Rudolf Trebitsch: Euskal hizkuntzaren eta musikaren grabazioak (1913)

Abstract

During the summer of the year 1913 the prestigious Austrian ethnologist Rudolf Trebitsch visited the Basque Country following the instructions given by the Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften in Vienna to which he devoted his investigations. Previously to that, he had already travelled around Ireland, Wales, England, Scotland, Brittany and Lapland with the same aim: to get linguistic and ethnographic information. It is supposed that the Basque Country was an appealing destination for somebody interested in old languages and ancestral ways of living. As a linguist he used a gramophone to record pieces of conversation, songs and poems performed in the different Basque dialects (including the one already extinguished from the Roncal Valley). There were even recordings from musical pieces. All those records were sent to the Phonogramm Archivs der kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften and, since 1984, the Azkue Library in Bilbo has kept their reproductions. These are, no wonder, the oldest recordings performed in the Basque language. As an ethnologist, he gathered items related to the house, hunting, fishing, clothes, etc, so as to shape the collection from the Basque Country displayed in the Kaiserlichen Museum für österreichische Volkskunde in Vienna.