As of: January 26, 2024, 9:21 a.m
By: Christoph Ulrich
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“Incredibly warm sounds are created,” says musician and composer Peter Pichler about the Trautonium.
© Peter Pichler
The Trautonium seemed forgotten, but Peter Pichler resurrects it.
Once a resounding symbol of social awakening, it now plays an unexpected role in Munich.
Failure is inherent in the instrument, says Peter Pichler.
He has to know.
The Munich native is currently the last living master of the Trautonium, which was supposed to represent the dawn of music and was forgotten.
On the one hand.
On the other hand, it began an unnoticed triumph in modern music and the musical illustration of films, for example making the birds caw murderously in Hitchcock's classic “The Birds”, and will even be an actor on the stage of the Kammerspiele on Friday evening (January 26, 2024). .
Pichler and his mixture of trautonium are players in “As if we lived in a merciful country”, the stage adaptation of A. L. Kennedy's novel.
“It’s about the failure of humanity as the first species to destroy itself,” reveals Pichler during a break in rehearsals.
It is also about a new beginning, in this case that of humanity after the pandemic.
If you look at the history of the instrument, you have to come to the conclusion that there couldn't be a more suitable one.
It itself comes from a time of change, after the First World War.
Pichler captures the exciting uncertainty after Corona with his mixture of trautonium in sounds - live in dialogue with the actress Wiebke Puls and her colleague Edmund Telgenkämper.
What is a Trautonium?
To understand the invention of this instrument, a journey through time can help.
“Berlin was the third largest and, in my opinion, the most interesting city in the world after London and New York,” reports Pichler.
“Drugs were legal, Josephine Baker drove through the streets in a carriage pulled by an ostrich.” The city was filled with a desire for new things.
Inspired by this spirit, the composer Paul Hindemith teamed up with the engineer Friedrich Trautwein to develop an instrument.
The result was the Trautonium, named after its inventor: the world's first mass-produced electronic instrument.
It was performed publicly for the first time in 1930; Hindemith had composed a piece specifically for it.
The pianist Rudolph Schmidt and Oskar Sala, who became the most important artist and further developer of the Trautonium, were also involved.
It is not well-tempered and is fed from the overtone series.
“This creates incredibly warm sounds,” explains Pichler.
The Trautonium has no keys, but is operated with a string that is pressed onto a metal rail.
“I can use auxiliary keys to hit certain tones or glide seamlessly up or down.” While the original version was monophonic, Sala developed a two-string version, the Mixturetrautonium, which can also change timbres or switch on chords from the overtone series.
This makes the instrument, although visually not dissimilar to an organ, closer to the Indian sitar or the Arabic oud, where played tones cause passive strings to sound.
It marks a break with 500-year-old listening habits based on fixed pitches.
The instrument divided the artists of the time: “While Hindemith or Harald Genzmer were enthusiastic, Stockhausen or Schönberg, to put it bluntly, found it terrible.”
Who is Peter Pichler?
What frightened the father of intuitive music and the pioneer of twelve-tone technology appeals to Pichler.
At home in the punk movement and classically trained on the Renaissance lute and guitar at the Mozarteum Salzburg, among others, he came to Trautonium through films: “Oskar Sala, who I got to know in the nineties, made many soundtracks, including Edgar Wallace -Productions with Joachim Fuchsberger.”
Pichler has been intensively involved with the instrument since the 1980s and is now the only artist in the world to have mastered all of the classical compositions for it - and he also adds new ones.
He dared what Fritz Lang did not dare to do and accompanied “Metropolis” live with his mixture trautonium, was the first to take the instrument out of Europe and toured Australia.
But his personal career highlight took place in his hometown: “The National Socialists and Fascism prevented the Trautonium from becoming the instrument of the future.” Although Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was initially particularly interested, he later lost interest.
“If the Trautonium had anything to do with the Nazis, I would never have played it,” says Pichler.
When the opportunity arose to give a concert in the University of Music and Theater, the former Führer building, he agreed: “So I played in Hitler's fireplace room, where Hitler concluded the terrible Munich Agreement with Chamberlain, Mussolini and Daladier in 1938 .” He played atonal and – according to the Nazi classification – “degenerate music” and “destroyed all Nazi vibes.”
From today on he continues to write the history of the sound that could have become the sound of the future.
Pichler summarizes that the story of the Trautonium also tells the whole world of failure.