Widmann, Kozhukhin & Goldmund Quartet

The Tone of a Tender Heart

A Brief History of the Clarinet Repertoire

Michael Kube

In a letter to his father, written from Mannheim on December 3, 1778, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart enthusiastically remarked, referencing Salzburg’s Court Orchestra: “If only we also had clarinetti! – you would not believe the wonderful effect a symphony achieves with flutes, oboes and clarinets!” Indeed, the clarinet, which had evolved from the chalumeau just a few decades earlier, was a completely new instrument at the time—in solo playing, chamber music, and orchestras. With its sonic variety offering three characteristic registers, it was a welcome addition to the Mannheim Court Orchestra, an ensemble its contemporaries considered extraordinary and unique in its sound anyway. In his Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (“Ideas Towards an Aesthetic of Music”) of 1785, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart exuberantly described the Mannheim orchestra, but also, specifically, the clarinet: “Its character is: emotion overflowing with love,—quite the tone of a tender heart […]. The tone is so sweet, so languorous; and anyone who commands its intermediate colors may be sure to find himself vanquishing many hearts.”

This enthusiasm for a comparatively young instrument, the last to find its place within the classical orchestra lineup, was preceded by a remarkable technical development over the course of the 18th century that had a profound influence on the clarinet’s sonority. The Nürnberg-based instrument maker Johann Christoph Denner, who died in 1707, is widely considered the inventor of the clarinet. In his renowned workshop, which built mainly oboes and recorders, he developed the chalumeau, a woodwind with a low timbre and rather limited tonal range, into an instrument that commanded a new sound register, due to the possibility of overblowing. Since this was reminiscent of the bright “clarion” register of the trumpet, making the instrument sound “rather similar to a trumpet, heard from afar” (Johann Gottfried Walther’s Musicalisches Lexicon of 1732), the name “clarinetto” was quickly established. In his original construction with three keys and two double holes, Denner had opened up the instrument’s entire tonal register, but his sons later removed this innovation, so that the clarinet was originally only played in the high soprano register.

When, at the end of the Baroque period around 1760, the trumpet gradually lost its function in concertante music due to the shift in compositional styles, the clarinet established itself within the varied array of instruments and sound colors. As early as 1764, Valentin Roeser, a composer and clarinetist working in Paris, noted that the most important rule in composing for clarinet was to “let it sing, pleasantly and naturally.” Its soft notes invited comparisons to the human voice, and only a few decades later, the clarinet was considered an instrument of “abundant effects” that, with “soulful playing,” could produce “truly rapturous enchantment” (as Johann Georg Albrechtsberger wrote in 1790). In fact, it was the mutually inspiring creative collaboration between committed performers and outstanding composers that had sparked both the technical development and the expansion of repertoire. Carl Stamitz and Ernst Eichner wrote concertos for the musicians of the Mannheim Court Orchestra. The compositions of Franz Tausch, who was based in Berlin from 1789 onwards and as the teacher of Bernhard Henrik Crusell and Heinrich Joseph Baermann passed on his experience to the next generation, deserve special mention. Although practically forgotten today, Tausch’s works made exemplary use of all the clarinet’s registers and characteristics.

The most famous example for such joint experimentation might be the collaboration between the Viennese instrument maker Theodor Lotz, the clarinetist Anton Stadler, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. After Lotz and Stadler had expanded the lower range of the instrument, Mozart created not only the Quintet in A major K. 581 for the so-called basset clarinet, but also, a few months before his death, the Clarinet Concerto in the same key, K. 622. Iwan Müller, a native of Reval (today’s Tallinn), went even further: he invented a completely new set of key mechanics, which was later expanded to what became known as the “German system,” and replaced the unreliable felt pads with leather ones. Production of the instrument, begun in Paris in 1812 with support from the banker Petit (himself a clarinetist), ended in bankruptcy, however, after a commission of innovation-skeptics at the Conservatoire gave the instrument a negative report.

The year before, Carl Maria von Weber and Heinrich Joseph Baermann had met for the first time, following an introduction by Giacomo Meyerbeer. Only one week after this visit with the principal clarinetist of the Munich Court Orchestra, Weber had completed his Concertino for clarinet and orchestra, a work that electrified the musicians involved and the entire court at its first performance. Weber received a generously endowed commission to write two further concertos and in December 1811 embarked upon a concert tour of several months with Baermann. At their next meeting in Vienna in April 1813, Baermann was presented with the first three movements of the Clarinet Quintet as a birthday gift. (The final rondo was completed in Munich in 1815.) Weber wrote to his future wife Caroline Brandt about a private performance of the work: “Bärmann especially played like an angel, and he would have touched your heart as much as he moved mine.”

Such creative relationships did not remain an exception: Louis Spohr wrote his four clarinet concertos for his friend Simon Hermstedt, one of the most important virtuosos on the instrument in the first half of the 19th century. Johannes Brahms’s dedication to the clarinet late in his life, when he composed two sonatas, a trio, and a quintet, was inspired by Richard Mühlfeld, a member of the Meiningen Court Orchestra. And the 20th century saw the legendary collaborations of Benny Goodman with Paul Hindemith, Aaron Copland, and Béla Bartók.

Translation: Alexa Nieschlag