In 1845, Félix Danjou, the director of the French firm of organ builders Daublaine-Callinet, writing in the first edition of his magazine Revue de la musique réligieuse, populaire et classique, commented on the state of German organ composition:

Danjou's generalisations on the music of the Thuringian Christian Heinrich Rinck (1770–1846) and the Silesian Adolf Friedrich Hesse (1809–1863), composers who might be said to have laid the foundations for nineteenth-century German organ music, while having an element of truth, are one-sided and not entirely accurate – for example, both composers wrote in equal measure in the legato fugal style and in the free variation manner. If organ music had failed to maintain the lofty standards of J. S. Bach, one has to look at least a hundred years earlier and to forces external to music for the causes of decline. Movements in philosophy and the arts such as Aufklärung (Enlightenment) and Empfindsamkeit (sensibility) had challenged accepted norms and traditions. The Church lost its centrality in society, and had to compete with man's growing belief in his own self-sufficiency, as well as with a rise in nationalistic fervour.