Oskar Sala 1910–2002

Among the curiosities of the twentieth-century concert repertoire, Paul Hindemith’s Langsames Stück und Rondo of 1935 is surely one of the most esoteric. Not only did the score quickly disappear from circulation, but the instrument for which it was conceived — the two-manual Trautonium — failed to catch the creative imagination of composers at large with quite the same potency as its French sibling, the ondes Martenot. Indeed, its leading exponent, Oskar Sala, will be best remembered not as a recitalist and recording artist but for his distinctive contribution to one of the classics of the cinema, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 shocker The birds.

Although Hindemith’s diptych has not weathered well the storms of time, a concerto for the instrument, by his student Harold Genzmer, made somewhat more of an impact. Appropriately enough, its premiere, in 1939, took place not in a traditional concert-hall setting but, thanks to Radio Germany, over the airwaves. When it was first performed in public, a year later, Sala was joined on the platform by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, no less, and the rendition generated spontaneous applause before the first movement had scarcely run its course. Sala’s reputation as the leading, indeed sole, Trautonium virtuoso was thereafter assured, at least on his native soil, but more than twenty years were to elapse before its eerie sounds reached international ears — thanks to a last-minute decision by the master of suspense.

Hitchcock’s original intention for the film had been to commission a traditional orchestral score from Bernard Herrmann, his usual collaborator at that time, and to supplement it with the natural sounds of birds. But a chance letter from the German composer Remi Gassman alerted him to the more intriguing possibilities of electronic music. A rough-cut of the film’s climactic scene — the unseen birds’ terrifying attack on the Brenner house — was duly despatched to Berlin, and the resultant soundtrack, by Gassman and Sala, convinced Hitchcock that this was the only way forward, despite protestations from a nervous Universal Studios official. Although the deadline was tight, the score was finished just on time, and contributed memorably to the film’s success.

As in the case of the ondes Martenot, the Trautonium’s leading virtuoso was not its inventor. This was Friedrich Trautwein, who first exhibited the instrument in Berlin in 1930. Trautwein was primarily a scientist, but he also played the organ and was employed at the radio experimental centre of the Berlin State Music Academy, where he was eventually to be appointed Professor of Musical Acoustics. Galvanised by Hindemith, the Academy’s Professor of Composition, Trautwein produced his new instrument. Hindemith quickly learnt to play it and wrote a concertino the very next year. Other composers followed suit, including Richard Strauss and Werner Egk, though none of them produced a truly significant work or empathised with it as deeply as did Messiaen with the ondes.

The original Trautonium was essentially a monophonic instrument: Indeed, it could be described as a state-of-the-art descendant of the Pythagorean monochord — a wire stretched across a fingerboard. In the Trautonium’s case, the depressed wire completes an electric circuit that activates an oscillator, whose tone is amplified and can be altered by means of filters.

Oskar Sala was born in Griez, Thuringia, on 18 July 1910. He studied composition in Berlin with Hindemith, and it was through the older composer that he became acquainted with Trautwein and his invention. Sensing that a traditional musical training would be insufficient for him to conquer the new medium, he undertook a parallel course of instruction in physics. It was because of his outstanding ability in both these disciplines that he was able not only to master the instrument as a performer but also to involve himself at a practical level in its development.

At first, Sala assisted Trautwein himself on a domestic version, manufactured by Telefunken between 1932 and 1935. He was soon constructing his own radio and concert versions. The Radio-Trautonium was commissioned by the Reich Broadcasting Corporation in 1945—35, and it was for this that Hindemith wrote the Langsames Stück und Rondo. The Concert-Trautonium, developed in 1937—38, added portability to the instrument’s features; this was the model employed for the Genzmer concerto.

But it was the Mixtur-Trautonium, with two fingerboards and subharmonic timbres, developed after the war, which became the flagship model, and Sala was granted US, French and German patents for the circuitry involved. With its richer sound and capacity for playing chords, it rightly occupied pride of place in Sala’s Berlin studio, and attracted the interest of several leading German composers of the day, including Hans Werner Henze, Carl Orff , Paul Dessau, and, again, Genzmer, who obliged in 1952 with a second concerto.

None of them, however, was able to match the success of Sala himself in The birds. After the triumph of 1963, Sala continued his film work, and provided the soundtrack for A fleur d’eau, a film for the Swiss Tourist Centre, which won a Golden Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival. Further work in the medium ensued, and he was awarded a Filmband in Gold in 1987 for his contribution to the industry.

Meanwhile, during the early 1980s, and with Sala’s blessing, a student project at the Technical College of the German Federal Post Office in Berlin brought the instrument into the digital age. When the new ‘Mixture-Trautonium after Oskar Sala’, as it was named, was handed over to Sala, he was, despite his unfamiliarity with the new technology, able to enhance it still further, simply by incorporating elements from the older versions.

Sala’s ninetieth birthday last year provoked a number tributes, not least a Festschrift — Oskar Sala: Pionier der elektronischen Musick — edited by Peter Frieß, director of the Deutsches Museum in Bonn and one of his staunchest supporters. Fittingly, it is to this, one of Germany’s leading technology museums, that Sala has bequeathed his Nachlass, just as he gave the director of the museum in 1931 one of the first Trautoniums.

Oskar Sala: born 18 July 1910; died 26 February 2002.