Rieger Orgelbau

He received a good education and decided to become an organ builder, to which end he travelled to Vienna, where he was apprenticed to organ-builder Joseph Seybert.

He married Rosalia Schmidt, with whom he had nine children, and completed his opus 1, a twenty-stop, two-manual and pedal organ, for the Burgberg Church, in 1845.

Upon their return home in 1873, their father passed his workshop to them, remaining in a consultative capacity until 1880; the name of the firm became "Franz Rieger & Söhne" and the opus count was restarted at zero.

Rieger was awarded the Austrian coat of arms by the Federal Republic in 1889, and the brothers were made Knights of the Franz-Joseph Order in 1899.

Innovations by Gustav Rieger included combined registers — using "extension" to get two stops out of one rank — and free stop-combination based on a mechanical action (used on the 1890 concert organ at the Deutsches Haus, Brno).

He participated in the organ-building working committee at the 1909 Third Congress of the International Society of Music in Vienna which drew up a directive for the building of organs; the result was a decisive recommendation to move away from the late-romantic orchestral organ and towards the use of the slider chests and mechanical action typical of the classical traditions of organ-building, familiar from the many surviving baroque instruments.

During this time of adjustment as the established markets of the Danube Monarchy adapted to the newly created states, Otto Rieger died, leaving behind his wife and two daughters.

He was an engineer and former officer to the Imperial General Staff; he completed an apprenticeship in organ building, and took over the running of the firm seven weeks after his friend's death.

Before the war, the long-established organ-building firm of Vorarlberg, owned by Anton Behmann, had suggested that they enter into business with Rieger.

With the renewal of the offer, Josef von Glatter-Götz father and son, together with some workers and their families from the firm, established a new workshop at Schwarzach, Vorarlberg under the name "Rieger Orgelbau" in 1946.

In the difficult post-war years they were commissioned to undertake some organ restorations, but under hard circumstances also made handlooms and window frames, and ran a public sauna in order to make a living; Josef Glatter-Götz Jr., worked as a masseur.

Under his direction, the firm returned decisively to the principles and traditions of the classical organ-building craft which had begun earlier in the century, while adding the modern benefits of advanced technology, tone, and design.

Caspar served as apprentice in the Rieger workshop, and worked for Kern, von Beckerath and Kuhn as a journeyman.

He returned to Rieger as works manager, a post he held until the end of 1992 when he left to take over at Orgelbau Egbert Pfaff at Owingen, in Germany.

Raimund studied interior and industrial design at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, following which he trained as an organ builder with the Bonn workshop of Johannes Klais.

He took over as works manager of Rieger in 1992, and became president and owner of Rieger-Orgelbau GmbH on 1 October 2003, in a similar sequence to that of Josef von Glatter-Götz eighty years earlier.

Rieger employs approximately 40 people; two groups of ten employees each build the organs from the planning stage through to the point where the finished instrument is resting in its final home.

Rieger has a long-standing interest in social justice, having been one of the first employers to give their employees health insurance and electric lighting in their accommodation in the opening years of the twentieth century.