Why Antique Brasses?

excerpts from the sleeve notes

Cosima Wagner, in Das zweite Leben, relates the story of how, at an 1868 rehearsal for Die Meistersinger, that crusty old anti-Wagnerian, Franz Strauss, refused to play his part because of fatigue. Relations between Strauss and Wagner had been abysmal since Wagner's arrival in Munich in 1864 at the invitation of the Wagner-besotted Ludwig II. Hans Richter, assistant music director to Hans von Bülow and an ex-horn-player himself, bellowed from the stage that he would perform it. When Strauss's horn was passed across the footlights Richter sneeringly declared "I do not play post horn". This was a distinct jibe at Strauss, who had adopted a B-flat single horn by Ottensteiner as his main instrument the year before. Richter's years as an orchestral player were spent in Vienna, where the longer-tubed single F horn was used then, just as it is now. 

Why the fuss? Surely the pitches produced remain the same whatever the tube length used to procure them? Well - yes - but the brass instrumentalist reaches for a shorter tube to enable him to obtain a given pitch because by so doing it reduces the chance of his missing that pitch. This is especially true for the players responsible for playing pitches in the high register, where the notes of the harmonic series crowd together and the chances of 'splitting' a note are thus increased. Players have resorted to this practice ever since the invention of valves circa 1815. So much for Franz Strauss's choice of instrument in 1868; but the Prussians in the late 1830s, followed by the Bohemian Václav Ãervený in 1844 and Adolphe Sax in 1845, had all 'invented' 6½-foot E-flat alto horns to supplant the 13-foot E-flat hand horns used in the traditional harmonie band. It is an almost certain bet that the audience at a modern-instrument performance of Bach's First Brandenburg Concerto will be hearing a 6-foot F alto horn instead of Bach's 12-foot instrument. Similarly, trumpet players will be employing 2¼-foot piccolo A trumpets to play most of the Baroque trumpet music written for the 7-foot natural instrument in D. The beauty of overtone-rich sound produced by longer tubes are what we have sacrificed on the altar of accuracy, together with the subtleties of technique needed to conjure eloquent music from the valveless horn and trumpet. 

Even more remote from us now are the sounds of the keyed brass instruments. The soprano instrument was the keyed bugle, whose ancestor is the Renaissance cornetto. Invented in 1810 by Joseph Halliday, bandmaster of the Cavan Militia, its alternative name was Royal Kent Bugle - given in honour of the Duke of Kent, Commander-in-Chief of the Army. It was swiftly adopted by British military bands and it is thought that its rapid spread to European hands was as a direct result of military musicians' meeting their fellows at Waterloo. The baritone keyed instrument was the ophicleide, which sprang from the old wooden serpent. It was the invention of Jean-Hilaire Asté, also known as Halary, who patented it in 1821. Like the cornetto both of these instruments make a sound which cannot be replicated on a valved instrument, because to achieve a rising chromatic scale holes are opened in the side of the instrument like a woodwind instrument. The same applies to the keyed trumpet, whose technique was mastered so well by Anton Weidinger that both Haydn and Hummel composed for him. Hindsight now shows us that man's ingenuity in finding this solution to the problem of chromaticising natural instruments, and improving a feeble and unreliable wooden bass instrument, was to be short-lived. The invention of a valve mechanism was first recorded in a report by the Theatre Director in Breslau, printed in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1815, stating that 'Heinrich Stölzel had devised a simple mechanism by which a chromatic scale of three octaves is obtained by means of two levers for the right hand'. Although the two systems co-existed for several decades, it was the valve which prevailed. 

In the matter of tone, two further determining factors are the bore of the tube used and the size and shape of the mouthpiece. The taxonomy can often be confusing, especially in the bewildering number of different names for instruments used by nineteenth-century manufacturers. Take again the tube length of 6½ feet: the E-flat trumpet, E-flat alto cornet, E-flat althorn, E-flat saxhorn and E-flat alto trombone are all this long (not to mention the E-flat clavicor, the E-flat saxotromba, the E-flat genis, the E-flat quinticlave, the E-flat cornon, the E-flat bimbonifono, and so on ad nauseam), but their tone differs enormously according to bore, profile and mouthpiece type. The bore and bell size of all brass instruments has increased enormously, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, and nowhere is this more striking than in the trombone family. The trombonists who performed Beethoven's Æquale at Linz Cathedral in 1812 used instruments with the same bell size as those used in Monteverdi's Vespro della Beata Vergine two centuries earlier, that is to say 4½ inches or 11.5 cm - about the same as the trumpet. 

This unsullied palette of sound, which predated the later-nineteenth century's mad rush for unified 'families' of instruments headed by Adolphe Sax and Václav Ãervený, is quite unreproduceable with modern brasses. It is a mixture of richly overtoned long-tube instruments, lightly overtoned keyed instruments, and trombones nearer in size to Renaissance instruments. Only now, when we have so many virtuoso performers on period brass, has a recording such as this become possible. In my research into the original music from the dawn of this period of technological change I have encountered much astonishing material. Could Beethoven have possibly imagined that within a few years of his death his famous Septet would have been transcribed for brass ensemble? I have sought to reproduce the wealth of different sounds and instrumental groupings in the music which I have unearthed from the 1820s and 1830s and in this, the start of the Antique Brasses Project, I have had inestimable help and advice from Åke Edenstrand, Mike Fage, Jon Gillaspie and Crispian Steele-Perkins. 


The Music

Our opening flourish for trumpets is by Antonio Salieri (1750-1825). Written in hunting style, it is the sixth of eight fanfares for trumpets found in an undated volume of wind music, now in the Music Collection of the Austrian National Library. These small pieces are not mentioned in the composer's own catalogue of works, drawn up in 1818, but this particular piece bears the legend Del Sig. Salieri. The players use unvented instruments, allowing the eleventh harmonic its natural sound - somewhere between F and F sharp. 

Like Salieri, Sigismund Neukomm (1778-1858) was, in his day, a much respected and performed composer and, also like Salieri, one now largely ignored. He was born in Salzburg just a few doors away from the house in which Mozart was born, and received his musical and general education there. His first great teacher was Michael Haydn, to whom his mother was related. From 1797 he was a pupil of Josef Haydn in Vienna and between 1804 and 1808 held his first appointment, as kapellmeister of the German Theatre in St Petersburg. In 1809 he arrived in Paris, which was to be his home for the rest of his life, although his extraordinary travel diary reads like that of a modern jet-setter. He became pianist to Talleyrand in 1814, accompanying him to the Congress of Vienna where his Requiem, in memoriam Louis XVI, was performed before the great and the good in January 1815. This earned him the Légion d'Honneur and the title Chevalier, of which he was inordinately proud. Talleyrand and Neukomm passed the winter of 1825/26 in the south of France, and when Talleyrand returned to Paris Neukomm journeyed onwards to Italy. By May he had reached Naples where he composed a Quatuor pour 3 cors et trombone pour être exécuté à la Grotte tuonante près le Scoglio di Virgilio dans le Golfe de Naples, as the title page has it. Although the earliest valved horns existed by this date, Neukomm's clever use of a trombone to supply the bass, as opposed to a natural horn with its limited chromatic possibilities, makes me believe that the Neapolitan players (almost certainly members of the San Carlo Opera orchestra) were still using hand horns. The echoes appear in the 'Adagio' movement and are designated merely with the word 'echo'. It is possible that Neukomm wanted the type of mutes asked for by Beethoven in his wind Rondino. Given the title, however, I do not think that Neukomm had mutes in mind. It may be that he wanted the cave's natural echo alone to lend its charm to the piece. Lacking the resources to journey to Naples for this recording, our solution has been to use an extra (echo) trio of players. 

The Swedish Royal Court Orchestra employed an outstanding quartet of wind players at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They were: Carl Anton Philipp Braun (1788-1835), oboe; Bernhard Henrik Crusell (1775-1838), clarinet; Johann Michael Friedrich Hirschfeld (1775-1841), horn; and Frans Preumayr (1782-1853), bassoon. All four players had duties as directors of music for various regiments. Crusell composed a horn concerto for Hirschfeld in 1813, most of which is now lost. However the first movement, in this version for solo horn and brass, has recently been discovered by the Swedish musicologist Åke Edenstrand. It was made by Frans Preumayr, Crusell's son-in-law, for the band of the Life Regiment's Dragoon Corps, of which he had been music director since 1835. The score states that it was completed on Palm Sunday morning in 1840. The soloist was probably Frans Müller (1812-1866), a precocious talent who had joined the band in 1822 at the age of ten, and became its bandmaster at the end of the 1840s. He was also a member of the Royal Orchestra from 1841 until his death. 

Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868) is thought to have composed his five duets for two horns in 1806. His father, Giuseppe, was variously a trombetta or civic trumpeter and a horn player who was often engaged in the pit bands of the opera houses in which his mother sang seconda donna. At about the age of ten Giuseppe began giving his son horn lessons, and by the time he was thirteen Gioacchino would occasionally play next to his father in the pit. His comprehension of the instrument's secrets is total - witness the parts that he subsequently wrote in his operas - and these duets are most idiomatically conceived for the hand horn. 

According to Reschke (Zur Geschichte der Brandenburgisch-Preußischen Heeresmusik) the Prussian Jäger regiment bands had by 1817 an instrumentation of three horns and pairs of keyed bugles, trumpets and trombones. Following this pattern, most Swedish cavalry and artillery regiments adopted an instrumentation of two keyed bugles, four horns, two trumpets, and alto, tenor and bass trombones. Braun and Crusell are thought to have collaborated on the Adagio and Polonaise for solo kenthorn and band in about 1829 with, we believe, Braun as composer of the Adagio and Crusell the Polonaise. 

With the Vienna Kärntnertortheater's professional orchestra and chorus, Franz Lachner (1803-1890) began subscription concerts at the theatre in 1833. They quickly supplanted the old semi-amateur concerts of the Spirituel-Konzerte and it would seem likely that Lachner composed the two pieces for orchestral brass which have come down to us, a nonet and the present Septet, to give pleasure to his talented players. The orchestra's principal horn (from 1823 until 1846) was Eduard Constantin Lewy. One of his colleagues in the orchestra was the second oboist, Jacob Uhlmann, whose father, Tobias, was the owner of a fine wind instrument-making concern which had begun making experiments in the construction of valved brasses. Jacob's brother, Leopold, trained as a horn player and took out the first patent for the Wiener pumpventile (the characteristic Viennese double piston valve) in 1830. We know from a report in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung that Lewy 'introduced the newly invented Viennese chromatic horn' to a Stuttgart audience in 1826. We have therefore used Vienna horns for this music. 

Neukomm and Mendelssohn arrived for their first visits to Britain within days of each other in April 1829. The two met at the house of Ignaz Moscheles and instantly got on well. The older composer had the quicker success, Mendelssohn being appreciated more as a pianist initially. Neukomm's oratorios and cantatas delighted the British - a glance at the programme books for the four days of the Birmingham Musical Festival of 1834, for example, shows the following works performed: the two oratorios, Mount Sinai and David; the organ piece A Concert on a Lake Interrupted by a Thunder Storm; the Concertante for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, trumpet and double bass; the cantatas Napoleon's Midnight Review and The Prophecy of Babylon, plus several songs. The Festival programme lists a large roster of brass players: eight horns, eight trombones, serpent, ophicleide, contra-bass ophicleide and six trumpeters led by the great Thomas Harper senior. The Concertante was the first of several works for which Neukomm included a trumpet part, as in Hummel's Septet. It was a commission of the Royal Philharmonic Society and received two performances in the year of its composition, 1832, with Harper as trumpeter; further performances followed in 1834 and 1835. So, Harper knew Neukomm well, and I think that we can be reasonably sure that it was Harper who encouraged the composition of these three pieces with brass accompaniment because both the 'Andante' and the 'Divertimento' are reproduced in his Instructions for the Trumpet of 1837. They have slightly varying instrumentation and were composed in London on 20 June 1833 ('Adagio'), in Lyon, en route from Hyères to London, on 19 May 1834 ('Andante') and in London on 31 October 1834 ('Divertimento'). Harper's instrument was, of course, the English slide trumpet. This was the ordinary trumpet of the Baroque and Classical periods but fitted with a retractable, spring-loaded slide which served to correct the defective intonation of the eleventh and thirteenth harmonics. The slide also lowered any of the other harmonics by a semitone, thus making it a fully melodic instrument, especially in the key of the dominant. In Britain, at least, it preserved the true sound of the Baroque trumpet until late into the nineteenth century. 

The six sonatas for two horns by Otto Nicolai (1810-1849) are of a different stamp to Rossini's duets. All six are substantial works in three movements. The original manuscripts lay in the Stettin City Library until they were destroyed during the Second World War. Two separate horn players made copies: Kurt Janetzky, who was a member of the Stettin Opera Orchestra from 1935 until the opera house's destruction, and Handel Knott senior, an amateur of music who was born in the 1870s and is thought to have made his copy in the first decade of the twentieth century. Both sources give the sonatas' year of composition as 1848, that troubled year of revolution in Europe. Nicolai, recently arrived in Berlin from Vienna, where he had been kapellmeister of the Court Opera since 1841, made many journeys to see friends that year - partly because the Berlin theatres had been closed down by Royal decree and partly to avoid the unpleasantness in the streets. The Royal Family had asked him to give some thought to the establishment of a Conservatoire and this brought him back into contact with Carl Nicholaus Türrschmidt, grandson of the horn-player Johann and son of the great Carl, whose fame as a horn duettist with Johann Palsa was legendary. Carl Nicholaus, whom Nicolai had known since his days in Rome (1833-37), was a respected teacher of theory in Berlin. Perhaps it was he who suggested some music for his own purposes, either as player or pedagogue. Although the sonatas are quite playable on the hand horn, I believe that, like Schumann's works for the horn from 1849, they were probably meant for the new valved instrument. Roger Montgomery and I have used a pair of Viennese double-piston valved instruments. 

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827) had an immediate success with the Septet, Op 20, from its first performance in the early months of 1800 at the palace of Prince Schwarzenberg. Many arrangements of it were made; one, for piano trio, is by Beethoven himself (Op 38), and another, for string quintet, was sanctioned by him. Czerny made one for harmonie sextet in 1805 and Jiòí Druúecký one for harmonie nonet in 1812. Crusell arranged the first two movements for an eleven-part türkische musik around 1827. In the same year Carl Braun was appointed Music Director of the Life Regiment's Dragoon Corps band. He began composing and arranging for this ensemble immediately; the Septet movements were arranged separately at different times before 1830. 

Prince Carl Friedrich von Löwenstein-Wertheim-Freudenberg (1783-1849) was the Erbprinz, or hereditary prince, at Wertheim. The estate was a wealthy one which maintained an orchestra until 1806, the year in which Napoleon consolidated his gains in Germany into the Confederation of the Rhine. Thereafter the orchestra was disbanded, but a small harmonie of two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons was retained. The Prince delighted in music and arranged and composed a great deal for his players. From about 1820 the establishment was expanded to some thirteen players and a separate grouping of trumpet, three horns and bass trombone became possible. Reschke (op cit) gives this formation as standard for a Prussian Jäger battalion around 1806. The Prince left a body of over a hundred arrangements and compositions for this brass quintet and we estimate its compilation as dating from about 1827. From it we have selected four movements. The trumpet part is fully chromatic and always crooked in either F or E flat. It may have been intended for the new valved instrument, or possibly a keyed trumpet, but it is not a keyed-bugle part as low Gs are frequently written. We have used a variety of instruments to render the part: a two-valved Pace trumpet for the Française, a Köhler cornopean equipped with three Shaw disc valves for the Schwert-Tanz, and a keyed trumpet for the Grave, and Tema con variazioni. 

The four short pieces, taken from a set of ten attributed to Crusell, are found in the archive of a Swedish infantry regiment, the First Life Grenadier Regiment, and would seem to date from the early 1820s. They are scored for an ensemble of kenthorn, three horns, a pair of natural trumpets and a bass trombone, very probably a group that would have been drawn from the full band's complement of brass and woodwind. The 'Andante' movement varies slightly, having two kenthorns and - a charming colouristic effect this - a jägarhorn or Swedish bugle. It is most probable that music such as this was intended for entertainments in the Officers' Mess. 

Christopher Larkin ©2000

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