Famous Trumpet Concerti
Sonata Opus 2 No.11 - Benedetto Marcello (1686 - 1739)
Sonata a cinque No.1 - Giuseppe Torelli (1658 - 1709)
Concerto in D Major - Georg Philipp Telemann (1681 - 1767)
Concerto in D Minor - George Frideric Handel (1685 - 1759)
-(reconstructed by Jean Thilde)
Concerto in D Major - Leopold Mozart (1719 - 1787)
Concerto in E Flat Major - Joseph Haydn (1732 - 1809)
The trumpet has had a long and eventful history, in one form
or another, whether to alarm the enemy in battle or to rouse the dead at the
Day of Judgement. Fifteenth century princes in Europe saw the instrument as one
to boost the importance of a ruler, Matthias Corvinus boasting a band of 24 trumpets
and the Sforzas in Milan 18 and a dozen trumpeters are listed in the Salzburg
archives in the time of Mozart.
The Baroque trumpet, for which Torelli and his
contemporaries wrote, was confined in range to the notes of the harmonic
series, so that lower notes were widely spaced and step-wise melodies were only
possible at a high register.
Where more was required than a mere bugler's summon to
the cook-house a player had to cultivate the difficult and virtuoso art of clarino
playing, using the upper partials of the series. The technique was developed
particularly at the basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, home of so many
distinguished instrumental players. Here, in the last decade of the seventeenth
century, Giuseppe Torelli wrote a series of splendid pieces for Giovanni
Pellegrino Brandi, who was employed for major festivals at San Petronio for
some twenty years. Many of these compositoins follow the then established
pattern of the
Sonata da chiesa (church sonata), with a sequence of
movements slow-fast-slow-fast, and were designed to mark the beginning of the Mass.
The sonata by the Venetian writer and composer Benedetto
Marcello, here scored for trumpet and strings, is typical of the existing style
of instrumental music, both in its sequence of movements and in its use of the
solo instrument. A near contemporary of Vivaldi, whom he satirised in his II teatro
alla moda, a Hogarthian caricature of contemporary operatic practices, Marcello
and his elder brother Alessandro were gentlemen amateurs in the art of
composition, but none the less proficient for that, if less prolific than some
of their contemporaries.
Telemann, a friend and successful rival of Johann
Sebastian Bach and god-father of the latter's distinguished son Carl Philipp
Emanuel, was educated at the University of Leipzig, where he established the Collegium
musicum that Bach was later to direct after his appointment as Cantor at the Thomasschule
in 1723. Telemann was the choice of the Leipzig city fathers for that position,
but he wisely chose to remain in Hamburg, where he spent much of his professional
life. On his death he was succeeded as director of music of the five Hamburg
city churches by his god-son. In Hamburg Telemann had opportunities to provide
music of all kinds, for church, theatre and home. Of his 47 surviving solo
concertos, one is for solo trumpet.
Handel, established in England in the second decade of
the eighteenth century until his death in 1759, made considerable use of the
powers of endurance of the trumpeter Valentine Snow, sergeant-trumpeter to the
king from 1753. No trumpet concerto survives, although the oratorios provide copious
evidence of Handel's handling of the instrument. The D Minor Trumpet Concerto
is arranged by Jean Thilde from a flute sonata, a procedure not entirely foreign
to the composer's own economical practice of borrowing from his own and others'
music as occasion required.
By the time of Leopold Mozart, father of Amadeus, and for
much of his career Vice-Kapellmeister at the court of the Archbishop of
Salzburg, the Baroque trumpet had begun to go out of fashion. Its part in
orchestral texture was to become much more limited, as the suaver tones of violin,
oboe or flute replaced the heroic pretentions of the trumpet. Leopold Mozart's
concerto for the trumpet was written in 1762, coming, therefore, at a time when
he was already sacrificing his own interests to those of his son, whose genius
he had been quick to perceive.
Joseph Haydn's famous trumpet concerto marked a new stage
in the development of the instrument. Baroque clarino-playing was something of
the past, but now attempts were being made to widen the range of the
instrument, which earlier in the eighteenth century had reached unparallelled
heights. One later technological development was the keyed-trumpet introduced
to Vienna by Anton Weidinger, who had been appointed trumpeter at the court
opera in 1792. This instrument, which enjoyed some success until the
introduction of the modern valve trumpet in the 1820s, allowed a player to play
the consecutive of the scale in the lower register of the trumpet. Haydn's
concerto, written for Weidinger in 1796, must have startled contemporary
audiences by its novelty. At the first performance of the new concerto in Vienna
in 1800 a trumpet melody was heard in a lower register than had hitherto been
practicable. Once neglected, Haydn's Trumpet Concerto has now become one of the
best known of all concertos.