aeijtzsche
New Member
Joined: 15 May 2019
Posts: 2
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 Posted: Wed May 15, 2019 3:23 pm Post subject: |
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| Gabrieli wrote: | To get back to the original poster's question, I do not think it has been answered adequately or correctly.
To make sure we are talking about the same thing: late romantic is for me the period ca. 1870-1910.
The original poster asked about trumpets in Mahler’s symphonies.
LSOfanboy replied "They played low F trumpets. "
and Trumpetmandan wrote "The trumpet in F parts from the late romantic era are generally for low F trumpet"
These statements are IMHO inncorrect
Composers such as Mahler notated their parts as if they were being performed on 6 foot f trumpets, which may still sometimes have been the case when he was studying composition ca. 1870 but by the time his symphonies were written and performed - despite the notation, sometimes in f sometimes in bflat- they would always have been performed on b flat trumpets or in the case
of the Vienna Philharmonic c trumpets. I think from around 1860-70 players had started changing to b flat in German speaking countries. I guess it is just possible that the first performance of his first symphony in Budapest may have been played on f trumpets.
The only country still using long f trumpets in Mahler’s time was Britain, I believe. They used f trumpets there into the 20th century.
So the short historically correct answer is:
the composer Mahler wrote often out of habit, as if the trumpeters were still using the long f trumpet, but in reality they weren’t, they were using the b flat.
Similarly modern horn parts are still notated in f but the players use the b flat side of their double horn most of the time.
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In my opinion, this is a little too categorical; while it is true that "long trumpets" were on their last legs as standard orchestral instruments by Mahler's time, it's not as though everyone went to bed one night playing F trumpets and woke up the next day playing Bb. It's also true that geography made a big difference as to how this played out.
While there are a few instances of a performing organization making the decision to buy new instruments to replace old ones (VPO's switch from Valve to Slide Trombones in the last decades of the 19th century comes to mind), I think that it is likely that all these trumpets existed alongside each other for quite some time. It's pretty much impossible to know what this looked like, but there are enough anecdotes around to suggest that Trumpet sections across Europe would look eccentric to us. For example, some French and English trumpet sections would have had cornet players playing trumpet parts long after composers stopped writing for them. And we know that French trumpet players had Natural Trumpet/Perinet Valve trumpet sets with crooks for low A up through G until the 1890s, and that they were used.
I suspect that Strauss's observation in 1905-ish was probably pretty close to accurate: That first trumpeters had pretty much abandoned the long trumpets in favor of the half-length instruments; but that section players still used long trumpets in D, Eb, and F at least enough that it was worth remarking upon.
There is also a story that I have not been able to substantiate that Mahler insisted on F trumpets on the lower parts for Beethoven, only allowing the principal to play on half instruments.
I think that, given the evidence, and the nature of trumpet playing and the repertoire, there was probably a fairly long period where the F trumpet fit in to the trumpet family just like any other trumpet, as an available tool that continued to be used when it worked best. One might even imagine a discussion between trumpeters much like discussions on this board:
"What horn are you using for Mahler's new Symphony, Fritz?"
"Well, Hans, I think I like it on the F"
"Don't you think the third movement lies better on Bb, though?"
"Yeah, maybe I'll have a chance to switch, but other wise I just prefer it on the F horn"
"Cool, I think I'm just going to play the whole thing on Bb" |
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