Organist Kenneth Danchik knew he was in trouble.

Perched in the organ loft for a Mass in St. Paul Cathedral, he had just lifted his hands from the keyboard after playing the entrance hymn. But a few pipes did not obey. They continued blaring, even as Bishop Paul Bradley began his greeting. Priests are accustomed to the occasional wail of an infant, but the piercing note -- A above middle C -- that rang out that morning was at another level.

It was every organist's nightmare: a cipher. That's jargon for when the air that courses through a pipe, or group of pipes, doesn't cease after its key is released. The breakdown that January morning was not the first time for the cathedral's massive aging von Beckerath pipe organ, but it was the most prominent one.

"I turned the organ off, since sometimes that fixes it, but when I turned it back on, the note was still there," recalls Danchik, associate organist at St. Paul. "It was very loud."

Danchik eventually shut the organ down and raced to the smaller portative organ near the altar. "I knew I wouldn't make it down in time, and I gestured frantically to the cantor that she would lead the Gloria. I made it down for the Psalm."

"He never missed a beat; it was like an angel flew down from the choir loft," said the Rev. Donald Breier, rector of the cathedral that is the seat of the Diocese of Pittsburgh.

Crisis avoided. But the mishap sparked the little note placed in the cathedral's bulletin that very same week: The organ will undergo a massive restoration that will cost nearly $1 million. The instrument will be shut down after Easter and returned to service before Christmas. In the meantime, a Wicks digital organ will provide music for the services.

"The sad thing is that because of the shape it has been in the last two years, we haven't been able to have the organ concert series and special events because they don't have the ability to use the full organ," says Breier.

"Only one-half of the organ is playable," says director of music and organist Don Fellows. "Several of the largest pipes are collapsing under their own weight. They were constructed from metal that had had impurities removed, and [later it was discovered] the impurities gave a lot of it strength."

Many of the largest flue pipes -- the tallest is 26 feet -- are bowing and sagging, which alters tone and hinders "speech." "It takes a while before the pitch even establishes," says Fellows, playing the foot pedalboard. "If you were to go through note to note, you will hear a very big difference from one to the next. That one is dead. That one has a lot of wind before it actually speaks." Also, because of mechanical failure, he had to manually adjust air flow to certain pipes.

"We did this intentionally because we still need to be playing the organ for major services," he says. Those attending the three to five Masses a day and the 100 weddings and funerals a year may not be able to tell -- the sound is still magnificent -- but the organ ... cannot create the tonal shading and color it is capable of through the activating of all of its different stops, or varied groups of pipes.

"It is always loud on this keyboard," Fellows says.

With 67 stops, 97 ranks and more than 5,000 pipes, the St. Paul Cathedral instrument that was installed in 1962 is one of Western Pennsylvania's mightiest pipe organs, and a nice complement to the impressive Casavants, Reuters, Aeolian-Skinners and others in town. "Pittsburgh is widely regarded as a good organ city," says Craig Cramer, a professor of organ at the University of Notre Dame. "There are a wide variety of instruments."

One element that sets the St. Paul organ apart is its arrangement. While church organs are often placed in compartments throughout the interior, the von Beckerath is displayed in all of its glory in the rear gallery, approximately three stories high.

"When people hear it they know it -- even to see it is visually stunning," says Breier. "It is a beautiful thing."

But the true mark of the organ, its reason for renown, is its role in the organ reform movement and in the career of its maker, Rudolf von Beckerath.

"It is widely known as one of the monument organs in the United States," says Cramer. "Von Beckerath was one of the leaders of the organ reform movement." The reaction was against the style of organs being built in the early 20th century. These were large instruments with pipes often buried in chambers and using electric action -- when a pressed key activates a pipe through an electrical connection. The reform builders in the 1930s and onward looked to the old German organ practice of tracker action -- when the keys are mechanically linked to the pipes, bringing the player into close proximity to the pipes.

"These organ builders tried to recover the principles of organ building as practiced in the 17th and the 18th centuries, the golden age of organ design, playing and composition," says Cramer. Von Beckerath was particularly successful at learning from the older instruments and applying their ideals into his own style of building. But he was not adverse to new technology. The St. Paul tracker organ uses some electrical wiring for the pulling of stops, but the key action remains mechanical.

"This organ established von Beckerath as one of the greatest builders in the world," says Cramer.

The cathedral and the Diocese of Pittsburgh chose Taylor & Boody Organ Builders of Staunton, Va., for the restoration in part because co-owner George Taylor was an apprentice to von Beckerath.

The first order of business is to replace the nearly 30 damaged pipes with new ones. But the instrument also will be cleaned and tuned, and the mechanical elements fixed.

"It will be returned to its original state in which all of its components function reliably," says Fellows.

Danchik would take reliability, but he and the other church and local organists want much more. "I remember what the organ used to sound like when it was working well," he said. "You had such a variety to choose from."

"It is an organ of vast tonal resources," says Cramer. And soon its pipes will ring out again like new -- but only when the organists intend them to.