux online .
7. ^ Fritz Münger: Swiss organs from the Gothic to the present , Bern 1961, p. 14 online .
8. ↑ Silvio Sorrentino: L'organo settecentesco del monastero della Visitazione in Pinerolo (TO) e l'organaro Adrien Joseph Potier: ipotesi per un'attribuzione, In: Arte Organaria Italiana III, 2011, with illustration online .
9. ↑ Sulzmann, 1979, p. 126 f.
10. ↑ Such a listing of the registers 1865, in which “the relics of the Schiedt-Potier organ [sic!] Could well have been found”; Bernd Sulzmann: Historical organs in Baden 1690 - 1890 , Munich / Zurich 1980, ISBN 3-7954-0421-5 , p. 72
11. ^ Claus Dotter Weich: Parish and pilgrimage church Kirchhofen im Breisgau. Regensburg 1995, p. 21.
12. ^ Organ Kirchhofen 100 | 200 years. Ehrenkirchen 2014, p. 4, based on Bernd Sulzmann: Festschrift on the occasion of the organ inauguration. 1977, and on the organ history of the Ehrenkirchen community. In: On the 400th anniversary of the death of Lazarus von Schwendi and on the 350th anniversary of the death of the 300 farmers from Kirchhofen, Ehrenstetten and Pfaffenweiler. 1983.
13. ^ The original of the contract is printed in Sulzmann, 1979, p. 168 f .; Johann Andreas Silbermann failed because the price was too high, Catholic parish of St. Ulrich: St. Ulrich / Black Forest. Munich 1991, p. 10.
14. ^ Organ in Thun , accessed on February 26, 2015