Born in 1830, in the outskirts
of Vienna, to a family of cabinet makers, Wilhelm Kleinbach was
to be the last of the notable Funerary Violinists. A grand-student
of Herr Gratchenfleiss himself, he had taken up the profession
just as the Great Funerary Purges were destroying it, and continued
the practice in secret into the early 20th century, through an
underground network of dedicated followers of the art. Often performing
in the dead of night at Vienna’s Zentralfriedhof, before
a select gathering of cognoscenti assembled to hear his performance,
and who often hadn’t known the deceased, Kleinbach developed
an international reputation amongst the handful of individuals
still taking an interest the art. Scholarship has revealed very
few specific details about his life, but some accounts of these
moonlit vigils, performing the works of Herr Gratchenfleiss to
the dead, have survived.
Wilhelm Kleinbach was a student of Thomas Techler,
who was, in turn, Gratchenfleiss’ favourite, making Kleinbach
a direct link to the great masters of Funerary Violin. Though
entirely forgotten for many years after his death, His position
in history was forever assured thanks to a series of wax cylinders
he recorded at the very end of his life. That these recordings
exist at all is something of a miracle, given that they are the
result of a fortunate coincidence. Karl Weinfurter, a young gentleman
of leisure who lived two doors down from Kleinbach, in a middle
class suburb of Hamburg (to which Kleinbach had moved after an
unfortunate incident during one of his performances, resulting
in his expulsion from Vienna in 1881) acquired an acoustic recording
device using wax cylinders (and later a system for transfer to
78 rpm disks) and, upon hearing Kleinbach practising, suggested
that he might use him to test out his new equipment. It can be
heard from the recordings that he did many experiments with different
acoustics, and sizes and materials for the horn, with mixed results.
The recordings were made between 1906 and 1911 (judging by the
original cylinders) when Kleinbach was in his late 70s and early
80s. Though the intonation is at times a little shaky, the power
and intensity of his playing is clearly still evident.
It was not until 1990, seven years after the discovery
of the Hildesheim trunk, that scholars identified these previously
unknown pieces, (located in the music library of the Hamburg Institute
for Social Research) as the works of Herr Gratchenfleiss. So far
thirty two of the pieces have been deciphered from the rotting
pages of the notebooks, and seven of Kleinbach’s recordings
match these works. In some cases his recordings are different
to the written versions, with changes in structure and octave,
and occasional variations –possibly due to his deteriorating
technique, or the constraints of working to a two or four minute
wax cylinder. Given the notebooks current state of preservation,
it is impossible to say how many more works will be uncovered
before their complete disintegration. There are another twenty
cylinders and 4 disks in the collection that do not correspond
to any known works at present .The entire collection was recently
acquired by the Guild of Funerary Violinists, and is currently
being subjected to further study.
