Georg Stössel

Georg Stössel (born May 1, 1867 in Würzburg , † June 26, 1943 in Cologne ) was a German violin maker and inventor of the Stössel lute named after him .

Life

Stössel began an apprenticeship as a carpenter at the age of 12 and then learned violin making from Friedrich Wittstadt in Würzburg. He then worked in Vienna for violin makers David Bittner, Ignaz Bucher and Josef Hamberger. Travels took him to Hungary, the Balkans and Constantinople . From 1889 to 1893 he lived in Italy, where he further perfected himself in violin making in Naples , Rome and Cremona . After stops in Zurich at the violin maker Anton Siebenhüner and in Mittenwald , he returned to Würzburg in 1893, where he made so-called " knight violas " in the workshop of Karl Adam Hörlein . In the same year he started his own business in Würzburg. There he developed a later patented "legacy zither".

In 1900 he moved to Cologne , where he opened a violin making workshop on Auf dem Berlich 31 in July of the same year. He was regarded as a “master in imitating and restoring old violins” (cf. Lütgendorff 1922, II, p. 489). In 1910, Stössel and colleagues founded the “Association of German Instrument Manufacturers and Dealers” in response to the flooding of the German market with cheap American chord zithers . In 1914 he invented the pestle lute, a plucked instrument that combines the characteristics of the zither and the neck lute . In the following decades he built hundreds of modifications of his lute. On June 23, 1923, the "Stösselinstrumentenbau AG" was founded in Stuttgart, which produced the lute, under Stössel as technical director and engineer Kurt Schiffler as sales manager, for the national market. In 1925 the AG went bankrupt. Georg Stössel himself was killed in the bombing of Cologne on June 26, 1943.

literature

• W. Leo Freiherr v. Lütgendorff: The violin and lute makers from the Middle Ages to the present. 3rd, extended edition Frankfurt: Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt 1922, 2 volumes.
• Patent specification DRP No. 296436, class 51c, Gr. 14 of August 31, 1915
• Stefan Lieser: The pestle lute: a folk instrument for everyone. Brought to light after 40 years of oblivion. In: Guitar & Laute 7, 1985, 4, pp. 13-18.

Web links

• Biography of Georg Stössel at the Museum for Musical Instruments at the University of Leipzig
• Guitar & Lute online: The Stössel Lute - A folk musical instrument for everyone!