Night of the Horns

One Soul—Many Colors

From Solo to Octet: The Horn in Original Works and Arrangements

Michael Horst

From a canzone by Giovanni Gabrieli dating back to around 1600 to a veritable world premiere: the historical spectrum covered by the compositions of this “Night of the Horns” spans roughly 400 years. Among them, there are old and new works, familiar and unfamiliar ones, solo and ensemble pieces, originals and arrangements. “I tried to divide the evening into three parts, introducing the sound of the horn from different perspectives,” Radek Baborák, curator of the program and a faculty member at the Barenboim- Said Akademie, describes the idea behind the musical selection. “In the first part, we find the sounds of the forest, hunting calls and hunting masses. The second part features original works for horn ensemble from the 20th century, and for the finale, we have chosen famous compositions arranged for horns. I would like to show how the sound of the horn has changed throughout the various epochs, but also that one thing has remained the same: the soul of the horn.”

The evening begins with the Frenchman Charles Koechlin. A student of Gabriel Fauré and classmate of Maurice Ravel, he is known primarily for his exquisite orchestral music, in which impressionism and church modes left their traces, as did excursions into atonality. His symphonic poems inspired by Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, which occupied him for 40 years, are especially charming. In Koechlin’s oeuvre, which includes 226 opus numbers, we also find a great many chamber music works, including a series of monodies for various wind instruments, short solo pieces from his later years. The Monody for horn is particularly intriguing—not least because Koechlin himself was an accomplished horn player.

The Twelve Duets K. 487 by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart take us back to the Classical period: simple works for two voices that despite their economy of means betray the melodic inventiveness of the genius. The autograph gives July 27, 1786 as the date of composition for some of these duets— though not the combination of instruments Mozart had in mind. For many years, the assignment to horns was debated. But neither the use of chromatics—a skilled horn player certainly knew how to produce these, even then—nor the tessitura, which is extremely high at some points, argue against the execution by two horns; in the latter case, Mozart chose the practical solution of embedding these notes in scale-like runs, making them more easily playable.

Like Mozart, the composer Anton Reicha was closely associated with Vienna, where he enjoyed the company of colleagues such as Haydn and Beethoven. Later, he moved his residence to Paris, where he was a highly esteemed professor at the Conservatoire and counted Liszt and Berlioz among his students. It is mainly his work for winds that has kept Reicha’s memory alive as a composer; his 24 Trios for Three Horns were published in 1815. Their pedagogical approach can hardly be missed, for the composer not only made liberal use of different types of movements and forms such as minuets and rondos, but also introduced horn players to counterpoint and fugues. Reicha himself was a flutist, but presumably consulted on technical matters with his famous horn-playing colleague Louis- François Dauprat.

At the time, Dauprat was considered one of the preeminent horn players in Paris. Renowned as the principal of the Opéra orchestra and at the court of King Louis Philippe, he also passed on his expertise to the next generation as a professor at the Conservatoire. As a composer, he dedicated himself fully to the horn as well: in addition to his Six Sextets for Horn Op. 10, from which a selection will be played tonight, he wrote duos, trios, and five horn concertos. An ardent champion of the natural horn, he rejected the use of valves: “This method, which has already been applied in the case of the trumpet, changes the instrument’s timbre and lends it a special character, which corresponds neither to the trumpet nor to any other known instrument. The horn would suffer the same fate were such changes to be made: it would lose its character as well as the clear distinction between natural tones and stopped tones.”

Radek Baborák and his colleagues, however, will forego the use of natural horns: “Of course we could also play hunting horn or natural horn,” Baborák explains, “but our modern valve horn contains the hunting horn anyway, so it is much more interesting to imitate it, invoking the wild chase, so to speak.” Such “wild chases” are what was behind the St. Hubertus Masses, which were particularly popular among music lovers in 19th-century France. St. Hubertus is the patron saint of hunters; in his honor, masses are held on his feast day, November 3, in the open air (or in a chapel with an organ), and it is the sound of the horn that gives them an authentic character. They are very rarely heard in concert; Baborák, however, raves about the “incredible energy” released by the combination of four horn parts and organ.

The composers of these St. Hubertus Masses were masters of their field, such as Gustave Rochard and Jules Cantin. Their French compatriot with the unusual name Tyndare Gruyer—often known simply as Tyndare—went down in the annals of music history as the author of a Méthode complete de trompe de chasse, a textbook on playing the hunting horn; he is also revered to this day as the founder of the National Association of French Horn Players. In style, the St. Hubertus Masses from France closely resemble each other; this suggests combining individual parts of the liturgy from different mass settings—in this case, Baborák has chosen as his model a selection made by his great horn-playing colleague Hermann Baumann. Thus, the Introitus is by Gruyer, the Kyrie and Offertory by Albert Sombrun, the Transubstantiation (“Élévation”) was composed by Gustave Rochard, and the final piece (“Sortie”) by Jules Cantin.

It is hardly a coincidence that in the English-speaking world, the horn is often called the French horn—after all, its roots lie in France, where it also enjoys particular popularity. There, the instrument was omnipresent early on in opera and ballet, and tonight, it also falls to a Frenchman to open the second part of the program featuring original compositions: Olivier Messiaen. A profoundly religious Catholic, a passionate ornithologist, and composer of organ music and massive orchestral scores, he wrote a short piece for solo horn in 1971, commemorating the horn player

Jean-Pierre Guézec, who had passed away shortly before. When Messiaen was commissioned soon thereafter to write a grand orchestral work for the 200th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, he decided to reuse this horn composition, now entitled Appel interstellaire (“Interstellar Call”), as an opening for the second part of Des canyons aux étoiles… (“From the Canyons to the Stars”).

In only five minutes, Messiaen here concentrates many of the technical advancements of the horn in the 20th century: glissandi, flutter tongue, notes played with half-closed valves. In the lyrical moments of this invocation, one also hears the sound of two birdcalls. Messiaen subsequently spoke out against the not uncommon practice of performing Appel interstellaire outside of its orchestral context as an individual piece—a stance that is somewhat surprising, given the composition’s provenance.

Paul Hindemith’s Sonata for Four Horns also goes back to a specific occasion: the composer wrote it in 1952 for the ensemble Salzburger Hornbläser, as a thank you to the musicians for a serenade they had played for him. He himself called it “a full-grown and serious piece”—an assessment Radek Baborák can only confirm: “The Sonata is quite difficult, especially in terms of ensemble playing.” The unmistakable seriousness of the three-movement piece is also expressed by the fact that Hindemith begins with a fugue, followed by a lively movement in which sonata form and fugato are freely combined and in which frequent changes of measure make for metrical diversity. The third movement consists of free-form variations on the late-medieval hunting song Ich schell mein Horn in Jammers Tal, written by Duke Ulrich of Württemberg.

A sextet by the Czech composer František Šterbák will have its world premiere this evening. Šterbák is a friend of Baborák from their student days in Prague, and the piece was written 25 years ago—now it will finally be heard in public. Baborák gives a concise comment on what listeners may expect: “avant-garde to a certain degree, but with a sense for tonality as well.”

De profundis by Miloš Bok, another Czech composer, introduces a kind of horn that occupies a special position, not least because of its name: the Wagner tuba. Conceived and “invented” by Richard Wagner for his Der Ring des Nibelungen, it looks rather like a tuba, but is part of the horn family in terms of playing technique. Its most striking feature is the bell, which opens upwards; its very immediate, dark yet piercing sound is unmistakable. Following the master from Bayreuth, it was mainly the Wagner admirer Anton Bruckner who considered this instrumental color essential for his last three symphonies. Later, the Wagner tuba was also used by Richard Strauss in his operas Elektra and Die Frau ohne Schatten, as well as his monumental Alpensinfonie; almost at the same time, Igor Stravinsky used it in Le Sacre du printemps in 1913. Ever since, this unusual instrument has only rarely been featured in new works.

Completing the group of original compositions is music by another professional horn player, the American Kerry Turner, member of the American Horn Quartet and a prolific creator of works for his instrument. These range from a Twelve-Tone Waltz for solo horn to Bronze Triptych for 12 horns, timpani, and percussion. “My goal is to paint a musical picture, thought, impression as clearly as possible,” Turner describes his compositional approach, “and then communicate it to the listener and the performer, that it might appear in their minds as vividly as if it were on a large movie screen.”

Farewell to Red Castle was written in 1995, commissioned by Soichiro Ohno and the Japanese-German Horn Ensemble. Its theme is based on a medieval Scottish folk tune with a typical hunting melody. It remains clearly discernable in each of the four very different variations, which are also interconnected by the fact that in the third variation, the poetic, sad melody appears to be a continuation of the original theme. In the brilliant finale, Turner not only calls for all the technical sophistication of modern horn playing, but also adds a certain Texan flair to the Scottish theme.

The last part of the “Night of the Horns” focuses on arrangements—here, the special attraction is to hear familiar compositions in an unknown guise. This is perhaps least true for the works of the Venetian Giovanni Gabrieli, for example the Canzon per sonar septimi toni of 1597, which was originally played from the balconies inside the Basilica of San Marco, preferably by wind or brass instruments. Live stereophonics combined with echo effects—this is an idea we owe mainly to Gabrieli and the chorus-like division of his wind/brass and choral ensembles, and it is found in this work as well.

The freedom-loving Ludwig van Beethoven was inspired in 1809–10 to write his incidental music for Egmont by Goethe’s eponymous tragedy about the Flemish count. The overture, composed last of the ten numbers, follows the tried-and-true principle per aspera ad astra, “through darkness toward the light.” The entire score is marked by constant upheaval, chromatics, and abrupt accents. Egmont’s death, however, is not in vain: the music turns from minor to major, concluding in a visionary, triumphant coda. This fascinating piece is heard tonight in an arrangement by the legendary English horn player Alan Civil.

Even more grand is the finale of the concert, featuring the first movement of Anton Bruckner’s Symphony No. 9. Its musical material consists of three very different ideas: the first theme is monumental, sharply syncopated, confronting the listener with massive passages in unison; in contrast, the second strives upwards in sweeping, melodious lines. The third theme, finally, consists of a harsh broken chord in the basic key of D minor, but soon moves on to more distant key signatures. Bruckner combines and juxtaposes all these elements in different ways, driving the music to a dramatic culmination before the reprise reverts gradually to calmness.

It is not overly daring to venture that the composer himself would have been pleased with Miloš Bok’s arrangement—particularly because of its combination of horns, Wagner tubas, and organ. Indeed, this is a compelling way to complete the circle which this “Night of the Horns” aims to paint. Once again, the “soul of the horn” invoked by Radek Baborák resounds—amplified eight-fold—embodying the cosmos of an instrument that has fascinated composers and listeners alike for centuries.