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THREE QUARTETS for Valve Horns (score & parts)

THREE QUARTETS for Valve Horns (score & parts)

 
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Printed Edition
Composer:Weber, Friedrich Dionys (1766-1842)
Instrumentation:4hn.
Publisher Ref:RB01
Composed c.1828 and probably the first published work for valved brass ensembles.

Price: £15.00
Qty
Arranger:Larkin, Chris
Editor:Sawbridge, Paul
Duration:30'00
Publisher:Rare Brass
Year of Issue:2014
ISMN:none specified
ISBN:none specified
The first music ever composed for an ensemble of valved brass instruments. Written by Friedrich Dionys Weber, the first Director of the Prague Conservatoire, circa 1824-8. This edition is an exact copy of the original Prague edition of Marco Berra, first published circa 1831.
Friedrich Dionys Weber was born near Karlsbad, now Karlovy Vary, in Bohemia in 1766 – at that time, of course, a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He went to Prague to study, initially, theology, philosophy and law but soon became absorbed in music. He was utterly devoted to Mozart and his music, having briefly met him, though none of his biographers seem able to give a date for this (possibly during one of Mozart’s two visits to Prague in 1787 when Weber would have been 20 or 21. Again, his biographers state that he studied with the Abbé Vogler, but none seems to know when. An educated guess would be prior to 1786 when Vogler went to the Swedish Court.
Moves towards the creation of a Prague Conservatory of Music began in 1808 and its doors opened in 1811. Its first Director was Weber who, whilst abhorring the new expressive music of Beethoven and his namesake, Carl Maria von Weber, was nevertheless a progressive when it came to the encouragement of new ideas. One of these ideas, the newly chromaticised valve horn, may well have been tried in Prague by Josef Kail (1795-1971) who was a horn player in the class of Václav Zalužan (1767-1832) when the Conservatorium began and who graduated with honours in 1817. He is cited in Bransberger’s book celebrating the Conservatory’s centenary in 1911 as having given solos there in 1817, 1818 and, on March 5th, 1819, as giving Variations for the newly invented Keyed (i.e. valved) Horn by F. Dionys Weber. Kail’s first post was at the theatre in Pest (1819) and he then moved to the Vienna Court Opera in March, 1823. In Vienna he worked with Josef Riedl on improvements to the valve, the first patent for which had been taken out in 1815 by Heinrich Stölzel (1777-1844) followed by Friedrich Blühmel in 1818. Kail was clearly a very talented young player with a go-ahead attitude and an enquiring mind. In late 1825 he returned to Prague to take up a position at his alma mater not, as one might have expected, as a horn teacher but as Professor of valve trumpet and trombone. As his own teacher, Zalužan, was still active this was an expression of respect and loyalty on Kail’s part
Another horn-player, Edouard Constantin Lewy, was also ‘pushing the envelope’ with the new instrument. Like Kail, he had moved to Vienna (from Basel) in 1823. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung mentions Lewy’s “significant dexterity” in a concert of January, 1824. By November of that year he had become so esteemed that he felt able to organize a benefit concert for himself on the 21st in which he played Carl Maria von Weber’s Concertino “with great virtuosity”, Kreutzer’s Variations for horn and Friedrich Dionys Weber’s Horn Quartet. Whether this was one of the Trois Quatuors pour quatre Cors chromatiques is impossible to say. Kail would have been around and Gottfried Schunke, principal horn at Stuttgart, and another devotee of the valve horn gave a concert laden with horn music only a fortnight later on December 5th in which his horn-playing son, Ernst, also featured – so a quartet of Lewy, Kail and the Schunkes? The following is a speculative chronology:
F.D. Weber was already interested in valve horns as witness his Variations played by Kail in 1819. Sometime during 1824 he writes a horn quartet (to help entice Kail back to Prague?). After Kail’s return to Prague he sees it as part of his didactic purpose to compose more for the new instruments – two further quartets were composed in the following years. Marco Berra’s first edition bears the plate number 500 indicating a date somewhere between 1830 and 1831. Certainly one quartet was performed at the Conservatory on March 11th, 1831, by students Fausek, Permann, Skaupy and Towara On the inside there appeared the famous illustration of a horn with three Vienna double piston valves complete with a fingering chart and advice on how to move the valves ‘firmly and decisively’ and to ‘use alternative fingerings for suspect intonation’. These then were the first chamber pieces for an ensemble of brass instruments all of which were equipped with the new valve. - Chris Larkin 2014

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