Peter Harlan

Harlan Lucas Evenings, left Peter Harlan (1927)

Peter Harlan (born February 26, 1898 in Berlin ; † January 13, 1966 Sternberg / Lippe Castle ) was a German multi-instrumentalist and musical instrument maker . In the 1920s he worked for the Munich magazine Der Guitarfriend .

Live and act

Peter Harlan comes from the family of artists Harlan . He is the son of the writer Walter Harlan and brother of the film director Veit Harlan ( " Jud Süß " ).

After graduating from high school, an apprenticeship as a string instrument maker with Ernst Wilhelm Kunze and the establishment of his own workshop for the construction of medieval instruments in Markneukirchen in the Vogtland Musikwinkel , Peter Harlan got to know the first recorders with Wilibald Gurlitt in Freiburg im Breisgau in the 1920s . He later stated that he had built the first recorder in 1921. In 1925 he and the German music researcher Max Seiffert visited Arnold Dolmetsch, the leading expert in early chamber music in England. In 1926 he had a recorder built by other wind instrument makers. The result of these attempts was the German-fingered recorder, which is still used today, which became an instrument that was easy and quick to learn, with which both known songs and classical repertoire could be played. This Bärenreiter recorder from the Harlan workshops was also widely used because of its low sales price of 4 Reichsmarks.

Inspired by Gurlitt, Harlan developed not only recorders but also fiddles , viols and clavichords based on historical models. He saw the fiddle construction as the most important of his deeds. It was his special concern to make this 6-string string instrument, which he constructed from the basic structure of the viol, into a future-oriented amateur instrument - next to the recorder - because of its easy-to-learn playing style.

Together with the musicologist Cornelia Schröder-Auerbach and the violist and composer Hanning Schröder , he founded the Harlan Trio in 1930, which did pioneering work in the field of historical performance practice with music from the Middle Ages to the Baroque.

In the Second World War he became an air force officer and in December 1944 was given command of Sternberg Castle in Lippe . In the last days of the war in 1945 he refused the order to destroy the castle using a few barrels of gasoline and waited for the Allied troops to march into safe Lemgo, so that the castle fell into their hands without a fight.

In 1947, Peter Harlan leased Sternberg Castle, resumed instrument making there and developed the castle into an important training center for German music care. For this purpose, a diverse learning and presentation program was established, consisting of courses on playing the fiddle, courses on making musical instruments yourself, but also small concerts, puppet shows and guided tours of the castle. Until his death, he made it possible for countless children to take their first steps in the field of music, by playing, building themselves or buying simple musical instruments.

After Peter Harlan's death, the sons Till and Klaus Harlan continued their father's work at Sternberg Castle.

literature

• Wind tunnel : 2006-3.4
• Hermann Moeck : On the "post-history" and renaissance of the recorder . In: Tibia. Magazine for woodwinds , Vol. 3 (1978), pp. 13-20 ( online ; PDF; 12 MB) and Pp. 79–88 ( online ; PDF; 13 MB), here p. 18 f. Also special print: Edition Moeck, Celle 1980.
• Frank Jendreck : Founder of the Sternberg Music Castle. Peter Harlan on the 50th anniversary of his death . In: Heimatland Lippe. Journal of the Lippischen Heimatbund and the Landesverband Lippe. Jan / Feb 2016, p. 29 f.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ www.archiv-der-jugendmusikbewegung.de , accessed on May 5, 2013