Muting in Beethoven

A gem for woodwind octet with odd mute changes.

John Ericson recently wrote a post at the Horn Notes Blog about playing a stopped passage in Gershwin’s American in Paris with mutes. I ran into a similar situation.

Beethoven’s Rondino (1792) is written for two oboes, two clarinets, two horns and two bassoons. It was composed in the same year as the more well-known Woodwind Octet. There has been some speculation that the Rondino may have been intended to be part of this Octet.

Over the weekend I performed this piece with some friends as a part of a chamber music fund-raiser. It had been a while since I had played this piece and I had forgotten about the clumsy mute changes near the end of the piece.

This effect is written in both horn parts. For the sake of simplicity, we opted not to use mutes and played it as a subito pianissimo effect instead, taking some time between each entrance.

I did find a period instrument performance on the Duetsche Welle web site by the Italian group Ensemble Zefiro. It is from the 2007 BeethovenFest in Bonn.

It is interesting to listen to – the horn players use mutes modeled on originals from the period. Scroll down a bit on this page and click on the link under “Audios and Videos on the Topic.”

The horn players take considerable time to put in and take out the mutes. After listening to this, I am not sure if the subtle effect is worth the effort for a modern horn player. Stopping the music for so long to put in and take out the mutes is a bit disconcerting.

Also, modern mutes sound much more “buzzy” by comparison. This then makes me wonder about the final bars of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony:

Ethel Merker once remarked to me that owning one mute is not enough. She spoke of using a trombone straight mute for Don Quixote to get an extremely “buzzy” sound.

Along this line of thought I now wonder if this Beethoven excerpt would be better performed on a less “buzzy” mute – if such a thing exists.