Tibor Ehlers

Tibor Ehlers (born August 19, 1917 in Großschlagendorf, Upper Hungary ; † June 3, 2001 in Betzweiler-Wlassung ) was a German teacher and musical instrument maker of Carpathian German origin who revived historical instruments of traditional folk music .

Life

Ehlers was born in Großschlagendorf on the German-speaking island of Spiš in today's Slovakia . He grew up in Bratislava (Pressburg) and was trained as a teacher. Already at this time he was working musically with his students. In 1945 he fled to Bavaria, where he learned to work with wood as a sawmill worker in Cham (Upper Palatinate) . In 1948 he worked for a short time as a woodcarver for handicrafts in the Hohenlohe region , until he did an apprenticeship as a potter in Hockenheim and married the master potter there in 1949. From 1952 to 1962 he was a teacher at the elementary school in Buchenberg in the Black Forest .

Tibor Ehlers was a pedagogue and not trained in classical instrument making, so he developed his own techniques. In 1957 he built his first Bohemian trestle . Later he developed hurdy-gurdy , viols and folk harps , but also pastoral flutes and historical clarinets , which found recognition in the professional world. In 1962 he became a lecturer for arts subjects at the Protestant College for Social Pedagogy in Freiburg im Breisgau . From 1976 to 1978 he worked at the State Teacher Training Institute in Gengenbach . After retiring at the age of 61, he settled in Betzweiler-Wlassung , continued to develop his instruments and held courses. He was one of the most important pioneers in the rediscovery and revival of instruments of traditional folk music both in the Swabian region and in Bavaria. There he held annual instrument making courses together with the Upper Palatinate district home nurse Adolf Eichenseer since 1974 in Pleystein and later in Waldmünchen . He was the first to point out the independent Swabian bagpipe tradition around 1970 and renewed the "Swabian-Alemannic bagpipe".

After the death of his first wife Irmgard (born August) in 1991, he married Ursula Lederer the following year. Until shortly before his death he was active in instrument making courses and devoted himself to new instruments such as the lyre and chitarrone . In 2001 Tibor Ehlers died in the clinic in Betzweiler-Wlassung .

The cultural council of the Swabian Alb Association honors musicians, music groups and instrument makers who are committed to the rediscovery and revival of traditional folk music as well as the manual production of historical folk instruments with the “Tibor Ehlers Medal”.

Prize winner of the Tibor Ehlers Medal

• Georg Balling and Herbert Grünwald (2003)
• Ernst Eugen Schmidt (2006)
• Berthold Büchele (2009)
• Eckhard Böhringer (2012)

literature

• Ernst Eugen Schmidt: "From Swabian to Swedish" - Beginnings of the revitalization of the bagpipe game in the southwest of the German-speaking area , ad marginem 86 (2014), pp. 19-29
• Manfred Stingel, Hans Georg Zimmermann: lyre, viol, bagpipes: the instrument maker Tibor Ehlers , Swabian cultural archive of the Swabian Alb Association, 2002, Balingen, ISBN 392-0-80154-7
• Uta Süße-Krause : Tibor: Factual and poetic about viols and Tibor Ehlers , texts: Hatto Zeidler, SAV, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 978-3-920801-51-3

Web links

• Literature by and about Tibor Ehlers in the catalog of the German National Library
• Swabian Alb Association: Tibor Ehlers Medal , accessed on November 6, 2015.