2 - Brahms and the orchestral clarinet

Summary

Brahms's orchestras

Brahms must have experienced the playing of various clarinettists, since a number of different centres became associated with the premières of his orchestral works, including Vienna (Opp. 50, 56a, 73, 81, 90), Hamburg (Opp. 12, 13, 16), Karlsruhe (Opp. 54, 55, 68), Leipzig (Opp. 45, 77) and Hanover (Opp. 11, 15). In the current climate of interest in late nineteenth-century performance practice it is significant that these orchestras varied considerably in size during the period in which Brahms was composing orchestral music. In the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra (which Mendelssohn had directed during the 1830s) the woodwind personnel numbered approximately ten players c. 1844. By 1881 it had increased to fifteen, with the addition of another oboe, clarinet and bassoon, as well as cor anglais, bass clarinet and contrabassoon. This orchestra as a whole totalled between fifty and sixty players during the time of Schumann's association. But as late as 1864, the Düsseldorf orchestra, which Schumann had previously conducted, numbered only thirty-four players. In 1859 Richard Wagner reported, ‘I am not aware that the number of permanent members of an orchestra has, in any German town, been rectified according to the requirements of modern instrumentation’. Written after hearing the Meiningen orchestra under von Bülow in 1884, a report by the critic Eduard Hanslick suggests that the orchestra's forty-eight players placed it at a disadvantage by comparison with the ninety-strong Vienna Philharmonic.