St. John’s organ builder feels ‘enormous joy’ hearing the instrument played

Majestic musical tones swelling from a pipe organ, especially during the holidays, can evoke reverence, memories of past celebrations or a sense of community and connection to time-honored traditions.

Christian Metzler, a native of Austria, moved to Minnesota last year to help carry on one such custom, that of pipe-organ building, which dates to the ninth century efforts of Benedictine monks.

Metzler, 50, has built organs throughout this country and around the world in the past 30 years. He practices that craft now as a lay artisan at St. John’s Abbey Organ Builders on the St. John’s Abbey near the campus for College of Saint Benedict and Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minn.

Metzler’s desire for a career in woodworking eventually led to an apprenticeship at Austria’s Rieger Orgelbau, among the world’s largest organ-building companies.

From there, Metzler joined the organ-building workshop of Martin Pasi, a fellow Austrian, in Washington state. Metzler’s work later took him back to Europe as well as to China, Japan, South Africa and Palestine.

At St. John’s, Metzler has teamed up again with Pasi, who moved his organ-building venture to the 30,000-square-foot Abbey Woodworking Shop, which opened in October 2023. Both the Abbey Organ Builders and Abbey Woodworking Shop are under the direction of Lew Grobe, an Abbey priest and a monk himself.

Metzler, poised to lead the next generation of Abbey Organ Builders, estimated 20,000 hours of labor and tens of thousands of wood-and-metal parts have gone into creating the abbey’s first completed organ, all using traditional technique. The team will then disassemble the 3,200-pipe organ ahead of its Jan. 6 delivery to a congregation in Leawood, Kan.

My first career position was as a chef in a restaurant. I started that early, at 16. After I finished that apprenticeship, I knew I wanted to do something else. I was always fascinated by woodworking, traditional woodworking with solid wood. Somebody mentioned that organ builders work with traditional techniques like mortis and tenon and so on. I asked to do an apprenticeship at Rieger, but they were full for that year. They said, “Maybe if you go for one year to work as a cabinetmaker and get some experience woodworking, then you can start the next year.” And that’s what I did. The apprenticeship lasted about 3½ years, and after that, I went to work with Martin Pasi in Washington.

Working with my mind and my hands together. Imagining things and bringing them to life or manifesting them. You can bring your personality into it. Working with a great team. Bringing joy to the people, to a good musician who uses that instrument.

That’s usually very moving, especially in the beginning. If somebody really plays something very nice and creates some new sounds, it’s enormous joy, what you feel. And gratitude; to be able to be part of something like that.

I want to be part of carrying or bringing that to the next generation. That’s a very nice aspect of my work here, also passing on the knowledge. Because we got the knowledge from someone who was willing to train me and others. So, if somebody’s interested, yeah, that’s very nice to pass that on.

A person who definitely likes to work with his hands, has a lot of patience. Likes to create something. Has a lot of endurance, maybe, sitting for hours in an awkward position and trying to do very accurate work. But mainly, I think, somebody who really likes to build a musical instrument.

I did in the past. I built a lot of furniture. Not here. I try to be outdoors. Enjoy when the weather it’s nice. I like garden work a lot. We have flowers and vegetables. I still like to cook. I don’t look up recipes. I use things and create things with what I have unless I want to do something very specific.

Because Martin Pasi, he was looking for a successor. I didn’t mind trying something new, having new challenges. Working in a smaller shop was also very appealing. I gained a lot of experience in the big company with voicing [making changes to single pipes to adjust their sound quality] and chose to experiment with creating new sounds. But I do also like to work on different aspects of the organ, not just voicing. Building things and being able to decide how to create an instrument from scratch and design it, and you have that opportunity here.

It was the right time. I was almost 50. Our sons were old enough to do their own thing. They decided to stay in Europe, where one is a chef and one a metal worker. So I just came with my wife over here, looking forward to being here for the next, who knows, almost 15 years or maybe more.

In Their Shoes is an occasional series highlighting Minnesotans at work. If there’s a type of job you want us to profile — or if you have someone who would be a good candidate — email us at InTheirShoes@startribune.com.