Organ grinder

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A “Werkelmann” in Vienna with a Berlin-style barrel organ
An organ grinder with a monkey, 1892
Ludovico Wolfgang Hart : Organ grinder and listener in the Black Forest, 1864

An organ grinder or a popular northern German designation following organ grinder , Austrian also Werkelmann , the player is a barrel organ .

Organ barrel playing as a livelihood

Barrel organs have been used as an instrument in Europe by street musicians and jugglers , but also by petty and morality singers since the beginning of the 18th century. The barrel organ experienced a heyday as a begging instrument in the second half of the 18th century. It was used to earn a livelihood supported by the state: Empress Maria Theresa is said to have been the first to issue licenses to war invalids after the Seven Years' War to “look for a barrel organ”. In 1838 there were around 800 of these so-called Werkelmänner (Werkel = small organ work) in Vienna.

Prussia later imitated the Austrians. With the introduction of the freedom of trade , organ barrel players were classified as traders from 1810 and permits were issued. However, many organ grinder did not have their own barrel organ, but rented the relatively expensive instrument from manufacturers or lenders at a fixed daily rate. In Berlin there were also certain regulatory rules, and sometimes proficiency tests even had to be taken.

In the second half of the 19th century the number of organ barrel players increased steadily. During this time Berlin developed into one of the strongholds of barrel organ building in Germany, and up to 3,000 barrel organ players roamed the streets and backyards of Berlin. When the organ grinder in the backyard had started playing organ music, a number of residents would first open their windows so that they could hear the music and singing better. At the end of the lecture, groschen (10-pfennig coins) carefully wrapped in paper were often thrown into the courtyard.

In tourist areas such as Saxon-Bohemian Switzerland, places where organ grinders could perform their game were often very competitive due to the great competition. In reports from the beginning of the 20th century, there was a real report of a plague. B. on the Fremdweg and the Prebischtor .

Until the 1920s, the organ grinder remained a familiar sight on the streets of the big cities, not least because of the difficult living conditions in the post-war period. Mackie Messer's morality “And the shark, he has teeth” from Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera portrayed this on stage in 1928. In the 1930s, the barrel organs gradually disappeared from the streets. The increasing street noise drowned out the sound of the organ works, and the radio and record took over the musical entertainment in the apartments . In Vienna, playing the organ barrel was completely forbidden during the time of the Greater German Empire . No new licenses were issued later either, the last being from 1930. The decline in the industrial production of mechanical jukeboxes could not be stopped. After the Second World War , organ grinder players like Elsa Oehmigen (Mudder Ömchen) roamed the backyards with their salvaged organ grinders for a few years .

The music of the organ grinder

Organ grinder players naturally had to offer music at all times that made it as easy as possible for the listener to give. The success with the general public determined the repertoire that the horn knob had on his cylinder. He always had to have the latest pieces ready; Songs or dances were added or changed as needed. It is difficult to understand what music was really playing in the streets and courtyards; the repertoire sheet that came with the pen roller and a few comments in the literature are pretty much all that is left.

The increasing popularity of the opera in barrel organ music made itself felt early on. As early as 1775, a music lover reported in a magazine Der Jüngling about his strange joy, "when he heard Hasse arias , which made a great impression in the operas, singing in the streets, no matter how much they were disguised". Fifty years later, a musicologist remarked that the organ grinder seemed to have signed an indissoluble contract for the overture to the opera La caravane du Caire (The Caravan of Cairo), and it was lucky for them that Gretry had composed it. We wind you the maiden wreath from the Freischütz by Carl Maria von Weber , which premiered in Berlin, seems to have been the most played piece on the barrel organs, and that for about a hundred years. Nowadays there are voices who claim that it was not the Scala in Milan but the Italian barrel organs that really spread the art of Giuseppe Verdi .

Otherwise everything was represented in barrel organ music, from the sentimental to the ambiguous street hit . "High" art, for example from the opera, was presented in a rather simple form. All in all, there was an understandable intention to serve a wide variety of tastes and to take different life situations into account. A kind of repertoire model developed that was valid at least until the First World War. Operas, operettas or singspiele provided entertaining successful pieces, but they could also be petty or other well-known songs. There was almost always room on the roller for a chorale and a march.

The organ grinder in art and culture

The Imperial Era (History 2009)

Painting, otherwise not averse to the representation of musicians and their instruments, could not gain anything from the barrel organ man and his mostly unadorned case. Most likely it was the serinette , which appeared in the context of genre representations in paintings . The unpretentious clothes of the organ grinder and the milieu were not exactly picturesque either. Nevertheless, artists in the 18th and 19th centuries took on this subject in many copper engravings and woodcuts , often as part of series . However, the bohemian character of the character and thus the entertainment of the viewer was often in the foreground.

Even poets sometimes saw the lyre man only as a journeyman who lived happily into the day. Much more realistic is already there, the early dedication to the organ-grinder (meaning here the hurdy-gurdy man ) located in the poems of Wilhelm Müller place famous for Franz Schubert's setting in the song cycle Winterreise :

Over behind the village there is a hurdy-gurdy man,
And with rigid fingers he turns what he can.
Barefoot on the ice, he staggers back and forth
and his little plate always stays empty.

Nobody likes to hear him, nobody looks at him,
And the dogs growl around the old man.
And he lets everything go as it wants,
turns and his lyre never stands still.

Strange age, should I go with you?
Do you want to twist your lyre to my songs?

Singer Bully Buhlan sided with the audience in 1951 with his successful hit: "Dear organ grinder, start all over again, an old melody ..." . It was expressed in a similar way 100 years earlier on a drawing by Chr. Reimers in the Düsseldorf monthly issue : “ Dat sounds shy! … Hear the song bidden laht mi again… three times wedder torück. "

In 1953 there was a quarter-hour film called Dear Leierkastenmann in the cinema newsreels . In 1959, the director Peter Lilienthal made his first film Earned in the blink of an eye, about a Berlin organ grinder.

The sculptor Gerhard Thieme created a “monument” for the organ grinder in 1987 with his bronze sculpture, which is in the beer garden of Café Reinhardt in Berlin's Nikolaiviertel . Properly dressed in tails and top hats, a kettledrum with a beating cymbal strapped to his back, the man turns his organ barrel, on which a little monkey is sitting.

Organ barrel playing today

An "
organ grinder" in the GDR during the 750th anniversary of Berlin (1987)

Nowadays the owners of old barrel organs are no longer concerned with making a living. Rather, almost without exception, it is lovers and collectors who simply enjoy showing their collector's item to the public or using it for a good cause. This is joined by the owners of modern instruments with a wide variety of control systems. Many have come together in associations, maintain historical cultural assets, hold exhibitions and organize barrel organ festivals. Organ grinders and morality singers have returned to the streets and squares of many cities as a public attraction on certain occasions.

literature

Web links

Commons : barrel organs (and barrel organ players)  - collection of images, videos, and audio files
Wiktionary: Organ grinder  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Zeraschi: barrel organs . Koehler & Amelang Verlag, Leipzig 1976.
  2. ↑ Hellmut Wiemann: History of organ building and the barrel organ . In: Dietmar Jarofke (Ed.): The Leierkasten - A landmark of Berlin . Verlag Wort- & Bild-Specials, Berlin 1991, p. 14.
  3. ↑ Gretel spot: organ grinders in Vienna . In: Dietmar Jarofke (Ed.): The Leierkasten - A landmark of Berlin . Verlag Wort- & Bild-Specials, Berlin 1991, p. 106.
  4. ↑ That was Berlin. Dear organ grinder . In: Die Zeit , No. 24/1953
  5. ↑ See therein (quote): “In the whole of Vienna there are only three people who can identify themselves with a Werkelmann license. This “sad way of earning a living” has lost its voice and soundless. If you want to hear the melancholy Werkel music for the last time in the spring of 1958, you will probably most likely succeed in Mariahilf or Währing . In the 6th district live two and in the 18th district one owner of the so-called begging music license, which can no longer be acquired according to the theater law from 1930. One of the three license holders is female. 20 years ago there were 40 authorized workers in Vienna. Only 10. survived the last war. "