What is a cistre ou guitharre allemande?
Two distinct 'families' (or traditions) of plucked instruments, guitars and citterns, can relatively straightforwardly be traced back to the Renaissance, and they survive today. A typical guitar has a figure-of-eight body shape and gut (nowadays nylon) strings and the notes are sounded with the fingers, not a plectrum. Citterns, on the other hand, typically have wire strings and a pear-shaped body and are played with a plectrum. Within each family, of course, there have been many variations.
In the eighteenth century, for some reason, instruments that seem obviously to belong to the cittern family were sometimes called guitars. In Britain, the popular cittern-like instrument was commonly called guitar (or guittar). The French version of this instrument was usually called cistre ou guitharre allemande ('cittern or German guitar'). However in all of Joseph Carpentier's publications (at least ten of them) the instrument is described as cythre ou guitharre allemande. Carpentier is insistent that the new cythre or cytre (he used both spellings) should not be confused with the old cistre. This is a significant point. The new deep-bodied, fingerstyle cythres of the 1770s are very different from citterns of the seventeenth century and earlier. Mr Demesse, also used the term cythre rather than cistre in his publication for the instrument and so did a Mr Guerrier in his Sonates pour 2 cytres(1770). Nevertheless the term cistre was more widely used than cythre (or cytre).
A typical cistre.
A typical cistre
The instrument typically has eleven wire strings (of brass and steel) and wound basses. The top four strings are paired and the three lower strings are single. It is a seven-course instrument tuned E-A-d-e-a-c#'-e'. However, both Joseph Carpentier and Mr Demesse wrote for an eight-course instrument with an added low D in the bass lying off the fingerboard. Like all the eighteenth century 'guitar-citterns', the cistre has a much deeper (guitar-like) body than a thin-bodied traditional cittern. To complicate matters further, some cistres had lute-shaped bodies. In the Partie 2 of his Methode (1771), Carpentier writes about the construction of 'cytres en luth' as well as the more usual shape,'cytre en plat'.
Carpentier also describes 'cytres à laiton' and 'cytres à boyeaux': wire-strung and gut-strung cistres. He has quite a lot to say about the construction and diapazon of gut-strung cistres but I have never found any other references to them.
Instruments tuned to a C major, as was the fashion in Britain, must have existed too. Christophe Unguelter published his 'Vraie methode fixeé pour jouer du cistre ou guitarre allemande, op.2' for a C-tuned cistre.
Michel Corrette briefly mentions the 'Cistre Allemand' in his Nouvelle Methode for the mandolin (1772). He gives the usual seven-course tuning (but with the top five strings doubled and two single basses. He also mentions a six-course tuning (by omitting the low E) and a five-course tuning which omits the d. This five-course tuning, transposed to C, is the tuning of the Thuringer zither that was to become popular in Germany around 1800.On a typical cistre the wire strings pass over a floating bridge and fasten to pins at at the tail. Some cistres have the usual wooden pegs to tighten the strings but some have tuning mechanisms (as on later guitars) and some have metal 'watchkey' devices (as on some English guitars). Accurate tuning thin of wire strings is not easy and these alternative devices to pegs must have made tuning easier.
Cistres have curved fingerboards with metal frets and sometimes have holes through the neck in the first few positions. This enabled the player to use a capo (Pollet calls it a clef) to raise the pitch of the instrument to suit the voice. Much of the cistre repertoire consists of songs with accompaniment.
Cistres with extra bass strings fastened to a second pegbox (like a theorbo) were popular too. Probably the the lower strings were tuned diatonically. In some of C.F.A Pollet's collections of cistre music, the basically seven-course music has '8's under some of the notes, indicating that thay are to be played an octave lower.
Pollet doesn't make a distinction between the seven-course instrument and instruments with extra basses: the instrument is the cistre ou guitthare allemande with or without extra basses. The music can (almost always) be played on either instrument.
'frying pan' sides
One tuning for this kind of cistre is A'-B'-C#-D-D#-E-A-d-e-a-c#'-e': just like the typical seven-course instruments but with more basses descending to a low A. The curiosity of this tuning is the low D#: most cistre music stays within the home keys of D and A major and D# would only rarely be needed. Benoit Pollet (the younger brother of C.F.A. Pollet) claims to have invented the tuning which includes the D#. Benoit Pollet le jeune writes out the lower notes in full in his cistre song accompaniments rather than use '8's like his older brother, Pollet l'ainé.
Nowadays these larger cistres with extra basses and extra pegboxes are described as 'arch-citterns'. Carpentier has a section: 'Des exmanches où manches tüorbés' in his 1771 Methode. Sometimes arch-citterns were made with quite unusual body shapes. Some more or less flat-backed instruments have 'frying pan' sides: so the back is narrower than the soundboard. There are examples of archcitterns which have one the side of the body extend up along the neck, presumably to reinforce the sound of the bass strings - as in the example on the right (and see the gallery for more examples of this unusual body design).