The Erzgebirge folk music original is one of the last German virtuosos on his instrument.
Just play from sheet music? Joachim Süss can no longer do that. His eyes were never good, which is why he couldn’t get a driver’s license even as a young man. But for a few years now he has only been able to decipher any type of writing with a high-tech reading aid: a camera enlarges notes or sheets of paper of any kind on a large computer screen in the kitchen in a way that no magnifying glass could ever do.
But even on his 90th birthday today, he doesn’t need the device as a connection to his actual world: Joachim Süss simply has to put his hands on his zither and he can’t help it, the tones and melodies are already bubbling up, his Erzgebirge homeland sound. The concert or harp zither that the Crottendorfer plays is an unconventional instrument. Once popular as the “little man’s piano” in the Alpine region, it is particularly simple or rather tricky, depending on your perspective. The left hand grips the melody strings from above, whose frets resemble those of a guitar. The melody is played with the thumb of the right hand, the remaining fingers of which have to find their way through the elaborate tangle of the accompanying strings. Although these cover all tones chromatically, they are arranged in fourths and fifths. The experienced player can easily call up more demanding accompaniment chords with just a few finger strokes – but anyone who has approached the Western European tonal space on more conventional instruments is initially in the woods.
But Joachim Süss feels at home there body and soul. He is one of the few zither virtuosos, and he is one of the last. Because the instrument has shaped the traditional folk music of the mountain areas, its sound alone is inextricably linked to the genre: the steel strings of the instrument sound fuller, more direct than a harp, but much softer than a piano; and the “scratched” part of the guitar is left out. This makes the zither, although it sounds loud and concise enough for small groups even without amplification, always somehow comfortably reserved, sweet and homely. It sounds like you’ve arrived on the stove bench, “finally get out of your wet boots”.
With the “Third Man” came popularity
Joachim Süss, born on December 22, 1932 in Crottendorf near Annaberg, fell in love with this sound as a boy. He once found his family’s concert zither in a box under the bed. “I played the first notes and immediately enjoyed it. My father said: You go to Meinel Philipp!” says the musician: “He was a zither teacher, and I did my first event with him in 1944. That was here at school, where a hospital was set up. We played for wounded soldiers there. It was my first performance.” The instrument was popular in the post-war period, which culminated in the 1949 cinema classic “The Third Man”, whose famous title theme is something like the “Smoke On The Water” of zither music. “Many wanted to learn the zither back then, Meinel had a lot to do,” says Süss. Only: only a few managed to keep up the fine finger dance due to the tight steel strings; the Crottendorfer remained exotic – but more and more people wanted to listen to it, despite jazz and swing, which attracted young people in the post-war period. “It just wasn’t my style,” says Suess: “We used to sing folk songs in the family, so I just stuck with it.” The zither thus became his voice, which in the old songs of the Ore Mountains sang above all about the beauty of being here. Shortly after the Second World War, when the district of Annaberg was a restricted area in which the Wismut ransacked the landscape for uranium ore, the traditional Ore Mountains were kept alive in songs. “It wasn’t a good time. But I tried not to worry. The zither was there, I played it and it was a pleasure to perform it in public. You just had to make the best of it!”
Became popular with Herbert Roth
This soon made the trained administrative employee a sought-after man: in 1954 the then popular singing trio of the Caldarelli siblings from Sosa were looking for a new zither player, and shortly thereafter the Münzberger siblings too. Playing concerts with both of them alternately made it possible for Joachim Süss to pursue a career as a professional musician in the GDR. There, in 1965, his collaboration with the Thuringian folk music legend Herbert Roth made him popular, in whose program he brought a potpourri from the Erzgebirge. “We got along very well, although it was difficult at the beginning,” says Süss: “I already had my events and Herbert had his. The first quarter of the year was chaotic. I had to rely on the train without a car and I’m from Crottendorf drove to Suhl via Annaberg and Zwickau almost every other day and back again at night. After that we came to an agreement and gave each other free times!”
The Crottendorfer put his homeland back on the musical map – especially with Christmas carols. Süss made it to 15,194 events in his stage life with a repertoire of over 360 songs, with which he made it into 115 television programs. He kept a precise book about it – although the size of the performances was never that important to the down-to-earth man: “When I go on stage, music is made. It doesn’t have much to do with the rest of the world. In essence, it’s there for me a family celebration is nothing more than a big concert in a town hall. I do my program.” On his zither, he was undeterred when the folk music boom of the 1970s slowly transformed the genre into folksy hits: “I accepted that with a shake of my head. But ultimately folk music is folk music, and hits are hits!” He never needed trends: “Once I was somewhere, I was always allowed to come back,” says Joachim Süss and laughs heartily: “I stayed in Arzgebirge!”