Traditional scholarship has stated that the serpent and ophicleide (as well as their successor, the tuba) were developed and added to the standard orchestra to add a bass voice to the brass, allowing a tonal compass to match a similar downward expansion in the strings and woodwinds. A closer reading of the earliest scores calling for these instruments reveals a more coloristic purpose, related to timbre as much as to compass. Indeed, the fact that composers rarely wrote for serpent and ophicleide makes two points: it proves them to be inadequate choices as a brass bass, and when they were called for, they had an expressive, often descriptive purpose. Despite his conservative musical education supervised by Carl Friedrich Zelter, the seventeen-year-old Mendelssohn, under the influence of A. B. Marx, used the Corno inglese di basso, an upright version of the serpent, in his Overture to A Midsummer Night's Dream to give a more rustic flavor to Bottom's ass-braying. Even when the English bass horn functioned as a bass voice, it was playing in contexts that were descriptive, where it often demonstrated its musical inadequacy. Berlioz's descriptive writing for the serpent and ophicleide are well known. A remarkable feature which Symphonie fantastique shares with works by the other composers is the confidence Berlioz showed in the ophicleide's functional independence by occasionally giving it an arpeggiated figure while the rest of the orchestra sustains the chord. Wagner's writing for the serpent and ophicleide in Rienzi follows the less imaginative conventions of French grand opera. In Der fliegende Holländer the ophicleide, while not used as descriptively as Mendelssohn and Berlioz, nevertheless contributes significantly to Wagner's emerging focus on the inner lives of his characters and expressive commentary on the stage action. Tubists should consider the expressive implications and the unique timbre of these instruments when performing works originally written for the forerunners of the tuba.

In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts spielte Mendelssohns Musik in Kompositionslehren noch eine keineswegs unbedeutende Rolle. Insbesondere in deren Abteilungen zur sogenannten freien Komposition, soweit sie Fragen der musikalischen Form und der Orchestration betrafen, wurde Mendelssohn oft zitiert. Vor allem in Salomon Jadassohns Kompositionslehre erlangte sein Werk Modellcharakter. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie dieser Lehrer am Leipziger Konservatorium im späten 19. Jahrhundert auf der einen Seite Mendelssohns musikalische und ästhetische Haltung fortwirken lassen wollte, wie er sich jedoch andererseits bereits vorsichtig von gewissen Aspekten des Mendelssohnschen Komponierens distanzierte. Aus um 1900 geschriebenen Lehren verschwindet Mendelssohns Name zusehends ebenso wie die Namen jüdischer oder französischer Komponisten wie Halévy oder Meyerbeer. / In the second half of the 19th century Mendelssohn’s music played a prominent role in treatises upon composition. Especially the volumes on socalled „free composition“, including recommendations concernig musical forms, instrumentation and orchestration, often quote from his works. Mendelssohn claimed the figure of a model-composer. The paper concentrates on Mendelssohn as a model for young composers, as it was given by teachers at the Leipzig conservatoire. Treatises upon musical forms and instrumentation, written by Mendelssohn’s successors at the conservatoire show how the teachers on the one hand try to continue Mendelssohn’s compositional attitude and on the other hand try to part themselves from certain aspects of Mendelssohn’s music.

In der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts spielte Mendelssohns Musik in Kompositionslehren noch eine keineswegs unbedeutende Rolle. Insbesondere in deren Abteilungen zur sogenannten freien Komposition, soweit sie Fragen der musikalischen Form und der Orchestration betrafen, wurde Mendelssohn oft zitiert. Vor allem in Salomon Jadassohns Kompositionslehre erlangte sein Werk Modellcharakter. Der Beitrag zeigt, wie dieser Lehrer am Leipziger Konservatorium im späten 19. Jahrhundert auf der einen Seite Mendelssohns musikalische und ästhetische Haltung fortwirken lassen wollte, wie er sich jedoch andererseits bereits vorsichtig von gewissen Aspekten des Mendelssohnschen Komponierens distanzierte. Aus um 1900 geschriebenen Lehren verschwindet Mendelssohns Name zusehends ebenso wie die Namen jüdischer oder französischer Komponisten wie Halévy oder Meyerbeer. / In the second half of the 19th century Mendelssohn’s music played a prominent role in treatises upon composition. Especially the volumes on socalled „free composition“, including recommendations concernig musical forms, instrumentation and orchestration, often quote from his works. Mendelssohn claimed the figure of a model-composer. The paper concentrates on Mendelssohn as a model for young composers, as it was given by teachers at the Leipzig conservatoire. Treatises upon musical forms and instrumentation, written by Mendelssohn’s successors at the conservatoire show how the teachers on the one hand try to continue Mendelssohn’s compositional attitude and on the other hand try to part themselves from certain aspects of Mendelssohn’s music.

S. 1 - 45

S. 46 - 88

No description available.

Titelblatt

S. 1 - 39

S. 39 - 76

No description available.