The Wartburg Gittern: New Insights

Since 1860, the collection of the Wartburg Foundation in Eisenach has housed a small lute-like instrument that, based on the glued-in instrument label, is attributed to Hans Ott in Nuremberg, dated around 1450 and described as a gittern. This so-called Wartburg gittern has, to date, been considered to be one of the oldest surviving European plucked string instruments, is regularly mentioned in musicological literature and has often been ‘copied’ in the course of historical performance practice. Surprisingly, however, there has been neither a detailed study nor a comprehensive publication on this instrument. As part of a research project by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Bern Academy of the Arts, the Wartburg gittern was re-examined in 2021. In addition to the direct analysis of the instrument, a three-dimensional model was created from numerous photographs using photogrammetry, a micro-computed tomography scan was carried out in collaboration with the Fraunhofer Development Center for X-ray Technology in Fürth, Bavaria (Fraunhofer-IIS/EZRT), a dendrochronological dating of the soundboard of the instrument was commissioned and new research into its provenance was undertaken. The most important findings are presented in this article.