Takácsy Ignácz (1830–1906): The 60th Work of the Organ Builder in the Monastery Church of János Hunyadi

The pipe organ, with more than two millennia of history, has been a favourite instrument for centuries. It was also the instrument that played the accompaniment at the massacre of the first Christians. Yet the beauty of its sound helped to ensure that, despite initial dislike, the Church in time (9th-10th centuries) gave it a place in worship. Finally, the Church and the liturgy played a major role in the development of the organ, and it is thanks to the organ that it has taken its present form. The organ appeared in a few places in Hungary and in Transylvania during the 15th and 16th centuries. Organ building and the organ builders themselves began to spread along with the instruments. The organ builder Ignácz Takácsy (1830-1906), whom I have researched, was one of the most prolific organ builders in Transylvania. I was saddened to find that the literature contains only a negligible amount of information about this master, who was active for 40 years (1860-1900) and made 79 organs. It has become increasingly clear that there is a huge lack of information about our organ builders and the instruments they built in Transylvania. With my work, I would like to join the ranks of those who have undertaken the task of uncovering this extremely incomplete segment of our history at the archival level. However, I am not specifically researching the organ history of a particular religious denomination, but rather, unusually, I am focusing on the lives and work of two organ builders in particular. Ignácz Takácsy (1830-1906) and his pupil István Vass (1852-1921) were two of the most important organ builders in Târgu Mureș and its surroundings in the second half of the 19th century. I am trying to reconstruct their biographies on the basis of the archival sources available, so my work is primary research. Similarly, I am trying to learn the history of the new organs they built (about 95) and the numerous repairs and modifications they made. In this way, I will know the antecedents, the processes and the fate of the organs for more than a hundred years. Hopefully, my thesis will not only be a tribute to these two great masters, but also to our faithful ancestors, whose main desire and intention was to praise God with the sound of the organ. In this study, I would like to illustrate the history of an organ built in a very special place in my research, which is the 60th work of Ignácz Takácsy. This instrument was built in 1890 for the Catholic church of Teiuș in Alba County, one of the oldest in Transylvania.