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  • Die Laute in Europa: Geschichte und Geschichten zum Geniessen [The Lute in Europe: A History to Delight]
  • David Dolata
Die Laute in Europa: Geschichte und Geschichten zum Geniessen [The Lute in Europe: A History to Delight]. By Andreas Schlegel. Menziken: The Lute Corner, 2006. [120 p. ISBN-13: 9783952323205. $23.] Music examples, illustrations, bibliography.

Lutenists. We’re an odd bunch. Were one to ask my wife how many lutes I need, she’d respond with a sigh, “just one more.” Yet it is our lot for a very practical reason: during the Renaissance and baroque eras, lute design, stringing configuration, tuning, and technique quickly accommodated the rapidly changing musical tastes that make this repertoire so diversified, exciting, and challenging. For instance, the 7- or 8-course (a course is a single string or pair of strings tuned in unison or octaves) Renaissance lute necessary to perform the music of John Dowland (1563–1626) cannot be used to play that of J. S. Bach’s contemporary Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687–1750), which calls for a larger lute sporting more strings arranged and tuned differently. One lute cannot serve all. Even lute music composed at exactly the same time in different nations sounds noticeably better on an instrument designed to take into account that area’s musical tastes. While French 11-course and German 13-course baroque lutes are tuned similarly, they carry structural modifications that best serve their own national styles, the 11-course exploiting the French interest in texture and timbre while the 13-course favors the German preference for clear counterpoint. This record of extraordinarily rapid and innovative response is further evidence that back in the day they were every bit as interested in being au courant as we are today.

Enter Andreas Schlegel’s Die Laute in Europa: Geschichte und Geschichten zum Geniessen, which thankfully bears a parallel English title and side-by-side translation as The Lute in Europe: A History to Delight. For anyone interested in learning basic information about the lute in a tidy attractive package jam-packed with information and full-page color photographs, this lovely publication is just the ticket. For lutenists, this book should fit quite nicely on the bookshelf between Douglas Alton Smith (A History of the Lute from Antiquity to the Renaissance [Lexington, VA: The Lute Society of America, 2002]) and Ernst Pohlmann (Laute, Theorbe, Chitarrone: Die Lauten-Instrumente, ihre Musik und Literatur von 1500 bis zur Gegenwart, 5th ed. [Lilienthal: Edition Eres, 1982]). Better yet, it merits a place of honor on the coffee table because readers—and visitors—will want to refer to it again and again. Printed on very thick high quality paper, it is quite heavy (17 oz.) for a 120-page paperback measuring 16.5 x 24 centimeters.

Despite Schlegel’s occasional excursions into the arcane, this fully footnoted compendium focuses largely on the instrument itself and other practical matters, as befits a primer or introduction, in contrast to Smith’s broader treatment. Schlegel includes a fully illustrated “gallery of lute types” with photographs of each lute type’s front and back, tunings, and short and long neck measurements in centimeters, a very thoughtful feature. Almost every page opening displays a spectacular color photograph. It’s one of the finest collections of high-resolution lute photographs I’ve ever seen. As Smith explains in his book and Schlegel reinforces here, the instrument’s visual beauty and related powerful mythological associations attract many to its world—they come for its good looks, but stay for its sweet sound. Many of the photographs are sumptuously detailed closeups, providing a voyeuristic insider’s view into the lute’s interior and such elements as the intricate tracery of lute and baroque guitar roses, the finely cut designs that cover the opening on the belly through which the sound emits. Most of the illustrations, however, are photographs of the original lutes upon which modern reproductions are based; I am sure that lutenists will appreciate noting how precisely our contemporary versions resemble their exemplars. As if these were not enough, bonus features include a brief and partially illustrated glossary of relevant lute construction terms and a lexicon of the...

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