A New Life for Villa’s Organ

Built in 1928, Villa Aurora’s Venerable Pipe Organ Is Getting Ready for Its Close-Up

If all goes well, the Villla Aurora’s best-kept secret will be out this time next year. In fact, you won’t be able to avoid hearing her, given the great set of pipes she has. So what’s hiding at the Villa? A vintage pipe organ, which will be played for the first time in decades in December 2010, when the Villa will celebrate its 15th anniversary as a German-American cultural center in Pacific Palisades. Constructed in 1928 by the Artcraft Organ Company of Santa Monica, the organ has eight rows of pipes, from which 34 registers can be engaged simultaneously. But it’s currently in disrepair and a team of pipe organ specialists is currently working to refurbish it in time for its inaugural performance. A benefit event at the Villa is scheduled for Tuesday, December 8 at the historic ‘migr’ refuge, located at 520 Paseo Miramar. Musicians Christopher Bull and Norton Wilson will perform. ‘A musical and visual art program will be performed on our historic Bluthner piano, once owned by the ‘migr’ composer Ernst Toch,’ says Daniel Rothman, director of programs at the Villa Aurora. ‘UCLA organist Christoph Bull and performance painter Norton Wilson will take part. The organ builders we’ve hired to restore the organ will be introduced and the organ chambers displayed.’ Proceeds from the fundraiser will help pay for the renovation of the instrument, sections of which are housed in different parts and floors of the three-tiered mansion. The pipes are located on the first floor, on the opposite side of the living room from the organ console and echo chamber. A level below, the blower is installed in a small room behind the garden apartment. ‘It languished for a couple of years,’ says Rothman. ‘The house was pretty much in ruins. The house sold at the time for $9,000 [in 1943].’ My, times have changed. It will cost nearly $100,000 to restore the organ. The organ could not have a better home than this historical landmark, which Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann called ‘a veritable castle by the sea.’ Villa Aurora is an international meeting place for artists and intellectuals fostering a lively exchange in the fields of literature, art, science and politics. Built in 1927, the Villa was originally a Los Angeles Times demonstration house by architect Mark Daniels (who designed what would become the Hotel Bel-Air). The organ was a feature of the home’s original design, with its manuals and pneumatic percussion effects built in the living room’s east chamber and its pipes into the west chamber. A pair of exiles, German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger and his wife, Marta, purchased the house in 1943. Until the 1950s, the spacious house became one of the preferred meeting places for German and European exiles in Los Angeles and their friends. Filmmakers Fritz Lang and Charlie Chaplin, Mann and his brother, Heinrich, Bertolt Brecht, Alfred D’blin, Franz Werfel, Aldous Huxley, Ludwig Marcuse, Kurt Weill, Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg and Bruno Frank were among the regular guests of the Feuchtwangers. When Feuchtwanger died in 1958, he willed the house to the University of Southern California. Marta continued to live in the house until her death in 1985. Two years later, the home and its contents were left to USC. In 1995, Villa Aurora once again became a meeting place for artists and intellectuals, with a focus on its artists-in-residency program under the financial auspices of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in Germany. In the past decade alone, the 501(c)3 nonprofit organization has been the home to more than 120 artists-in-residence, six of them recipients of the Feuchtwanger Fellowship. The cultural facility regularly hosts fucntions aimed to deepen ties between American and European artists and to encourage Jewish-German dialogue. It relies on tax-deductible donations to keep its cultural programs going. It’s late September, and several independent contractors from across Los Angeles are at the Villa to begin the organ restoration process. Greg Rister and Karen Wilson will spend about five months working on the console, while Ken Kukuk and Ed Burnside will concentrate on the pipes chamber, chest percussion and blower. This pipe organ is practically a Palisadian itself. Or at least a close neighbor. ‘It was built right here in Santa Monica,’ says Kukuk. Once based on Wilshire Boulevard, the Artcraft organ company flourished for a couple of decades, when silent movies reigned, before closing in the late 1920s. ‘This may be one of their last organs,’ Rothman notes. What Rister calls a ‘pretty straightforward job’ will take at least half a year to complete. ‘The tuning and repair of the pipe organ will take at least a couple months.’ What the repair team are dealing with consists of a 16-foot pipe organ made up of a console, a 49-note wood bar harp (called a marimba), 61 Vox Humana pipes, 250 medium pipes, 50 large pipes, 247 small pipes, and 25 chime notes. ‘The organ sucks in air up through and into the baffle box,’ Burnside explains. ‘It’ll be a little bit of a challenge to get the wind going.’ Today, Rister will work on individual parts at his Whittier shop. The day before, Rister and Wilson had worked on the organ at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium. They recently rebuilt a 1929 Reuter in Santa Monica. ‘We did a church in El Monte, another project up in Torrance,’ Rister continues. One gig took them to the former Hollywood Hills residence of Liberace. ‘We take care of the El Capit’n Theatre in Hollywood,’ says Kukuk, while Burnside, whose career began as a hobby, has worked on the organ that rises out of the stage before movie screenings at the Arlington Theatre in Santa Barbara. In 1964, Kukuk got his big break when he was booked to work at the Wiltern Theatre, the green-hued, art-deco Pallissier building on the corner of Wilshire and Western, which had a 32-foot pipe organ. ‘It’s a fairly lucrative business,’ he says of his esoteric profession. ‘There are not that many people doing it anymore,’ Rister says. ‘You go into this business because you want to.’ ‘We don’t get apprentices,’ Kukuk adds, laughing. As the pipe organ specialists work on a difficult reconstructive process, Rothman remains optimistic that, via the generosity of culture-lovers in the Palisades and beyond, the $97,270 needed to cover repair costs will be raised. ‘The organ is not only part of the Villa’s history, but, in many respects, part of the history of Pacific Palisades,’ Rothman says. ‘With the hope that the community shares this sentiment, we must naturally be hopeful for its restoration in the year to come.’ For information on the December 8 benefit and to make a donation, call 310-454-4231 or e-mail InfoLA@Villa-Aurora.org. Visit www.Villa-Aurora.org.