In its widest sense, music for wind instruments. Within its ambit have come a variety of musical styles: for instance, the French commonly use the term ‘harmonie militaire’ to refer to military bands, even the massed wind bands of the Napoleonic era: Elgar wrote Harmony Music for his domestic wind quintet; the Germans refer to the wind quintet as the ‘Harmonie-Quintett’. The title of Haydn's Harmoniemesse (1802) is explained by the prominence of wind instruments in that work. Mendelssohn’s Harmoniemusik op.24 (1824) is for 23 wind instruments and percussion. In its more limited sense the term was fully current only from the mid-18th century until the 1830s when it was primarily applied to the wind bands (Harmonien) of the European aristocracy and the music written for them, and secondarily to their popular imitations in street bands (Mozart told in a letter to his father, 3 November 1781, of being serenaded by a street band containing two clarinets, two bassoons and two horns with his Serenade k375) and small military bands without heavy brass instruments or percussion. To translate ‘Harmonie’ simply as ‘wind band’ is vague, and as ‘military band’ generally wrong.
The nucleus of the Harmonie was a pair of horns, beneath which were bassoons (in early Harmoniemusik where there was only a single part two players would commonly play in unison) and above a pair of treble instruments, usually oboes or clarinets; by the 1780s it was standard practice to employ both oboes and clarinets in an octet Harmonie. Flutes, english horns and basset-horns were also occasionally used as alternatives, or in addition. The trombone, serpent, double bass and double bassoon were variously employed to give a 16' quality: the instrument used depended upon availability, and such parts were often optional. The principal function of Harmonien, the only sources of musical entertainment for some patrons, was to provide background music at dinners and for social events, but they also performed in public and private concerts, where they occasionally accompanied a soloist.
Wind bands of clarinets, horns and bassoons were employed in France by the 1760s, and of clarinets and horns even before that. The Duke of Orléans, the Prince of Condé and the Prince of Monaco retained the three best known, and these were probably the first to give public performances, appearing frequently at the Concert Spirituel during the 1760s and 1770s. French military bands of the period were modelled on the court Harmonien, and in general remained no larger than a sextet even as late as the Revolution. English Harmoniemusik existed at a popular level in public performances given, for instance, in the open air at St James's by one of the small military bands (of clarinets, horns and bassoons) and at Ranelagh Gardens in the 1790s; pairs of horns were often played in the pleasure gardens. At the court, only the Prince of Wales retained a Tafelmusik, during the 1780s. The repertory of French and English Harmoniemusik also differed: the French used pièces d'harmonie, which were a group of six or so short pieces normally selected and arranged from opera originals, whereas the English developed a peculiarly individual repertory of ‘military divertimentos’, long sequences of short movements which were a mixture of original, dance and military movements, sometimes with pieces taken from the works of other composers. Somewhat rarer was the sonata type, best exemplified by J.C. Bach's six sinfonias and four quintets or ‘Military Pieces’.
In central Europe, the traditions of employing a wind band go back at least to the beginning of the 18th century: a band of oboes and horns was employed at the Prussian court in 1705 and bands of oboes, tenor oboes and bassoons were known even earlier. Harmoniemusik became more widespread in the second half of the century. Prince Paul Anton Esterházy retained a sextet Feldmusik from 1761, and the divertimentos for pairs of oboes, horns and bassoons recently written by the new Kapellmeister Haydn probably formed part of its repertory. When Emperor Franz I visited Prince Philipp Carl of Wallerstein in 1764 he heard French horns and clarinets play at table. Dinner music was written by Mozart for the Archbishop of Salzburg in the mid-1770s, and a wind band played such music in Albert's tavern in Munich in 1777.
The octet, or ‘full Harmonie’ was introduced in central Europe by Prince Schwarzenberg, who in about 1776 gathered together a group of oboe, english horn, horn and bassoon players. But it only came of age when in 1782 Emperor Joseph appointed a Harmonie consisting of the finest available performers on oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon. This ensemble founded a Viennese tradition, its characteristics later mirrored by the ensembles of several other aristocrats, including Prince Esterházy and Prince Liechtenstein. The performers were first-class professional musicians, not liveried servants such as had often been employed for this kind of domestic music previously. The emperor's Harmonie, for example, originally consisted of Georg Triebensee and Went (oboes), the Stadler brothers (clarinets), Rupp and Eisen (horns) and Kauzner and Drobney (bassoons), all members of the Burgtheater orchestra. Their repertory was technically and musically more advanced than anything written earlier; there can be little doubt, for instance, that Mozart's two serenades, k375 and 388/384a, and Krommer’s 13 Harmonien were composed for one of the Viennese Harmonien. The greater part of it, and that which they used principally as dinner music, was something completely new, although it undoubtedly had strong connections with the French pièces d'harmonie of the 1760s and 1770s. This consisted of full-length transcriptions of opera and ballet scores. It was normal for these to contain 12 or more near-complete movements, and sometimes even the recitative was included. It was rare for a composer to make such arrangements himself (although Mozart undertook such a task with Die Entführung aus dem Serail; letter to his father, 20 July 1782); usually it was the work of the director of the Harmonie that played it. Thus Went made many transcriptions for the emperor's Harmonie, and Joseph Triebensee and his successor, Sedlak (who was responsible for the authorized transcription of Beethoven's Fidelio), still more for Prince Liechtenstein's Harmonie. The emperor's library acquired many of their transcriptions. The influence of this Viennese practice was widespread throughout Europe; Maximilian Franz, in taking his Viennese Harmonie to Bonn when he became Elector of Cologne in 1784, pioneered the new vogue in Germany and the Lobkowitz Harmonie was probably the leading exponent of the Viennese tradition in Prague. Many Harmonie transcriptions were published throughout Europe during the next half-century, and many more existed in manuscript in various court and monastery libraries. Probably the best-known of all transcriptions is Mozart's of ‘Non più andrai’ from his Le nozze di Figaro (along with music by Sarti and Soler) as dinner music in Don Giovanni; he also used a Harmonie ensemble for a serenade in the garden scene of Così fan tutte.
The privations caused by the Napoleonic wars forced most of the Viennese aristocracy to discontinue patronage of their Harmonien, though those of the emperor and Prince Liechtenstein apparently survived with little interruption even into the 1830s. In Germany the Duke of Sondershausen retained his until 1835 when it was replaced by a full orchestra. References to Harmoniemusik beyond this date are rare.
European Harmoniemusik was imported by emigrant Moravians into the USA, where it remained in vogue well into the 19th century. It became a custom to play Harmoniemusik in the evenings from the roof of the Single Brethren's House at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and 14 Parthien for clarinets, horns and bassoons were written by the Moravian composer David Moritz Michael for this purpose. He was also responsible for the Harmoniemusik which accompanied a peculiar local event at Bethlehem every Whit Monday (c1809–13), a boat trip down the Lehigh River to a whirlpool and back. The music was planned to reflect the moods of each phase of the journey.
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V. Röser: L'essai d'instruction à l'usage de ceux qui composent pour la clarinette et le cor avec des remarques sur l'harmonie à deux clarinettes, deux cors et deux bassons (Paris, 1764/R)
J.F. von Schönfeld: Jb der Tonkunst von Wien und Prag (Prague, 1796/R)
A.F.C. Kollmann: An Essay on Practical Musical Composition (London, 1799/R), 94ff
L.J. Francoeur: Traité général des voix et des instruments d’orchestre (Paris,1813)
E. Holmes: A Ramble among the Musicians of Germany (London, 1828/R)
E. Hanslick: Geschichte des Concertwesens in Wien, i (Vienna, 1869/R)
R.A. Grider: ‘Music in Bethlehem’, in J.H. Martin: Historical Sketch of Bethlehem in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1872/R, 2/1873), 157
S. Sadie: ‘The Wind Music of J.C. Bach’, ML, xxxvii (1956), 107–17
D. Whitwell: ‘The Incredible Vienna Octet School’, The Instrumentalist, xxiv (1969), no.3, pp.31–5; no.4, pp.40–43; no.5, pp.42–6 (1970), no.6, pp.38–40; no.7, pp.31–; no.8, pp.31–3
R. Hellyer: ‘“Fidelio” für neunstimmige Harmonie’, ML, liii (1972), 242–53
D.N. Leeson and D. Whitwell: ‘Mozart's “Spurious” Wind Octets’, ML, liii (1972), 377–99
R. Hellyer: Harmoniemusik: Music for Small Wind Band in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries (diss., U. of Oxford, 1973)
R. Hellyer: ‘Mozart’s Harmoniemusik’, MR, xxxiv (1973), 146–56
R. Hellyer: ‘The Transcriptions for Harmonie of Die Entführung aus dem Serail’, PRMA, cii (1975–6), 53–66
R. Hellyer: ‘The Harmoniemusik of the Moravian Communities in America’, FAM, xxvii (1980), 95–108
R. Hellyer: ‘Mozart's Harmoniemusik and its Publishers’, MT, cxxii (1981), 468–72
R. Hellyer: ‘The Wind Ensembles of the Esterházy Princes, 1761–1813’, Haydn Yearbook 1984, 5–92
B. Blomhert: The Harmoniemusik of Die Entführung aus dem Serail by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: a Study of its Authority and a Critical Edition (The Hague, 1987)
W. Suppan: ‘Die Harmoniemusik: das private Repräsentations - und Vergnügungsensemble des mitteleuropäischen Adels zwischen Kunst- und gesellschaftlichem Gebrauchswert’, Musica privata: die Rolle der Musik im privaten Leben: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag von Walter Salmen (Innsbruck, 1991), 151–65
J. Sehnal: ‘Populární hudba na Morave na pocátku 19. století’ [Popular music in Moravia at the beginning of the 19th century], OM, xxiv/3 (1992), 82–7
For further bibliography see Divertimento and Band (i).
ROGER HELLYER