The panorama of Hispanic organ building in the Baroque centuries points to the Navarrese town of Lerín as one of the most outstanding in the diffusion of an instrument such as the Iberian organ subject , which, as is well known, has its own characteristic ingredients compared to the European ones: sweet and timbre sounds, split registers, which allows two hands to play both tonalities and the trumpets horizontally.

A whole network of families and workshops, with at least a dozen and average of organ builders, which had their correspondence and parallelism with some dynamic and outstanding masters dedicated to the sculptural genres, to whom little attention has been paid, but who were complementary to the organ builders, a fortiori because many of them participated in the realization of the cases or furniture of the musical instruments. Over the years, time has erased the traces of both sculptors and organ builders, apprentices and masters, and an extensive study is needed, which is still to be done, based on the rich documentation of the local notary's office and other sources from different archives.

When facing the study of the cultural heritage of past centuries, we tend to fall into the temptation of considering in different focuses, on the one hand, music, on the other, artistic workshops, and on the other, the cultural environment and literary creation. However, it is necessary programs of study and reflections that put in relation everything mentioned, globally, as the only way to understand phenomena that are explicable only in that way, by the evident relations between what we call today the arts and other historical plots referred to outstanding promoters and mentors and illustrious men capable of helping their countrymen to achieve contracts beyond the lands where they were born.

An expansive artistic focus

A common characteristic of the masters of the woodworking arts and the organ builders of Lerín was their expansive character, since both went to work outside the region and Navarre, a phenomenon that was more evident in the case of the organ builders.

The vitality of an artistic, musical, sculptural or other focus specialization program is measured, in large part, by the issue of works, their originality and quality and their radius of influence throughout territories more or less distant from their location.

As an example, in the field of altarpieces, let us consider that one of the best examples in the city of Burgos in the 18th century is that of the old temple of the Compañía de Jesús, today the parish of San Lorenzo, the work of the master José Valdán from Lerida, made between 1725 and 1726, to which some elements were added by other masters. Valdán was active in the capital of Burgos until the middle of the century and his workshop produced various works that Prof. René Payo has studied, such as the missing main altarpiece of the convent of San Francisco de Aranda de Duero (1730).

With respect to the organs, the great specialist and researcher, Louis Jambou, concludes his contribution to the study of the Lerín organbuilders with this conclusive hypothesis: "One could imagine a line from north to south of the Spanish geography in two differentiated zones: one to the west of the Eibar-Bilbao-Madrid-Toledo-Seville axis, which would recall the presence of the Eibar workshop, and another to the east of the Lerín-Pamplona-Alcalá de Henares-Madrid-Toledo-Seville line marked by the presence of the powerful and secular workshop born in Lerín? "

Organ case masters

A remarkable issue of masters dedicated to the sculptural genres resided in Lerín, becoming position of numerous projects of altarpieces, pulpit loudspeakers, choir stalls and, of course, organ cases. The first of these to be highlighted was the famous retablist established in Tudela, Francisco San Juan y Velasco, born in Lerín in 1639 and died in the capital of La Ribera in 1705. Among his great projects are the major altarpieces, now disappeared, of the parish of Lerín and of the high school of the Anunciada of the capital of Navarre, works carried out around 1690. But his first major work was precisely an organ case, that of the cathedral of Tudela (1671).

In this regard, one might wonder if in the context of the success of the organ builders of Lerín, there was a certain specialization in that subject of liturgical furnishings, which were the organ cases. In any case, as Eduardo Morales Solchaga has exhaustively documented in a very well-documented and acute study on the construction of the organ cases by examined masters and their vicissitudes, it should be noted that the instrumentalist and the author of the piece of furniture did not always proceed in the same way. B official document Thus the organ builder of Lerín, José Mañeru y Ximénez, declared in 1718: "For thirty years he has worked as an organ builder, both in this town and in the Villa y Corte of Madrid, and different places in the Kingdom of Castile, as well as in the city of Zaragoza and other places in the Kingdom of Aragón, he has made use of the carpenter journeymen that he has found, even if they were not examined, and with them, and by himself, he has worked on everything that belongs to the said School of organ builder".

Among the natives and residents of Lerín who, in addition to working on numerous projects, made outstanding organ cases are José de Lesaca and Juan José Vélaz. The former, trained in Lerín from 1705 onwards, made those for the parishes of Miranda de Arga (1734-36) and San Miguel de Corella (1732), following in the latter the design of Marcos de Angós and with the partnership in the round sculptures of José Serrano. Both have been preserved and are magnificent examples of the prevailing uses throughout the third and fourth decade of the 18th century. position He also designed the spectacular boxes of the parish churches of Santa María de Tafalla in 1735, the work of the Estellan sculptor Juan Ángel Nagusia, and of his town, Lerín, which was the work of the local master Juan José Vélaz, in 1738. As noted by Sagaseta in his monograph on Navarre's organs, the three masters who worked on the instrument were from the town, the organ builder José Mañeru y Ximénez and the authors of the design and the material execution of the case.

In the cases of Miranda de Arga, Tafalla and Lerín, the instrument itself was also made by a master from Lerín, José Mañeru y Ximénez, which indicates more than a sporadic partnership between the sculptor's workshop and the organ builder, which will have to be evaluated in more detail.

The same José de Lesaca attended the auction of the altarpiece of the Santo Cristo de Falces in 1722, was the author of the tornavoces and choir stalls of Santiago de Puente la Reina (1729), the stalls of Berbinzana (1729), a missing collateral of Dicastillo (1721), the Holy Week monument of Lerín, and the altarpiece of the Virgen Blanca of his native town (1722), of which the aforementioned José Valdán became position who, as we have indicated, moved to the lands of Burgos. From Burgos, he took over his brother Gregorio and his brother-in-law José de Fuentes to collect the last payments for the aforementioned altarpiece.

The list of artists from Lerín does not end with these names, as we must add those of Bernardo Lucea, the aforementioned José Valdán and various members of the Vélaz family. Lucea learned the official document with José de Lesaca, with whom he signed the mandatory apprenticeship contract in 1723, made the altarpiece of the Soledad de Miranda de Arga (1737) and attended the auction of the altarpiece of the Virgen del Rosario de Tafalla in 1743. Domingo Vélaz finished the altarpiece of Leoz in 1704 and worked for the basilica of Mendía in Arróniz at the end of the 17th century. Juan José Vélaz, married in 1732 with Bárbara Sánchez, related to the organ builder Bartolomé Sánchez, built the altarpiece of the parish of San Miguel de Estella, between 1734 and 1737, by cession of the also from Larraga Juan Francisco García who had been awarded the work in the preceptive auction and many other works like the heraldic shield of the town hall of Larraga in 1742.

Local organ builders

If the data above do not form part of a unitary study and come from different monographic programs of study and documentary sources, we refer to programs of study for those related to organs by Joaquín Goya, Aurelio Sagaseta, Juan Cruz Labeaga, Claudio Zudaire and Louis Jambou, in the latter case both to the monograph on the king instrument in Spain and to a thoughtful chapter he wrote in the monograph on Lerín, recently published (2010) and, by the way, out of print and difficult to acquire. Lerín's organ school was one of the best in the north of the peninsula in the 17th and 18th centuries, with almost two dozen master organ builders working throughout Spain.

The aforementioned Louis Jambou compiles a list of no less than eighteen organ builders in Lerín, whose origin he places in the figure of Lorenzo López de Galarreta, born in 1590. The aforementioned researcher sketches the panorama of Spanish organ building and highlights two localities in the construction and configuration of the Baroque organ: Eibar and Lerín, with the Navarrese town being ahead in terms of chronology. Likewise, he reports on the two meetings of the workshops of both towns at two specific moments in the sixteenth century and in two different locations on the peninsula, after which, in the last quarter of the seventeenth century, a period of skill and exchanges of experiences began.

Numerous towns in Aragón, Castile, the Villa y Corte of Madrid, as well as dozens of towns in Navarre were recipients of the organs that came out of the Lerner workshops. Historical research is continually revealing new data about the feverish activity of most of them, especially Félix Yoldi, José Mañeru and the Tarazona family.

By the end of the 17th century, an organ subject had been devised and built throughout Spain and its possessions in America. Lerín and Eibar had collaborated decisively in the configuration of an instrument with horizontal trumpet, split keyboard and echo system. This last aspect of the concept and technique of the echo chest, of French descent and precursor of the expressive case, was introduced by the Gallic organ builder Nicolás Briset in the cathedral of Pamplona, after having built the organ of the monastery of Fitero between 1657 and 1659, which, by the way, Lorenzo López de Galarreta y Baquedano, master of Lerín, considered to be well built.

Epilogue and wish

From these lines we wish to join those in Navarre and beyond, who for some time have been dreaming of the recovery of the organ of Lerín, so that it can sound again in specialized auditions and in the liturgy, with the necessary frequency for its conservation, a very necessary condition at the time of elaborating the project of restoration and sustainability. It is not just another instrument, in this case the character of "unicum", of all cultural property, is made more noticeable by a very special identity and authenticity, as it is evocative of the outstanding artistic workshops of the locality and transcends, as it means, the historic town, head of the county of its name. In order to show to the new generations its material values and to speak to them at the same time of the immaterial ones, its recovery is convenient and necessary, because the patrimony has to be contemplated not only as support of the collective conscience (tool essential for the historical knowledge ), but also as resource partner -economic of first order and essential, for the sustainable development of the contemporary societies.