Lyrical approach

"This is how the lute tickles my listening ear", wrote Johann Friedrich Lauson (1727-1783) at a time when the lute was already almost singing its own swan song and would soon give way to romantic transfiguration. Even if only temporarily. Because just over a hundred years later, it would rise like a phoenix from the ashes - not to be confused with the so-called lute guitar from the Wandervogel era, which was a guitar "disguised" as a lute. To this day, the number of students studying the lute at music academies continues to grow. And the popularity of the guitar continues unabated. Raymond Dittrich's undertaking to dedicate an anthology of almost 150 poems from the 16th century (the first heyday of the lute) to the present day to both instruments is therefore very fitting. These "literary compositions" bear witness to the enduring enthusiasm which, from the 1960s onwards, even attracted other "loving style flowers" to the stage of rock guitarists in the form of the Groopies; admittedly hardly for the purpose of reciting poetry.

In Dittrich's anthology, one encounters the most diverse literary preferences, styles and genres of the respective time of origin. He rightly writes: "No less than the music, the poems are part of the cultural and social history of the lute and guitar." And so you will not only find well-known pieces such as Der Luthier by the Nuremberg Meistersinger Hans Sachs (1494-1576) or the poem of praise by the opera librettist Johann Ulrich von König (1688-1744) for his contemporary, the famous baroque lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss, but also poetry by many unknown or forgotten authors. A few illustrations, such as the woodcuts by Jost Ammann from 1568, which are well-known among lutenists, illustrate the well-kept volume.

The wealth of material found by Dittrich necessitated a limitation to the German-speaking world. The absence of the well-known poem My Lute awake by Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542) or the guitar poems by Federico García Lorca (1898-1936). A detailed afterword explains the character and genre of the texts and provides a careful introduction to the subject matter. This unique volume in paperback format will appeal to literature lovers as well as musicians interested in the art of poetry, especially lutenists and guitarists, of course: an opportunity to gain an even deeper emotional understanding of the essence of one's own musical instrument.

Lute and guitar in German-language poetry. Poems from six centuries. An anthology, edited by Raymond Dittrich, 346 pages, € 16.00, Engelsdorfer Verlag, Leipzig, 2015, ISBN 978-3-95744-394-6

Another volume was published in 2018:

Lute and guitar in German-language poetry (Volume 2). With an essay on the lute similes of Prokop von Templin, edited by Raymond Dittrich, 346 pages, € 16.00, Engelsdorfer Verlag, Leipzig, 2018, ISBN 978-3-96145-337-5