DICTIONARY OF MUSIC - El Atril

476 INSTRUMENTATION INSTRUMENTATION
little personal, practical knowledge of wind
instruments, and one finds it hard to understand
how Richard Wagner, an operatic conductor of
great experience, should have struggled in the
mists of ignorance so long as he did. In his
early works we find—as in most contemporary
scores—two valve-horns and two hand-horns,
an absurd comi)romise which many composers
then made. The hand-horns were to satisfy
the purists, the valve- horns to satisfy the
composer's needs, and a very slight inspection
of the ' Tanuhfiuser ' Overture will reveal the
futility of this concession to pedantry. The
unique way in which valve-horns are written
for in ' Lohengrin '— ' Corni in E, in F, in C,'
etc. marked at every other bar—shows quite a
phenomenal misunderstanding of what seems
to us now a very simple matter. But the
treatment of the trumpet question by the French
is still more curious. French composers were
the first to adopt the useful cornet-a-pistons
into the orchestra, but instead of using it as
a substitute for the trumpet they kept both,
and they retain them to this day. Therefore
all French music suffers from too much
brass in the treble octave. Another curious
feature is that the French have always been
accustomed to write for three tenor trombones,
instead of for alto, tenor, and bass, like other
nations, and to write the three parts on one
stave of tlie score. Which is the cause and
which the result is hard to say, but it will
be noticed that they write their trombone
harmony in the tenor register, generally in
close position— the least sonorous arrangement
—and have no lower octave. All the music of
Auber, Hali^vy, Gounod, and even Meyerbeer,
and Berlioz (where they are not employing
extra forces) shows this weakness, and Wagner,
in scoring his ' Rienzi 'forthe Parisopera, imitated
the French plan : he, however, added a tuba,
which was a considerable improvement.
Here are three typical passages for brass :
the first, from Gluck, shows tliat the faulty arrangement
of trombones was traditional. Here
all tlie instruments are very badly placed :
bb