First mentioned in 1290, Gräfenroda is considered the birthplace of the garden gnomes. The composer Johann Peter Kellner was born here in 1705 and was cantor for decades. Many Bach works would not have survived without his sheet music copies. He deliberately arranges the Weise organ in the St. Laurentius Church for an authentic baroque sound. His current successor in the office of cantor, Peter Harder, has been an honorary citizen of Gräfenroda since 2005.
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Lots of wood without ostentation
The creaky wooden staircase leads steeply up to the organ gallery, the workplace of Peter Harder, who has been cantor in the St. Laurentius Church in Gräfenroda for decades. Once there, he first turns his back on the imposing instrument and looks into the baroque nave, which is held together by a wood-paneled ceiling.
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The amount of wood is typical for Thuringia, Harder describes this rather large, but also quite simple church with its two galleries. It gets by quite well without the pomp and showiness of the provincial nobility. In the end, the people of Gräfenroda put their church in the village of their own accord and at their own expense.
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English pewter in the Thuringian Forest
Then Harder turns to the organ, which seems to want to embrace him with its expansive case: “Here you can tell that the people from Gräfenroda have put everything into the organ. The size alone, even the pedal has a principal stop made of English pewter, which was really very expensive and is probably more appropriate for a city organ than for the village of Gräfenroda,” says the cantor.
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You can see and hear that. Thanks to Johann Peter Kellner. He was born in Gräfenroda in 1705, is a teacher and passionate organist, takes over the position of cantor and takes care of the disposition of this instrument, which is completed in 1736. Above all, the 26 registers were intended to provide a sound home for the works of the Thomaskantor Johann Sebastian Bach, whom he admired. Waiter diligently collects his compositions in order to play them in Gräfenroda, on this organ, whose bellows always rumble so wonderfully in the background.
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“Johann Peter Kellner trained many organists, especially on Bach’s works, who then in turn became important interpreters and ensured that the music of the Leipzig Thomaskantor was spread further, especially in church services,” says Harder.
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Maintaining and rediscovering souvenirs
In the meantime, the Johann-Peter-Kellner-Society takes care of the memory of the important Gräfenrodaer son, a society that Peter Harder co-founded. Since then, Kellner’s works, once popular and widely played, have struggled to find their way back onto the music stand. Above all, of course, in the St. Laurentius Church in Gräfenroda.
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It is not at all surprising that such a musical talent came from this Thuringian town with just 700 inhabitants at the time. Being able to play at least one instrument as a resident of Gräfenroda is simply part of the proverbial good manners, without a music school, of course.
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“When so many people master a musical instrument, there are always some who are good enough to teach. And if a Gräfenroda craftsman played the viola, the apprentice had to play the viola too.”
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Up until the 1930s, the local string orchestra performed at a remarkable level, so that the string players occasionally helped out in the surrounding court and theater orchestras. But those times are probably over, says Peter Harder. Only the brass band music is maintained jointly.
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Waiter’s pioneering work in the matter of Bach survived, indeed, some compositions by the famous Leipzig Thomaskantor would perhaps even have been forgotten without the copies of the Gräfenrodaer Kantor.
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Compositions from Gräfenroda
A fugue and a toccata in D minor BWV 565 are even attributed by some scholars entirely to Kellner or those around him. In any case, this leaf, like most of the transcripts of the music, is now in the Leipzig Bach Archive.
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The own compositions of the Gräfenroda cantor meanwhile always provide surprises. For example, cantatas by him were recently found in the village church of Thörey, between Erfurt and Arnstadt. But that’s probably because “the rectory there was never tidied up,” assumes Kellner’s successor in the cantor’s office with a bit of a smile. “In Gräfenroda we have expanded and rebuilt so much, nothing was left behind!”
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