Der Notenstecher von Würzburg | Der Letzte seines Standes

The music engraver was produced in 2007 for the series "der Letzte seines Standes" (The last of his class) in cooperation with Bayerischer Rundfunk. More than half of all music books sold today are still originally engraved by hand. They are reproductions of millimetre thick lead plates. For centuries, to reproduce music, it was stamped into the soft metal and engraved as in copperplate engraving. The film accompanies Hans Kühner at his last work in lead. Bach's Fugue is what he intends to work on. The template is the original manuscript. First he divides the manuscript and sketches it on the lead. Not an easy task, because the manuscript of the great composer leaves many questions unanswered, including whether Bach actually died over the work on this last fugue, as one remark claims. With the five-line 'Rastral', he draws the staves and engraves the bar lines corresponding to the 'break'. Then he gets the box with the stamps, strikes whole and half notes into the plate, accidentals and clefs. With the graver he digs the notes' necks into the lead. For this he needs patience, because even the thousandth should be as accurate as the first. A good engraver wants to convey the character of the piece of music to the musician by its appearance already. He will set a fast piece, e.g. an alegro, narrower, a slow one like a largo wider. The end of a double page of a piano work, for example, should end with the player having one hand free to turn the pages. Placing the notes in such a way that the musician can play them with pleasure is the mastery of Hans Kühner. Initially, as a 15-year-old, he wanted to become a car mechanic. But more than half a century ago, he says, there were not so many cars and no apprenticeships and because he played the accordion and knew the notes, he became a music engraver. He has not regretted that until today. The master has temporarily set up his workshop in the cellar of the Kulturspeicher, an old Würzburg harbour building. Winfried Henkel, a lithographer, also works there. What he is trying to do now, nobody has tried for decades: copy the engraved lead plate onto stone and print from it. Senefelder, the inventor of stone printing, had initially invented the process for copying notes. In the film, this original technique can be seen once again. Hans Kühner has his apartment and his other workshop directly below the Würzburg fortress. There he tells us why he works mainly with the computer today. He has a 500-page Haydn work in progress. It would take him four to five hundred days with lead, but of course it is much faster on the computer. His clients confirm that he is one of the best with his long experience, on the computer as well. He is proud of his work when he sees musicians all over the world playing from 'his' sheet music.