Repertoire books for beginner keyboard players (including organists) tend to contain quite a lot of music from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for obvious reasons: up till the early nineteenth-century writing was generally diatonic, in simple key signatures with just a few straightforward modulations.

But organists as they develop need to absorb the idioms and tropes of Romantic composition for the organ: the typical musical gestures of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the characteristic harmonic patterns and key shifts, not to mention aquire a seamless legato along with the practical skill of reading chromatic music liberally sprinkled with accidentals. And it’s not so easy to find a resource of short French and German Romantic repertoire suitable for organists before they are in possession of sufficient expertise to tackle the great Romantic masterworks of, say, Franck, Widor, Brahms or Elgar.

So Bärenreiter’s Festive Romantic Organ Music is a welcome addition to the developing/intermediate organist’s library: easy-to-moderately-difficult short preludes and postludes chosen by Andreas Rockstroh to be of practical use for the church organist. The pedal parts are quite easy, and key signatures remain simple, so the player can concentrate on style and execution.

None of the composers is particularly well-known, but the short biographical notes reveal them to be the busy working organists, teachers, and composers around in nineteenth-century Germany, who created useful music for themselves and their students, which is just as helpful for students today.