“I can play sounds from the future” – Munich

This piece is a show, certainly also because of Peter Pichler. A show, that’s what they commonly say in Bavarian when no adjective is sufficient to express appreciation. For the two-person play “As if we lived in a merciful country”, which has been showing at the Kammerspiele since the end of January, this expression, taken from the depths of the dialect, fits well because Pichler is a dialect-speaking Munich native. In addition, the production offers a wonderfully successful two hours of almost madness to watch. There is talking, singing, crying and (spoiler alert) vomiting at the highest level of acting without any speed limit. In Alison Louise Kennedy’s novel of the same name, Wiebke Puls and Edmund Telgenkämper set standards. Equipped with a few props – a large, cocoon-like wicker basket and a transparent, walk-in cylinder – everything takes place on the forestage. The backdrop can be set up and dismantled quickly. However, there is also a musician on the right edge of the stage and an instrument with which he picks up melodies and creates wondrously sounding, squeezed and croaking tones: Peter Pichler and his Trautonium.

This duo is an experience and for several reasons: The electronic Trautonium has never been seen on stage as musical support for a play. In general, it is rarely heard live, occasionally as a musical accompaniment to silent films such as Metropolis. The wooden box looks wonderfully old-fashioned. It is reminiscent of the time of grandparents or even great-grandparents and at first glance it looks like a small organ. If there weren’t so many buttons and switches that Pichler constantly turns and presses during the game.

The Trautonium is considered the forerunner of the synthesizer. It doesn’t have keys in the classic sense, but rather metal strips on which the fingers dance back and forth, sometimes grinding, sometimes jumping. It is named after its inventor Friedrich Trautwein, who first presented it publicly in 1930. He developed it together with the composer and musician Oskar Sala, who earned money after the Second World War by scoring feature films and advertising. Pichler is considered the only remaining Trautonium player. He says about himself: “I am the last one, I can play sounds from the future.”

But does he really have to be the last? Pichler, slim and agile, will probably be able to use this instrument for quite some time and will probably also be able to pass on his skills, just as he gives guitar lessons. He doesn’t want to reveal his exact age, but why shouldn’t his enthusiasm ignite a fire among young musicians? “It’s electronic music that’s as warming as central heating,” he says about the Trautonium. Can such sentences leave you cold? In a YouTube video, Pichler explains in detail how the instrument works, how glycerin under the metal rail ensures dynamics and the “subharmonic generator” enables tones. “The Trautonium can play louder and deeper than any other instrument,” enthuses Pichler during a visit to his studio. It is a pleasantly temperate room in an old building where two of the instruments are located, which do not produce “well-tempered sounds”, as Pichler repeatedly says.

You enter a collector’s retreat that is full of memorabilia. Pictures, books, CDs, records, figurines everywhere in and on shelves. A floral girl’s dress hangs from the ceiling. “My children’s room,” says Pichler. He knows how to react to surprised faces. Around 30 guitars in cases and cases are piled up against one wall. Opposite there is a piano, a book by Franz Xaver Kroetz and a packet of sneezing powder are draped on the music rest. Next to it in a corner are a smaller and a larger Trautonium, as can be seen in the Kammerspiele. Real melodies can also be played on the small, called Volkstrautonium, which is barely wider than a bedside table. It is from Telefunken and was connected to a radio to encourage the general public to make music. Jürgen Hiller recreated the larger one, a “Mixture Trautonium”. “An electro freak,” says Pichler about the Berliner. He himself has relatively little knowledge of these construction plans. That’s why he got into playing. He had to practice a lot, it was quite complicated. He has been playing at concert level for about nine years now, and he no longer sees himself as a guitarist.

The fact that the ideas surrounding the instrument, which was avant-garde at the time, could not really take hold has to do with the country’s dark history. The Trautonium was intended to be played live on radio shows and broadcast over the airwaves. There was also a radio testing center in Berlin, which the National Socialists took over in 1933. “The Nazis stopped the development of Trautonium,” says Pichler. “They wanted speakers, not music.”

It is speculative to say so, but perhaps it is precisely this early thwarted rise of the instrument that appeals to Pichler. Telefunken invested a lot back then, he says. Nevertheless, the history of the Trautonium is a history of failure. The large compositions for this were missing. The most important ones come from Paul Hindemith and Oskar Sala. Bela Bartok probably had a mission and died before he could fulfill it. It annoys Pichler that people like Sala have kept a lot of things about the instrument to themselves. He brought the menacing-sounding fluttering in Alfred Hitchcock’s film “The Birds” out of the Trautonium and thereby made it better known again. The hum of an engine, the rotor blades of a helicopter, everything is possible. In the Kammerspiele, Pichler evokes Schubert’s E flat major trio. In a video he posted online, you can hear him adding danceable beats. The Trautonium can obviously do a lot. There are keys for classical music, infinitely playable. “A completely different way of playing. You can change chords and sounds. I have 100 notes in an octave. Incredibly exciting.”

Open detailed view

A waist-high replica of the Munich television tower stands on a window sill in Pichler’s workroom. Pichler grew up in the Olympic center. He started out as a punk musician and played with the Condoms and, as was fitting, he also had trouble with the police at the time. He then studied at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, at the Leopold Mozart Conservatory in Augsburg and at the University of Music in Karlsruhe.

All of that is behind him, but Pichler is still a bit of a rebel at heart. “The content is what’s important, that’s why I became a punk,” he says and raves about fellow artists like Stephan Zinner, Hans Söllner and Funny van Dannen, who sometimes said no or kept their mouths shut. Director Sandra Strunz, in turn, says how happy she is that Pichler agreed to work together. “I’m high speed, Peter isn’t.” Because: “The Trautonium is absolutely the right instrument for this evening.”