Chamber Music: An Essential History

5. The Emergence of the Wind Quintet

five The Emergence of the Wind Quintet The combination of pairs of oboes, horns, and bassoons to form a wind sextet was common enough during the Classical era. When the clarinet arrived upon the scene, the sextet was expanded to the traditional eight-instrument assembly associated with Harmoniemusik. Pairs of ›utes, basset horns, and other wind instruments were often added to the ensemble, particularly in later repertoire. These wind bands were maintained by wealthy courts “for performing serenades and divertimenti during dinner or as a background to conversation.” In general, the music for these ensembles went under the designation partita. Furthermore, the repertoire often “included transcriptions of operas.”1 This music was casual stuff intended for ease of execution and comprehension. Neither Mozart nor Beethoven escaped such corruption of their works; excerpts from Mozart’s Singspiel Die Entführung aus dem Serail, and Beethoven’s well-known rescue opera, Fidelio , were widely circulated even during the composers’ lifetimes. The instrumentation of Harmoniemusik betrayed its origins: It was simply the wind section of an orchestral ensemble. Both the character of the repertoire and the constitution of the wind ensemble belied the simple fact that Harmoniemusik really stood apart from the mainstream of chamber music literature. The ‹rst composer who sought to elevate wind-ensemble music to the level that had been achieved in the string quartet literature of the eighteenth century was Giuseppe Maria Gioacchino Cambini (1746–1825), whose set of Trois quintetti, Livre 1, was published by Sieber in Paris in the year 1802. Cambini was a violinist, and he was well acquainted with serious chamber 83 music for strings. After relocating in Paris in the 1770s, he wrote hundreds of string quartets, quintets, and chamber works for other combinations of instruments. His wind quintets show him as a virtuosic composer capable not only of interesting ideas, but of highly idiomatic ones as well. Cambini’s ‹rst step in the transformation of music for winds—and perhaps the most important one—was to eliminate the pairings of identical instruments that had been and remains customary in orchestral writing. The wind ensemble that resulted consisted of solo ›ute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. None of these instruments was new; nevertheless, their construction changed signi‹cantly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. construction of wind instruments in early nineteenth-century france To an extent, Cambini’s achievements in wind quintet writing were the result of a united effort by many people. Solo winds had generally not been practical before Cambini’s time. Problems in construction resulted in dif‹culties with intonation, dynamic control, and nuance. These de‹ciencies became the focus of instrument builders’ attention in the early stages of the Romantic era, largely because of the more complex harmonic idiom that contemporaneous scores required. As Anthony Baines informs us, Nineteenth-century woodwind history is an action story of brilliant, dominating individuals—performers or craftsmen, sometimes both— and of their patented inventions through which the elegantly simple instruments of the past were transformed into the complicated tools of the woodwind section today. First there came a period of some twenty-‹ve years which saw the development of the basic “simple systems.” With these, each instrument came to be provided with a set of simple closed keys following the example already set by the later eighteenth-century ›ute-makers. These gave an accurately-tuned keyed note for every semitone that had previously been unsatisfactory as a cross-‹ngering. Ten years after the Eroica, Beethoven’s Seventh and Eighth Symphonies would have been introduced with eight-keyed ›utes and eight- to twelve-keyed clarinets. Oboes and bassoons, on which chromatic cross-‹ngerings on the whole worked the best, were still mainly classical in design, but another ten years later, when the Ninth Symphony was produced [i.e., 1824], these instruments too had become available with extra keys. 84 • chamber music Baines cites some of the most important instrument builders active during the early part of the nineteenth century and refers to “new inventions” [such as] . . . [Jospeh] Sellner’s full simple-system oboe (newly introduced by the maker [Stefan] Koch in Vienna), the [Iwan] Müller clarinet (‹rst devised in about 1810, in Paris), and . . . [Carl] Almenraeder ’s newly remodelled bassoon.2 We know, too, that Anton Joseph Hampel (ca. 1710–1771) had devised a method of hand stopping that enabled the player to produce tones that were not otherwise possible...