Carl Novak

Carl Novak (born October 28, 1866 in Opočno , Bohemia ; † July 31, 1929 in Königsberg , East Prussia ) was a Bohemian organ builder who worked in East Prussia.

Life

Carl Novak came from Bohemia. He began an apprenticeship as an organ builder in Prague and worked for Max Terletzki in Königsberg from 1891 , for whom he carried out tuning and repairs. Novak converted to the evangelical creed and married Hedwig Pohl in 1896 in Königsberg Cathedral. In 1898 Bruno Goebel took over Terletzki's workshop.

Carl Novak started his own business in 1900 and founded the sole evangelical organ building company in East Prussia Owner: Carl Novak . His seat was at Kaiserstraße 27, the workshop was in Sackheim at Neue Gasse 5. Novak only built pneumatic organs , with cone chests and tube pneumatics. In addition, he built pneumatic action into existing instruments and made changes. Novak mainly worked in Protestant churches in order to be able to withstand the pressure of competition with the much more successful Bruno Goebel in Königsberg.

He soon obtained metal pipes, keyboards , cone valves, diaphragms and other individual parts from August Laukhuff's organ building company in Weikersheim and only manufactured the housing , windchest , blower and wooden pipes himself. This enabled him to offer the work cheaper. Even when making changes, he usually only removed the mechanical action and replaced it with tubes, parts that were no longer in use, such as wind chests and other things, remained in the instruments and caused unwanted background noises such as rattling or knocking when playing. In this way, Novak was able to make very inexpensive offers for the renovations to the communities, especially in the villages.

Werner Renkewitz, who as a student experienced some of his work himself and was familiar with the instruments he made, was very critical of the way he worked. When rebuilding baroque organs, little consideration was given to the original sound, new built-in registers were always too loud and drowned out the others. The wind pressure was very high and led to a "brutal" sound. The baroque housing was optically defaced by inept changes. The tuning of the instruments was also often done improperly, only with a tuning horn and sometimes only by pressing in the labials with a thumbnail.

Carl Novak became impoverished around 1923 and had an accident a few years later while repairing an unstable scaffolding. He died soon after.

List of works (selection)

A directory from 1903 listed 21 new buildings, from the following years only 9 more are known. Carl Novak built pneumatic action into some organs and changed the disposition. He also worked as a tuner.

New organs

year	place	building	image	Manuals	register	Remarks
1897	Eisenberg	Ev. church		II / P	14th	supposedly his masterpiece
1901	Kościeszki	church		II / P	11	originally sold in Groß Koschlau, 1960
1902	Passenheim (Pasym)	Ev. church		II / P	20th	in the Baroque prospectus by Mosengel from 1905, 1997/1998 new building by Zych (II / P, 23)
around 1905	Czychen	church		II / P	15th	largely preserved (2000)
1912	Koenigsberg	Melanchthon Church		II / P	23	destroyed
around 1913	Tharau	Ev. City Church		I / P	9	destroyed

literature

• Werner Renkewitz , Jan Janca , Hermann Fischer : History of the art of organ building in East and West Prussia from 1333 to 1944. Volume II, 2. From Johann Preuss to E. Kemper & Sohn, Lübeck / Bartenstein. Siebenquart, Cologne 2015, pp. 588–611.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Travel and organ music in southern Masuria with dispositions (German)