(b Aschersleben, 10 Aug 1802; d Berlin, 4 Aug 1872). German musician and instrument designer. He was the most important member of a prominent German musical family. After receiving instruction in wind instruments from his father, Wilhelm studied in Dresden and Leipzig and in 1824 took up a professional appointment as a royal chamber musician in Berlin. In 1825 he reorganized a military band, introducing some valved instruments. From 1828 to 1843 he accepted various positions of leadership, ranging from the regimental band of the Royal Life Guards to the entire Prussian military musical establishment, with Wieprecht all the while remaining a civilian. At the founding of the German Empire in 1871, Wieprecht's musical organization was introduced in all the other German states.
His interest in wind instruments brought him into contact in 1828 with the firm of Griesling & Schlott, the makers of the first really practical piston valves. Soon after, he entered into a long-lasting association with J.G. and C.W. Moritz. Wieprecht's name has been associated since Kalkbrenner's time with the plump looking Berlin valve (Ger. pl. ‘Berliner Pumpen’), for which he was refused a Prussian patent in 1833. Heyde has shown, however, that there were actually two types of Berlin valve. Wieprecht's (which he called a ‘Stecherbüchsen-Ventil’) is distinguished by its valve loops, the inlets and outlets of which are on opposite sides of the valve casing, while a model devised by Stölzel (called by him a ‘Röhrenventil’) and for which a patent had also been refused in 1827 has slides, their inlets and outlets being on the same side of the casing. Patent or not, the Berlin valves were so successful that Adolphe Sax fitted out many of his instruments with them, calling them ‘cylinders’. (These are not to be confused with rotary valves, collectively called ‘Zylinder-Maschine’ in German.) A meeting between Sax and Wieprecht in Koblenz in 1845 was inconclusive.
In 1835, with J.G. Moritz, Wieprecht was granted a Prussian patent for a revolutionary new instrument, the wide-bore chromatic Bass-Tuba with five valves (later expanded to six; seeTuba (i)). His preoccupation with the problems of intonation presented by the combination of two or three valves led to his invention in 1838 of the ‘piangendo’, a device allowing valved brass instruments to play portamento.
Wieprecht’s enthusiasm for military music was not confined to brass; in 1839 he devised the Bathyphon, a military-style contrabass clarinet, made by the firm of Skorra. He also invented the ‘16füssiger Orgelbass’ (1845), a wide-bore brass contrabassoon with a novel mechanism; it was played by one hand on a one-octave keyboard. This led to C.W. Moritz's development of the ‘Claviatur-Contrafagott’, patented in 1856.
Wieprecht’s letters to various German musical papers (c1845) give the most complete near contemporary account of early valve mechanisms.
See alsoSaxhorn.
Waterhouse-LangwillI
A. Kalkbrenner: Wilhelm Wieprecht, Direktor: sein Leben und Wirken nebst einem Auszug seiner Schriften (Berlin, 1882)
H. Heyde: Das Ventilblasinstrument (Leipzig, 1987)
H. Heyde: ‘The Early Berlin Valve and an Unsigned Tuba at the Shrine to Music Museum’, JAMIS, xx (1994), 54–64
PHILIP BATE/EDWARD H. TARR