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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,...