Handmade in Germany
Erzgebirge Mountain Workshop
One notices the posture first. Shoulders square, elbows lifted at precisely the angle a corps drummer takes before the first stroke of the roll, wrists cocked, sticks suspended a hairsbreadth above the drumhead. Christian Ulbricht's Red Drummer is not a figure holding a drum. He is a figure caught in the beat before the beat — and anyone who has stood in the wings of a Tchaikovsky overture recognizes that stillness immediately.
The snare is the piece of this drummer I would draw a guest's eye to: a narrow body painted in the dark teal-green of regimental lacquerware, with natural wood rims top and bottom and the grain left unvarnished where the head would be struck. It is chest-high. It is small. And it is carved and mounted with the proportion of a working instrument rather than the exaggerated bulk most workshops default to. The busby rises tall and black above him, the gold rope cord looped with the tension of a theatrical costumer's hand, twin fringed tassels falling in perfect parallel. A single white plume. Real-hair sideburns, silver. The epaulettes are fringed textile, not painted — a small extravagance that changes the whole piece.
I have placed him in the Castle's music room, stage-left of the little harpsichord where the Cavalier rehearses his bows. The Snow Queen walked past him yesterday and paused — which, from her, is the equivalent of applause. He does not strike the drum. He waits. That, too, is a discipline. Brilliance, in my experience, is usually a matter of restraint.
— The Sugar Plum Fairy
