Jacques Bittner has been played on NTS in shows including The Early Bird Show w/ PAM, featured first on 14 August 2025. Songs played include Suite B-minor.

Jacque(s) Bittner (Jacob Büttner) (fl. 1680s)

Jacque(s) Bittner—born Jacob Büttner and better known under the French form Jacques Bittner—was an Austro-Bohemian lutenist and composer active in the 1680s, remembered almost entirely through his surviving printed lute music. Very little is securely known about his life beyond what can be inferred from his publications and a handful of later remarks, but those publications are substantial: he issued large collections of pieces for the 11-course lute in Nuremberg in 1682 and 1683, representing one of the most important German-language-region lute print ventures between Esaias Reusner and Silvius Leopold Weiss. The prints adopt an explicitly French stylistic profile—dance-suite structures and a strong ornamental language—with the hallmark feature that many suites are preceded by a prélude non mesuré, signalling deep engagement with the French lute tradition while translating it into a Central European idiom described by later writers as “galant.”

The 1682 print bears the French title Pièces de lut and includes a dedication to a Prague-based patron, Johann Peter (Pierre) Pedroni de Treyenfels, indicating that Bittner’s professional network and support structure was connected to Prague even though the prints were produced in Nuremberg. His music remained known to later generations of lutenists: Ernst Gottlieb Baron briefly discussed him in 1727 (though with some inaccuracies), and modern performers continue to revive the suites, with recordings spanning from the landmark 1980s LP by Konrad Junghänel to the recent SACD by André Henrich.