ABSTRACT
It is a remarkable fact that with few exceptions all important masters of the North German organ school presided over instruments which were principally from the sixteenth century. In spite of later renovations, what players like Hieronymus and Jacob Praetorius, Scheidemann, Weckmann, Reincken, Buxtehude and Böhm had at their disposal were basically instruments of the sixteenth century, and mostly of the Dutch Renaissance type. To be more specific, it was the Dutch classical three-manual organ of the Van Covelens–Niehoff school 1 which became the norm, principally through the two large instruments built by Hendrick Niehoff in North Germany, at Hamburg StPetri (1548–50) and Lüneburg St Johannis (1551–53). It was in particular the first-mentioned instrument which set the pattern of Hamburg organ building. It represented a thorough rebuild of an early sixteenth-century instrument but was in its three manual departments almost identically composed to the Niehoff instrument in the Amsterdam Oude Kerk (Table 17.1). The only clear concession made by Niehoff to Hamburg practices was the addition of a large independent Pedal department (in the Dutch tradition the Pedal always has pull-downs to the Hauptwerk, with only one or two reinforcement stops of its own) 2
