7 - The legacy of Brahms's clarinet music

Summary

Introduction: clarinet music after Brahms

After the brilliant creations of Brahms and Reger, public interest in the clarinet as a chamber music instrument seemed to become strangely paralysed. But today, thanks to the efforts of outstanding players and chamber music circles, the clarinet has regained its rightful place in the concert hall, especially as the radio has for many years made wide use of the solo player. Numerous works with solo clarinet have been written in recent decades, and most of them far exceed the level of the average work composed at the turn of the century…

So wrote the German clarinettist Oscar Kroll in a book which was in preparation during the 1930s. At the beginning of the twentieth century the most enduring composers for the clarinet seem to have been those with their own individual mode of expression rather than subscribers to the Brahms tradition. In radically expanding the clarinet's expressive range, Berg caused surprise and astonishment with his Vier Stücke Op. 5 (1913), damned with faint praise in Tuthill's article in Cobbett as ‘Very outré; interesting as studies in effects’. Meanwhile, the French school continued to flourish in its own distinctive vein, Debussy contributing a masterly and taxing example of the solo de concours with his Première rapsodie of 1910. The solo clarinet repertory was also soon to be imbued with jazz influence (Stravinsky) and neoclassical traits (Krenek and others).