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On one day in March 2005 Michael Münkwitz pulls the chair out for himself, steps onto it, and takes the old trumpet from the nail. He is holding a 350-year-old instrument in his hands, built by Wolf Birckholtz, a student of Hans Hainlein, the famous instrument maker from Nuremberg. Dietmar Cassel, the pastor of the church in Belitz, located south of Rostock, can remember the trumpet maker’s lost gaze very well: “Michael Münkwitz was first speechless, and then swept off his feet. This trumpet had always been hanging there, in our village church, on the epitaph of the trumpet player Jacob Hintze. On the other side of it there used to be his sabre. But this had been stolen at some point. Its ugliness must have safeguarded the old trumpet from theft: the cords were scruffy from the dampness; the brass was dirty and full of coloured stains. The painters, who restored the church, had simply painted around it.” Michael Münkwitz saw immediately, through the dirt, that it was not just any trumpet: “Straight tubes, daedal end pieces, first-class engravings at the bell, and a remarkably even surface for that time – a professional was at work.” Now the trumpet is lying on a table in his workshop. Carefully he is showing the part of the instrument that reveals if someone has only been fiddling around, or if it is a master-piece: the soldered seam, where a strip of brass is soldered to a tube – so exact and long-living that the brass survives the procedures of burnishing, filing, scrapping, and hammering it unharmed. “The teeth fit exactly into each other. There is not a single stain of tin-solder to be seen. This man knew his trade. “ Posthumous respect for a colleague who deceased a long time ago. It is not a fad that Michael Münkwitz puts on his gloves before he touches the trumpet: the hand perspiration could harm the brass that has been affected for centuries. First, he doesn’t want to say anything about the value of the trumpet: “The intangible value is crucial to me. It is priceless.” Later, after some insistence, he estimates: “If there is a passionate collector, he would pay 10,000 or 20,000 Euros at Sotheby’s.” After all, a medium-sized vehicle. Michael Münkwitz is shaking his head – honestly appalled at such philistinism: “That is out of the question: the instrument is in the possession of the parish in Belitz, as I had it stipulated in a contract. This fact remains, even if the trumpet is given to a museum on permanent loan.” Today, it seems to him that the trumpet had only been waiting for him. The church musical director Prof. Hartwig Eschenburg gave him the hint; he had caught a glimpse of the instrument as soon as in 1982, during his walking tours of village churches with the juvenile choir. “I saw that it was an original instrument as you knew it from grave goods,” says Hartwig Eschenburg. “That matches the place where it was found, on the epitaph.” Nevertheless, more than 15 years passed by, before Hartwig Eschenburg told the trumpet maker about his discovery. “Since the end of the nineties, there was a note saying “Trumpet Belitz” in my records. As the New Year approached, I put it into my new calendar.” That would have continued to this day, if the TV station ARD hadn’t produced the living history docudrama “Adventure 1900 – Life in the manor house” in Klein-Belitz. “When I watched that, it became clear to me that Belitz was the next village to Prebberede – the place where I arrange a “Classical Park Open Air” every year in August. So, over the years I had missed several opportunities for a flying visit, I had driven past the church for umpteen times!” When he was lifting the telephone receiver at 8 in the morning to call Pastor Dietmar Cassel and tell him that he would be there half an hour later, Michael Münkwitz was still thinking of one of those infantry trumpets dating back to the First World War that can be found on flea markets. “When I was reading the name Birckholtz and the date, I was blown away. For some it might be a small sensation – for me it was a huge one.” After some first investigations I realised the uniqueness of the discovery: Only three instruments made by Wolf Birckholtz (? – 1701) still exist: two trombones and one trumpet of 1680 which consists of parts from several instruments, and is nowadays exhibited in Kopenhagen. Michael Münkwitz tells us “Except for the missing mouthpiece it is not simply the only complete trumpet by Birckholtz, it probably is his first work as a master instrument maker. It might even be his masterpiece: the date 1650 is engraved. In that year Wolf Birckholtz opened his own workshop in Nuremberg - after his years as a journeyman with Hanns Hainlein.” Further examinations leave him puzzled: some parts of the trumpet are fire gilded. “Fire gilding brass plate doesn’t make sense. You can find something like that only with silver surfaces, where the contrast is strong enough to achieve decorativeness.” says Michael Münkwitz. “I think that Birckholtz took the ageing of the brass into account: after a few years the difference between the brass patina and the gilded ball and ferrules would have been obvious.” His colleague Rick Seraphinoff is not very satisfied with this explanation. The instrument maker and horn professor at the Indiana University School of Music has already taken part in the workshops organized by Michael Münkwitz for years. During these workshops the international participants make natural trumpets after the model of an instrument by Hans Hainlein. The two of them have measured the trumpet from Belitz; special tools are being built, so that it can be made true to original. Michael Münkwitz, however, will have to spend a few days in the archive of the protestant regional church of Mecklenburg: there are the church registers that will hopefully provide information about the owner of the instrument, the trumpet player Jacob Hintze. Instead of pay for his service during the Thirty Year’s War he was given a pub in the next village Neu-Heinde. The wooden epitaph in the church of Belitz tells about his death in 1677: he was poniarded by an armoured man - his wife, his two daughters and four sons watching. According to historical sources it had been a murder out of jealousy. The murderer was the horned husband that was later executed for this crime. In this eerie story some questions have remained unanswered: Which town is pictured on the epitaph? Why did an adulterer get an epitaph that even shows the heinous crime? What connects Jacob Hintze with the composer and musician of the same name who died in Berlin in 1702 – the same town where the trumpet player Hintze was based? Will it be possible to decipher the hardly legible inscription? Michael Münkwitz wants to find the answers by the 24 June this year, when Belitz celebrates its 775th anniversary with a big trumpet concert. The original trumpet of course, will then be in a museum or in a safe, but a copy will be hung on the epitaph – exactly on the same nail where the instrument of the trumpet player Hintze had been waiting for his discoverer.
Frank Schlößer, Georg-Büchner-Straße 11 |