Brahms wrote for the natural horn in all of his works, but wrote for it in a period when the valved horn was in widespread use. Remembering that the valve was invented by 1814, that the valved horn was in fairly common use in Austria and Germany by around 1850, and that, for example, Brahms first symphony was completed in 1876! That is pretty late for natural horn.
As his orchestral works are such standards, the horn writing remains something that is both fascinating and puzzling to us today. I have looked at this topic quite a bit, and it boils down pretty quickly in my mind to two key points:
- Brahms clearly did write all of his horn parts for natural horn,
- But did the players of the time actually perform them on natural horns? No.
As to why he wrote for natural horn, part of it certainly is tradition, and that tradition also mixes in with other things including an anti-Wagner stance on the part of Brahms. The style of natural horn writing does mark his music with a type of sound that is unmistakable.
He wrote his Horn Trio before the orchestral works — as background, please read this article before the deeper look that follows.
A deeper look
The remainder of this article was for many years posted as part of a longer article on Horn Articles Online. A version of these materials was also published in “Brahms and the Orchestral Horn,” The Horn Call 52, No. 1 (October, 2021), 47-51.
In an examination of his orchestral writing the Symphony No. 1, Op. 68, completed in 1876, is an appropriate place to start. While we don’t have the quotations from his writings to shed light on his intentions as we do in the case of the Trio (see this article for more on that), Brahms in his first symphony makes several musical statements about his intentions in his horn writing. The following is a typical example.
Brahms, Symphony No. 1, Op. 68, mvt. II
In this example he calls for the horn in E and requests only notes playable on the natural horn. He is consistent with this style of writing throughout the symphony, calling for four horns crooked in pairs in the keys of C, E-flat, E, and H (B-natural in German notation). Even a casual look at the parts will confirm that clearly he is writing for the natural horn or he would not have selected the keys that he selected, the notes that he selected, and the divisions seen melodically between the two pairs of horns crooked in different keys.
There are two big issues to consider in relation to this writing. The first is Brahms intentions as notated in the parts; in this case, the intention is clearly to write the parts in a manner that would leave them performable on the natural horn. But the second issue looms large in the background. How did players actually perform these parts in the period? They almost certainly performed the work on the valved horn in early performances.
A strong statement that Brahms may be making musically by his continuing to write for the natural horn is this: to write for the natural horn was one of the most anti-Wagner stances he could have taken in relation to the charged musical climate of the period. Even if this was not his intention, he certainly gained something by writing for the natural horn, an almost intangible aspect but one that we, as horn players, are sensitive to. Horn writing conceived for the natural horn is inherently “hornistic;” it has a sound that sounds “right” for the horn, a sound that cannot be mistaken for a part written for another instrument in the same range as the horn. Being as well versed in the natural horn as Brahms was, this “sound” issue alone must have been highly significant.
His next major symphonic work, the Symphony No.2, Op. 73, composed in 1877, raises even more questions, most notably with his further request of the B-natural crook. Does Brahms have an axe to grind? This key was an extremely rare key to be found in a natural horn part in the classical period and he must have realized as well that it would be difficult to transpose this key onto the F crook on the valved horn. However, if you finger 123 on the F crook on a valved horn you get the key of B-natural. It is almost as if Brahms is daring the first horn to play this section the “right” way, without transposition, by fingering the B-natural crook with the valves and using natural horn technique.
Horn players themselves however seem to have came up with another solution to the difficult transposition even in the period. The famous Leipzig horn teacher and player Friedrich Gumpert (1841-1906) included the excerpt in the following manner in volume VIII of his Orchesterstudien (Solobuch) für Horn, published between 1886 and 1891 [12].
Brahms Symphony No. 2 excerpt as presented by Gumpert
In other words, Gumpert suggested transposing the part not onto the F crook but onto the E crook, where the transposition would be at an interval of the fourth instead of the augmented fourth required on the F crook. In this period crooks were still used on the valved horn, so this approach makes perfect sense [13].
In the Symphony No. 2 Brahms also requested the C, D, E, and G crooks. Valved horns were available with all of these crooks at the time. Horns constructed to take terminal crooks could typically be crooked as high as B-flat alto. Even fixed leadpipe models could take crooks in the period. This is notable in relation to the G crook as a horn of the general design illustrated below (this particular horn is a Geyer, but based on a design that dates to the 19th century) could be crooked as high as horn in G. As it stands in the photo this horn is in F; but with a straight tuning slide (the tuning slide on the horn has an extra turn) this horn would stand in G. We can’t be sure, but perhaps this had some influence on Brahms to not request crooks higher than G.
One of his next orchestral works was his Academische Festouverture [Academic Festival Overture], Op. 80, composed in 1880. In this work we can glean another significant insight from passage below.
Brahms, Academic Festival Overture, Op. 80
In this passage he requests certain notes to be performed Gestopft [stopped] at times in all four parts. These notes would have been performed stopped on the natural horn in this context but would have been performed open on the valved horn. This notation could be seen as an admission by Brahms that he realized his horn parts were in fact being performed on the valved horn; the notation makes it clear however that these specific locations were intentional stopped effects that must be performed stopped even if performed on the valved horn [14].
[Another article on this excerpt may be found here.]
This notation clearly harkens to statements of Hector Berlioz (1803-1869). In his Grand traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes (1843) he wrote,
Many composers show themselves opposed to this new instrument [the valved horn], because, since its introduction into orchestras, certain horn-players, using the pistons for playing ordinary [natural] horn parts, find it more convenient to produce by this mechanism, as open notes, notes intentionally written as closed notes by the author. This is, in fact, a dangerous abuse; but it is for orchestral conductors to prevent its increase; and, moreover, it should not be lost sight of that the horn with pistons, in the hands of a clever player, can give all the closed sounds of the ordinary horn, and yet more; since it can execute the whole scale without employing a single open note.[15]
This passage is especially relevant to his own Symphonie Fantastique (1832), movement IV, where in a note to the published score (1845) Berlioz requested at the beginning of the movement that the horns “produce the stopped tones with the hand without using the valves” (“faites les sons bouchés avec la main sans employer les cylindres“); this instruction is almost universally ignored today [16].
Berlioz, Symphonie Fantastique, mvt. IV
Like Berlioz, Brahms also clearly did not want his intentional stopped horn effects to be lost if performed on the valved horn. In fact, you can see notations of this same type in the first symphony of Brahms at the beginning of the second movement, so he was very aware of this issue right from the beginning of his symphonic writing.
As we arrive at the later orchestral works of Brahms we see that he continues to write in a way that his parts are at least theoretically playable on the natural horn. In these works Brahms pushes the limits of natural horn technique with the knowledge that the parts would in fact most likely be performed on the valved horn. Passages such as the following are playable on the natural horn, but most would agree that this would lay better on the valved horn.
Brahms, Symphony No. 3, Op. 90, mvt. III
The die was cast, he wrote the way he wrote (for the natural horn), and players played the way they played (on the valved horn).
One final thought. Is it really natural horn writing if nobody played it on natural horn at the time of composition? Brahms did certainly write only for the natural horn, but there is a case to be made that he knew at some point that players would play the parts on valved horns and at that point the writing does in a sense cease to be natural horn writing and becomes something of an exercise in notations and transposition.
But what an exercise!
NOTES:
12. This dating is based on the listing of this work in volume 10 of Friedrich Hofmeister, ed. Handbuch der Musikalischen Literatur (Leipzig: Hofmeister, 1893), 260, which covers the years 1886-91. All of the published works of Gumpert misspell his family name as “Gumbert” as is noted in Norman Schweikert, “Gumpert, not Gumbert!,” The Horn Call 1, no. 2 (May, 1971), 45-46. Also refer to this article in Horn Artcies Online.
13. See for example “A Letter From Anton Horner,” The Horn Call 23, no. 2 (April, 1986), 91-93, and also my article “Crooks and the 19th-Century Horn,” The Horn Call 30, no. 1 (November, 1999), 49-58.
14. Brahms thus clearly intended this passage to have somewhat distant sounding “natural horn” stopping which is less harsh and buzzy than the fully stopped sound that is typical in performances today.
15. Hector Berlioz, A Treatise On Modern Instrumentation and Orchestration, trans. Mary Cowden Clarke (London: Novello, n.d.), 141-142.
16. See Hector Berlioz, Fantastic Symphony (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), ed. Edward T. Cone, 122, for this marking, not seen in all editions of the work (noted in Jeffrey Snedeker, “Joseph Meifred’s Méthode pour le Cor Chromatique ou a Pistons, and, Valved Horn Performance in Nineteenth-Century France” [D.M.A. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1991], 77-79). Today, this passage is probably most commonly performed muted, a notation actually present in some modern editions of the work.
