David Tannenberg, Pipe Organ Builder
Near Allentown, Pennsylvania
The Bethlehem area gave early America some of its finest musical instruments. David Tannenberg was born in Berthelsdorf, Germany, in seventeen twenty-eight and emigrated to the Moravian community at Bethlehem in seventeen forty-nine. He apprenticed under organ builder Johann Gottlob Klemm and within a decade was crafting instruments on his own.
Over a career spanning nearly half a century he built more than forty pipe organs, each combining exceptional tonal quality with refined visual artistry. Tannenberg's organs were the finest produced in colonial and early republican America, and several survive in Moravian churches today. He died in eighteen oh four in York, while tuning an organ he had built there.
