David Guerrier plays the keyed trumpet

The trumpet goes back a long, long way. Trumpeters are depicted in art from ancient Egypt, dated in the 14th century BCE.

For most of its centuries of existence, the trumpet was an instrument of royalty, used for playing fanfares. Frankly, that’s about all it was good for. These early trumpets couldn’t play all the notes of the scale. They played only the first few notes from the harmonic series, which is already a subset of the scale’s notes.

By the 16th century, instrument makers had figured out how to make trumpets play more of the notes from the harmonic series. Now, the further up you go in the harmonic series, the closer together the notes get. If you could push your trumpet far enough, and fudge the pitch of some notes a bit, you could play all the notes of the scale. By the 17th century, trumpets could actually be used to more or less play melodies.

I say "more or less" because they still didn’t do a very good job of it. It took a really talented (and fit!) player to get all the notes in tune. (Many of today’s period instrument specialists use trumpets with tiny, inconspicuous, and inauthentic "cheater holes" that help them with this challenge.) Even then, the timbre (tone quality) of the notes varied radically.

In the 15th century, a few instrument makers had experimented with adding slides (like a trombone’s) to trumpets. We have pictures! But given the design – they were straight trumpets – it’s hard to see how a player could’ve flung that slide around fast enough to play any but the slowest music. He might well have knocked his own front teeth out trying. For centuries more, trumpet players had to pretty much depend only on skill and lungs to coax a real tune from their instruments.

In the 17th century, Vienna became something of a Mecca for trumpet players. The very earliest trumpet players had been little more than vagrants, but Viennese trumpeters were given a place of honor. On high feast days the court’s string orchestra was augmented by a choir of trumpets, playing sonatas composed by the likes of Schmelzer and Biber.

But by the late 18th century the trumpet was going out of style, giving way to more agile and tonally consistent instruments. A few trumpeters, determined to salvage their careers, scrambled to develop a trumpet that could compete with the violin, flute, and oboe. Some of them achieved a measure of success by adding keys to the trumpet, so it could play all the notes of the scale, even in its lowest register.

Enter Anton Weidinger (1767 – 1852). Weidinger was a Viennese court trumpeter. Around 1793, he began experimenting with some of these keyed trumpets, refining them and practicing with them. By 1796 he was making enough progress that he convinced Haydn to write a concerto for his Klappentrompette (keyed trumpet). He took that concerto on the road in 1803, playing it in France, Germany, and England. Weidinger caught the interest of composer Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who composed yet another concerto for him and his curious keyed trumpet.

The critics had good things to say about Weidinger’s trumpet and his playing. But it was too late. By 1820 the valved trumpet had appeared in Vienna and was rapidly taking over. Weidinger’s keyed trumpet hung on for a little longer; some musicians and composers preferred its tone to the valved trumpet’s. But by 1840 the Klappentrompette was forgotten – obsolete.

Although the Baroque natural trumpet has no shortage of proponents (and makers and players), not many musicians have shown much interest in reviving the Klappentrompette. Who can blame them? After all, what’s the point of reviving an instrument for which only two major concertos were ever written? (See also the arpeggione.) Adolf Egger has built modern reproductions, as has Christopher Monk, but they don’t seem to have had many customers. The few recordings that have been made with their instruments have quickly gone out of print, presumably for lack of interest.

But if you’d like to see and hear the keyed trumpet, here’s a rare opportunity: David Guerrier playing the first movement of the Haydn in the Festival de l’Epau last May (2009). He’s accompanied by the chamber orchestra "Les Siècles."

Further reading:

The story of the keyed trumpet, by Norwegian trumpeter Ole J Utnes

The natural trumpet in Wikipedia

Adolf Egger’s workshop

Trumpeter David Guerrier from Trumpet World

This article was first published in WKSU Classical on 28 December 2009.

Estates Theatre, Prague, where Mozart conducted Figaro in 1787 (Wikimedia Commons)

Much has been written about Leopold Mozart’s anxiety about his family’s financial security – and his own, as he aged. Leopold was unrelenting in his pressure on Wolfgang to find a permanent position. This, as much as anything else, may have precipitated Mozart’s split with home and hearth. In 1781, he cast off Archbishop Colloredo’s hated livery and shook Salzburg’s dust from his boots. Mozart would make his fortune as a freelance musician in Vienna, or so he believed.

There, at first, Mozart had all the concert and lesson business anyone could want. Five years on, though, Vienna’s appetite for Mozart’s keyboard virtuosity had already begun to wane. Increasingly, he saw opera as his future; but even there, the response was cooler than he had hoped. The Vienna premiere of Le nozze di Figaro in May of 1786 went well. However, after only nine performances that year, Figaro faded from the repertory.

In December of 1786 Figaro opened in Prague – and there it did not fade. Quite to the contrary.

In spite of his wide travels, Mozart had never visited Prague; there were more musical and financial attractions in other cities. But his music had led the way four years before, when a traveling company had first introduced the Prague public to Die Entführung aus dem Serail.

The Figaro premiere literally ignited a new musical sprit in the city. A month later, Mozart was invited to Prague to conduct a performance of the opera at the Nostic Theatre (now the Estates Theatre).

Given Vienna’s growing indifference, the adulation Mozart encountered in Prague must have been deeply satisfying. In a letter to his student Baron Gottfried von Jacquin, Mozart marveled, "Here they speak of nothing but Figaro. Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but Figaro. Nothing draws like Figaro."

Figaro was to be the main course for Prague, but Mozart also planned dessert – a symphony. Symphonies had been among his concert staples in earlier years, but since then Mozart’s symphonic output had fallen drastically (in 1773 alone he had turned out a half-dozen – as many as he composed in his entire ten Vienna years from 1781). In fact, there’s evidence that he initially planned to simply recycle the Paris Symphony (K300a) for Prague. He even composed a new finale for it. But for some reason he set that work aside, and made a fresh start. Mozart wrote the date on his newly-finished Prague symphony: 6 December 1786.

This was a somewhat uncharacteristically punctual finish for Mozart – he wasn’t due to leave for Prague until the 8th of January. Thus, some historians speculate that Mozart didn’t really compose K504 for Prague, but rather meant it for a Vienna premiere which never took place. Others argue against this, pointing out that the Viennese expected their symphonies to have four movements, and K504 has only three.

The missing minuet gives K504 its other (seldom used) nickname – "Ohne Menuett." And of course it provides yet another source of speculation for the music historians.

Some of them characterize the Prague Symphony as a throwback to Mozart’s earlier Italian-style 3-movement symphonies. This is a little tough to swallow, though, when hardly anything else about this symphony suggests those earlier works.

Mozart expert Alfred Einstein declared in the 1940s that K504 is "a full scale Viennese symphony which happens to lack a minuet simply because it says everything it has to say in 3 movements." Maybe so, but this strikes me as somehow more in line with Schumann’s ethos, or even Beethoven’s, than with Mozart’s.

One recent writer has even declared that by dispensing with the "aristocratic" minuet, Mozart was indulging his pro-Enlightenment persuasions. This isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem on first glance. Prague wasn’t too keen on Vienna’s political machinations, and one reason for their enthusiasm about Figaro was the opera’s rather daring political tone.

Or perhaps the experts are all thinking too hard. Seven years before, in his K338 symphony, Mozart had swapped the andante and minuet for no apparent reason. So maybe it’s just as valid to suggest that Mozart dumped the minuet in K504 because he felt sure that Prague’s musically canny audiences would let him get away with a bit of creative tinkering.

Nor was this the only example. Mozart began with a slow introduction, only the second time he had done so in a symphony (though Joseph Haydn had shown the way fully 25 years before). After the first 36 bars, Mozart dispelled the dark clouds with an energetic theme. He developed this theme in ways that no doubt raised a few eyebrows among his more knowledgable listeners.

A pastoral andante leads to the fleet-footed finale. Here Mozart gave Prague concertgoers a treat by including one of those Figaro themes that they were all playing, singing, and whistling.

Both the Figaro performance and the symphony were rousing successes for Mozart. Twenty-one years later, Mozart’s biographer Franz Xaver Niemetschek was able to report that this and the K543 symphonies "are still favorites of the Prague public, although they have been played at least a hundred times."

"The rests are as important as the notes …" Pianist Andras Schiff talks to a Wigmore Hall audience about Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 3 in C.

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The article is part of an eight part series titled "Schiff on Beethoven" by the Guardian newspaper, a series to which one can subscribe.

Sergei Rachmaninoff rarely smiled in public, so you may think that he was dour. This tribute will show you otherwise. This is the Rachmaninoff of about the mid to late 1920s. He’s smiling and you can see his love for his granddaughters. And, as one of his friends once reported, he’s polite. He says “thank you” frequently.

Sometimes just being able to see a composer’s painting or photo along with his or her music adds a new dimension to the listening experience. I found a silent film (as part of something much bigger) that shows Jean Sibelius at his home in his later years. View while listening to his music.