Heckelphone.

A double-reed instrument with a wide conical bore and large tone holes. The most important member of the family is the instrument in C, pitched an octave below the oboe. This was developed by Wilhelm Heckel (1856–1909) and his sons Wilhelm Hermann and August (see Heckel (i)) to fill Wagner's request, expressed in a meeting of 1879, for a baritone voice to fill out the double-reed choir. Wagner had envisioned an instrument combining ‘something of the character of the oboe with the mellow but powerful sound of the alphorn’. Heckel did not succeed in producing such an instrument during Wagner's lifetime, but in 1904 he introduced one modelled on the Basse de musette, a forgotten instrument with a broad conical bore, large tone holes, a broad bell and a coiled brass crook (see Hautbois d'église). The new instrument was built in three sections, retaining the broad bore proportions of its model, and with a large globular bell (vented by a single hole; see fig.1), to which was attached a short metal peg designed to support the instrument's not inconsiderable weight. The tone holes were as large as the bore would allow, the key system based on that of the German oboe, and the compass B–g''. Within a year Heckel had redesigned the lower part of the instrument, adding an insert between the lower joint and the bell for the B key and an added A key. During the 1920s the instrument was further redesigned by Heckel, and a version of the Conservatoire key system was developed for it (see Oboe, §II, 3(iv)), as well as a smaller bell vented with three holes and closed with a perforated cap. The reed is either a small version of a bassoon reed (the earliest players being bassoonists) or an enlarged english horn reed (as many modern players are oboists), placed on a curved crook. Music for the heckelphone is notated in the treble clef an octave above sounding pitch.

Richard Strauss was the first to write for the heckelphone, with an important part in Salome (1905). He scored for it in a number of other works between 1905 and 1915. It was used by Max von Schillings (Mona Lisa (1915) begins with a heckelphone solo), Orff, Varèse, Hindemith and others, and later especially by Henze. It was also used in Germany (later increasingly elsewhere) to play bass oboe parts in the works of English composers such as Holst (The Planets) and Delius; this practice has given rise to the incorrect idea that these parts were originally written for the heckelphone.

The success of the heckelphone led to the development of the two smaller instruments, the piccolo-heckelphone in F (1905) and the terz-heckelphone in E (1915), sounding respectively a 4th and a minor 3rd higher than the treble oboe (fig.2). Both had a written compass of b to e'''. Strauss reported that the piccolo-heckelphone made an expedient replacement for the solo trumpet in Bach's Second Brandenburg Concerto, and the instrument was included in a few new works, but it never gained popularity and only 13 were made. The terz-heckelphone had a proportionally larger bore than the piccolo-heckelphone and possessed, according to W.H. Heckel, ‘a full, round and sonorous shawm-like sound’, but only a handful were produced.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MGGl (‘Heckel’, H. Becker)

W. Altenburg: ‘Das “Heckelphon”, ein neues Blasinstrument’, ZI xxiv (1903–4), 1023–4

W. Altenburg: ‘Neue Mitteilungen über Holzinstrumentenbau’, ZI, xxvii (1906–7), 345–6

E. Teuchert and E.W. Haupt: Musik-Instrumentenkunde in Wort und Bild, ii (Leipzig, 1911), 68–77; (2/1927), 69–78

L. Bechler and B. Rahm: Die Oboe und die ihr verwandten Instrumente nebst biographischen Skizzen der bedeutendsten ihrer Meister (Leipzig, 1914/R), 94–7

G. Joppig: Die Entwicklung der Doppelrohrblatt-Instrumente von 1850 bis heute (Frankfurt, 1980)

G. Joppig: ‘80 Jahre Heckelphone’, Das Musikinstrument, xxxiii (1984), 22–6; Eng. trans., rev., Journal of the International Double Reed Society, xiv (1986), 70–75

PHILIP BATE/MICHAEL FINKELMAN