Abstract
Joseph Binvignat was born in Attigny on 26 June 1755 and had been apprenticed to the Reims organ maker Louis Péronard. The first record of his presence in Maastricht is a document dated 7 September 1774, which mentions a tender submitted by Joseph Binvignat and Lambert Houtappel for repairs to
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the organ of the Protestant church in Valkenburg. The period of Binvignat’s collaboration with Lambert Houtappel from 1774 to 1794, which corresponded to the latter years of the Ancien Régime, may be considered his most prosperous and successful. He installed new instruments in Bree, Maastricht, Houthem, Montzen, Hasselt and Berg. In September 1794 Maastricht was taken by French troops. Social and religious life was greatly affected by the French domination and in the cours of time chapters and monasteries were abolished and numerous churches were closed. Joseph Binvignat turned to trading in liquor for his livelihood. Nonetheless, Binvignat’s activities as an organ builder did not entirely stagnate. He submitted a plan to repair the organ in the Maastricht Dominican monastery and in 1798 he built a bureau organ for an anonymous customer. After the Concordat of Napoleon with Pope Pius VII on 15 July 1801 numerous parish churches were reopened. Binvignat transferred no less than nine instruments from abandoned monasteries and installed new ones in Stokkem and in St Jan and St Matthiaskerk in Maastricht. In the period from 1814, when Maastricht came under the rule of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, Maastricht organ building witnessed a certain revival. Binvignat built new instruments in Geulle, Mechelen, Gruitrode, Lummen, Kerkrade, Simpelveld, Schinnen and Maasmechelen. These were modest instruments, some with pedal pull-downs. On 12 September 1837 Joseph Binvignat died at the age of eighty-two. The workshop was taken over by Adam Binvignat, who had trained with his father and assisted him. He continued the regular maintenance of organs and built new ones for the Protestant churches of Meerssen, Sittard and Beek and the Catholic churches in Oud-Vroenhoven and Borgharen. Once again these were modest instruments. Archival sources and technical analysis of the thirteen surviving instruments by Joseph and Adam Binvignat enable us to address the question whether their work conforms to the principles of the French classical organ or rather to regional traditions. Until the 1820s Binvignat modelled his stop lists on the French classical organ. An exception was the Sesquialter, which was a Liège, Flemish and Rhineland characteristic rather than a French one. Binvignat’s hand-pumped diagonal bellows and the style of his flutes and reeds follow descriptions given by Dom Bedos. A typical Rhineland element are such stops as the Carillon, Tintinabulum and Hautbois, which featured on stop lists from the early nineteenth century onwards. The oeuvre of father and son Binvignat may be compared to that of their great seventeenth-century Maastricht predecessor André Séverin, whose work is a synthesis of French, Southern Netherlands and Rhineland influences which Maarten Albert Vente strikingly typified as not French, not Walloon, not Flemish, not Rhinelands, but as the Maastricht school.
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