Interpreting Schantz Opus Numbers for New Instruments and Rebuilds

A Schantz opus number is the firm’s own project number, and the place a reader will actually find one is a third-party database record, not a company publication. As of August 31, 2026, the Schantz website publishes no opus list: its Instruments page presents what it calls ‘a selection of Instruments in our portfolio’, identifying each by venue, city, year and rank count without opus numbers, and no searchable catalog of the firm’s opus numbers appears on the site. The 2021 National Register nomination for the Schantz plant, the likeliest published place for a description of company record-keeping, contains no statement of numbering practice and nothing about the prefixes, although it does show that its writer had access to company records for production figures.

Every opus, year and action pairing on this page therefore comes from the Pipe Organ Database and from third-party listings built on it, and those are contributor-maintained records, not factory records. Where Schantz project documentation might be sought, and what is known about its custody, is covered at Finding Schantz Specifications and Records.

A Schantz opus number can sit on an instrument that another firm built, because Schantz numbers from the firm’s own series are recorded against work on pre-existing instruments by other builders. In the Pipe Organ Database, as observed on September 1, 2026, Opus 2349 of 2024 at Central Presbyterian Church, New York is recorded as ‘Originally M. P. Moller (Opus 8000, 1950)’; Opus 2352 of 2025 at Ambridge, Pennsylvania as ‘Originally A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co. (1923)’; and Opus 2353 of 2025 at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Lakewood, Ohio as ‘Originally Holtkamp (Opus 1722, 1959)’. Of the five most recent Schantz opus numbers visible in the database on that date, 2349 through 2353, four are recorded against instruments that already existed under another builder or under the earlier Schantz firm.

That is a snapshot of five records, not a count across the whole series, but it shows the pattern is ordinary rather than exceptional.

The same pattern runs back through earlier decades. Among the Schantz Organ Co. opus numbers recorded in the database against instruments originally built by other firms are Opus 1565 of 1978, a console replacement on Skinner Opus 402 at Pottstown; Opus 2151 of 2000, on Skinner Opus 816 at Severance Hall; Opus 2161 of 2000, on the Hill, Norman & Beard instrument at Melbourne Town Hall; Opus 2197 of 2001, on Reuter Opus 1368 at Northminster Presbyterian; and Opus 2274 of 2007, on Skinner Opus 634 at Rockefeller Chapel. That list is a minimum, not a full enumeration; the total number of such Schantz opus numbers has not been established.

Nor is the practice peculiar to Schantz: an American organbuilding firm may assign a number from its own series to work on an instrument a different firm built, so no opus number, by itself, says who built the instrument.

Not every rebuild pairing rests on the same strength of evidence, and the difference matters when you cite one. Among four Schantz rebuild pairings, Opus 2338 and Opus 2343, both Schantz rebuilds of instruments originating with other builders, are corroborated by trade notices in The Diapason, while Opus 2151 at Severance Hall and Opus 2161 at Melbourne Town Hall rest on Pipe Organ Database records alone. The Cleveland Orchestra’s archive and a broadcast profile of the Severance Hall organ identify Schantz’s restoration role without publishing an opus number, and the Organ Historical Trust of Australia attributes the 1999–2000 Melbourne Town Hall enlargement to Schantz but gives no Schantz opus number.

The database itself is consistent on both: its Severance Hall record reads ‘Schantz Organ Co. – Opus 2151, 2000’ and its Melbourne Town Hall record ‘Schantz Organ Co. – Opus 2161, 2000’. But both records come from the same contributor-maintained database, neither has been checked against a Schantz company record, and the database dates the Severance Hall work to 2000 with rededication on January 6, 2001, which does not match every published account of the project’s span. Cite 2151 and 2161 as database attributions, and cite 2338 and 2343 as corroborated ones.

‘PW’ appears on Pipe Organ Database records of the A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co. era, and ‘A-‘ or ‘A’ appears on records of later Schantz work on the firm’s own earlier instruments. The ‘PW’ examples are ‘Opus PW139, 1909’ at the Christian Church, Massillon, Ohio; ‘Opus PW266, 1918’ at First Baptist Church, Seville, Ohio; and ‘Opus PW19, 1921’ at a theater in Ashland, Ohio. Those three numbers do not run in date order, so ‘PW’ cannot be read as one sequential series, and both the Seville and Ashland records were contributed from the Schantz company archive by the same person, so the prefix may reproduce a distinction internal to those records.

The ‘A-‘ examples pair the prefix with the original number. First Presbyterian Church, Carrollton, Ohio is recorded as ‘Schantz Organ Co. Opus A-185, 2010’ over an original ‘Schantz Organ Co. Opus 185, 1953’. First United Methodist Church, Brevard, North Carolina is recorded as ‘Schantz Organ Co. (Opus A346, 2023)’ over ‘Originally Schantz Organ Co. (Opus 346, 1958)’. In both cases the prefixed form is recorded against later Schantz work on an instrument Schantz had built; whether the company itself issued the prefixed number or the database applied it as an editorial device is not stated in either record.

The reading above rests entirely on third-party database records, and it should be carried no further than they go: no company statement defines either prefix, states when one is assigned, or says whether it ever appeared on a nameplate. Nothing here supports a meaning for either prefix; the records show where the letters appear, not what they denote. The prefixes are also not applied consistently to the same situation, because other Schantz rebuilds of Schantz instruments are recorded under the unchanged original number, as the record-reading section below shows. Treat a prefixed number as a strong lead that the instrument has a Schantz record under its builder and year, and go find that record.

An opus number can narrow the likely period of a Schantz project, but it cannot date one. Third-party listings supply approximate Schantz opus and year pairs, and a small sample does rise cleanly: indexed Pipe Organ Database record titles, checked on September 2, 2026, give Opus 932 (1969), Opus 1214 (1973), Opus 1535 (1979), Opus 1627 (1981) and Opus 2153 (1998), rising together without inversion. Five points cannot support interpolation to a single year, and the sequence assembled across the whole series contains non-monotonic and apparently anomalous examples.

One mechanism demonstrably produces such anomalies: rebuild records. A record can carry an opus number of 1989 or 2003 against a work year of 2023, and a rebuild record can carry a 2025 year against an original instrument of 1923, so any list that pairs Schantz opus numbers with years without separating rebuild records will contain out-of-sequence pairs.

One numeral can also face several years: indexed titles show ‘Schantz Organ Co. – Opus 346, 2002’ at First United Methodist Church, Brevard, while a separate record for the same church renders the instrument as Opus A346 of 2023 over an original Opus 346 of 1958. The indexed titles do not explain the 2002 date, and the three dates may reflect an original build, a later contract and a still later one, but that reading is not confirmed. The pairs are research leads; confirm the year from the record for the specific instrument, not from the number’s position in a list.

A low Schantz opus number is ambiguous without its year, because numbers were re-used across the firm’s corporate eras. Eight instruments dated 1946 carry Opus 4, 6, 7, 10, 11, 17, 18 and 26, while a 1909 instrument of the earlier firm carries opus 139; later instruments reach Opus 185 in 1953, Opus 1488 in 1978, Opus 1684 in 1982, Opus 1989 in 1992 and Opus 2292 through 2305 in 2010. The 1946 low numbers are consistent with a new series beginning when the firm was renamed Schantz Organ Co., but no located source says the series was restarted, so a number such as 18 could belong to either side of 1946.

The database also files that transition year inconsistently: of the eight 1946 instruments, four are recorded under ‘A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co.’ (Opus 4, 7, 10 and 18) and four under ‘Schantz Organ Co.’ (Opus 6, 11, 17 and 26). That shows inconsistency in the catalog’s handling of the name change; it does not establish which name appeared on any particular 1946 instrument’s nameplate or contract. The name chain itself, and the dates attached to it, belong to Schantz Organ Company.

The Pipe Organ Database represents a rebuilt instrument by creating a separate record whose primary heading is the rebuilding firm and its opus number, with a line of the form ‘Originally <original builder> (Opus <number>, <year>)’ beneath it. On Schantz rebuild records that line is populated in the ordinary case: the Severance Hall record reads ‘Originally Skinner Organ Co. (Opus 816, 1929)’ and the Rockefeller Chapel record ‘Originally Skinner Organ Co. (Opus 634, 1927)’, each beneath a Schantz opus number of its own, and as observed on September 1, 2026 the Northminster Presbyterian record reads ‘Schantz Organ Co. ( Opus 2197, 2001)’ over ‘Originally Reuter Organ Co. (Opus 1368, 1963)’.

Because the ‘Originally’ line is populated on rebuild records, a rebuilder’s opus number displayed there is distinguishable from an opus number on a record for a new instrument. The heading order gives the rebuilder primacy and the original builder second place, which is the reverse of how owning institutions usually describe the same instrument, so do not let the heading settle what the organ is called.

Two gaps in that structure matter. The original opus is not always populated even when the original builder is known: the Melbourne Town Hall record reads ‘Originally Hill, Norman & Beard (1929)’ with no original opus or job number, although the Organ Historical Trust of Australia records a job number for that instrument. And some records that are plainly later work carry no ‘Originally’ line at all. A search on builder name plus opus number also matches both lines: as observed on September 1, 2026, a query for Reuter Opus 1368 returned four records, two of them rebuilds by other firms (Peragallo Opus 772 and Schantz Opus 2197) whose only Reuter Opus 1368 value sits on the ‘Originally’ line. A hit on an original-builder search may therefore be a Schantz rebuild record.

Not every Schantz rebuild receives a Schantz opus number in the record, and the same number can appear twice for one instrument. As observed on September 1, 2026, the database carries ‘Schantz Organ Co. (2023)’ with no opus number for the instrument at St. Mark the Evangelist Catholic Church, Norman, Oklahoma, recorded as ‘Originally W. W. Kimball Co. (Opus 7035, 1928)’, and ‘Schantz Organ Co. (2022)’ with no opus number at St. Thomas More, Norman, Oklahoma, ‘Originally Ernest M. Skinner (Opus 422, 1923)’. An absent number may mean that none was issued, or only that no contributor supplied it; the absence is evidence to interpret, not proof of anything.

Repetition is the mirror case. The database carries ‘Schantz Organ Co. (Opus 2209, 2023)’ over ‘Originally Schantz Organ Co. (Opus 2209, 2003)’, and ‘Schantz Organ Co. (Opus 1889, 2023)’ over ‘Originally Schantz Organ Co. (Opus 1889, 1989)’: the original number re-used unchanged for later Schantz work on the same instrument. Whether that re-use reflects the company’s own numbering or the database’s record-keeping is not stated, and it sits awkwardly beside the prefixed A346 treatment of the same situation on another record. Two records sharing one Schantz number and two years can be one instrument with two Schantz layers rather than an error; check the ‘Originally’ line before concluding either.

A prefixed Schantz number cannot be found through the database’s opus search, because that filter accepts only numeric values, as observed on September 1, 2026; the workaround is to search by builder and year. The database’s HTML page title compounds the problem by stripping prefixes and suffixes that the page body displays: the record showing ‘Opus PW266, 1918’ is titled ‘A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co. – Opus 266, 1918’, and a Wicks record showing ‘Opus 633-B, 1981’ is titled ‘Wicks Organ Co. – Opus 633, 1981’. A web search that indexes titles will therefore return the number without its letters, and a reader who searches the stripped form will not know a prefix exists until the record is opened. These are observations of the interface on one date, and the interface can change.

Builder and year searches run into the database’s entity structure. As of September 1, 2026, the database distributes the Schantz firm’s records across five separate name entities of very unequal size: ‘Schantz Organ Co.’ with 1,878 instruments; ‘A. J. Schantz, Sons & Co.’, noted as the name of the firm from 1892 to 1946, with 266; ‘Schantz’, noted as an alternate nameplate, with 31; ‘Schantz Organ Company’, also noted as an alternate nameplate, with 16; and ‘Schantz Overview’ with none. Consecutive numbers of one year can be split across them: Opus 2350 of 2025 is filed under ‘Schantz Organ Co.’ while Opus 2351, 2352 and 2353 of 2025 are filed under ‘Schantz Organ Company’.

Those entities are one firm’s records filed under different database headings; a separate Pipe Organ Database builder entity carrying a Schantz name does not mean a separate firm. Search each entity for the era in question before concluding that an instrument is not recorded.

Where a rebuilder’s opus number is the record’s primary identity while a large and quantified share of the surviving material is the earlier builder’s, the instrument’s identity is legitimately contested and cannot be settled from documentary sources alone. No professional-association rule fixes a threshold of retained material at which attribution passes from one firm to another; the American Institute of Organbuilders’ published Guidelines for Fine Organbuilding do not address attribution at all. Relocation adds a further layer: moving an instrument to another building, or within the same building, can itself receive an opus designation from the firm that carries out the move, so a number may mark a move rather than a rebuild or a new instrument.

A nameplate cannot close the gap. No published statement of Schantz nameplate practice on rebuilt instruments has been located, so no nameplate convention is described here and none should be relied on; a Schantz project number alone, wherever it appears, is not proof that Schantz originally built the instrument. What the number gives you is a Schantz project to look for. What that project retained, replaced or moved is a question for the instrument itself, and for whatever project documentation survives.

Three questions branch from here, and each has its own page. For where Schantz specifications, opus records and drawings might be sought, and what is known about their custody, see Finding Schantz Specifications and Records. For what a Schantz rebuild has retained or replaced in documented projects, which is where an attribution question becomes a scope decision, see What Schantz Preserves During a Rebuild. For the firm’s name chain and the corporate eras behind the entity names used above, see Schantz Organ Company.

Once the paper trail has been read this far, a condition survey and its documentation are the ordinary way to establish what is actually in the instrument and from whom. Scope, price and schedule for any such work are project-specific and controlled by the accepted written proposal, and work is accepted only after appropriate technical and logistical review.