Roman Emilius, Organ

Fantastic worlds - Organ transformations - The Bach Organ Regensburg
Works by Frescobaldi, Buxtehude, Mozart, Schumann, Boëly, Chopin, Reger, Saint-Saëns, Verdi and Bach
Imagination is a special human gift. Fantasizing about things and making up stories is the basic requirement for all art. The words ‘fantasy’ and ‘fantastic’ have positive connotations today, but that wasn‘t always the case. “Fantastic” in the sense of imagined, invented, without plan or purpose was not reconcilable with the regularity of art. Yet “fantastic worlds” are often responses to the overly ordered, constructed, and lifeless, always focussing on depicting humans with all their mood swings. The organ as an instrument of the church has to transform itself for this because anything too human was to be kept out of the church. That is why this CD is subtitled “Organ transformations”.
“Stylus phantasticus” was the name given in the 17th century to a style of music that called for boundaries to be crossed and rules to be broken in favour of increasing expressiveness. This goes hand in hand with freedom of presentation. Two masters of this style are Frescobaldi in his toccatas and Buxtehude in his major works.
The famous Air by Bach is an encore that, at the end of the recording, leaves the reconciliatory word to the namesake of the Ahrend organ in Regensburg‘s Trinity Church, known as the “Bach organ”.
Roman Emilius (extract of the booklet text)


Roman Emilius was born in Nuremberg in 1963. He studied church music at the Frankfurt/Main University of Music with Edgar Krapp (organ), Wolfgang Schäfer (choral conducting), Irina Edelstein (piano), and Jiri Stárek (orchestral conducting). Following the church music exam, he completed the organ graduate degree course (Konzertexamen) and the Diplom degree in orchestral conducting.
He was awarded the cultural study award (Kulturförderpreis) of the city of Erlangen in 1988. After one year as an assistant in Rothenburg ob der Tauber, he received a scholarship from the Bavarian Ministry of Culture in 1992 for the “Cité Internationale des Arts” in Paris.
In addition to his position as cantor at the Auferstehungskirche (Church of the Resurrection) in Fürth, he was the pianist with the ars-nova-ensemble in Nuremberg from 1994 to 1998. In 1997, he became cantor at the Christuskirche (Christ Church) in Munich, where he was subsequently appointed church music director and started to teach choral conducting in the church music fi eld of study at the Munich University of Music.
Since 2008, he has been the Protestant city and deanery cantor in Regensburg and director of the Regensburger Kantorei and the Raselius-Chor church choirs. Together with a panel of experts, he designed the Ahrend organ (Bach organ Regensburg) for the Trinity Church in Regensburg, which was inaugurated in 2020.

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