The Trautonium is an electronic synthesizer created in 1930 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin at the Musikhochschule's music and radio laboratory, known as the Rundfunkversuchstelle, which is now part of the Berlin University of the Arts. Soon after, Oskar Sala joined Trautwein and helped continue the development of the instrument until Sala's death in 2002.

Description

The Trautonium does not use a keyboard. Instead, its playing surface is made of a resistor wire placed over a metal plate. When pressed, the wire creates sound. Players could make expressive sounds by sliding their fingers along the wire, which allowed them to produce vibrato with small movements. The loudness of the sound depended on how hard the player pressed the wire and the plate. The first Trautoniums were sold by Telefunken from 1933 to 1935, and 200 were made.

At first, the Trautonium used neon-tube relaxation oscillators to create sound. Later, it used thyratrons and then transistors. These devices produced waveforms similar to sawtooth shapes. The pitch of the sound was controlled by where the performer pressed the resistive wire against the plate beneath it, which changed the effective length of the wire. This allowed techniques such as vibrato, quarter tones, and portamento. The output from the oscillator was sent to two parallel resonant filter circuits. A foot pedal adjusted the volume ratio of the two filters, and the combined signal was sent to an amplifier.

On June 20, 1930, Oskar Sala and Paul Hindemith performed publicly at the Berliner Musikhochschule Hall as part of an event called "Neue Musik Berlin 1930" to introduce the Trautonium. Later, Oskar Sala toured Germany with the instrument. In 1931, he performed as the soloist in Hindemith’s Concerto for Trautonium with String Quartet. He also played the solo part in the debut of Hindemith’s student Harald Genzmer’s Concerto for Trautonium and Orchestra.

Paul Hindemith composed several short trios for three Trautoniums, each tuned to a different range: bass, middle, and high. His student Harald Genzmer wrote two concertos with orchestra: one for the monophonic Trautonium and another for Oskar Sala’s Mixtur-Trautonium. Oskar Sala added a switch to change the static tuning. Later, he included a noise generator, an envelope generator (called "Schlagwerk"), a formant filter (multiple bandpass filters), and subharmonic oscillators. These oscillators produce a main pitch and subharmonics, which are fractions of the fundamental tone rather than multiples. For each of the two manuals, four of these waveforms could be mixed, and the player could switch between predefined settings. This version was called the Mixtur-Trautonium.

Oskar Sala composed music for industrial films, including the famous bird noises in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. The Trautonium was also used in the Dresden premiere of Richard Strauss’s Japanese Festival Music in 1942 to mimic gongs and bells. In the 1950s, it was used in Bayreuth for the Monsalvat bells in Wagner’s Parsifal.

Oskar Sala and Remi Gassmann used the Trautonium in George Balanchine’s science fiction ballet Electronics, performed by the New York City Ballet in 1961.

Manufacturers

The German company Doepfer sells devices for use in the commercial market that provide synthesizer control similar to the Trautonium. The German company Trautoniks offers custom-made Trautoniums.

Present performers

Oskar Sala continued to improve the Trautonium and worked with at least one student, Maria Schüppel, who was a pioneer in music therapy. Peter Pichler, a musician and artist from Munich, heard the Trautonium's sound as a young man and was deeply moved by its emotional power and wide range of tones. Pichler could not forget the instrument's unique sound and searched for years to find someone who could help him learn more about it. He eventually found Oskar Sala. In 1996, they met in Sala's studio in Berlin, and this meeting helped save much of Sala's knowledge about the instrument.

Pichler was deeply changed by the experience, but he had to wait fifteen years before he could afford to commission his own Mixturtrautonium from the company Trautoniks. He wrote a musical theater piece called "Wiedersehen in Trautonien," which honored the creators of the Trautonium. The piece was performed at the German Museum in Munich to celebrate Oskar Sala's 100th birthday in 2010. For this performance, Pichler ordered three smaller versions of the Trautonium, called "Volkstrautonien." One of these instruments was later added to the German Museum's permanent collection. Pichler continues to work closely with the museum, which manages Sala's legacy.

Since then, Pichler has performed regularly with the Mixturtrautonium in many types of music. Classical music written for the instrument by composers such as Paul Hindemith, Harald Genzmer, and Oskar Sala is very difficult for even skilled musicians to play.

Pichler is one of the few people in the world who has mastered the Trautonium and is also writing music for it. In October 2025, the Mixtur-Trautonium played by Peter Pichler was used in the soundtrack of the film Ballad of a Small Player, directed by Edward Berger and composed by Volker Bertelmann.

Daniel Matz plays the Trautonium on the Agnes Obel albums Citizen of Glass and Late Night Tales. The Dutch performer LudoWic [Thijs Lodewijk] also plays the Trautonium and is one of the few people who own and play a Mixtur Trautonium.

Gallery

• Mixtur-Trautonium, 1955
• Max Brand Synthesizer (1968), also known as Moogtonium, was created by Austrian composer Max Brand in collaboration with Robert Moog between 1966 and 1968. It is a version of the Mixtur-Trautonium.
• Doepfer A-198 Trautonium Manual / Ribbon Controller with modular synthesizer