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NOTE: SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST. Over the weekend I saw a link to an article on a performance of the Brahms trio posted on the NPR website. I am a tough audience for this type of article, especially so as about ten years ago I actually worked up a pretty extensive article on Brahms and the orchestral horn (still unpublished, but it will make it out there in some form eventually). The NPR article in part reads
When Brahms composed his Horn Trio in 1865, he was working with a revolutionary instrument. The earliest horns used by hunters and by military bands were capable of making a lot of noise, but they weren’t very expressive instruments, and by the middle of the 19th century, that had changed. Newer, easier-to-play horns with valves could blend nicely into the background of an ensemble piece and also carry a beautiful solo melody much easier.
But Brahms didn’t appreciate the newfangled French horn. He once mocked the instrument, calling it the “brass viola.” And he was uneasy about imagining his Trio played with such a thing.
“But I would be apprehensive about hearing it with the valve horn,” Brahms wrote to a friend. “All poetry is lost, and the timbre is crude and dreadful right from the start.”
Oddly, his description of the new horn is precisely how many people would describe the sound of the older horn today. Perhaps Brahms loved the old, romantic sound of what he called the “Waldhorn” (or “hunting horn”) because he played one as a kid. So when he set out to write his Trio, he knew it would be written for what is today referred to as the “natural horn.” In fact, the title on the manuscript reads, “Trio fur Pianoforte, Violine & Waldhorn.”
I could pick this apart line by line, a number of things cause my eyebrows to rise, but there is one particular quote that caught my attention, that Brahms had called the valved horn a “brass viola.” I do not recall seeing this quote in any resource I consulted for my Doctoral research or for my later, still unpublished Brahms article. So I did a little digging, as I had a hunch where the writer had turned for information and was right. The full text of a DMA Dissertation on the Brahms trio by Joshua Garret (Julliard, 1998) is [Update: was] online in the Osmun website, and the “brass viola” quote is on this page. The “brass viola” quote is in a section right after quotes from Wagner on the horn. Garrett wrote
Brahms was even more emphatic than Wagner about retaining what he felt were the “true characteristics” of the horn. Brahms referred to the valve horn disparagingly as the “Blechbratsche”- the “brass viola.” Although Brahms probably conceived most or all of his orchestral horn parts for the natural horn, he knew that they would often, if not always, be played on valve horn. In his first symphony and in the Academic Festival Overture, Brahms, like Wagner, indicated certain notes which he insisted be stopped, even if the parts were played on valve horns.
So this explains where our NPR writer found the quote [NOTE: SEE UPDATE], but where did Joshua Garrett? The online version in the Osmun site has no footnotes [BUT SEE UPDATE III], but I do actually have a printed copy of this dissertation. The underlying source cited is an article by Kurt Janetzky, “Vom Signal bis zum Konzertstück,” published in the February, 1997 issue of Das Orchester. The underlying source beyond that I am not certain, as I have not had time to track down that issue of Das Orchester.
The very next quote in the NPR article is also intriguing, which to repeat it is
“But I would be apprehensive about hearing it with the valve horn,” Brahms wrote to a friend. “All poetry is lost, and the timbre is crude and dreadful right from the start.”
It does not seem to be from an online source. It however reminds me of another source cited by Garrett, that I would trust a bit more than the NPR article.
Brahms expressed one of his reasons for choosing the natural horn in a letter published in the Beilage zur Allgemeine Music-Zeitung in 1899. He wrote that “if the performer is not obliged by the stopped notes to play softly the piano and violin are not obliged to adapt themselves to him, and the tone is rough from the beginning.” Brahms was thus not only concerned about the horn player sounding too loud and rough, but about the effect that this would have on the whole ensemble.
Brahms and the horn is a big topic. In closing I would add one other quote from the Garrett dissertation, which helps put the use of the natural horn by Brahms in this and other works in context.
Part of the reason why Brahms felt so strongly about retaining the “true characteristics” of the horn was probably that, as a child, he had studied the instrument with his father. In addition to working as a double bass player, Jakob Brahms was a professional horn player with the Hamburg Bürgerwehr (town militia) for 36 years, from 1831 to 1867. The young Johannes thus grew up in the presence of the Waldhorn and probably strongly associated it with his childhood. This might explain why the first piece he wrote after his mother’s death was one for Waldhorn just as, after his father’s death in 1872, Brahms wrote ten etudes for Waldhorn that he dedicated “to the memory of my father.”
UPDATE: Here is where things get more interesting. I just purchased A Devil to Play by Jasper Rees. It seems that this is the source of the “Brass Viola” quote in the NPR article. But, more interestingly, it seems that a source Jasper Rees used for the text of page 192 is the Joshua Garrett dissertation. Check it out. And, even more interesting to me, the very next page is “borrowed” from my scholarship on Franz Strauss without attribution. I will blog on this further soon.
UPDATE II: My reaction on the plagiarism of my Franz Strauss material is here, with additional explanation from Jasper Rees in the comments to that post.
UPDATE III: Joshua Garrett provided a full PDF copy of his dissertation for posting on Horn Matters that may be accessed here.
