The World of Lutherie, Vol. 4 — Europe

Nobody could get a Fender

In 1959 a teenager in Liverpool who wanted an electric guitar could not buy the one on the record sleeves. Britain had restricted imports of American goods since the war, and a Fender was, for most purposes, unobtainable. So George Harrison's first electric was a Futurama — built in Czechoslovakia, behind the Iron Curtain, and sold in London as an affordable stand-in for a Stratocaster. When Hank Marvin of the Shadows got a real Strat that same year, Cliff Richard had to import it for him, and it's often described as the first in the country.

That's the story of European lutherie in one shop window. This is the continent where the guitar's first answers were written — courses and then six strings, Torres's bracing, the violin towns that perfected building for export. And it's the continent that spent the second half of the twentieth century buying those answers back, first from America and then from Japan, building copies of copies behind import walls and an Iron Curtain, before its own builders, one bench at a time, started writing new ones.

Season 1 follows that arc. Eight episodes, country by country — but first the map: the five ages of the European guitar, the forces from Vol. 3 at work across the whole continent, and the stops ahead.

Read it top to bottom and the shape is a curve, not a line: authorship, export, imitation, retreat, and a return that's still under way.

First drafts, many hands

Vol. 2 walked the route; this is the same ground seen from above. For three centuries Europe was the only place the guitar was being argued about seriously, and the argument moved around the continent like a touring virtuoso.

Iberia wrote the first draft — the vihuela for the court, the four- and five-course guitar for everyone else. Italy and France took the five-course instrument and made it fashionable, from Neapolitan workshops to the court of Louis XIV. The move to six single strings happened in several cities at once around 1800, which tells you how well connected the continent already was: Naples, Cádiz, Paris and Vienna each arrived at it, and printed music and travelling players carried each city's answer to the others within a few years. Paris and Vienna were where the early nineteenth-century guitar became a concert instrument, with Lacôte and Stauffer building for virtuosos who played all over Europe. Then Seville, with Torres, wrote the version that stuck.

Run the six forces from Vol. 3 across that period and Europe had all of them, in one place, before anyone else had any. Alpine spruce for tops, colonial rosewood off Iberian ships. Courts, salons and concert halls asking for refinement. Founders whose answers set the shape. Guilds, workshops and families to carry them forward. Borrowing across borders that were, for craftsmen, surprisingly open. And customers with money. That combination is why the guitar's grammar — its body, its bracing, its scale, the very idea of it as a solo instrument — is European.

What Europe didn't have, yet, was volume. That came from the villages.

Violin towns, guitar towns

The second age belongs to a handful of small towns that turned instrument-making into an export industry, and most of them started with the violin.

The model was the Vogtland — the corner of Saxony around Markneukirchen, and Schönbach just over the Bohemian border — known in German as the Musikwinkel, the music corner. By the late nineteenth century it worked less like a workshop than like a distributed factory. One household made necks, the next made bodies, another did varnish or pegs or strings, and merchant houses in town assembled, labelled and shipped the result. Violins first, then guitars, mandolins, zithers and anything else that sold. Much of it went to America; the trade was big enough that the United States kept a consulate in Markneukirchen to handle it. C.F. Martin's father was part of that world, which is why Vol. 1's guild dispute happened there at all.

France had its own version in Mirecourt, in the Vosges — centuries of violin making that, in the industrial era, fed large firms such as Jérôme Thibouville-Lamy, which built violins, guitars and mandolins by the thousand alongside its fine instruments. Naples built mandolins for the whole world in the same spirit. Each of these places had the same three advantages: a deep local skill base, nearby wood, and merchants who knew how to reach foreign markets. Each had the same weakness: they built for export, at a price set somewhere else.

That weakness is the hinge of the European story. A village that lives on export lives on borders, and the twentieth century spent fifty years closing them. Two wars cut the American market off. The Vogtland ended up on the eastern side of a new border, and Schönbach — as Vol. 3 told — lost its German makers altogether. When peace came, the guitar that the world wanted was no longer one the villages knew how to make.

Accordions to electrics

Then rock and roll arrived, and every teenager on the continent wanted the same instrument at once.

They couldn't get the American one. Britain's import restrictions kept Fenders and Gibsons out of the shops until the end of the 1950s, and across most of Europe a dollar-priced guitar cost more than a young musician earned in months. So Europe built its own, fast, and the people who built them came from unexpected places.

The most interesting were the accordion makers. The accordion had been the popular instrument of the European working class for a century, and by the late 1950s its market was collapsing under the guitar. Two of the firms that had the factories, the dealers and the nerve to switch were Hagström in Sweden, which began building electric guitars in 1958, and Eko, founded in 1959 by Oliviero Pigini in Recanati, in the heart of Italy's accordion country. Both brought accordion habits with them: celluloid and pearloid coverings, sparkle finishes, push-button switches. That's why so many European guitars of the period look like they were dressed for a dance hall — they were made by people who had spent their lives dressing instruments for one.

Germany's refugees did the volume. In Bubenreuth and around Erlangen, Höfner and Framus — the Schönbach makers rebuilt in the west — produced archtops, solid-bodies and basses by the tens of thousands, and Höfner's violin bass went around the world with Paul McCartney. Britain had Burns in London and Vox in Dartford, which commissioned many of its guitars from Eko in Italy. The Netherlands had Egmond, whose cheap acoustics were the first guitars of an entire generation, George Harrison included. Italy also had Wandré, building guitars that look like modern sculpture and remain the most unashamedly strange instruments of the era.

It lasted barely fifteen years. Once the import walls came down, the European boom guitars were competing with the real thing, and by the early 1970s they were competing with the Japanese copies too — better made and cheaper than most of them. Burns had already been sold to an American firm; Framus went under, Hagström closed its guitar line, Egmond faded. The boom left behind a collectors' market, a handful of survivors and one lasting lesson: Europe could build guitars at volume, but not at a price the world would pay.

The other Europe

Half the continent ran the boom on different rules. Behind the Iron Curtain the old instrument towns kept building — they had the skills, the wood and a captive market — but as state enterprises working to a plan.

In East Germany the Markneukirchen workshops were folded into nationalized combines, the best known under the Musima name. In Czechoslovakia, Schönbach — now Luby — became home to the state violin and guitar works sold as Cremona, and the Jolana and Resonet electrics came out of state factories elsewhere in the country; it was a Resonet that George Harrison bought in London as a Futurama. Poland had Defil. The Soviet Union built electrics in factories that also made radios and military hardware, and players still trade stories about them. Craftsmen became employees, materials were whatever the plan allocated, and the hardest currency an instrument factory could earn came from selling cheap classical and electric guitars to the West, which many did.

The East also kept instruments the West forgot. The Russian guitar — seven strings, tuned to an open G chord — had its own nineteenth-century repertoire and a living tradition in Russian song and Roma music that never touched the six-string mainstream. It's the clearest example on the continent of a school that grew sideways, and it will come back when the series reaches the east.

The interesting twist is what happened at the end. Some of the region's best-known independent builders were founded before the Wall came down — private workshops that found room in the last decade of the planned economy — and after 1990 the craft skills that had been kept alive inside state factories went looking for owners. Central Europe's builders today work in some of the continent's oldest instrument towns, with labour costs the west can't match and a reputation the factories of the 1970s did not earn them. That combination is one of the season's best stories.

The bench comes back

The comeback started small and in several places at once, which by now should sound familiar.

In the 1970s and 1980s a scattering of builders across Europe stopped trying to beat Japan on price and started competing on everything else. George Lowden in Northern Ireland built acoustics with their own bracing and their own voice. Patrice Vigier in France built electrics around engineering ideas no factory would risk. In Germany, Hans-Peter Wilfer — son of the man who founded Framus — started Warwick and built basses for players who wanted something other than a Fender, and later brought his father's brand back to life. Classical builders in Spain, Germany and France carried on as they always had, largely ignored by the electric world and doing some of the finest work on the continent. None of them were large. All of them were building instruments a factory couldn't sell.

By the 2010s that scattering had become a scene. The European Guitar Builders association and its Holy Grail Guitar Show in Berlin put a hundred-odd independent makers in one hall; Guitar Summit in Mannheim and a string of national shows filled out the year. Builders who had worked alone in a village could see each other's work, share suppliers, swap apprentices and argue about bracing in person. The density is the thing. Few places on earth fit so many serious independent builders into a train ride of each other, from so many different traditions, with so much wood, skill and history in reach.

That's the claim this season will test: Europe lost the volume game in the 1970s and doesn't need to win it back. What it kept — the towns, the skills, the oldest schools in the trade, and now a generation of benches talking to each other — is exactly what the boutique guitar is made of. The country episodes will show where that's true, where it's a story Europe tells itself, and where it's still being decided.

Eight stops

Here's the season. Each episode takes one country or one cluster of them, runs the six questions, and ends at the bench.

Not every country gets an episode, and that's a choice, not a judgment. Greece, with its bouzouki makers, the Balkans, the Baltics and the Russian-speaking world each have traditions worth more than a paragraph; they'll get their paragraphs in the episodes they touch, and their own pieces if the material earns them.

The order isn't chronological or alphabetical. France goes first because it's where this series is written, and because it's the episode I can write most from the bench. Every other stop is a guest.

From the bench

Four years ago I came back from the United States to build guitars in France. People asked why, and they weren't being polite: the American market is bigger, the players have more money, the supply chain is next door and the whole electric guitar was invented there. On paper, a builder of electrics leaving America for Europe is going the wrong way.

Here's the honest ledger, because I've kept one.

What Europe lacks is real. The market is split across thirty countries, two dozen languages and as many ways of doing business. A European player with money to spend often buys an American name first and discovers the builder down the road second, if at all. Our labour costs more than Asia's, our currency costs more than America's on a bad year, and our timber now arrives under the same permits as everyone else's. Nobody builds guitars in Paris to save money.

What Europe has is harder to put on a spreadsheet. It has towns where the trade never stopped. It has the oldest schools in lutherie and a public that still treats craft as something closer to culture than to retail — in France we have whole institutions dedicated to the métiers d'art, and they take a guitar seriously. It has a generation of independent builders who know each other, a train ride apart, building from more traditions than any other continent can name. And it has the thing this whole introduction has been circling: most of the guitar's first answers were written here. Building in Europe means building next to the originals, with the chance to read them closely and the obligation to do something new with them.

That's why I came back. Season 1 is me checking whether I was right — one country at a time, starting at home.