Bach trumpet

(Ger. Bachtrompete).

A misnomer still prevalent in German-speaking countries for any high Trumpet used in modern performances of Baroque music. Originally, the term was applied to a straight trumpet in A (a 5th higher than the Baroque trumpet in D and a semitone lower than the modern B trumpet) with two valves; such an instrument was first employed by the Berlin trumpeter Julius Kosleck in September 1884 in Eisenach. He also played it on 21 March 1885 in a historic performance of Bach’s Mass in B minor at the Royal Albert Hall in London, with Walter Morrow and John Solomon playing the second and third parts on normal instruments. Kosleck’s trumpet was described as being in B/A and possessing a posthorn (conical) bore. Its mouthpiece was also deeply conical. Morrow and Solomon immediately had such instruments made (they were apparently imported by Silvani & Smith from France), although theirs had the standard cylindro-conical trumpet bore and were played with a normal trumpet mouthpiece. Morrow first employed his at the 1886 Leeds Festival; Solomon’s instrument still survives.

The public was misled by journalists to believe that the ‘Bach trumpet’ was a replica of the valveless trumpet of Bach’s day, even though W.F.H. Blandford, with Morrow’s support, published an article thoroughly exploding the fallacy. The straight ‘Bach trumpet’ in B/A was, furthermore, discarded as soon as still shorter trumpets in D were made, also in the straight form but with three valves. The first was manufactured by Mahillon in 1892. Even before that, in 1885, Besson of Paris had made a high G trumpet for the Parisian Teste for a performance of Bach’s Magnificat, and V.C. (not Barthélémy) Mahillon is said to have invented a so-called ‘piccolo B flat “Bach” trumpet’ a year later. The shorter instruments, with correspondingly greater distance between the notes of the harmonic series in any given register, considerably simplified the problem of accuracy in the high register. Curiously, the term ‘Bach trumpet’ was used to refer to the shorter instruments as well as to Kosleck’s original model.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

W. Menke: History of the Trumpet of Bach and Handel (London, 1934/R), 228

W.F.H. Blandford: ‘The “Bach Trumpet”’, MMR, lxv (1935), 49–51, 73–6, 97–100

P. Bate: The Trumpet and Trombone (London, 1966, 2/1972), 174–80

H. Heyde: Das Ventilblasinstrument (Leipzig, 1987), 199–200

W. Waterhouse: The New Langwill Index (London, 1993), 249, 273

R. Dahlqvist and B. Eklund: ‘The Bach Renaissance and the Trumpet’, Euro-ITG Newsletter (1995/1), 12–17

R. Dahlqvist and B. Eklund: ‘The Brandenburg Concerto No. 2’, Euro-ITG Newsletter (1995/2), 4–9

EDWARD H. TARR