Natural & Vintage Horns

Vienna Horns, part I: What is (and isn’t) a Vienna Horn

Dec 16, 2023

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Astute readers of Horn Matters might have noticed that I have rarely written about Vienna horns. Not that there is no content, but relative to the deep and continued interest in the Vienna horn I have not written much at all.

Like most Horn Matters readers, I first noticed the unique design from videos of the Vienna Philharmonic. A Vienna horn is a single F, but much more exciting than any standard single F you might have played as a beginner.

Blame my dissertation

By the time I was thinking about dissertation topics I had decided to focus on the early valved horn in Germany – which means I was focused mostly on horns with rotary valves. I looked at it all pretty deeply in “The Development of Valved Horn Technique in Early Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Survey of Performers and Works Before 1850 With Respect to the Use of Crooks, Right Hand Technique, Transposition, and Valves” (Indiana University, 1995).

Eventually I recorded a CD on a rotary valve single horn with crooks (more on that here), and I have modified several horns to imitate 19th century rotary horn designs (especially during my sabbatical), including horns with crooks, that I use often and enjoy playing (more here).

So, what is a Vienna horn?

Visually, it is a very 19th-century design. There are a number of features to consider, including the use of a crook, pitch level in F, and the bore and bell size. But when you get to it the most central feature is that a Vienna horn has Vienna valves.

Vienna valves are a type of piston valve, sometimes referred to as double piston valves. They operate as pairs of small valves that are connected together, as seen in this illustration. The historical summary of the design (more here) is as follows:

This valve design, patented [see endnote] in 1823 by Viennese instrument maker Joseph Riedl (d. 1840) and hornist Josef Kail (1795-1871), had actually been produced as early as 1819 by instrument maker C. F. Sattler (1778-1842) of Leipzig and possibly earlier by Stölzel and Blühmel [Dahlqvist, 111, 114, and 123. Leopold Ulhmann of Vienna also held an 1830 patent on an improved Vienna valve]. The use of two pistons for each valve loop made for a more consistent bore and eliminated the potential problem of back pressure found in the single-piston Stölzel valve. However, when a Vienna valve is depressed it introduces two sharp 90-degree angles into the windway, and also introduces two sudden constrictions of approximately 8% in the bore, neither of which assist in the response of the instrument [Merewether, 31]. It should be noted that the Stölzel valve shares these same defects of design. German players favored the Vienna valve until the 1850s [Carse, 222], while Austrian players continued to used it throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.

[The endnote and the reference sources may be found in the original article, which is drawn from my dissertation. Also, I’m a bit skeptical of that final statement drawn from Carse, it would be one that could be researched out more. And reality is you don’t notice the 8% constriction that Merewether mentions.]

Are there Vienna horns with rotary valves?

Worth also mentioning, there are horns built with the same layout as a Vienna horn, but with rotary valves. They have been around since the early years of valves and are interesting horns for sure. I’d love to own one or build one someday.

Without the distinctive Vienna valves they are not considered by some to be Vienna horns. Vienna horns have Vienna valves! Personally, I would call them a type of Vienna horn, as so many of the other design features are the same — only the valve section is different — and historically these rotary instruments existed alongside the Vienna valve instruments.

However, if the layout of a rotary valve horn is otherwise different, it is not a Vienna horn. It is a crooked, rotary valve horn, of the type that I have worked with the most personally. A rotary valve Vienna horn would certainly have the valve section placed in the same location as the Vienna valves and take exactly the type of crook used on a Vienna horn. If the crook is larger or smaller, the design has clearly diverged significantly away from that of the Vienna horn.

Finally, I would add that this is a topic on which opinions differ, but for sure the pro players of the Vienna horn today all use horns with Vienna valves, and you are safest to stick with that as what we call a Vienna horn today. I’ll have a bit more on this in Part II.

And I didn’t have a Vienna horn

Another reason I have not looked at the Vienna horn that much is I did not have a Vienna horn to use beyond very limited testing.

When one became available to me recently I was also initially not very impressed. I’ll talk about that more in Part II, as I was able to rework an unfinished crook for that horn and it plays rather better on the finished crook! A good crook is a necessity! Made a huge difference. A sneak peek look at that crook may be found here.