Berlioz and the bassoon

[00:00:00]One of the things that you'll probably notice the first time you see a Berlioz orchestra is that he has two flutes, two oboes, two clarinets, and very often four bassoons.

[00:00:13]>> [music] >> Berlioz is famously one of the great romantics, but he never mastered an instrument, not even the piano. Which is weird because he went on to write one of the most famous treatises on instrumentation, which was published in 1844.

[00:00:30]And in it, he talks about each of the instruments in great detail. And for the bassoon, he comments that the instrument lacks sonority, meaning that it is not very loud. And that explains why he often uses four rather than two.

[00:00:47]>> [music] [music] >> For our latest Berlioz patch, we're all using instruments that were made in Paris during the first part of the 19th century. And we've got quite an interesting case because we have two instruments that were both made by the same person, and his name was Frédéric Guillaume Adler. And this instrument here is from one of my colleagues. This was made in some point in the 1820s, and it's made from maple. You can see it's got lots of beautiful brass keys on it.

[00:01:22]The key work is not too dissimilar to an instrument that would have been known to Beethoven. So, we've got a handful of keys for the lower register, a couple of speaker keys that help with the high notes, and then a few extra keys um down the front. One of the very special things about this instrument is that it comes with a tuning slide. Now, I don't move it, but you can twist this, and this part of the instrument gets longer.

[00:01:47]And the reason for that would be that um back then, there were a lot of traveling musicians, and pitch in different towns varied, and it depended often on the pitch of the church bells. So, if you were a traveling musician, you pick up your bassoon and you turn your tuning slide and then you can play in tune with the local band.

[00:02:04]Another thing I really like about this instrument is you've got these what we call rollers and it means you can slide between the keys really easily. And these rollers, you know, with nearly two well, 200 years later are still working really, really well.

[00:02:19]I've got for you a short extract from the final movement of Symphony Fantastique, which is the D zero theme.

[00:02:26]And in his treatise, Berlioz describes the bassoon as grotesque.

[00:02:35]>> [music] [music] [music] >> This here is my instrument and it's made by the same man, Adler.

[00:02:51]But this is about 15 years later. This is sometime in the mid-1830s.

[00:02:56]And there are lots of differences. The most obvious two I would say are firstly that it's made of rosewood, so it's a much darker and also a much, much heavier piece of wood.

[00:03:06]And also, obviously, there's this beautiful flare for the bell, which is a really unique feature of the instrument.

[00:03:13]When Berlioz was alive, people thought he was a bit mad. There's this famous cartoon of him conducting an orchestra and in the background you can see lots of instruments with this kind of shaped bell and I mean, who knows? They could be brass instruments, but there's part of me that likes to think maybe they're bassoons and people are mocking the fact that he was obsessed with having so many bassoons.

[00:03:38]>> [music] [music] >> You can see, compared to the previous instrument, I've got a lot more key work. I've got many more keys for the lower notes, meaning that playing chromatically is is easier.

[00:04:00]And I've got more speaker keys helping with higher notes, plus this magic key here, which if I press, it actually moves this thing up here, which closes a hole on the crook, which makes it easier to play high notes if that hole is shut.

[00:04:13]This key here is a C sharp key. So, if you play with your C in your left hand and then push that down, it opens a hole here and you get the most perfectly in tune C sharp. The problem I have is that when I'm holding the instrument and I'm playing it, that key bumps against my leg, which means that it squeaks all the time, which other people find funny, but I find it quite annoying.

[00:04:37]Um and I think it's interesting that that key kind of hung hangs around for a bit in the 19th century, but by the late 19th century, it's disappeared from instruments. So, clearly there were other people who thought it didn't really work as well.

[00:04:50]>> [music] [music] >> And then the other thing is I've got this new B flat key, which at the time it'd been very exciting.

[00:05:06]But, it's you can see up close that it's been moved.

[00:05:13]Back in the 19th century, if you bought your instrument from a maker and there was something you didn't like about it, you could take it back and ask them to adjust it and I can see that something like this has happened on this instrument because you can see where other holes have been drilled in or perhaps where the screws were in for the keys and they've been moved. And I for my hands, this is all a little bit tight. I can sort of make it work, but um the addition of an extra B flat key would definitely have been very exciting for players back then.

[00:05:41]Because of the materials, this bassoon has a particularly strong tenor register. But, when you read Berlioz's treatise, he's not particularly complimentary about the bassoon when it's playing high. In fact, he describes it as painful and miserable.

[00:05:56]>> [music] [music] [music]