Simon Molitor (1766-1848)

An important early six-string guitarist and musicologist in Austria, he wrote against nails in the preface to his Sonata, op. 7:

‘It is very regrettable that even guitarists who have achieved a certain level of skill on their instrument, who would be entirely destined to give this instrument a higher rank in the musical world, strive to gain the vain applause of the crowd more through pointless tricks than through good playing and pleasant performance, and that they even, out of a desire to be strange, fall into the most bizarre customs and the most ridiculous ideas. To this I include, for example, the overly frequent use or misuse of harmonics, the plucking of the strings with nails (by which they probably want to give the gut strings the sound of wire strings) … then the lapping and drumming on the soundboard by drumming out an entrata at the beginning or a flourish inbetween, etc. The gentlemen should consider that through such musical arts they degrade themselves to musical sleight of hand, and, as their masters have revealed, arouse surprise, but not admiration.‘¹

1. Simon Molitor, Grosse Sonate fur die Guitare (Artaria, c. 1806), p. 10. ↩︎