The Hungarian in Andante y Rondo

DISCOVERING THE “HUNGARIAN” IN ANDANTE AND RONDO:
A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO A STANDARD BASSOON SOLO
SUBMITTED TO MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS
by
Melissa Kritzer
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ............................................................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter 1 ..................................................................................................................................................................................... 4
Biographies ............................................................................................................................................................................ 4
An Overview of Weber’s Career ............................................................................................................................... 4
Background ....................................................................................................................................................................... 5
Early Life ............................................................................................................................................................................ 7
Vienna ................................................................................................................................................................................. 9
Professional Life .......................................................................................................................................................... 11
Brandt .............................................................................................................................................................................. 18
Chapter 2 .................................................................................................................................................................................. 21
The Concerto ...................................................................................................................................................................... 21
Chapter 3 .................................................................................................................................................................................. 25
The Hungarian Style........................................................................................................................................................ 25
The Turkish Style ........................................................................................................................................................ 25
Gypsies and Hungarians ........................................................................................................................................... 28
Verbunkos ....................................................................................................................................................................... 32
The Style hongrois ....................................................................................................................................................... 33
Gestures of the Style hongrois ................................................................................................................................ 36
Composers of the Style hongrois ........................................................................................................................... 40
Weber and the Style hongrois ................................................................................................................................. 42
Chapter 4 .................................................................................................................................................................................. 45
The Andante and Hungarian Rondo .......................................................................................................................... 45
Chapter 5 .................................................................................................................................................................................. 56
Performance Practice ..................................................................................................................................................... 56
The Manuscript Source ............................................................................................................................................. 56
Tutors ............................................................................................................................................................................... 57
The Instrument ............................................................................................................................................................ 60
Articulation .................................................................................................................................................................... 65
Ornamentation ............................................................................................................................................................. 66
2
Other Historical Considerations ............................................................................................................................ 70

Baermann ....................................................................................................................................................................... 71
Clues Left by Weber.................................................................................................................................................... 72
Application ..................................................................................................................................................................... 75
Chapter 6 .................................................................................................................................................................................. 83
Hermeneutics..................................................................................................................................................................... 83
Napoleonic Wars.......................................................................................................................................................... 83
Orientalism .................................................................................................................................................................... 85
Biological Developments .......................................................................................................................................... 88
Conclusions.............................................................................................................................................................................. 93
Bibliography............................................................................................................................................................................ 97
Works Consulted and Cited.......................................................................................................................................... 97
Recordings ........................................................................................................................................................................ 101
Appendix A: Score ............................................................................................................................................................... 103
INTRODUCTION
The significance of Carl Maria Friedrich Ernst von Weber’s (1786-1826) Andante e
Rondo Ungarese für Fagott und Orchester, Opus 35, (J. 158) is uncontested. Bassoonists
consistently place Weber among the most important composers for solo bassoon. Inclusion of
Andante e Rondo Ungarese at the end of some editions of the seminal Weissenborn bassoon
method as the prototype bassoon solo further testifies to its singular importance. Yet, very little
in-depth research has been done regarding this often-performed work. It is taken at face value as
an early Romantic solo piece using conventional harmonic language. In fact, no attempt has
been made to create a comprehensively researched orchestral score.1
This paper aims to breathe new life into a much-loved cornerstone of the bassoon
repertory. The study begins with three mysteries. First, why did Weber decide to write for the
bassoon? Second, what can the details of this composition tell one about the bassoon? And last,
how should one interpret the meaning of the work, as invoking a comic or a serious character?
The paper will address these questions through careful study of the work’s biographical
influences, formal and tonal features, performance practice conventions, and hermeneutics. The
first section gives relevant biographical information about Weber and Georg Friedrich Brandt
(1773-1836), the bassoon soloist for whom the work was written. The following section details
the development of the concerto and the language of the Hungarian-Gypsy style. The analysis of
Andante e Rondo Ungarese is supplemented by a description of historical practices, and the
author’s performance suggestions based on a synthesis of the two preceding topics. The final
section surveys nineteenth-century cultural thought to place the work in context. This paper
should help performers to interpret this important bassoon solo based on a broader understanding
1
William Waterhouse, “Weber’s Bassoon Concerto Op. 75: The Manuscript and Printed Sources
Compared,” The Double Reed 19, no. 3 (Fall 1996), 81.
2
of the work’s context and meaning. By becoming familiar with the vocabulary of a composer’s
era, a bassoonist can aspire to a new level of competency as a performer.
Andante e Rondo Ungarese was written in 1809 as a viola solo for Weber’s brother
Fridolin and then reassigned to bassoon in 1813. 2 The title of Andante e Rondo Ungarese,
translated as “Andante and Hungarian Rondo,” immediately prompts the question: How is the
piece ‘Hungarian?’ Weber made use of an existing style common among street performers in
Vienna—a style that had already been absorbed into the works of composers such as Franz
Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Weber’s approach to this style was not based on
extensive personal experience. The compositional style developed by Weber included elements
of many exotic cultures for dramatic effect. More than a defined concept of a specific culture,
his music evokes a sense of “otherness.” Andante e Rondo Ungarese reflects early nineteenth-
century Exoticism further revealed by a fascination with the Orient as well as political
developments involving exploration of foreign territory and domination of foreign peoples.
Natural science of the nineteenth century also contributed to studies concerning the differences
between biological entities and ultimately different races of people.
Leading up to this point in history, musical culture had seen many of the changes
associated with the “classical” music of today—orchestra direction by a conductor, instead of the
violinist-concertmaster, the establishment of a standard repertory, and increasingly public
performances. The first space built exclusively to house public concerts would not be built until
1831, more than two decades after Andante e Rondo Ungarese was first written.3 Conservatory
training, which was rapidly on the rise throughout Europe as this work saw its première, stressed
a standard level of competency, and included the study of counterpoint and harmony. A rich
2
John Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, 2nd ed. (Cambridge University Press, 1976), 72.
3
Reinhard Pauly, Music in the Classic Period, 4th ed. Prentice Hall History of Music Series (Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall, Inc., 2000), 72.
3
body of solo literature for the bassoon was being cultivated by composers Weber would have
known and worked with such as Franz Danzi, Peter von Winter, and Jan Nepomuk Hummel.
The fact that Weber chose to re-score the Andante e Rondo Ungarese for bassoon after
initially composing the piece for viola comments on the character he felt that the bassoon could
best express. The evidence left by descriptions in tutors such as Vollständige theoretisch-
praktische Musiklehre, published by Joseph Fröhlich (1780-1862) in 1810-11, as well as
Weber’s own orchestrations suggests that the bassoon can express a heroic character while
allowing for comedic relief and sincere pathos. These characteristics also apply to the style
hongrois, a musical attempt to define a culture foreign to the composer.
Often a finite and seemingly insignificant point in history can be seen to open and grow
in importance until it encompasses all of contemporary thought. Weber’s bassoon piece seems
to occupy an insignificant place. It cannot even be considered a full concerto, as it lacks a proper
first movement. Yet, the work represents the seed of scientific, cultural and political thought that
would bring about the major changes of its time, from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Napoléon
Bonaparte to Charles Darwin. Traces of the perspective implied by Andante e Rondo Ungarese
can even be seen in some of the United States’ policies in the unstable countries of the “Middle
East”—issues that have consumed and may yet define our time in history.
4
CHAPTER 1
BIOGRAPHIES
An Overview of Weber’s Career
Weber was a composer, conductor, and pianist who sought to promote art and shape the
tastes of an emerging middle-class audience. His contributions to song, choral music, and piano
music were highly esteemed by his contemporaries. His opera overtures influenced the
development of the concert overture and symphonic poem, and his explorations of novel timbres
and orchestrations enriched musical sonorities. Weber was a significant figure in the German
Romantic movement, and his 1821 opera Der Freischütz boosted public interest in German
opera. His music and ideas greatly influenced many composers, including Heinrich Marschner,
Felix Mendelssohn, Richard Wagner, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. His
music is important to understanding the later achievements of Romanticism.
Although best known as a composer, Weber actually enjoyed a diverse career. As a
writer he reviewed concerts, operas, books, music, new instruments and educational
establishments. 4 For a musician of his day, Weber’s opinions were strikingly original and
advanced. His mature style contrasts favorably in its clarity and grace of expression, especially
in its sense of humor, with that of most of his contemporaries.5 He also planned and contributed
to a guidebook for travelling virtuosos, wrote poetry, made some translations, and finished most
of a full novel. In order to cultivate musical appreciation and understanding, he wrote articles to
4
John Warrack, ed. Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music, trans. Martin Cooper (Cambridge
University Press, 1981), 1.
5Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, 98.
5
introduce operas he gave in Prague and Dresden.6 Spending several years employed as a teacher,
Weber always enjoyed the company of scholars.7
Background
Weber lived in a time of great social and intellectual upheaval. What we think of today
as Germany was Prussia, a loose confederation of some three hundred independent sovereignties,
ecclesiastical states and a few cities that formed the notoriously corrupt and ineffective Holy
Roman Empire. At the time of Weber’s birth in 1786, Germany as a single political unit was still
eighty-five years away from realization. The desire for unity emerged at the turn of the
nineteenth century, and subsequently the threat posed by Napoléon brought out many
nationalistic feelings.8
Frederick the Great of Prussia died months before Weber’s birth, and Prussia went into
rapid decline under his successors Friedrich Wilhelm II and III. Elsewhere in German-speaking
lands, many Electorates were controlled by reactionary and corrupt bishops. The free cities,
especially Bremen, Lübeck and above all Hamburg, fared little better, while other diminutive
territories were too small to support themselves and administered by the absurdly anachronistic
Imperial Knights. The economy was dependent on feudal agriculture and a primitive industry
still controlled by medieval guilds.
Yet, if Germany was politically feeble, her intellectual life was at fever pitch. The poets,
writers, philosophers and musicians of German-speaking lands were the leaders of a growing
nationalism. “While the political life was backward and anemic,” writes historian G. P. Gooch,
6
Warrack, ed. Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music, 1.
7
Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, 67-68.
8
John H. Gill, 1809 Thunder on the Danube: Napoleon’s Defeat of the Habsburgs (London: Frontline
Books, 2008), 9.
6
“a vigorous intellectual activity held out the promise of better days.” 9 Christian von Wolff,
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing and Moses Mendelssohn, the leaders of the German Enlightenment,
urged their countrymen to use their reason without fear; and deeper notes were struck by
Immanuel Kant, Johann Gottfried Herder, and Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. The Age of
Enlightenment in German literature opened with Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock. Kant’s great
Critique of Pure Reason, Critique of Practical Reason and Critique of Judgment influenced the
political theories of the writers whose voices were inspiring the nation. The philosopher Johann
Gottlieb Fichte was a founder of German Nationalism. He asserted that an essential part of the
German spirit lay with her simple burghers.10
Writers such as Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Heinrich von
Kleist, Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger, Gottfried August
Bürger, Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, August von Kotzebue and August Wilhelm Iffland poured
out a flood of poems, satires, novels and dramas, which created a voracious reading public,
generated a zeal for books that was, to a small extent, displacing religion with nationalism.
The lack of a centralized state favored the cultivation of scattered, mutually exclusive
intellectual groups, like the Freemasons. While the intellectuals were inspired by the revolutions
in France and America, admiration did not seem to inspire imitation. The way was open for a
swell of individual emotion in which poets and musicians, now replacing Church and State, set
about voicing the aspirations of an emergent middle class—a major part of the movement we
now call Romanticism.
There could be no more exciting time for a composer with a love of the theater. Only
Weber’s premature death just before his fortieth birthday would prevent the realization of his
9
Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, 20.
10
Ibid., 21.
7
promise he displayed. As a composer, however, Weber’s weaknesses give him his intrinsic
worth. Though he could not, like Ludwig van Beethoven, transcend his age in solitary greatness,
by being so intimately bound up with his time, he expressed it more completely, both helping to
form it and taking his voice from it.
Early Life
Carl Maria von Weber was born in 1786 in Eutin. The trade city, which lies twenty miles
north of Lübeck near the Baltic Sea, attracted writers and artists such as the painter Johann
Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein and the poet and translator Johann Heinrich Voss. Carl Maria was
the first son from Franz Anton Weber’s (1734-1812) second marriage, to Genovefa Brenner
(1764-98).
Weber came from country stock: his four great-grandfathers were a miller, surgeon-
barber, peasant and huntsman.11 His family included an uncle, Fridolin Weber II, who was a
pianist and copyist in Mannheim, and Fridolin’s daughters Josepha, Aloysia and Sophie, who
were singers. Aloysia was already famous at fifteen and became a prima donna at the Vienna
Hofoper at nineteen. Another first cousin, Constanze, the third oldest daughter of Fridolin,
married Mozart.12
Weber’s early years were dominated by the activities of his father, a quixotic person who
had appropriated the title “Baron” and the “von” in his name from an extinct Austrian noble
family. Franz Anton started his own theater company, mostly comprised of family members,
and toured extensively between 1787 and 1794. According to Carl Costenoble, a member of the
company in 1795, Weber was a weak, lame child, and later sources confirm that he was afflicted
11
12
Ibid., 12-13.
8
by a congenital hip disorder that caused him to limp.13 In the summer of 1794, Weber’s mother
Genovefa, a soprano, was briefly engaged for Goethe’s theatre in Weimar.14
In 1796 Franz Anton was forced to leave the theater company due to his wife’s poor
health. About this time he evidently began to entertain the thought of developing his son into a
child prodigy along the lines of Mozart. Weber received systematic music instruction from the
oboist and composer Johann Peter Heuschkel and later from Michael Haydn in Salzburg. His
father subtracted a year from Carl Maria’s age to make him seem more prodigious.
When Carl’s mother died, the father and son duo continued to travel, studying and
writing music. They dabbled in printing for a time, but did not continue. Carl’s first opera, Das
Waldmädchen, based on a fairy tale opera, premiered on November 24, 1800. Carl worked hard
to write Waldmädchen quickly because the ability to rapidly compose a score seemed to be
required of composer prodigies. An announcement in the local paper called Weber a student of
Haydn, yet, perhaps intentionally, failed to make it clear that Weber had studied with Michael
Haydn, not the more renowned Franz Joseph.15
Subsequent actions suggest that the fifteen-year-old Weber felt insecure in his work, even
though his father actively promoted it to publishers. He burned the bulk of his juvenilia in 1802,
and at the same time began to collect treatises on music theory in an attempt to answer technical
and aesthetic questions neglected in his earlier training. 16
13
Clive Brown, “Weber, Carl Maria (Friedrich Ernst) von,” Grove Music Online. ed. L. Macy (Accessed 24
April 2010), http: www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
14
Ibid.
15
16
Brown, http: www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
9
Vienna
Weber studied in Vienna from August 1803 to May 1804, experiencing his first extended
separation from his father. He seemed to enjoy the freedom of youth, playing guitar and singing
in taverns in Vienna, accompanied by his friend and fellow composition student Johann
Gänsbacher. In Vienna Weber finally found definitive instruction under the theorist, organist
and composer Georg Joseph Vogler (1749-1814). A theatrical, colorful, and grandly dressed
man, Vogler gave himself the airs of a mystic, adding the name Abbé to his own.
Vogler developed a theory of harmony which anticipated the Romantic period in its
chromaticism, coloristic orchestration, and melodic borrowings from folk tradition and exotic
cultures. Though melodic invention is not one of Vogler’s recognized strengths, some works,
notably in the two Polymelos collections (1791, 1806) and Pièces de clavecin (1798),
compensate by adopting exotic melodies, allegedly drawn from African, Chinese, Russian and
Scandinavian folk traditions.17 Between 1802 and 1803 Vogler was engaged at the theatre in
Vienna by Emanuel Schikaneder, an actor and singer best known for writing the libretto to
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte. Vogler was then at work on Samori, a new opera
commissioned by the Theater an der Wien.
Though Vogler himself never finished a full course of study, he had traveled extensively.
His tales of Spain, Portugal, Greece, Africa, Armenia, England, Greenland and Scandinavia
stimulated Weber’s imagination and initiated a life-long enthrallment with exotic folk music.18
Vogler may have played the part of a mystic to lend profundity to his conversation and to cover
the factual cracks in his knowledge. As a teacher, Vogler had developed a special system, only
partially explained in his Handbuch zur Harmonielehre und für den Generalbass from 1802, to
17
Margaret. Grave, “Vogler, Georg Joseph [Abbé Vogler],” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 12
June 2010), http: www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
18
10
turn out composers more quickly than traditional study. 19 A child of the Enlightenment, he
professed a passion for order and discipline, but apparently incited wild enthusiasm from his
students both with his music and his persona. Posterity has subjected Abbé Vogler to some
ridicule, but many of his pupils including Weber, Meyerbeer, Winter, Peter Ritter, Danzi and the
singer Aloysia Weber enjoyed successful careers.
Weber was clearly star-struck by Vogler, as his letters home relate.20 The composition
lessons with Vogler consisted of analyzing Vogler’s works to give Weber a method for
understanding the aesthetic basis of compositional procedures. Vogler restrained Weber from
composing during this time and instead demanded that Weber prepare a vocal score for the
production of Samori. After this, he encouraged Weber to write variation sets based on Vogler’s
own theatrical works.
Vogler introduced Weber to many leading composers in Vienna, including Antonio
Salieri, Hummel and even Franz Joseph Haydn. Vogler pitted himself against Beethoven and is
most likely the reason that the young Weber wrote the following about Beethoven:
My views differ too much from Beethoven’s for me to feel I could ever agree with him.
The passionate, almost incredible inventive powers inspiring him are accompanied by
such a chaotic arrangement of his ideas that only his earlier compositions appeal to me;
The later ones seem to me hopeless chaos, an incomparable struggle for novelty, out of
which break a few heavenly flashes of genius proving how great he could be if he would
tame his rich fantasy.21
Later, however, Weber came to deeply admire and defend Beethoven.
19
20
21
Warrack, ed. Carl Maria von Weber: Writings on Music, 14. This was in response to a comparison by the
publisher Nägeli of Weber’s work to that of Beethoven.
11
Professional Life
In May 1804, upon Vogler’s recommendation, Weber assumed the conducting position in
Breslau, Silesia. Here Weber tried to enlarge the orchestra, rearrange it to get a better tone, and
obtained higher salaries for its members. The conductor, still in his teens, encountered
substantial opposition to his reforming efforts. Orchestral members allegedly resented the
increased demands and critics were bothered by the new seating arrangement and by their
perception of excessively fast tempos. The management was troubled by the increased expenses
and a repertory that did not always cater to popular taste.22
Some of the new operas he produced here, Salieri’s Axur, as well as Johann Friedrich
Reichhardt’s Tamerlan, have a distinctively exotic taste. Weber’s own compositions in Breslau
include the Romanza siciliana for flute from 1805. This work, one of several exotic pieces
written at this time was said to be based on “original Saracen-Sicilian motives.”23 It directly
followed his studies with Vogler and was—Weber scholar John Warrack notes—“an indication
of how, spurred no doubt by Vogler’s tales of his travels, Weber’s imagination was moving
along the Romantic lines of inspiration in the exotic.”24
Weber left Breslau in the summer of 1806. Following Breslau, Weber spent time in
Carlsruhe in Upper Silesia at the court of Duke Eugen Friedrich of Württemberg-Oels. The
Duke, an amateur oboist, had begun a theatre in 1793. Here Weber composed his only two
symphonies for the small court orchestra as well as a concertino for horn and six variations for
viola.
Weber then accepted a position as secretary to Duke Eugen Friedrich’s relation, Duke
Ludwig Friedrich Alexander, which included administering the duke’s affairs and instructing his
22
23
Ibid., 57.
24
Ibid., 50.
12
children in writing and music. In the Duke’s court at Stuttgart, Weber met prominent artists and
intellectuals and encountered the philosophical writings of Kant, Wolff, and Friedrich von
Schelling. He gained renewed interest in writing about music. Weber stayed in the secretarial
position from 1807 to early 1810. The free time it afforded proved fruitful for Weber as a
composer. He wrote twenty-one songs, and nine instrumental works. Included are Andante e
Rondo Ungarese, written in 1809, and the opera Silvana, which was finished in 1810.
Most importantly, in Stuttgart Weber met Franz Danzi (1763-1826). Born twenty-three
years before Weber, Danzi was the son of an Italian cellist, Innozenz Danzi, who was a member
of the highly-regarded Mannheim orchestra under Johann Stamitz. Franz had joined the
orchestra as a cellist as early as 1778. He had also studied with Abbé Vogler at the Mannheim
school, and 1807 had accepted the position of conductor in Stuttgart. Of Danzi’s compositions
only the wind quintets have successfully retained high esteem today; his other works have—
undeservedly—fallen more or less into oblivion.25 Among his works are five bassoon concertos.
Danzi played an important part simply in recalling the young Weber to his sense of
vocation. The fact that Danzi had also been a Vogler student spurred Weber’s collegial drive.
Weber’s references to Danzi show respect and affection for the senior musical friend he so
urgently needed. Weber sent Danzi comic letters in verse and in musical recitative, dedicated to
him the cantata Der erste Ton, as well as several other works and talked long and seriously on
country walks with the “plump little man with rounded head and sharp, clever eyes that always
seemed good-humored.”26 Danzi’s cheerful nature seems to have found a kindred personality he
could believe in and encourage with practical advice.
25
26
13
Danzi was instrumental in Weber’s obtaining the commission to write incidental music
for a production of Schiller’s five-act drama Turandot in September, 1809. Schiller’s drama was
based on an earlier one by Carlo Gozzi, whose incorporation of fantastic and exotic elements into
his works had excited the Romantics to the point that they had proclaimed him “the Father of
Romanticism.”27 When in 1790 Goethe and Schiller founded a German National Theater at
Weimar, Goethe’s special fascination for Turandotte placed it among their first choices. It was
translated for production there in 1804 by Schiller, whose version (translated back into Italian by
Maffei) later became the source of Puccini’s opera. Weber’s continuation of the exotic
experiments influenced by studying with Vogler are evident in the incidental music to Turandot,
an adaptation of a piece Weber had written in 1804 titled Overtura Chinesa, which was based on
a theme he found in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique of 1768. 28 Turandot offers a prime
example of Weber’s fascination with Exoticism, even “Orientalism.”
In 1810, following a convoluted financial fiasco involving Franz Anton’s debts and an
illicit practice of selling military exemptions, Carl Maria and his father were arrested. In the end
Weber was banished from Württemberg and, with letters of introduction from Danzi, moved on
to his next destination, Mannheim. Controlled by Napoléon, Mannheim had been required to
democratize with great speed. Political discussions were censored, but artistic ideas were open,
indicated by a newly revived university. While in Mannheim, Weber also took the opportunity
to visit nearby Darmstadt where he was reunited with Vogler and Gänsbacher.
Weber supported himself in a variety of ways after his banishment from Württemberg.
He sold and reworked pieces for publication, negotiated to sell his incipient novel, and produced
the opera Silvana in Frankfurt. He continued to seek aristocratic patronage, cultivating the
27
28
Csilla Pethő, “Style hongrois: Hungarian elements in the works of Haydn, Beethoven, Weber, and
Schubert.” Studia musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 41, no. 1-3, (2000), 229.
14
support of Princess Stéphanie of Baden and Grand Duke Ludewig I of Hesse-Darmstadt. The
Grand Duke rewarded him with a very generous gift for the dedication of Weber’s new
Singspiel, Abu Hassan, inspired by the stories from The Thousand and One Nights.29
Abu Hassan exemplifies Weber’s continuing use of Exoticism displaying this fascination
in the choice of story as well as in the musical elements. The subject feeds off the popularity of
Turkish operas such as Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail and Vogler’s Kaufmann von
Smyrna. In Abu Hassan two guitars combine with expanded percussion that includes timpani,
bass drum, side drum and triangle to depict the Turkish style.
Weber next moved to Munich, arriving in March 1811. Munich, like Stuttgart and
Mannheim was controlled by France at this time. A fine musical tradition existed there, a legacy
from the days when the Elector Carl Theodor had brought his celebrated orchestra from
Mannheim to live in the Munich. The electoral court orchestra, transplanted in 1778, had played
a part in many musicians’ lives, among them Weber’s uncle, Fridolin Weber, and Danzi.
Weber stayed in Munich throughout the summer of 1811 to supervise the première of
Abu Hassan and devote himself to composition and music criticism. Of particular importance
during this period was the formation of a secret society called the Harmonischer Verein, a group
that initially included Weber, Gänsbacher, Gottfried Weber, Alexander Dusch (Gottfried’s
brother-in-law) and Meyerbeer.30 This society of musicians with literary skills sought at one
level idealistically to raise the standards of music criticism and taste through non-partisan
reviews that would promote the good wherever it existed. They planned to start a musical
journal, but did not. They also promoted the compositions of their members.
29
30
15
Peter von Winter (1754-1825) was the music director in Munich. He had started his
career as a violinist in the Mannheim orchestra at the age of ten and had later become the music
director of the theatre before following the court to Munich. He had become the Kapellmeister
in 1798. At first he received Weber cordially, but distanced himself abruptly when he
discovered that this was no amateur to be patronized, but a highly professional colleague.
Winter composed many pieces for bassoon, including favorites of the bassoon soloist, Georg
Friedrich Brandt, such as Potpourri and Concerto,31 which he repeatedly performed on tour.
Among Winter’s listed works are Rondo con Variatione for bassoon from 1810 and two pieces, a
Concertino and a Rondo for bassoon from 1814.32
Among the Munich orchestra’s most distinguished new artists was the clarinetist
Heinrich Baermann (1784-1847). The clarinet’s technical maturity had coincided with the
appearance of a school of virtuosos; and it had gained rapid acceptance into orchestras starting
with Mannheim during the last quarter of the eighteenth century. The great Joseph Beer, who
played in Mannheim, set the German style—soft rich and full in tone, in contrast to the shriller
and more brilliant French manner—and his immediate students won the enthusiasm of a wide
circle of composers who explored and extended the new range of sounds.33 Baermann, who
studied in Berlin with another virtuoso, Franz Tausch, had acquired a twelve-key clarinet that
allowed greater flexibility and smoothness; and in Baermann’s clarinet Weber found an
instrument that combined French incisiveness and vivacity with German fullness.
During the early part of 1811 Baermann visited Darmstadt and here began his great
friendship with Carl Maria von Weber. Baermann met with Weber soon after Weber’s arrival in
31
Woodrow Joe Hodges, A Biographical Dictionary of Bassoonists born before 1825 (Ph. D. diss.,
University of Iowa, 1980), 139-141.
32
Anna Amalie Abert and Paul Corneilson, “Winter, Peter,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed
31 January 2011): http:www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
33
16
Munich and agreed to help Weber establish himself with some concerts before the court, on the
condition that Weber write a new clarinet solo. Within three days Weber composed his
Concertino, Opus 26.
Baermann performed the concertino on a concert of Weber’s works given on April 5,
1811. The concert was one of those thrilling moments in music history when audience
enthusiasm becomes frenzied. Baermann played with marvelous charm and received tumultuous
applause, even from the orchestra.34 King Maximillian I, who was in attendance, immediately
commissioned two more concertos for Baermann. Later, Weber also wrote the clarinet quintet,
Opus 34, and variations on a theme from the opera Silvana for him.
After the wildly successful clarinet concertino, many orchestra members clamored for
Weber to write them a concerto, but the only one he accomplished was for Brandt, the
bassoonist. 35 Warrack attributes this to a preoccupation with woodwinds.36 The evident interest
of the conductor, Winter, in composing for Brandt could have also influenced Weber.
Commissioned by the King, the Bassoon Concerto, Opus 75 in F major was written during the
last two weeks of November 1811. Concurrently, Weber wrote an aria for the tenor Georg
Weixelbaum. The second clarinet concerto in E-flat was also on his plate at the time, and its
influence is felt in the exotic rhythms as well as the virtuosic flourishes.
As he came to the end of his stay in Munich, Weber found himself in a flurry of concert
activity. Weber planned his farewell concert for November 11, 1811. On November 25,
Baermann gave the first performance of the second clarinet concerto at a concert arranged by
Weixelbaum, who also sang the semi-operatic scene Weber had finished on November 22.
34
Pamela Weston, Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London: Hale, 1971), 120.
35
36
Ibid., 129.
17
Brandt gave the first performance of the bassoon concerto in a concert on December 28,
1811 in the Munich Hoftheater. The first printed copy describes the work as “Primo Concerto,”
which indicates that more was promised or intended.37 Apart from Andante e Rondo Ungarese
of 1813, nothing followed. Taken away from Munich by a tour with Baermann, Weber
abandoned such plans as he may have had for continuing the cycle of concertos.
In early 1813, Weber travelled to Prague for a limited engagement and decided to extend
his stay indefinitely after accepting the position of Music Director in Prague. Shortly after his
arrival, Weber set about preparing for his first concert in Prague. He finished two songs and
continued work on the Clarinet Quintet for Baermann, which he had begun two years earlier. In
response to Brandt’s request for another piece, Weber decided to revise a piece he had originally
written for viola from 1809 for his step-brother Fritz. The Andante e Rondo Ungarese in C
minor was reworked for bassoon and orchestra in 1813 and was given the opus number 35. The
revision was slight, with hardly any changes in the solo line.
In a review of the première, the anonymous reviewer gave the impression that he admired
the Andante and Rondo even more than the Bassoon Concerto in F major, which was also on the
program. The “gentle, expressive” melody of the andante is highlighted by beautiful middle
section in A-flat major, using bassoons and horns in combination.38 The theme of the rondo
employed an “authentic affect,” while the ever-changing entrances, first of the bassoon, then of
the orchestra, produced an “animated” effect.39 Weber had demonstrated once again his “superb
talent for noble heartfelt melody and effective instrumentation, based on his experience and rich
37
38
Review of Concert by Brandt and C. M. von Weber (Prague 1813). Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 10
March 1813, 177 (Accessed 1 September 2011), http://babel.hathitrust.org.
39
Ibid., 177.
18
harmonic knowledge laudably demonstrated.”40 The only drawback to the performance noted by
the reviewer was an occasional overpowering of the soloist by the accompaniment. The writer
finished the article by calling Weber a “lucky acquisition” for Prague and expressing optimism
for the upcoming opera season.41
While both bassoon works have great merit, modern scholarship has occasionally
downplayed the importance of the Andante and Rondo. Due to the lack of significant revisions
from the earlier viola version, Warrack assesses that it is “not a piece to set seriously beside the
Concerto . . . It lacks the confidence of idiom Weber was shortly to find in his Darmstadt and
Munich months.”42 Yet, in Weber’s autobiographical sketch, he describes how he felt he had
reached artistic maturity in Stuttgart.43 Weber, who noted in his diary that he was pleased with
the première of the Andante and Rondo, must have liked this work in its bassoon version because
he supplied it with an opus number in 1813. He chose this work specifically as the finale for his
introductory concert in Prague, an event that called for his best work to date.
Brandt
Georg Friedrich Brandt (1773-1836), like his teacher Georg Wenzel Ritter (1748-1808)
of Berlin, who inspired Mozart to write the Sinfonia Concertante for winds, 44 provided an
essential impetus and ideal collaborator for Weber’s compositions featuring the bassoon. Brandt,
whose background included playing bassoon in the Royal Prussian Guards in Berlin and
performing with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin’s Kapelle at Ludwigslust, had a well-
established reputation by 1811 when he met Weber.
40
Review of Concert by Brandt and C. M. von Weber, 177-178.
41
Ibid, 178.
42
43
44
Hodges, 550-552.
19
One of the first accounts of Brandt’s playing, from a performance in Schwerin in 1800,
emphasizes his great facility and delicacy.45 In late 1800 and early 1801, Brandt toured Stettin,
Berlin, Breslau, Dresden, and Poland, collaborating with the oboist Johann Friedrich Braun. In
the Breslau performance, L. A. L. Siebigk was particulary impressed with the “accuracy and
precision” demonstrated by both musicals in a double concerto. 46 Praised for cleanliness,
roundness, equality and taste, Brandt enjoyed a “large audience and unanimous applause.” 47
Brandt became a member of the Munich Orchestra on September 9, 1806, and
subsequently a charter member of the Munich Academy, a “concert-giving corporation of vocal
and instrumental members of the Royal Bavarian Kapelle.”48 Brandt was also a member of the
Academy’s steering committee. He returned to Ludwigslust as a guest soloist in 1810. In
December of that year he performed a concerto by Winter and participated in a quintet by Danzi,
receiving an honorarium.
Brant’s touring schedule continued to be eventful during the years of 1811 to 1813.
Brandt appeared twice in Berlin in early 1811. Brandt was in Vienna in December of 1811,
playing Weber’s Concerto, and Winter’s Potpourri on the program. For Brandt’s next
performance in Vienna on December 27, 1812, he played a concerto by Winter as well as Weber.
Reports of Brandt’s solo concerts become less frequent after 1813, but continue through 1817.
Brandt appeared in Prague on February 19, 1813, performing Andante e Rondo Ungarese
for the first time. 49 The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung reviewer began by citing earlier
positive accounts of Brandt’s playing and Weber’s concerto in the Viennese concert from
45
Review of Concert by the Schwerin Kapelle (Schwerin 1800), Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, 10
September 1800, 861 (Accessed 1 September 2011), http://babel.hathitrust.org.
46
Siebigk, L. A. L. Review of a Concert by Brandt and Braun (Breslau 1801). Allgemeine Musikalsiche
Zeitung, 18 February, 1801, 366 (Accessed 1 September 2011), http://babel.hathitrust.org.
47
Ibid., 366.
48
Hodges, 140.
49
Ibid., 142.
20
December. Quoting the Wiener musikalische Zeitung, the reviewer further noted that the
comparison of his own opinions with the earlier ones made the occasion “doubly significant.”
The reviewer noted that Brandt displayed his accomplished upper register, subscribing
completely to the opinions regarding Brandt’s beautiful and consistent tone, his wide range, and
his extraordinary technique—all of which served to admit him to the first place among
bassoonists.50 Brandt played the Andante e Rondo Ungarese with great success, Weber’s diary
noted.51
Brandt was a greatly respected musician and a personal friend of many of the greatest
performers and composers of his day. Letters show that Weber received innumerable requests
for concertos, and that he gifted not one, but two great pieces to Brandt.52 It is highly significant
that Weber chose Brandt, a representative for his music at an important time in his career, for his
first impression in Prague, a situation not unlike the legendary Munich concert in which
Baermann first played the clarinet Concertino. Brandt’s biography supports the fact that he was
highly regarded and valued as a soloist. Brandt’s concert activity indicates that he was the
recipient of many compositions including works by Massonneau, Danzi, Winter and Georg
Abraham Schneider. 53 Most of these works are now relegated to history. It is extremely
providential to the bassoon that Weber crossed paths with this great virtuoso.54
50
Review of Concert by Brandt and C. M. von Weber, 176-177.
51
52
Pamela Weston, More Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past (London: Hale, 1977), 86.
53
Hodges, 139-140.
54
As a footnote to this important relationship, it is interesting to note that Weber married a talented singer
and actress named Caroline Brandt. Her relationship to Georg Friedrich, if any, is not known.
21
CHAPTER 2
THE CONCERTO
Andante e Rondo Ungarese represents significant innovations that Weber made to the
concerto. The concerto developed in the seventeenth century just preceded by the sonata and the
new sense of tonality. It was intended for Mass or office as an introduction or postlude. Its
name suggests the Italian words for “playing together” and “struggling against.”55 The typical
eighteenth-century concerto involved alternation between passages scored for the entire
ensemble, called tutti, and lightly scored passages, usually scored for one or more soloists. The
solo passages were accompanied by the combination of a chordal instrument, such as a
harpsichord, plus one or more sustained bass instruments, called the continuo. Like the aria in
early opera, a concerto movement opens with a ritornello, followed by the first solo section. The
ritornello introduces the themes for the movement. The full ensemble and the soloist(s) then
alternate until the work ends with another restatement of the ritornello, in whole or in part.
Successive ritornellos are usually in different keys. The modulations take place during the solos,
so that each new ritornello statement serves as a point of arrival.
In many early concertos, the solo passages were relatively brief, but in eighteenth-century
concertos, the solo sections became longer. As public concerts increased in number, the ability
of virtuosos to attract audiences assumed greater significance. Concertos for smaller groups,
called concerti grossi, waned in popularity. Concertos for one solo instrument—most commonly
the violin and eventually the keyboard—became the most popular as the eighteenth century
progressed. The form evolved to adapt to the increasing focus on the virtuosic performer. With
55
Susan McClary, “A Musical Dialectic from the Enlightenment: Mozart's Piano Concerto in G Major, K.
453, Movement 2,” Cultural Critique 4 (1986), 138.
22
greater frequency, soloists were given a moment of improvisatory virtuosity in the cadenza
before the final orchestral ritornello concludes the piece.56
From its inception through the eighteenth century, characteristics such as the cadenza, the
ritornello, and a lyrical style were adopted from vocal arias. Composers were borrowing vocal
forms used to feature virtuoso singers. Both increasing technologies related to instrument
construction as well as audience demand for virtuosity allowed instrumentalists to gain greater
notoriety as performers than ever before.
With an increased emphasis on soloists, the eighteenth-century concerto can serve as a
metaphor for conflict and resolution between an individual and society. As the practice of using
a designated continuo group became obsolete in the composers’ writing, the eighteenth-century
concerto pared down to two parts. There is a soloist pitted against a large, collective group: the
orchestra. In discussing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G major, Susan
McClary describes:
Indeed, the problematics addressed in tonality, sonata procedure, and concertos are the
familiar issues of the late eighteenth century: the narrative construction of identity and
the threat of alterity, the relationships between individual freedom and collective order,
between objective reason and subjectivity, between stability and dynamic progress.57
Mozart’s music illustrates themes of individual identity and an increasingly rebellious sentiment
among artists and intellectuals.
The Viennese masters, represented by Mozart and Haydn, are important to understanding
Weber’s music. Mozart was a master of drama, and his timeless concertos, although very much
representative of his era, serve as important models of comparison. Mozart, with his Singspiele
such as Die Zauberflöte, is the dramatic predecessor of Weber, whose operatic writing would
56
The cadenza will be over a V chord.

57
McClary, 138-139.
23
also come to represent his country. Mozart composed his seventeen piano concertos in Vienna
as vehicles to promote himself both as a composer and as a performer, defining the concerto as
an individual expression of the performer. Weber goes further to make the concerto a personal
virtuosic statement, like a character in an opera. As Warrack notes, “Weber allows himself
demonstrative flourishes of a quasi-operatic kind that he would never have permitted his singers
in an actual opera. The essential quality is the individualization, even personalization, of the
instruments.”58
Weber belonged to a new generation, one that “rejected what they regarded as
‘instrumental reason’ in their celebration of the irrational.”59 Formal order was the antithesis of
what Weber is trying to portray. The finales to Weber’s concertos are more of an exciting
curtain than the completion of a carefully argued structure. Brilliance was one of the most
important expressive elements in his instrumental solos. If theatricality sometimes overtakes
Weber’s instrumental music, this is the outcome of the heightened sense of effect, visual, poetic
and dramatic which he introduced into Romantic prevalence.60
Throughout his career, Weber struggled with the sonata allegro form associated with the
first movement of a classical concerto. Warrack comments, “The fact remains that he found
sonata form basically incompatible with his own ways of thought . . . the true color and weight of
his invention lies elsewhere, in the grave, strangely-hued slow movements or the dashing charm
of the finales.”61 Typical of his concertos, when Weber composed his Bassoon Concerto in F
major, he did not finish the first movement until after he had completed second and third
58
59
McClary, 135-136.
60
61
Ibid., 125-126.
24
movements.62 Weber’s struggles with writing the first movement of his Bassoon Concerto, can
also be measured by the many revisions he made to the first movement during his lifetime.63
In contrast, the Andante e Rondo Ungarese which lacks a first movement, following only
the last two movements of a concerto, was only revised once and the main change in this revision
was simply to rewrite the solo part for bassoon instead of viola. Weber wrote several two-part
instrumental works which have the characteristics of the second and third movements of a
concerto combined. Two examples include the clarinet Concertino and the harmonichord
Adagio und Rondo. Furthermore, there are examples of his having omitted an existing first
movement in performance, as he did for his performance of the first piano concerto in
Mannheim, 1810.64
As Weber’s compositional style developed, he eventually abandoned traditional concerto
form entirely in his instrumental solos. The last of his concertos, the Konzertstück for piano,
uses a program to provide a shape that will be satisfying in strictly musical terms. Weber’s
ability to stimulate new ideas and forms constitutes one of his most significant contributions to
Romantic music.65 On an abstract level, Andante e Rondo Ungarese can be viewed as a vehicle
for soloistic playing, but this is only one aspect of the style. Weber also uses Andante e Rondo
Ungarese to transport the listener to a distant land.
62
63
William Waterhouse, “Weber’s Bassoon Concerto Op. 75: The Manuscript and Printed Sources
Compared,” 82-90.
64
65
25
CHAPTER 3
THE HUNGARIAN STYLE
The Turkish Style
Through the use of musical vocabulary imported from distant lands, European composers
of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regularly incorporated exotic themes into their
music. The Turkish style (or Janissary style or stilo alla turca), which came into use just prior to
the Hungarian style, or style hongrois, emerged from historical events that influenced both
styles’ development as exotic dialects used by Western European composers. Music composed
in the Turkish style adopted a light, popular, and even cartoonish manner, frequently bordering
on gauche and ugly. The meter and the intervals were obvious and crude. Marches were
common with pounding, even eighth-note rhythms. Composers used minor keys, static harmony,
inelegant harmonic phrases, drone fifths, and stark melodic alternation of thirds and fifths. The
most distinctive feature of the music is its persistent percussive quality, whether or not
percussion instruments are used, suggested through the use of grace notes and ornaments, played
in a jangling manner by melodic instruments.66
The Turkish style evolved from battle music played by Turkish military bands, often
filled with foreign conscripts known as Jannissaries, outside the walls of Vienna during the 1683
Siege of Vienna. The image of Turkish musicians playing cymbals and drums outside Vienna’s
walls proved to be an unforgettable image of besieged Christendom, and it lingered in the
popular consciousness for more than a century. The Turkish style reflected more about
66Jonathan Bellman, The ’Style Hongrois’ in the Music of Western Europe, (Northeastern University Press:
Boston, 1993), 35.
26
European imagination than it did about the Turks. Relatively few had heard the Turks play in the
original situation, and virtually no one remembered what it sounded like with any accuracy.
The siege which gave rise to the Turkish style actually had its roots in Hungarian history.
The Turks had dominated Hungary, a country that originated in the late ninth century when the
semi-nomadic Magyars arrived from north-central Asia, since conquering the region in the
sixteenth century. By mid-seventeenth century, certain areas of Hungary had become part of the
Holy Roman Empire, while the central region formed a separate principality under Ottoman
control. Hungary thus served as a crossroad of two great powers, providing space for the
intersection of two different cultures. Despite Ottoman expansion and Hapsburg rule, a
nationalist movement sought Hungarian independence. Within Hungary religion had been
affected by the Protestant Reformation. Politically, Hungary lacked any strong centralized
government, and the local government was in the hands of the lords of the “Estates”, who
subjugated the common people, operated private armies, and imposed systems of taxation.
Although the Magyar peasantry was Christian, their history of mistreatment by the Turks,
Hapsburg mercenaries and their own landlords left Hungarian peasants indifferent to both
Christian and Turkish rule.
The decade prior to the Turkish incursion in Vienna, gave rise to a signal event in
Hungarian national history. This time period marked a nadir in the status of the Hungarian
culture. In Vienna, Emperor Joseph II restricted religion and repressed Hungarian culture while
promoting the customs of the ruling Germans. The Habsburgs had designated German and
Slavonic the national languages, excluding Hungarian. In the face of these challenges, Imre
Thököly, a young nobleman raised a force that became known as the Kuruc warriors and
mounted an armed struggle against Hapsburg rule. His revolt succeeded and resulted in a treaty
27
in 1673. Though Thököly’s power declined, his revolt remained the nationalistic high point of
the era.67
The Turks used the Hungarian revolt to stage their attack on Vienna in 1683, after
securing a treaty with the Hungarians who agreed not to intercede on the Habsburgs’ behalf
when Vienna was invaded. Thököly, however, withheld military support from the Ottomans at a
critical point in the struggle, contributing to the final defeat for Turkish expansion in the West.
King John Sobiesky of Poland rescued the Habsburgs in the eleventh-hour. Poland made a treaty
with Hungary, bringing it back into the fold politically, but this action did not dispel a pervasive
sense of mistrust toward the Magyars. For their part, Hungarians continued their fight for
independence under leaders such as Ferenc II Rákóczi, even though the Holy Roman Empire
now ruled all territories.
These historical events provide a backdrop to the development of the Turkish style. As in
other forms of artistic expression, the use of exotic patterns suggesting “otherness” served
purposes unrelated to historical or cultural authenticity. Europeans mapped certain
characteristics, such as sexual promiscuity and violence, onto the Turkish people, inflecting them
with a sense of the forbidden in a socially restricted Europe. This practice permitted them to
master the Turks, who evoked lingering fear through stereotype and caricature. A typical
operatic drama from the eighteenth century involved the unsuccessful attempt of the Turkish
kidnapper to subjugate a European female to proper harem submissiveness, and the defeat of this
attempt followed by reformation of the Turk through learned western behavior.68
67
Pethő, 205.
68
Bellman, The ’Style Hongrois’ in the Music of Western Europe, 33.
28
Gypsies and Hungarians
People of the Gypsy tradition call themselves “Rom.” The word Romani, comes from the
word meaning Gypsy man or husband. The word’s etymology can be traced back to Sanskrit,
which uses the words domba and doma to mean “a man of low caste musicians.” 69 The
association of Gypsies with music is therefore an ancient one. Furthermore, as Hungarian
musicologist Bálint Sárosi points out, in Hungary, Turkey and Greece the words for Gypsy mean
the musical occupation, regardless of whether or not the musician in question is an actual Gypsy.
The Hungarian word Cigàny is said to derive from the Greek expression Athinganoi, which
means untouchable, referring to an ancient religious sect.
Before their journey west, Gypsies lived as a unified people somewhere in northern India.
Their wandering began between the fifth and tenth centuries and continued many centuries
afterwards, with periods of stable residence in Persia, Turkey, Greece, and the Romanian
principalities. By the time Gypsies arrived in Europe, they themselves knew nothing about their
own origins. Although they were subsequently expelled by Western European countries, in
Eastern Europe they found more tolerance. They performed all the lowest jobs in their
respective societies. In 1423 they were presented by Sigismund, King of Hungary, with the
assurance of freedom of movement which also secured self-government for them.70 Sixteenth
century Hungarian documents call them “pharaones” or descendants of the pharaohs.71 This was
a common misconception as the English term “Gypsy” also reflects an assumption that they were
from Egypt.
69
70
Bálint Sárosi, Cigányzene [Gypsy music] (Corvinia Press: Budapest, 1971; Eng trans., 1978), 12.
71
Ibid., 16.
29
In eighteenth-century Hapsburg-ruled Hungary, the Gypsies had been publicly designated
a scourge and were openly pursued and tormented. The entry for “zigeuner” in an encyclopedia
of 1749 states openly that “certainly Gypsies have been godless, evil people for all time, and are
persecuted for good reason.”72 In nearby Romanian lands, until the last quarter of the nineteenth
century, Gypsies could be legally owned as slaves. The effort by Maria Theresa and Joseph II to
control them demanded that they move into permanent dwellings, enter stable employment, teach
their children to observe European standards of manners and dress, cease trafficking in horses,
and give up the Gypsy language.73
In spite of these directives, many Gypsies refused to assimilate and this stubbornness
seemed threatening to European political powers. The identity, and thus the perception of threat
attributed to the Gypsies in historical documents of the eighteenth century, reflect European
bigotries, fears, and desires more than they refer to the reality of Gypsy life. Perceptions of the
Gypsies arise from the fact that in Europe, people and their native land were, to a certain extent,
conceptually inseparable. A wandering people distinct in appearance and language did not
correspond to European categories of lawful citizenship. Gypsies came to be known for theft,
violence, attempted murder, a curse on the Virgin Mary, incest and the seemingly free exchange
of children and wives. Baby snatching is one of the oldest associations with gypsies. Gypsies
were even accused of being vampires.
Negative stereotypes of the Gypsy came to be complicated by contradictions,
complexities and mysteries in their interaction with evolving European culture. The Romantic
era idealized the forbidden, and the fact that Gypsies lived outside of respectable society made
them a popular trope for artistic works. Dramatic portrayals of the Gypsies were found in widely
72
73
Ibid., 84.
30
read works of literature that were instrumental in forming popular though fictional images of
Gypsy people. Two examples of Gypsies in literature include Goethe’s play Götz von
Berlichingen, from 1773, and Miguel de Cervantes’ La Gitanilla, from 1613. In Goethe’s play,
the forest Gypsies prove to be the last faithful protectors of the betrayed hero, the knight Götz. A
Gypsy girl in La Gitanilla, is found to actually be of noble birth, making her eventual marriage
to a nobleman acceptable. One can see the stereotype that Cervantes’ is trying to portray:
Gypsies seem to have been born into the world for the sole purpose of being thieves: they
are born of thieving parents, they are brought up with thieves, they study in order to be
thieves, and they end up as past masters in the art of thieving.74
The play also gives the impression that Gypsies are unscrupulous in their sexual relationships.
La Gitanilla reappeared as Preciosa, Pius Alexander Wolff’s German adaptation, for which Carl
Maria von Weber wrote incidental music. Wolff (1782-1828), a student of Goethe, was a
successful actor and occasional dramatist Weber knew and admired in Berlin. There is clear
evidence of anti-Gypsy sentiment by the German author, as he augments range of deplorable
behavior by the Gypsies from Cervantes’ original.75
Hungary in the eighteenth century offered unusual opportunities for its Gypsy musicians.
The threat posed by the Reformation left the Catholic Church negatively inclined toward music
and dancing. The Counter-Reformation had nurtured strong social conventions banning violin
playing and other music making, effectively preventing Magyars from entering the sphere of
professional music. 76 Accordingly, there was an increase in talented Gypsy musicians, who
passed the craft along from father to son. This combination of circumstances eventually resulted
in Gypsy domination of musical occupations in Hungary. One typical early Gypsy musical
74
75
Ibid., 137-138.
76
Ibid., 15.
31
ensemble is a duo, consisting of a drum and a kind of oboe called a “tárogató”.77 Fiddle and
cimbalom, or dulcimer, also became significant instruments.
Rather than playing traditional Romani folk music, Gypsy musicians preferred to play
whatever Hungarian audiences wanted to hear. In the eighteenth century, Western styles
associated with “Germanophile” school and seen as higher and more cultivated level of musical
development dominated such upper-class environments such as the Esterhazy court, but an
indigenous Hungarian music was still enjoyed by society at large. The slower songs called nóta,
meaning “melody,” were vocal compositions by minor nobles, people for whom professional
musical performance would have been unthinkable. The songs were often sentimental in nature,
with a declamatory text. They featured angular, abrupt and punctuated melodic lines. This lent a
type of caprice to their slower pace and frequently sad or wistful mood. The nóta gained
popularity throughout the eighteenth century and was fast eclipsing old Hungarian folk music
that included petatonicism, ecclesiastical modes and heterophony.78
Gestures and styles that were becoming distant and archaic came to be associated with
Gypsies. In maintaining the disappearing Hungarian musical language, Gypsy performances
took on the power of the sort of folk music that touches the deepest regions of national
consciousness. The Gypsy musicians playing were assumed to be abandoning themselves
wholly to the music and the ancient grief and passions of which the music sang, and so
compelling was the effect that to an Austrian or German, the music obviously bespoke the
tribulation-filled history of the Gypsies. J. G. Kohl describes the effect of the Gypsy performers
in his travelogue of 1840:
77Sàrosi, 54.
78Ibid., 23.
32
I could easily understand the partiality manifested by the people generally for this music,
for there is something in its character so wild and impassioned—it has tones of such deep
melancholy, such heart-piercing grief, and wild despair, that one is involuntarily carried
away by it; and although, on the whole, the performance of the gypsies is rude and wild,
many of them manifest so much of musical inspiration, as well make amends for their
deficiencies in scientific culture.79
To a Hungarian-born listener, however, it was the distant Hungarian past that was being evoked.
It conjured a national identity all the more precious because of Hungary’s history and frequent
circumstance as ruled under the Ottomans and the Habsburgs.
As musicians, Gypsies were seen to have emotional responses to life that were pure,
genuine, and unencumbered by propriety, being so simple and unaffected as to be closer to
nature than to human society. Gypsies were thought to be disposed to wild celebration and
exultation; their talent for musical expression and entertainment seemed an outgrowth of this
propensity. At the same time, they were also subject to a profound, almost animal melancholy,
connected with their ancient curse, their wandering, and their persecution. Correspondingly,
Gypsy music could express grief to wild abandon. Utmost seriousness was juxtaposed with
frivolity, yet always with an accent and significance unattainable by more traditional musical
language.
Verbunkos
Dancing as a ritual form of expression and as a crucial aspect of living was a strong
element in Magyar culture, incorporating tribal, equestrian, and nomadic aspects of its distant
history and inspiring seriousness and courage. Hungarian dance incorporated soloistic
improvisation in a powerful individual style. The dancer strived is to give off his own fire and to
invent dance figures. A German officer wrote in 1792:
79
Johann Georg Kohl, Austria, Vienna, Prague, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Danube (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1843), 214.
33
[The Hungarian National Dance] expresses the character of the nation in an extraordinary
way. Even the long trousers of the Hungarian point to a people whose living element is
riding . . . The clicking of the spurs is indeed an essential part of the Hungarian dance.80
The dance would be known as verbunkos, a man’s dance used so extensively by the
Habsburgs for military enlistment that it was named after the German word “Werbung,” which
means recruiting. From 1715 until the introduction of general military duty in 1868, these heroic
dances were used by the Imperial Army to lure the village boys into the army with depictions of
a jolly, carefree army life.81 In the interests of successful recruiting, the military authorities were
careful to see that the people knew and liked the verbunkos dances. That is the dances—at least
in their basic motifs—had to be ones people already knew by tradition.
The verbunkos seems to have produced a great dramatic effect, beginning slowly with
measured, dignified steps from the commanding officer and becoming wilder and more joyous as
men from further down the military hierarchy began to join. The accompanying music was
supplied by Gypsy musicians, sometimes under duress. The magic associated with Gypsy
musicians stemmed from their performance style, but was greatly enhanced by the fact that they
were playing music that itself struck a nationalistic chord in the souls of the original Hungarian
listeners. This character of the verbunkos, both music and dance, was something unique to
Hungary, and thus a powerful music for the Gypsies to cultivate in their performances.
The Style hongrois
In the eighteenth century, Gypsies migrated to Vienna, the eastern outpost of the West,
and their music began to be appreciated there. Style hongrois began to appear in Viennese
Classical music in the 1760’s as a small body of inflections that might lend the character of
80
81
Jonathan Bellman, “Verbunkos,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 11 June 2010),
http:www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
34
ungarese to a piano trio or a string quartet movement. What this meant, in German terms, was
slightly exotic or “characteristic” but no more disruptively so than the highly popular Turkish
style, with which the style hongrois overlapped in themes of both chronology and specific
content.
The source music on which Haydn, Weber, and others drew was not purely Hungarian
music, but rather a combination of Hungarian popular song and dance repertories with the
performance style and interpretive traditions of the Gypsies, who were the most prominent
musicians in Hungary. Since the origin of the music was both Gypsy and Hungarian, the term
must be considered to reflect both influences.
An example of a successful gypsy musician is János Bihari (1764-1827), who appeared in
Pest in 1801 or 1802 with his band, which consisted of four violinists and a cimbalom player.
Working mainly in Pest, he soon became widely known for his interpretation. Beethoven heard
Bihari play in Vienna, “often and with pleasure.”82 One of his most famous contributions to the
repertory is a rendition of the Rakóczi Song, an important nationalistic anthem.
When Gypsies emerged from the suspect east playing Hungarian music and maintaining
an apparent aloofness from society, reactions to them were colored by political and cultural
upheaval surrounding the Siege of Vienna. The Viennese perceived Gypsies to be in league with
the Turks. A German Encyclopedia of 1749 states “believable indications that [the Gypsies] are
informers, traitors and spies in the Christian countries for the Turks and other enemies of
Christendom.”83
While both style hongrois and the Turkish style lack authentic representation of their
subject, the Turkish style had not been heard by the musicians “imitating” it and so was largely
82
Kohl, 214.
83
Bellman, The ’Style Hongrois’ in the Music of Western Europe, 28-29.
35
synthesized. In contrast, Hungarian Gypsies could easily be heard in person. The Gypsies
became a distilled version of “otherness” that embodied both the Turkish threat and the more
general threat of contact with a different culture. The style hongrois eventually superseded the
Turkish style as Europe’s common exotic musical dialect, yet for a period of time the two styles
coexisted. This Turkish-to-Gypsy transitional period, extending roughly from the last quarter of
the eighteenth century into the second decade of the nineteenth century, is interesting in the way
that it parallels other transitions taking place at the same time: the expansion of the eighteenth-
century musical vocabulary, the transition from the notion of affect to the Romantic notion of
pure feeling, and the evolution of the harmonic language. The quaint, stylized associations with
the Turks were being replaced by the fearsome yet alluring reputation of the Gypsies. The style
hongrois, therefore, would speak to the emerging Romantic sensibility with an immediacy and
relevance unavailable to the largely burlesque Turkish style.
Today, style hongrois refers to the specific musical language used by Western composers
from the mid-eighteenth to the early twentieth-centuries to evoke the performances of Hungarian
Gypsies. Franz Liszt first catalogued Gypsy music in the 1859 book Des Bohémiens et de leur
musique en Hongrie, naming it “style hongrois.” Written well after the style had already
developed, Liszt’s classification has many problems. The French term style hongrois coined by
Liszt and traditionally employed, has long been applied only to the Hungarian-Gypsy writing of
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Liszt, and Brahms, whereas the English phrase
“Hungarian style,” has been applied to composers like Bartók and Kodály. The style hongrois
continued to be used until Ravel’s Tzigane of 1924.84
84
Matthew Head,“Style Hongrois,” Grove Music Online ed. by. L. Macy (Accessed 11
June 2010), http:www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
36
Gestures of the Style hongrois
The development of the style hongrois and verbunkos, can be observed in specific
compositions with distinguishing musical features. General characteristics of verbunkos
included duple meter, the gradual increase of tempo from very slow to very fast and a great deal
of instrumental ornamentation. In the early verbunkos repertory the musical material was
nothing but a set of prefabricated melodic patterns transmitted aurally. 85 A single melodic
pattern could have many variations. The slow and fast dances came to be markedly
differentiated as this improvised folk music began to be written down and developed by trained
performers and composers. The improvisatory quality of music led to a simple structure with
repeated motives.
The repertory characteristically used a two-dance lassύ-friss (slow-fast) type which could
include a connecting figura section. More intricate overall construction featured three, four or
more sections gradually accelerating throughout the piece. The slow section was heavy,
deliberate and in 4/4. The slow dance tended to have dotted rhythms with noble deportment and
a heroic or pathetic character.86 The lassύ was free, rhapsodic, and although its basis was song
literature, the lassύ was enveloped by an improvisatory nature, often in direct contradiction to
any lyrics. Movements following the slow main section were called figura, which means
addition in Hungarian. Functioning like a coda, the figura featured repeating motifs in a
perpetuum mobile-like texture based on an even progression of sixteenth notes. 87 These
adaptations of instrumental folk music were characterized by a narrow tonal range, figurations,
and high register motivic repetition.88 The friss, or fast movement used melodic contours that
85
Pethő, 200.
86
Ibid., 216.
87
Ibid., 206.
88
Ibid., 206.
37
were more daring than the slow movement, often requiring virtuosic performing skills. The friss
could be one of several dancing songs, typically energetic, featuring a total loss of emotional
control, and lending a fiery character to the music.
Two instruments most strongly associated with Gypsy performances were fiddle and
cimbalom. Middle-range woodwinds, originating with the tárogató, also had a long tradition in
Hungarian-Gypsy music. Any references to the folk style of playing on these instruments could
be an attribute of style hongrois. These references included pizzicato, wide leaps performed in a
wild, indiscriminant manner, double stops, and small jangling ornaments as well as drone fifths.
Several style hongrois features could be seen in melody construction. The Kuruc-fourth,
a rebounding figure that alternates between the fifth scale degree and upper tonic, used a
repeated fourth leap. The musical language associated with the Kuruc period had a tremendous
resonance for Hungarians.89 The augmented second and the raised fourth scale degree were
characteristic intervals. The Gypsy scale, although more of an after-the-fact theoretical
distillation, not unlike the “Blues” scale, can nonetheless aid in understanding.
Example 1: The “Gypsy” Scale
Some of the most striking effects of the entire style hongrois were caused by a
nonfunctional deployment of harmony, one that features sudden chordal shifts and juxtapositions
of distant chords. Liszt’s book stressed the Gypsies’ “habit of passing suddenly to a remote
key,” and that their “system of modulation” seeme to be based on a total negation of all
89
György Ránki, ed., “Hungarian , History--World History,” Indiana University Studies on Hungarian
History, 1 (Bloomington IN, 1984), 34.
38
predetermined harmonic plan.90 Mode mixture, or a fluid shifting between major and minor was
common. As verbunkos matured, chordal treatment was also more diverse, although simple
harmony based on the I-IV-V chords was still frequent. Altered chords like the diminished
seventh and chromatic scales in the melody also appeared. The third related relationships,
increasing common , were probably a recent Western effect in verbunkos music.
Another large group of gestures associated with the style hongrois was rhythmic. The
music had tremendous rhythmic flexibility. Gypsy ornamentation in slow music included runs,
touching languid pauses, and sustained or snapped off notes that virtually pulled the original
structure apart. A very common ornamental rhythm in style hongrois was the dotted rhythm.
This was all but universal in verbunkos pieces and was a staple of Gypsy fiddlers as it provided
an insinuating, attractive swing to melodies. Another rhythm, not unique to style hongrois, but
used extensively, was the simple decorative triplet.
Specific turning figures were associated with gypsy music, as is evidenced by the early
collections of verbunkos music. Since the style was initially transmitted aurally, a gypsy
performer would develop a repertoire of patterns that were suitable for a given function in the
music, often cadential. The most frequent closing formulae included embellished variations of
repeated quarter notes at the same pitch or jumping an octave. The spondee, a metric foot
consisting of two longs was a common Hungarian reference.91 The accented short-long, a figure
which was similar to the “Lombard” rhythm appears in the style hongrois. The Hungarian
anapest was another figure consisting of an accented short-short-long. The alla zoppa (Italian,
“limping”) rhythm was one of the most common in the style hongrois. It consisted of a quarter
note between two eighth notes, or a half note flanked by quarters. In fast music, it produced a
90
Franz Liszt, The Gypsy in Music [Des Bohémiens et leur musique en Hongrie, 1859], trans. Edwin Evans,
1881(Reprint London: William Reeves, 1960), 297.
91
Pethő, 214.
39
highly infectious and kinetic dance rhythm. Syncopated accompaniment was generally a trait of
Hungarian-Gypsy music.
The bokázó figure, one of the clearest indications of the style hongrois, was a special case
because it is not only a rhythm but also a specific melodic contour—a turn beginning with the
upper neighbor. The melody could be traced to the roots of the genre as it reflected the turning
figures which were the building blocks of early verbunkos performances. Its etymological
origins mean “capering.” The bokázó rhythm came from a traditional heel-and–spur clicking
figure common to Hungarian dance. It was so universal at the end of phrases that Liszt referred
to the bokázó simply as the “Magyar cadence.”92 The following examples show the rhythmic
motifs as seen in Andante e Rondo Ungarese:
Example 2:
Hungarian Anapest: measure 132 Spondee: measure 99
Alla Zoppa: measure 106 Bokázó: measure 194
92
Liszt, 21.
40
Composers of the Style hongrois
Scores of verbunkos music were published from 1784 onwards in Vienna and
elsewhere.93 Arrangements of verbunkos for home piano use included four books of anonymous
compositions Originelle ungarische Nationaltänze im Clavierauszug von verschiedenen
Zuegeunern aus Galantha, including the pieces notated after the guest performance of the
Galánta Gypsies in Vienna in 1787.
Haydn was in the service of the Esterházys in Hungary for most of his career, so he had
firsthand knowledge of the newly developing verbunkos repertory. It can also be documented
that he had contemporaneous verbunkos publications such as a collection entitled Ungarische
Nationaltänze, mentioned in the 1858 inventory of Prince Esterházy.94 Some of the first notation
of early verbunkos is from the finale of Haydn’s Piano Trio in G major (Hoboken XV:25). The
Rondo “In the Gypsies’ style” is a blend of Turkish and Gypsy styles. Early verbunkos
publications include the theme from this movement. However, since Haydn’s piece predates
such music, Haydn may have heard it in person or collected a manuscript with this theme.
Haydn was able to blend various eastern styles with great skill. He lived most of his life in areas
where he could be exposed to these musics and subsequently had a deeper understanding of
them. The second movement of the string quartet Opus 54/2 is an improvisatory Gypsy lament.
The second movement of Haydn’s Symphony 103 is an etude in pan-eastern exoticism, cast in
the form of a set of variations in alternating major and minor modes. Rondos were the most
typical placement for the style hongrois, such as Haydn’s Rondo alla Ungherese, the finale to the
D major keyboard concerto.
93
Bellman, “Verbunkos,” http:www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
94
Pethő, 221.
41
Mozart is not as successful as Haydn with style hongrois. Mozart used Turkish music
separately, as in his opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail, but the Hungarian-Gypsy music is a
combined style that lacks the character of Haydn’s work. In the last movement of Violin
Concerto in A major K. 219, Mozart makes use of alla zoppa syncopations and virtuosic violin
writing as well as the Kuruc fourth, yet, the middle section of this rondo is Turkish—it uses
thumping 2/4 meter, static harmony, ornaments and exaggerated dynamic effects to imitate
percussion.
Beethoven, known to be partial to Gypsy performances in Vienna, was befriended by
several noble Hungarian families and also visited Hungary. Further evidence of Beethoven’s
esteem of Bihari includes melodic borrowing from the Gypsy composer.95 In the Overture to
King Stephen, he uses Gypsy syncopations and other inflections to suggest the Hungarian setting
of the play, referencing a tune by Bihari. The Piano Concerto in E-flat contains a passage in the
parallel minor with prominent dotted rhythms and ornaments, using the quintessentially Gypsy
augmented second. Beethoven’s Alla Ingarese, Opus 129, “Rage over a Lost Penny” suggests
Gypsy thievery, but the music is purely Turkish. In the second theme of the finale of the Seventh
Symphony, Beethoven was able to express complete and overwhelming passion through
verbunkos music.
The difference between the deployment of the style hongrois in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries can be summarized this way: In the eighteenth century, the vernacular’s
rough edges were for the most part softened in the interest of the homogeneity of musical
language. This accounts for Mozart’s restrained elegance when using Hungarian-Gypsy style.
Exotic elements were assimilated into the prevailing style. Weber and Beethoven and later
Schubert Brahms and Liszt chose to use the style hongrois to intensify the dramatic effect rather
95
Pethő, 222.
42
than constrain it. In the eighteenth century, ungarese was merely a topic; the nineteenth century
style hongrois was a discrete musical language.
Weber and the Style hongrois
Influenced by Vogler, Weber embraced Exoticism. Traveling almost constantly
throughout his life, Weber absorbed all the influences that reached him. Examples of the various
exotic styles Weber employed include Weber’s theatrical works, such as his incidental music for
Schiller’s Turandot and his opera Abu Hassan. Weber’s Exoticism also extended to the
instrumental genre, including his works Grand Polonaise for piano, Nine Variations on a
Norwegian Air for piano and violin and Romanza Siciliana for flute. Other works have titles
such as Polacca, Alla Polacca, Carattere Espagnuolo, Espagnuolo, Air russe and Air polonaise.
Weber, whose output includes style hongrois, never travelled to Hungary nor had close contacts
with Hungarian music. The only remote connection was a flood of verbunkos compositions
coming out in 1803-1804, when Weber was living in Vienna.96 In early exotic works, Weber
typically built his pieces around a single foreign theme, often lifted directly from a dictionary or
song book that provided curt musical examples from foreign countries. In later works, however,
Weber’s style blended elements from many different traditions to create an undefined Exoticism.
The Grand Pot-Pourri for cello and orchestra (Opus 20, 1808), can be seen as a
preliminary study in the style hongrois, with three continuous movements. The Hungarian
influence is most discernible in the second episode of the rondo. The cello solo of the Pot-
Pourri remains predominated by the dotted rhythm, reinforcing the Hungarian character.
Weber’s next foray into the style hongrois, the Andante e Rondo Ungarese was a
textbook presentation of the style hongrois. In this successful characterization, Weber relied
96
Pethő, 211.
43
heavily on the legacy of Haydn, presenting the style hongrois in a finely-wrought, virtuosic form,
belonging to the “classical” style. Like Haydn, his primary placement of Hungarian-Gypsy
material occurs in a rondo movement.
In 1816 Weber composed the Sieben Variationen über ein Zigeunerlied (Opus 55), a
commissioned work lacking both an interesting theme and any demonstrable commitment on the
part of the composer. Its genesis, however, attests to the popularity of verbunkos. In 1819
Weber completed the Huit pieces (1818-1819, Opus 60) for piano duet, the fourth of which was
entitled “Alla Zingara.” This movement, placed within a group of pieces varying in style, also
lacks the more distinct character he was able to give to the Rondo Ungarese. Titles did not
always express the exotic content contained in a work, as Weber combined various exotic styles
freely. An example is the Horn Concertino in E minor (Opus 45), subtitled Alla Polacca. Amid
a nominally Polish style the alla zoppa rhythm and the bokázó formula are present.
In the incidental music Weber composed for Wolff’s Preciosa, Weber presents mixed
Exoticism. The story, which includes a nobleman who falls in love with a Gypsy girl and joins
the wandering Gypsies, requires exotic music. In Weber’s only Hungarian correspondence of
note a Hungarian nobleman, Baron Frigyes Podmaniczky wrote in his diary:
My father frequently communicated with . . . the world famous composer of Der

Freischütz, Carl Maria Weber, and corresponded with him. Owing to this friendship,
when the opera Preciosa was being composed, my father sent Weber several Hungarian
tunes by Bihari; these tunes had been notated by the music teacher of my sisters after
Bihari’s performance in Aszód and arranged for the piano.97
The “Zigeunermarsch” of Preciosa musically paints the entrance scene of a band of Gypsies,
including style hongrois gestures similar to the Rondo Ungarese but he combines this with
Spanish elements. In the Spanische Nationaltänze of Act III, there is a bokázó formula, while in
97
Pethő, 229.
44
the Chor und Tanz der Zigeuner, the dance rhythms are more polonaise than verbunkos. Weber
is able to incorporate many exotic styles, making Preciosa his best pan-exotic attempt.
Weber would eventually come to use the style hongrois with ever greater deftness. In
Der Freischütz, his most celebrated composition, Weber uses hints of the Gyspy-Hungarian style
in Act I, Caspar’s song “Hier im ird’schen Jammerthal.” Here Caspar, in an evil plot, seeks to
win the trust of an unsuspecting Max. The opening of this song is in minor mode, with spondee
rhythms, truncated phrases, and shrill ornamentation, all of which provide a subtle Gypsy
backdrop for Caspar’s deceit. This allusion to the style hongrois, goes beyond an
unsophisticated caricature, to actually insinuate what motives are beneath the surface.
Ännchen’s Romanze from Act III, “Einst träumte meiner sel’gen Base,” also features a character
trying to mask her true feelings. Here Weber employs violistic flourishes and a dotted
Zingarese-type melody. The text of the song refers to dream divination, an activity long
associated with Gypsies.
In Preciosa and Der Freischütz this musical dialect is not appearing either at random or
as an elegant “characteristic,” diversion. It appears in specific contexts to the music around it.
Weber’s use of this style represents a profound development because he is the first composer
who used style hongrois not only to suggest Hungarian Gypsies but also aspects of their
stereotype and situation.

45
CHAPTER 4
THE ANDANTE AND HUNGARIAN RONDO
The motives, harmonic language, and formal structure of Andante e Rondo Ungarese
represent conventions prevalent in Weber’s time. The work is so basic in its design that it is
clearly meant to highlight the stylistic background. Accordingly, this section will analyze formal
and harmonic elements of the work along with the characteristics of the style hongrois to reach a
comprehensive understanding of the work.
The andante is based on the siciliana, a dance that is a slower version of the gigue, which
was popular in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Siciliana has an Italian
connotation, as it is also related to a Renaissance dance once fashionable in Venice. 98 The
siciliana is normally in a slow 6/8 or 12/8 meter and tends to have clear phrases. Along with the
simplicity of style, an upbeat eighth note is the dance’s most defining trait. Used during the aria
“And He Shall Feed His Flock,” in Georg Friedrich Handel’s Messiah, the gentle rocking feeling
created by the sicilana is often associated with pastoral scenes, and it can also elicit melancholy
emotions.99 Weber uses the Neopolitan sixth chord with a melodic lowered second scale degree
in the opening as a superficial way of creating exotic flavor. Through modulations between
major and minor key centers, often a third apart, Weber invokes a happy-sad color that reflects
Exoticism.
98
Meredith Ellis Little, ”Siciliana,” Grove Music Online. ed. L. Macy (Accessed 3 September 2010),
99
Little, http:www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
46
The andante can be broken down as such:
Theme mm. 1-17 C minor

Transition 1 mm. 18-21
Variation 1 mm. 22-37 bassoon obbligato
Transition 2 mm. 38-39
Variation 2 mm. 40-55 A-flat major
Transition 3 mm. 56-59 melody in strings, use of diminished seventh chords, ending on V7
Variation 3 mm. 60-75 C minor, more assertive, faster bassoon obbligato
Transition 4 mm. 76-81 pedal G
The andante uses sectional variations. Since the melody is based on a siciliana, a
baroque dance form, it is no surprise that the theme is in simple binary form. The bassoon first
plays the theme to a homophonic chordal accompaniment of pizzicato strings, a Hungarian-
Gypsy touch. Sharing an identical melody in their respective first measures, the first two phrases
form an antecedent-consequent relationship. The music follows a symmetrical sectional binary
form, cadencing on the tonic after the first section. In the B section of this small binary theme,
Weber begins on a g minor chord, which is minor v in C minor. This G minor key area is short-
lived, as a B natural substitutes for B-flat four bars later, with the addition of an F natural to spell
a dominant seventh chord in the original key. As the piece reaches the end of the second part of
the binary form, the key sits firmly in the tonic. The four-bar transition to the next variation re-
affirms the key area.
Weber evokes the style hongrois throughout the andante, using numerous rhythmic and
harmonic devices typical of the style. The short-long “Lombard” rhythm, a rhythmic gesture
common in the style hongrois, appears in measures two and four, with eighth notes on the
downbeats followed by accented quarter notes. This creates a sighing motif in the opening
melody and a punctuated, pathetic feel. Weber also makes use of dotted rhythms in bars 3 and 7,
which are also typical of the style hongrois. More Hungarian-Gypsy ideas can be seen in the
melodic intervals. Both the F sharp to A in measure 10 and the skipping of scale degree two in
47
measure 16 give the fleeting impression of an augmented second in the melody. Weber also
employs the raised fourth in measure 10.
The second part of the theme makes dramatic use of appoggiaturas. The A-flat in
measure 14 has the distinction of being a flattened, accented incomplete neighbor.
Appoggiaturas in measures 9 and 11 also heighten the tension and dramatic anticipation.
Combined with the Neopolitan chord in measure 15, these characteristics give the listener a
strong sense of Exoticism.
The progression of variations on the theme is effective, as each variation adds a new layer
of complexity and energy. In the second variation (beginning at measure 22), the orchestral
accompaniment, which has up to this point been simple pizzicato chords, takes up the bassoon
melody while the bassoon plays a new obbligato. The rhythm in the bassoon is steady sixteenth
notes. The orchestra uses reduced parts during the second variation with only the first and
second violins playing. Although the harmonic structure stays the same throughout the variation,
Weber varies the vamp in the transition from the second to the third variation by shortening it
from four bars to two. The harmonies in this transition are the anticipated pre-dominant
followed by a cadential 6-4.
The transition to the third variation suggests a continuation of C minor, but the bassoon
melody enters in an unambiguous A-flat major. This change of key is sudden and unprepared,
creating a sense of exotic fluctuation between happiness and sadness. Weber also experiments
with form in the third variation. He brings back the initial melody at the end of the B section,
signaling rounded binary as opposed to the simple binary used in the previous two variations.
The accompaniment is augmented to include the entire string section in this variation, with a
brief moment of horn accompaniment. When the horns then take over the accompaniment from
48
the strings in measure 48, the change in timbre signals that this is the most tonally distant part of
this variation, employing chromaticism and mode mixture in the melody.
The melody anticipates the harmonic shifts throughout the andante, beginning in the first
variation, where the bassoon plays many of the most colorful notes. Examples include measure
7, where the bassoon has the leading tone in the applied dominant, measure 10, where the
bassoon gets F sharp and A, signaling that there is a temporary new key area, and most
importantly, the flat supertonic in measure 14, the single most interesting note in the whole of the
16 bar theme. Weber continues to lead with the bassoon melody in the third variation which
includes a new exotic-sounding technique—mode mixture. Other than measure 50, which
includes a mode mixture and a cadence on the dominant preceded by applied dominants, the
third variation uses conventional harmonies, relying on the unexpected shift to A-flat major to
generate most of the harmonic interest.
The third transition makes use of a chain of applied dominant seventh chords followed by
fully diminished seventh chords to end on a G dominant seventh chord in bar 59. It is also the
first transition where the strings play the melody instead of a simple vamp, and this transition
stands out for its use of melody in the accompaniment. This transition includes the only major
revision that Weber made to the piece after re-casting it for bassoon—the four-measure transition
to the fourth variation was not included in the original version for viola.100
Firmly back in C minor, the spirited fourth variation is more rhythmically aggressive than
its predecessors. The accompaniment carries the original melody, as in the second variation.
Weber energizes the solo part by doubling the note speed yet again to thirty-second notes in a
new bassoon obbligato. He also includes repeated tongued notes, which give the obbligato an
100
Carl Maria von Weber, Andante d Rondo Ungarese für Fagot und Orchester Opus 35, with a preface by
William Waterhouse (New York: Universal Bassoon Edition, 1991), ii.
49
assertive quality. The obbligato bassoon melody also features dramatic leaps, such as the
double-octave plus a third in measure 64 and the minor tenth in measure 68.
During the last variation, all of the wind instruments enter and create a building in the
accompaniment. The growing momentum in the accompaniment evokes the Hungarian
verbunkos tradition in which the tempo accelerates throughout the piece. The vamp at the end of
this section uses a diminished seventh chord for drama, but it leads to the dominant. Then,
Weber introduces a pedal and dwells on the dominant harmonies, giving a sense of anticipation
leading up to the C major rondo. He uses dark horn notes only in the last two measures. When
C major finally arrives, the preceding music sets up exaggerated brightness.
While the andante primarily imitates the siciliana, it also suggests Hungarian-Gyspy and
verbunkos elements, making it an example of mixed Exoticism. The tempo, acceleration and
affect of the andante have the standard elements of the lassύ in general terms. One last example
where the andante reflects the Gypsy performing style is the A-flat major variation. The move to
A-flat recreates a Gypsy-like unexpected shift in keys. The andante, which is discounted by
Hungarian musicologist Csilla Pethö because it is siciliana,101 deserves attention due to the many
elements of style hongrois. The increasing momentum, coupled with Lombard rhythms, the
melodic content and the affect of the andante all attest to the fact that Weber, while composing a
siciliana, was thinking of Hungarian-Gypsy music.
With the rondo theme Weber begins to evoke style hongrois in earnest, using virtually
every gesture typical of the style in rapid succession. Weber started by searching for an
“original” source for the opening theme. In his study Beethoven és Magyarirszág [Beethoven
and Hungary] Ervin Major presents a tune with the words Die Hussiten zogen vor Naumburg,
101
Pethő, 235.
50
which the German song-books define as of Hungarian origin.102 The first four bars of the tune
are practically identical to the beginning of the rondo theme. This theme, along with the
multitude of style hongrois gestures in the rondo, make the rondo decidedly Hungarian-Gypsy in
nature.
This Hungarian Rondo is in a five-part rondo form. The form breaks down in this way:
A mm. 82-105 bassoon presents the rondo melody in C major, followed by

orchestral repetition
mm. 106-113 dotted sixteenth motive over vamp
mm. 114-121 legato leaps, tonicization of a minor
mm. 122-137 return of theme by orchestra, followed by transitional material in C
major
B m. 138 “Cantabile,” G major
mm. 161-163 mode mixture, touch of G minor
m. 165 B-flat dominant seventh, A-flat in melody
m. 169 German augmented sixth chord, followed by cadence in C
A m. 174 Abbreviated return of theme, in C
C m. 194 F major with color notes
mm. 206-209 tag to C theme in D minor
mm. 214-215 return to F major
m. 223 return of C theme
m. 226 orchestra turns initial C theme to minor
m. 231 F minor using motive from transition of A theme
m. 236 pivot chord to A-flat major
m. 241 A-flat major
m. 247 transition starting in E-flat major
A m. 259 abbreviated return of theme, C major
Coda m. 278 C major
What makes the rondo theme Hungarian is not merely its so-called Hungarian melody,
but its many verbunkos elements, such as the turn motifs in bars 82 and 85 combined with
leaping pairs of eighth notes and a pervasive dotted rhythm. The consistent syncopated accents
give a distinct rhythmic pulsation to the music. The use of grace notes is another important
gesture. Weber whimsically turns to e minor, which is iii in C major, at the end of the theme.
This is not even a full tonicization, however, because he immediately returns to C major with the
102
Pethő, 236.
51
orchestral repetition of the material. Throughout the Andante e Rondo Ungarese, Weber exploits
third relationships between keys on both large and small levels.
With the second part of the rondo theme, Weber plays with two motifs he has already
introduced, the dotted rhythm, and rolling eighth notes, both typical verbunkos formulas. The
leaping legato section, temporarily in A minor, contrasts with the previous section both in
tonality and with its more static rhythm. Accents and large leaps play an important role in the
incorporation of Hungarian-Gypsy elements. Weber further differentiates the dotted figure and
the leaping eighth notes with orchestration: at measure 106, the orchestration suddenly drops
down to only horns and bassoons, which play a drone in the alla zoppa rhythm. This change in
orchestration sets this section apart and emphasizes the simple repeated structure of this passage.
The violins and violas then take up the accompaniment to the leaping legato melody, with cello
and bass playing a light pizzicato.
In the A section of the rondo, the initial motive finally returns in C major in measure 122,
with the flute and first violin playing the melody, accompanied by the full orchestra. In
measures 129-137, Weber introduces a new motive in the accompaniment which transitions to
the B section. A chain of anapests, animated by ties and syncopated accents, begins in measure
129. The anapest motive becomes significant when it returns in the C section in the solo voice,
and it evokes a clear style hongrois character throughout. The closing gesture in measure 139,
which features a jump to the third, refers motivically to a cadential formula typical in verbunkos
pieces.
The opening statement of the A section surprises the listener with a phrase that is twelve
bars long, instead of eight or sixteen. This unexpected length of phrases continues with the
second part of the A section at bar 106. Here, a repeat sign doubles the length of the eight bars,
52
creating a sixteen-bar phrase. The last leaping section, which begins at measure 114, is simply
eight bars, followed by a truncated eight bars of theme in the orchestra and eight bars of new
transitional material. Weber uses these asymmetrical phrase lengths to enhance the Hungarian
character of the work. Asymmetrical construction is not typical of Weber’s other works, which
confirms that he used this technique to create an exotic color.
The “cantabile” at measure 138 marks the beginning of the B section of the rondo.
Though ambiguous to start, it lands on the dominant in the eighth measure. The initial ambiguity
foreshadows the more adventurous harmonic language throughout the B section, which includes
mode mixture, more use of chromaticism, an unexpected modulation in measure 165 and even
the appearance of a German augmented sixth chord in measure 169. Chiefly used as contrasting
material, the B section features only a light sprinkling of anapests and dotted notes in the
melody.
The return of the A section is shortened the second time, featuring one rhythmic
alteration—an ornament supplied by the composer—in bar 182 that changes even sixteenth notes
to a dotted figure. The form is reinforced by a short four-bar repetition of the theme in measure
178, which is translated to minor and features the flute and oboe, directly before the return of the
main motto. When the flute and oboe drop out, there is a clear shift in the accompaniment with
the return of theme A. The orchestra does not repeat the bassoon melody, but rather moves on to
the material first played in bar 106 of the first episode. Weber then launches immediately into
the new thematic and tonal area.
The fourth large formal section of the rondo, known as the C section, is in F major which
is subdominant in the overall tonal scheme. This section, which begins in measure 194, features
extended mode mixture between F major and F minor as well as a prominent third relationship
53
between F minor and A-flat major. The orchestral transition from measures 129-137 recurs in
measure 231; however, it is now in a minor key and carried by the bassoon. The rhythmic
liveliness introduced by anapests returns with the large leaps heavily reduced, evoking the
temperament of a fast verbunkos piece in minor tonality.
The theme of this last episode begins with a bokázó gesture, which is almost buried under
the galloping motion intensified by constant octave changes, giving the simple tune a lot of pep
and sweep. The C section continues to be more audacious in its musical devices, with a very
mischievous tag to the twelve bar motive in D minor. Here again, we see Weber using third
relationships for short tonicizations within the larger scale harmonies, such as in measure 206. A
surprise modulation to A-flat occurs in measure 236-239. The A-flat section also features a
smoother, scale-like motion in the solo part. By measure 245, the tonal center is on the move
again toward E-flat major. A cadence confirms this shift in measure 247.
The last transition to C major, which begins in measure 259, is the most interesting.
Once again, the transition is achieved through a third relationship between E-flat major and C
major. The first 6 bars of the transition back to the final A theme stay in E-flat major. Weber
introduces some uncertainty with a diminished-seventh chord in the third measure, measure 249.
In measure 253 he introduces the same diminished-seventh chord, spelled differently and uses it
as a pivot chord. This diminished seventh chord in measure 253 strongly suggests a cadence in
C major, but we do not get the resolution directly. From here he touches D minor before
proceeding to a G dominant seventh chord. At the end of this transition, the modulation is driven
by the melody. First, at measure 253, the violins and flutes play the theme in D minor with a
fully diminished seventh chord beneath them. In the second repetition of D minor, at measure
54
255, the accompaniment plays a D-minor chord. Then, after a G dominant seventh chord in
measure 257, the D minor harmony is re-cast as minor ii of C major.
Example. 3: a loosely constructed ii-V-I, measures 253-259
The last restatement of A can be distinguished by the subtle use of oboes and a grace note
added in measure 267. The bravura section at the end of the piece functions as a coda. The coda
is distinctive from earlier material, featuring constant, triplet sixteenth notes. With regard to
tempo, these are the fastest moving notes of the entire work. The coda can further be divided
into two sections: one section starts at measure 278 and goes until measure 301 while the second
goes from measure 302 to the end.
The first section of the coda starts with simple tonic-dominant vacillation on downbeats
in the orchestra and scalar work in the solo part. As the orchestra reintroduces the rondo theme,
the harmonies shift to slightly more complex predominant harmonies and the solo part includes
55
more leaping material. Eventually the bassoon lands on a series of arpeggios followed by trills.
The accompanying harmonies move from predominant, to applied dominant, to a German 6-5.
Weber stretches the harmonies out with a series of applied dominants before finally resolving to
tonic in bar 302. The last section of the coda features a tonic-dominant fluctuation and arpeggios
in the solo bassoon part leading to an unaccompanied scale up the range of the bassoon with
added chromatics for color. The coda typifies a virtuosic concert piece and the Hungarian-
Gypsy style at the same time. The virtuosic runs terminate the work spectacularly, and also, with
their motif-repeating structure, refer to the figura parts of verbunkos pieces.
Andante e Rondo Ungarese successfully introduces the exotic. Weber enlivens the
bokázó pattern and the sixteenth note figurations with dotting. The unexpected leaps and
changes of register further expand the range of gestures in the music. Rhythmic differentiation,
motivic material based on patterns at some times and on free invention at others, and the
sweeping melodic writing are all features that characterize the friss dances of mature verbunkos
composed to increasingly satisfy the expectations of art music. Weber is able to surpass his
predecessors in his distinctive use of the style hongrois by deriving his material from later, more
sophisticated verbunkos. The elements he borrowed from mature verbunkos are effectively
combined with his own personal style and with the requirements of a virtuosic concert piece.
56
CHAPTER 5
PERFORMANCE PRACTICE
The Manuscript Source
During the last four decades historical performance has become part of mainstream
musical life. One challenge for today’s musicians is that a composer did not always include
performance specifics; he simply expected certain conventions to be observed. Some of these
conventions no longer exist, while others have undergone significant changes of meaning. The
manuscript of the Andante e Rondo Ungarese is preserved in the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in
Berlin. While Weber has meticulously marked certain passages, elsewhere he has deliberately
left his interpreter free to determine matters of articulation and accentuation. Since Weber’s
time, it has become the rule for editors to decide all such matters on behalf of the player, too
often failing to permit him or her to distinguish between what the composer himself has
prescribed and what the editor has added. Therefore, the attempt to create a historically accurate
performance may benefit from consulting the manuscript, contemporary tutors, and works by the
same composer. The potentials and limitations of the instruments available at the time of
composition should also be considered.
An important indication of the history of the work is provided by Friedrich Wilhelm
Jähns (1809-88), who in addition to writing a biography of Weber, created a thematic catalogue
of Weber’s works that provides a system of reference more exact than opus numbers. Jähns
annotated the title of the Andante e Rondo Ungarese thus: “after the Concertino for viola by
C.M. v. Weber (composed for his brother Fritz, completed on the 18th Oct. 1809) found by me
today, re-arranged for bassoon on the 16th, 17th and 18th Oct. 1813 in Prague for his friend Brandt
57
from Munich, who performed it on Feb. 19th in his concert in Prague. F.W. Jähns Sept 14th,
1864.”103
Weber made comparatively few changes in transitioning the piece from viola to bassoon.
He expanded one of the orchestral refrains in the andante by adding bars 56-59. Andante e
Rondo Ungarese was published around 1816 by Weber’s Berlin publisher Schlesinger as Opus
35 in parts only. An anonymously edited arrangement for bassoon and piano followed in about
1865, some forty years after the composer’s death, which was the source for subsequent editions;
the solo part differs in a number of details from the composer’s original from 1816.
Tutors
The eighteenth century experienced great revolutions in music pedagogy. Published texts
supplanted the earlier system of learning an instrument by imitating and following the verbal
instructions of a master teacher without the benefit of standardized written teaching materials.
Many of the earliest bassoon references describe the bassoon, but do not effectively design a path
of study to master the instrument.104 Eighteenth-century treatises for instruments such as violin,
flute or keyboards offer philosophical insights into the art and craft of music and make essential
reading for any musician wishing to develop a complete perspective. Specific areas for detailed
study include articulation, melodic inflection, tempo, ornamentation, and improvisation. Of the
wind instruments, the flute was commonly studied by amateurs, and, in fact such notable
individuals as the Frederick the Great of Prussia (1712-1786) were known to play the flute
avidly.105
103
Weber, Andante d Rondo Ungarese für Fagot und Orchester Opus 35, with a preface by William
Waterhouse, ii.
104
Christin Schillinger, The Pedagogy of Bassoon Reed Making: An Historical Perspective (DMA diss.,
Arizona State University, 2008), 4.
105
Pauly, 60.
58
It was Frederick the Great’s flute instructor, Johann Joachim Quantz (1697-1773) who
authored Versuch einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu Spielen in 1752. The work was
recognized immediately for its far-reaching importance, as attested to by the fact it that was
published in both German and French within a year of being completed. Quantz’s flute method
is widely accepted as one of the major resources for understanding eighteenth-century pedagogy
and performance practice. 106 Emphasizing the twin ideals of knowledge and taste, Quantz
warned against a teacher who knows nothing of harmony, and who is no more than an
instrumentalist.107
Some of the most current performance practice information comes from Johann Georg
Tromlitz’s Ausführlicher und gründlicher Unterricht die Flöte zu spielen. This tutor, published
in 1791, is the most comprehensive flute tutor written anywhere in the eighteenth century.
Tromlitz would have been a severe teacher and all indications are that he was extremely sensitive
to criticism as a professional. 108 However, his determination to improve on the tradition of
Quantz’s Versuch, produced an extremely detailed text. He follows the sequence of topics laid
out by Quantz, referring to the Versuch often.
A systematic approach to studying woodwinds was developed in Paris. Following the
French Revolution, in 1792, musicians began advocating for the foundation of a school for wind
music. Initially created to train the military-band musicians, this institution became the Paris
Conservatoire in 1795. In its effort to standardize instruction, the Conservatoire generated tutors
for each instrument. Etienne Ozi’s Nouvelle methode de bassoon, from1803, proved unique and
106
Schillinger, 7.
107
Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, 2nd ed., trans. Edward R. Reilly (New York: Schirmer
Books, 1984), 15.15.
108
Johann Georg Tromlitz, Ausführlicher und gründlicher Unterricht die Flöte zu spielen, trans. Ardal
Powell, with an introduction by Eileen Hadidian (New York: Cambridge Musical Texts and Monographs, 1991),
xvii.
59
groundbreaking. He had written a method in 1787, which is evident in the 1803 version;
however, the experience and thought he brought to the later edition made it by far the most
important bassoon tutor to date.109 Ozi’s tutor presented eleven articles that range from how to
hold the instrument to phrasing and breathing, to style in both Adagio and Allegro and finally the
general character of the bassoon. It includeed composed lessons and assignments for students in
solo and duet form, as well as six petites sonatas, six grand sonatas, thirty scalar exercises in
major and minor keys, and forty-two caprices.
As other institutions emerged, modeled after the Paris Conservatoire, Ozi’s bassoon tutor
received wide circulation. When the first state music school opened in Würzburg in 1804, the
Landes-Musikschule, violinist and administrator Joseph Fröhlich (1780-1862) borrowed and
adapted Ozi’s tutor. Fröhlich’s Vollständige theoretisch-praktische Musikslehre gave only a
passing acknowledgement to the “Parisian Bassoon Tutor,” which he used as the text in the
bassoon section. The tutor was not a free-standing bassoon method, as Ozi’s was, but rather part
of a larger instructional book for all the instruments of the orchestra as well as voice. Printed in
Bonn in 1810-11 Fröhlich’s Lehre is of great importance because it was the first bassoon method
in the German language that offered detailed instruction for German bassoons.
Instruction and orchestration went hand-in-hand at the turn of the nineteenth century.
The manuscript doubled as an instruction book for the instrument and an orchestration treatise.
The opening article of Fröhlich’s Lehre, “Character of the Instrument,” praised the bassoon’s
singing tone quality, great range, technical versatility, and articulation variety. “It is well suited
to express the most solemn exalted sentiments, to lend a kind of dignity to a thought,” Fröhlich
109
Schillinger, 18-19.
60
commented. 110 He extolled the majesty of its bass and the grace of its middle and high registers.
Fröhlich explained suitable keys, and, likewise, awkward motions for the bassoonist. One
section presented Fröhlich’s own corrective fingerings, as well as including those suggested by
Ozi.111 With a reference such as this, Weber had the benefit of the best information available on
composing for the bassoon from both the French and German schools.
Fröhlich’s Lehre appeared the year before Weber wrote the Bassoon Concerto, Weber’s
first solo bassoon work. On a concert tour in early 1811, Weber met the scholar Fröhlich in
Würzburg, hoping to recruit this teacher for his Harmonischer Verein.112 Fröhlich would later
finish a biography of Vogler, in 1845, a project that Weber started in 1810.113 Weber’s visit
could shed light on the mystery of why Weber was so generous to Brandt and the bassoon.
When Weber saw and read this book, he may have been taken with the idea of writing for
bassoon.
The Instrument
The Renaissance precursor to the bassoon was the dulcian, best known for the compact
efficiency of its one-piece construction. Its form was such that tone holes were naturally
positioned along a doubled-over bore so as to allow the thumbs and fingers to oppose each other
comfortably. As the Renaissance period transitioned to the Baroque, the dulcian was
increasingly used to supply the bass voice to the double reed and woodwind choirs. The decision
to lower the range of this instrument to the B-flat below bottom C required abandoning the one-
piece design, which was then replaced by an entirely new instrument, the bassoon.
110
Marvin Donald DaGrade, A Translation and Study of the Bassoon Section of Joseph Fröhlich’s
“Vollständige theoritisch-praktishe Musiklehre” (1810-11) and a Performance Edition of his Serenade for Flute,
Clarinet, Viola, Bassoon or Cello (Ph. D. diss., Indiana University, 1970), 7.
111
Ibid., 55, 81-82.
112
113
61
In order to reach the bottom B-flat on the dulcian while preserving the bore
characteristics of the instrument, the bell would have needed to be lengthened by an additional
third of the length of the body.114 Not only would this imbalance have placed too much stress on
the wooden tenon, but adding the necessary amount of extra tubing on one side of the instrument
would have negated the efficiency of the one-piece design.
The historical fix was a multi-sectioned instrument with a lengthened, less-tapered bore,
and repositioned bass note tone-holes and keys—among these the B-flat key. The sectioning of
the instrument was to prove revolutionary to the production and improvement of the instrument
as the use of four smaller sections lowered material costs, facilitated individual section
replacement, and permitted localized experimentation within the bore. Although each key
provides the ability to produce the named pitch, eliminating the need for lipping or awkward
crossed and half-holed fingerings in the production of solid fundamental pitches, each key also
was created to serve auxiliary functions to assist the color and intonation of other notes. The
order of keys added to the bassoon over the next century was: B-flat, D, F, A-flat, E-flat, the
wing keys and the right-hand thumb key.
In Germany, the Dresden Fagott makers were considered the best; most notable were
those made by the Grensers and their contemporaries Grundmann, Floth, and Wiesner. The
instruments were made of maple. A pinhole in the crook came into use in the nineteenth century.
Heinrich Christoph Koch’s Lexicon of 1802 describes the five-key instrument with two octave
keys “found on recent instruments.” He further characterizes the bassoon as an “Instrument der
Liebe,” meaning “instrument of love.”115
114
Paul J. White, “Early Bassoon Fingering Charts,” The Galpin Society Journal 43 (March 1990), 72.
115
Heinrich Christoph Koch, Musikalisches Lexicon, ed. Nicole Schwindt (Frankfurt/Main, 1802.Reprint
Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2001), 549. This dictionary entry for the bassoon is primarily a technical description, however,
he does mention that the “soft” characteristics of the bassoon, which is why it was called the “instrument of love.”
62
The upward range of the bassoon was extended at the beginning of the nineteenth century
when keys seven and eight were added to help produce notes above G’. The seventh key, added
to the upper end of the wing joint and operated by the left thumb, aided in the production of A’,
B-flat’ and B natural’. Ozi’s 1803 methode includes a fingering chart for a seven-keyed
instrument with a range of B-flat to D’’. The eighth key, placed above the seventh, made the
notes up to high D’’ easier to play.
Weber would have been acutely attuned to discoveries in instrument-making, evidenced
by his article in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on a new discovery for perfecting the flute
from 1811. 116 The bassoon presented in Fröhlich’s Vollständige theoretisch-pracktische
Musiklehre, from Bonn in 1811 has eight keys. The chart is titled “Scala für einen Dresdener
Fagott mit der hohen A and C Klappe.”117 However, the instrument does not really resemble any
existing Dresden bassoons. The illustration seems to have been patterned after Ozi’s illustrations
with two Dresden features etched in the plate: the German E-flat and a tuning hole in the bell.118
116
117
White, 104.
118
Ibid., 104.
63
Example 4: The front and back view of the instrument from Fröhlich’s Lehre.
The bassoon had just begun to evolve into two distinct types, one in Germany and one in
France. The German and French bassoons from this period differed in tone quality and key
mechanism due to the peculiarities of their bore and distribution of holes. In France the
64
improvements tended to provide improved mechanism and facility. The Germans seemed more
concerned with evening the tone of the instrument and smoothing the sound of the instrument to
allow it to blend better with the orchestra.119 Fröhlich describes the situation of his time—to
adjust to differing pitch levels, instruments were sold with a set of three wing joints of differing
lengths and with as many bocals. 120 Fröhlich’s fingering chart and the accompanying
instructions describe how to finger high D’’.
To confirm the illustration and description in Fröhlich’s tutor, there is significant
evidence that Brandt played on an eight-key bassoon, with a pinhole in the bocal. The keys
facilitating high notes on the wing joint were almost certainly present due to the repeated use of
high c’’, such as in measure 45. Both the Concerto and the Andante and Rondo use the full
upper range of the instrument, with the concerto going up to high D’’. With his compositions,
Weber is showing off the new model of bassoon, especially the high range, keeping up-to-date
with the most recent developments of the instrument.
Considering the instrument for which Andante e Rondo Ungarese was originally intended
can aid in making sense of what the composer actually wrote. The extreme difficulty of the solo
part in Andante e Rondo Ungarese and its inherent sense of danger was an exhilarating aspect
greatly reduced by the technical developments of later instruments. Although the historical
eight-keyed bassoon provides some technical challenges that have since been resolved, the music
Weber created shows that he found this eight-key bassoon to be entirely suitable for beautiful
expression.
Even greater refinement would be attained by bassoon makers who were already
experimenting with new improvements to the bassoon. The early nineteenth century was at the
119
Hodges, 23.
120
DaGrade, 9.
65
cusp of a great change in instrument construction. Between 1810 and 1825 the number of keys
available on the bassoon almost doubled to include fifteen.121 Some of the trends throughout the
nineteenth century that propelled these changes in the instrument would include increased
demands and expectations of composers regarding technique and expression, larger orchestras
and concert halls demanding louder-toned instruments, and international trade exhibitions
encouraging competition and experiment.122
An interesting connection can be made between Weber and the continuing development
of the bassoon. Gottfried Weber was a close friend, though not a relative of Carl Maria von
Weber. At the lowest point in Carl Maria’s career, when he was expelled from Stuttgart in 1810,
he found lodging for his father at Gottfried’s home. A charter member of the Harmonischer
Verein, Gottfried Weber was both a scholarly writer and a technician, creating a primitive
metronome.123 His interest in woodwinds led him to publish articles on woodwind acoustics,
corresponding with Carl Almenräder (1786-1843), a German virtuoso, known as the “Boehm of
the bassoon.”124 Almenräder published the first original German bassoon instruction book in
1843 and worked with Johann Adam Heckel (1812-1877) where together they brought the
German bassoon into the modern era.125
Articulation
In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, composers of wind music did not
insist on specific articulations or marks of expression throughout for the soloist. Certain
passages might include detailed phrasing and articulation, but by contrast, in virtuoso passage-
121
Hodges, 25.
122
William Waterhouse, “Bassoon,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 11 June 2010),
123
124Hodges, 142.
125
Ibid., 142.
66
work the composer would not presume to infringe on the privilege of the performer. Such
sections left free of any mark whatsoever called for artistic initiative and imagination on the part
of the player.126
Tutors, such as Tromlitz’s Unterricht and Quantz’s Versuch, devoted considerable space
to suggesting different ways in which such passages might be phrased and articulated. Quantz
assigned great importance to the tongue by which animation is given to the execution of notes
creating an analogy with various violin bow-strokes. The slur indicated an expressive accent
followed by a diminuendo. Therefore, paired notes automatically get clipped. For articulation
the two-slurred, two tongued approach can be appropriate, while the contour of notes sometimes
suggests other patterns.127
More than a practical consideration, the choice between slur and staccato creates an affect
or interpretation. Allegros need brisk, detached notes, while adagios need broad slurred notes.
As the nineteenth century progressed, legato became more pervasive but not to the extent it has
in the twenty-first century.128 Fröhlich made a point of distinguishing between the dot and the
vertical dash or wedge over the notes, stating that the former indicates staccato, while the later
denotes the firmer tonguing which is performed with “a great deal of force.”129 Effortlessness is
the main quality of the staccato.130
Ornamentation
When considering music of the early nineteenth century, one has to distinguish
ornaments that are fully written out in regular notes, those that are indicated by symbols, be they
126
Waterhouse, “Weber’s Bassoon Concerto Op. 75: The Manuscript and Printed Sources Compared,” 86.
127
Frederick Neumann, New Essays on Performance Practice (UMI Research Press: Ann Arbor, MI, 1989),
185.
128
Colin Lawson, The Early Clarinet: A Practical Guide, (Cambridge University Press, 2000), 20.
129
DaGrade, 34-35.
130
Ibid., 35.
67
abstract signs or little unmetrical notes, and those that do not appear in the score but are expected
to be improvised by the performer. Those that are written out in regular notes solve the hardest
problem, that of design, but they still challenge one to recognize their ornamental nature and to
render them therefore with a certain amount of rhythmic freedom that reflects the improvisatory
origin of musical embellishments.
For the symbol-indicated ornaments, one faces the problem of their proper execution
while the discretionary ornaments confront the performer with the need first to diagnose where
ornamental additions are desirable and then to invent their proper design. Tromlitz instructed the
player:
In general, it is necessary to listen carefully to players of whom it is known that they are
equal to the task; or if you have the chance to listen frequently to good, I say good
singers; this will educate the sensibilities and train them so that a piece can be well
ornamented and performed even if no ornaments are written in.131
The performer understood interpretation from rhythm, melodic intervals, phrasing and harmony,
and chose the decoration suitable. As an overriding philosophy, early music specialist Frederick
Neumann advised, “ornaments are born of improvisation and must always retain a measure of
flexibility to be true to their function.”132
Tromlitz’s tutor expounded on the types of ornaments to include trill, short trill,
appoggiatura, passing appoggiatura, double appoggiatura, turn, mordent, battement, slide, glide,
dynamics and vibrato. Trills should be even, beautiful, and the correct speed appropriate to the
movement. In order to arrive at the correct speed, one should generally take the third division of
the relevant beat. If the pulse is in quarter notes, thirty-second notes are the rule of thumb for a
trill. Every trill must have a termination, but for a chain of trills, one should use a termination
131
Tromlitz, 212.
132
Neumann, 192.
68
only on the last note. The short trill, which consists of two or four notes starts on the note and
was best used in spirited movements, though it couldn also be of use in cantabiles, if it was
introduced carefully. Regarding the great controversy of whether trills should start from the note
above or on the main note, Tromlitz wrote:
Some people think the trill should begin from above . . . Anyone who wants to do it like
this may do so; for me it is impossible and unnatural to my feeling; the note over which
the trill is written is the main note, and this must be clearly heard for the sake of good and
expressive melody.133
Although contemporary opinions increasingly accorded with Tromlitz, in 1828 Hummel would
be the first to unambiguously state that a trill on the main note was the rule.134
The appoggiatura, an Italian term meaning “to lean on,” is a suspension of a note by a
preceding one. This ornament takes half the value from the following note, to which it is slurred.
Appoggiaturas are taken from above as well as from below: They are usually dictated by the
position of the previous note. Appoggiaturas are clearly detached from the preceding note,
which allows proper emphasis. The accent always falls on long appoggiaturas in practice, and if
there is time the appoggiatura should be started weakly and allowed to grow the full strength of
the note. The resolution is weak, as if the performer were letting it slip.
The turn consists of either three or four notes, and is played freely or in time. When
attacked freely, there are only three short notes and the fourth is the main note. When the turn is
attached to a long appoggiatura, or placed between two equal notes, all four little notes are heard.
The orientation of the symbol will dictate whether to start a turn from above or below.135 If the
133
Tromlitz, 241.
134
Lawson, 72.
135
Tromlitz, 226.
69
turn involves a note that should be affected by an accidental, then a flat, natural or sharp must be
indicated above the symbol for the first note of the group or below the symbol for the last.136
Two other ornaments create a distinct effect. The slide consists of two little notes which
are slurred from the distance of a third either above or below to the following note, falling on the
beat. The glide, or chromatic finger slide drew special attention from Tromlitz as he felt it was
“very prevalent at the present time.”137 He prescribed a sparse use of the glide.
Eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century students learned free ornamentation
through imitating their teachers. Tromlitz advised “discretionary ornaments, too are an element
of good and varied playing.”138 Clearly performance practice continued the use of performer-
added ornaments between 1791 and 1813 because Fröhlich wrote, “it will be necessary to go
carefully through the lesson on essential and optional embellishments.”139
In freely invented ornamentation, cadence points and high or low notes are often
emphasized by a fixed ornament—an appoggiatura, trill, turn, mordent or slide. Another rule
was expressed by Tromlitz: “But it is better, or should I say essential, to leave the main theme at
the beginning unvaried, the better and more securely to grasp its mood and fix its influence on
subsequent variations; and only to try to introduce such variations or exceptions on repeats.”140
Sequential material is sometimes given identical or at least similar ornamentation, while
successive ornamentations are more florid. The ornamentation should follow and support the
original harmony, melody and rhythm. In addition, the ornamentation should always consider
the passion and emotion expressed by the passage.
136
Tromlitz., 225-229.
137
Ibid., 234.
138
Ibid., 286.
139
DaGrade, 43.
140
Tromlitz, 186.
70
Today’s performer may also use more recent guides to early practice. Looking to sources
such as Quantz, flutist Betty Bang Mather and David Lasocki created a practical guidebook for
ornamentation, especially that which is added by the performer. These authorities suggest a set
of conventions for ornamentation. Ornamentations generally begin and end on the most
important principal notes. They then pass from one principal note to the next, filling in the
spaces with: 1) small ornaments made of the scale steps, appoggiaturas, passing tones, lower
neighbors, turns and occasional escape or other non-harmonic tones; 2) small chord leaps; 3)
scale runs or passage-work made up of these elements.141 Ornamental notes are seldom more
distant than about two scale steps or two chordal leaps from their principal notes. The attack of
the principal note is often anticipated or delayed in the ornamentation.142 In order to make sure
the original melody sounds like the ornamented melody when it is played, Mather suggested
locating and circling the principal notes in a free ornamentation. She also recommended
memorizing ornaments to build a vocabulary and simulate the feel of improvisation.143
Other Historical Considerations
Eighteenth and early nineteenth-century composers expected that the performer would
assemble the pertinent interpretive information from the rhythms, melodic intervals, phrasing
and harmonies notated in the score. One instructive aspect of Tromlitz’ text is that even though
his tutor was written for beginners, this book assumed a basic understanding of figured bass.
Modern players must keep this practice in perspective for study and performance. For
expression, Quantz noted that dissonances should be brought out. 144 Melodic inflection can
come from chromatic notes. Quantz addressed the siciliana, commenting that these movements
141
Betty Bang Mather and David Lasocki, Free Ornamentation in Woodwind Music 1700-1775: An
Anthology with Introduction (New York: McGinnis & Marx Music Publishers, 1976), 12-13.
142
Ibid., 13.
143
Ibid., 17.
144
Quantz, 254.
71
should be played simply and not too slowly. The siciliana should have few ornaments other than
some slurred sixteenth-notes or appoggiaturas, with practically no trills.145
In Early Recordings and Musical Style, Robert Phillip discussed how the earliest
recordings place a premium on characterization rather than extreme clarity and accuracy within a
strict tempo. 146 The metronome was introduced in 1812 during Weber’s lifetime and he would
grapple with its use. Tromlitz, by contrast, was innocent of such future developments and wrote
about tempo, “Let him listen carefully to the resulting melody and the sense contained in it and
let him choose his tempo.”147 Quantz related tempo to the human pulse.148 Period clarinetist
Colin Lawson noted that tempos have sped up over time in Weber’s clarinet works, especially
the finales. He claimed that “the opportunity for expressive nuance cannot afford to be sacrificed
for the sake of mere technical exhibitionism.”149
Baermann
Among many celebrated associations of composers and clarinetists, the relationship of
Carl Maria von Weber and Heinrich Baermann was especially prolific. Since Baermann was a
lifelong collaborator with Weber, it is helpful to look at descriptions of his playing as an example
of Weber’s ideal soloist. According to clarinet scholar Pamela Weston, Weber was small, sickly,
and limped while Baermann was “tall, athletic with a magnificently handsome head.”150 They
must have created quite an interesting pair on their frequent concert tours.
145
Quantz, 168.
146
Lawson, 21.
147
Tromlitz, 99.
148
Quantz, 285.
149
Lawson, 91.
150
Weston, Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past, 121.
72
In Vienna during 1812, Prince Lobkowitz declared that Baermann’s playing was “so
melodious that singers would do well to find out his secrets of cantabile.”151 Weston observed
that he had an innate sense of style and his interpretations were always well formed. She
commended, “His adagios had the power to move audiences to tears. Finger dexterity he had
too, but it always came second to the musical interpretation.”152
Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote Baermann and his son Carl the Konzertstücke for clarinet,
basset horn and piano said in a letter to the pianist Kohlreif: “He is one of the best musicians I
know; one of those who carry everyone along with them, and who feel the true life and fire of
music and to whom music has become speech.”153
At the first performance of the Second Clarinet Concerto in E-flat, Weber noted that there
was “frantic applause owing to Baermann’s godlike playing.”154 Weber compared Baermann’s
playing in his diary, with another virtuoso of his time, Simon Hermstedt:
Hermstedt played twice very beautifully. A thick, almost stuffy tone. Surmounts
tremendous difficulties, sometimes completely against the nature of the instrument, but
not always well. Also, pleasing delivery. He has many strings to his bow, which is all to
the good. But lacks the uniform quality of tone which Baermann has between the high
and low notes, and his heavenly tasteful delivery.155
One very clear conclusion emerges. Without any reach in assumption, one can conclude that
expressive playing is paramount when performing Weber.
Clues Left by Weber
Although Weber took full artistic leadership in his operas, conducting them with a baton
from a podium, his concertos may have been different. Weber’s generation of conductor-
composers had only recently taken the baton and assumed the duties of conductor from the
151
Lawson, 89.
152
Ibid., 89.
153
Ibid., 89.
154
Weston, Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past, 121.
155
Lawson, 89-90.
73
violinist-concertmaster. The memoirs of Bohemian conductor and composer Ignaz Moscheles
indicate that for solo works with orchestra, the concertmaster remained in charge. For example,
during Mendelssohn’s tenure in Leipzig as a conductor, it was the concertmaster who took
charge of solo works.156 This was likely the practice for Weber’s wind concertos.
Clearly, interpretation and expressivity were Weber’s primary concerns. In making
rehearsal notes for his opera Euryanthe, Weber wrote: “It is the conductor’s business to see that
the singer is not too easy-going and does not content himself with the first interpretation that
suggests itself.”157 Weber compared singing to playing an instrument when he wrote:
The double need to take breath and to articulate words imposes a certain rhythmical
freedom on all singers, something which might perhaps be compared to the beating of
successive waves on the shore. Instruments (especially stringed instruments) divide time
into sharply defined divisions, like the ticking of a pendulum. A perfect espressivo is
only achieved when these contradictory characteristics are successfully blended. The
beat (tempo) must not resemble the tyrannical restraint of a pounding triphammer, but its
role in the music should rather be that of the pulse in the human body. There are no slow
tempos without some points at which the music demands a faster motion if it is not to
give the impression of dragging.158
Weber’s expressivity defines his methods as an orchestrator. He gave the orchestra an entirely
new sound. Yet, with very rare exceptions—such as his work for the forgotten harmonichord,
and his use of the Turkish drum and the guitar in Abu Hassan—he used the conventional
orchestra of the day. He achieved a unique sound, as Debussy pointed out, principally by his
“scrutiny of the soul of each instrument.”159
Examples of Weber’s work expose the “soul” of the bassoon: It can be cocky and heroic,
comic, slightly grotesque, as well as plaintive and pathetic. The dynamic personality of the
instrument is on display in Weber’s Bassoon Concerto. The bassoon is presented as a dramatic
156
Ignaz Moscheles, Recent Music and Musicians as Described in the Diaries and Correspondence, ed. His
wife, trans. A.D. Coleridge (New York, 1970 from first part edition, 1873), 82-83.
157
158
Ibid., 305.
159
74
character.160 The opening allegro ingeniously uses Weber’s favorite dotted rhythm to display the
bassoon at its boldest. He may even be subtly suggesting the style hongrois with this gesture. In
the second movement of the F major concerto, Weber also discovers tenderness and dignity shot
with a curious pathos. Until the final bars of applause music in the last movement, the wit of the
rondo retains a note of wistfulness. He uses comic contrast between high and very low registers,
yet he does so sparingly and always to make a musical point. There is, in fact, no mocking of the
bassoon for a cheap laugh; the musical wit arises from the instrument and is never directed
against it.
In other compositions, Weber used various characteristics of the bassoon. Silvana
emphasized the comic qualities of the bassoon. The comic character, Krips, has an Arietta (No.
6) which draws its engaging character less from the simple melody than from the
accompaniment, lightly scored for strings with an obbligato flute and bassoon two octaves apart.
Weber also exploited the reputation of the bassoon, derived from its use in eighteenth-century
outdoor chamber music, to suggest a pure life in the woods. In his Robin-Hood-type opera
Rübezahl, Kurt’s recitative and arietta (No. 7) includes an original bassoon obbligato.
Weber had a particular sensitivity for instruments’ registers. Bassoons playing in parallel
thirds fire an apprehensive tinge to the scene of Euryanthe’s accusation by Lysiart; and for the
Largo introduction to Euryanthe’s “Hier dicht am Quell,” the unaccompanied bassoon, rising
from a low G to a high, irregular phrase before dropping down an arpeggio to a B-flat, portrays
the isolated, tragic dignity of Euryanthe. The bassoon continues with a discreet obbligato in the
aria itself, which is an unforgettable use of the instrument’s pathetic qualities, plaintive yet
noble.
160
75
Application
Gathering information aims toward and ideally culminates in an informed performance.
In order to achieve the whole range of expression intended by a composer, all the stylistically
relevant information must be investigated; this can help to fill the vast gap between what is
contained in the score and its execution. A mature performer must know what the style permits
or requires. As has been shown through the tutors, such knowledge does not negate the
responsibility to use taste and judgment.
The first priority is to realize elements printed in the score. The performer must use the
harmonic analysis to distinguish dissonances and decide where the composer has already added
ornaments to the score in order to perform them with the required flexibility. Then, the
performer must decide what additions to the articulation or ornamentation will help to best
express the music. Throughout, articulation should be suited to the expression in each phrase,
both on a small scale and on a large scale. Stylistically, any Hungarian-Gypsy elements must be
emphasized, including characteristic rhythms, melodic augmented intervals as well as turning
figures.
The opening phrase of Andante contains Lombard rhythms, coloristic notes and
appoggiaturas, all of which must receive proper attention to create the pathos of the movement.
The example below shows the notes and gestures that should receive emphasis:
76
Example 5:
In the second variation, the orchestra must emphasize the harmony, like the bassoon in
the first variation. The solo part requires the performer to create momentum within each group
of sixteenths, leading to the downbeat, or to places where the melody, now in the orchestra, has
interesting harmony. Identical passages in bars 22 and 26 can be varied with articulation. Since
trills are considered uncharacteristic to the siciliana style, a glide will add definition to the last
cadential low note.
Example 6:
77
For the third variation, the important harmonic features are the mode mixture in measure
50 as well as the rounded form of this variation. An appropriate way to show that the melody
has returned in exactly the same way that it was heard before is to add tasteful ornaments. In this
variation, it is important to recognize the ornamentation added by the composer. Ornaments can
be observed in measures 42, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51 and 54. Most of these sixteenth notes fill
in the gaps between notes. The lack of ornaments in measures 52, 53 and 55 are clear indications
that the composer is suggesting the performer’s own addition to the piece, according to taste. A
jangling upper neighbor in measure 52, a verbunkos-like turn in 53, and a run that includes an
augmented second, are three possible ornaments. The editor, William Waterhouse, suggests a
turn for the last cadence, which could also be appropriate. Since Weber has chosen to use
pervasive appoggiaturas in the siciliana melody, starting the trill in measure 51 from the upper
note might be a good choice, as it has the effect of an appoggiatura.
Example 7:
The last variation provides an opportunity to use both types of staccato as discussed by
Fröhlich. This change in articulation can provide some of the novelty of the fourth variation.
78
Aggressive articulation should be used on the low notes. Then, allow them to be a springboard
for the lighter staccato to follow.
The style of the rondo must be distinctive in articulation from the andante. It should have
a bouncy quality. Swinging the dotted notes can aid in transmission of the Hungarian-Gypsy
character. Bringing out the turns by holding the first note of the measure will also identify the
verbunkos-style ornament. The jangling grace notes should be anything but graceful. The paired
notes should be thoughtfully clipped, although some variation in the clipped quality is possible.
The brief harmonic turn to E minor can be brought out with a louder dynamic. The repeated
section at 106 can also use terraced dynamics. An added grace note accents the high note on the
repeat. All Hungarian anapests and alla zoppa rhythms deserve full energy from the orchestra.
Example 8:
The B section of the rondo includes a number of trills. Trills in measures 143, 150, 151,
163 and 173 can be justifiably started from the note that is printed, as this preserves the melodic
79
line. A termination is required in measures 151 and 173. The addition of a turn supports the
Hungarian-Gypsy character in measure 160. A Hungarian anapest in measure 152 can be
brought out with tonguing.
The extended harmony of the B section should be highlighted in performance. The
surprise modulation, the applied dominants and the German 6-5 chord in measures 165-169,
should receive dramatic emphasis with some rubato.
Example 9:
The return of the theme can come back even more softly than the first statement.
Additional ornaments may be used to distinguish its return. Weber himself adds a slight
variation in rhythm from the first statement in measure 182.

80
Example 10:
The heel-clicking exuberance of the bokázó must leap off of the page in measures 194,
205, 209, and 223. The anapests in measures 196, 205, 209, 225, 231, 232, 235 and 236 have to
carry the rhythm forward.
Melodically, the chromatic notes require full expression. The scale passages must be
played with great attention to the harmonic underpinnings. The temporary shift to D minor in
measure 209 serves as a musical joke and should have the punch and timing to show that it is
intentional.
Two places in particular deserve exaggerated rubato -- measures 221-222, leading into
the last statement of the bokázó or C theme. The second place that needs time is in measures
244-245. Instead of moving back to tonic, the harmony modulates for the third time in a short
space to E-flat major. Each statement of the bokázó, or C theme deserves new ornamentation.
This can be accomplished by adding more grace notes each time.
For the last return of the A theme, keep the ornaments previously added the second time
and add a further slide into the first C, with an arpeggio flourish on the last couplet. Weber
places an additional grace note in measure 267. The performer may also choose to play the
theme forte the last time.

81
Example 11:
The coda allows the performer to show ease of articulation with a few slurs in places that
suit the melodic contour. The sequences in measures 290-293 and measures 298-299 and the
chromatic climb in measure 311 must get increasing power. The sequence of trills should
include a termination. Since a slur makes the first note of the group longer, it gives an emphasis.
In this way the harmonic changes and harmonic rhythm can be supported by the articulation.
Slurring can also be used in some passages such as measures 290-293 as a way of varying
similar passages.
Several overriding characteristics can be applied throughout the work. The high notes,
which are understood to be especially significant since they were possible for the first time in
history, should display a new height of expression. From Weber’s praise of Baermann and from
descriptions of Brandt’s playing, one understands that a universal quality of tone between low
82
and high is desirable. While the work as a whole should express a gradual accelerando
indicative of the verbunkos tradition, the tempo for the siciliana should be moderate enough to
support a kind of nobility amid prevailing sentimentality. An allegretto tempo for the rondo
should be calculated to reflect expression as opposed to technical wizardry.

83
CHAPTER 6
HERMENEUTICS
Napoleonic Wars
Weber composed his Andante e Rondo Ungarese in the midst of the Napoleonic wars.
During the years 1803 to 1815, France’s leader, Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–1821), waged war
with every European power, and in doing so fundamentally reworked European society. Of
particular importance to Weber’s works was Napoléon’s conquest of German lands. Napoléon
solidified his hold on Germany by forming the Confederation of the Rhine on July 12, 1806, with
himself as its protector. He then dissolved the old empire, forcing Kaiser Franz of Hapsburg,
simultaneously “Holy Roman Emperor of the German Nation,” and Emperor of Austria, to
surrender the imperial title that had been virtually hereditary to the Hapsburg family since
1438.161 By this tactic, Napoléon effectively assumed Austria’s place as the arbiter of political
affairs in the region.
Perceiving his country to be at risk, Wilhelm III of Prussia engaged Napoléon in 1806
and was crushed. In 1807, Napoléon struck out at Russia, catching its principal force at
Friedland and smashing it. Alexander I, Tsar of all the Russians, sued for peace and met the
Emperor of the French on a raft in the river Neman at Tilsit to decide the fate of Europe.
Friedrich Wilhelm III, the unfortunate King of Prussia, could only wait in the wings, trusting that
the Tsar’s generosity would lead him to negotiate fair terms for Prussia.
During the Prussian campaign, Heinrich Baermann, as a member of the Second Regiment
of Royal Prussian Life Guards, was taken prisoner and thrown into a dungeon at Prenzlau near
Brandenburg. After a winter of imprisonment, Baermann managed to escape, fleeing to Berlin,
161
Gill, 2.
84
and then Munich.162 Perhaps his transcendent expressive abilities as a musician can be tied to his
desperate real-life experiences.
Following Napoléon’s victory over the Russians, Austria, weak and suddenly alone
against France, set up an active propaganda campaign to convince Kaiser Franz and other nobles
to fund a war against Napoléon. The chief of this effort, Phillip Stadion, Elector of Mainz,
sought to mobilize public opinion behind his cause. A host of writers, poets, composers, and
dramatists echoed the sentiments of the war party, particularly the emerging stirrings of German
nationalism, and these supplied Stadion with a willing pool of earnest, often heatedly fervent
propagandists.163 He did not hesitate to employ them to steer popular opinion against Napoléon.
In 1809, Württemberg, where Weber was living when he composed Andante e Rondo
Ungarese, was a hotbed of anti-French activity.164 Weber was a member of a society of poets
and artists, called Faust’s Höllenfart that included Friedrich von Matthisson, the librettist for
Beethoven’s Adelaïde, Franz Carl Hiemer whose verses Weber would set to music in Silvana,
and Franz Danzi. 165 Small exclusive intellectual groups like Faust’s Höllenfart helped to
generate nationalist propaganda and a groundswell of popular support for the war.
The noblemen of Hungary also resisted French rule. During an 1809 campaign against
Austria, Napoléon sought to incite Hungarian nobles to revolt against the Habsburgs. But by the
early nineteenth century, the Magyar nobility had achieved separate status under Hapsburg rule
and was even exempted from taxes. With this desirable position, the majority of these nobles
rebuffed France’s overtures. Instead, they supported Austria against Napoléon in the 1809
invasion, which Napoléon nonetheless won, though it would prove to be his final successful
162
Weston, Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past, 116-117.
163
Gill, 9.
164
Ibid., 28-29.
165
85
campaign. The Andante e Rondo Ungarese may even have been inspired by the actions taken by
these Hungarian nobles against Napoléon in the 1809 campaign. 166 The effort by gypsy
musicians to support the war effort is exemplified by János Bihari, a gypsy violinist who lived in
Pest and referred to his recruitment of soldiers during the 1809 offensive in his only surviving
letter.167
The culmination of the 1809 campaign, the Battle of Wagram was, by any standard, a
struggle of awesome proportions in scale and duration second only during the Napoleonic era to
the climactic Battle of Nations at Leipzig in 1813.168 The Napoleonic wars ended following
Napoléon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815 with the Second Treaty of Paris formally ending the wars
that same year.
Orientalism
Aside from fundamentally re-shaping the political landscape of Europe, the Napoleonic
wars opened channels of cultural influence and scientific learning from the Orient. Napoléon’s
invasion of Egypt in 1798 and later foray into Syria have had great consequence for modern
history. The invasion served as a model of a scientific as well as political approval of one
culture by another. 169 With Napoléon’s occupation of Egypt, processes were set in motion
between East and West that still dominate our contemporary cultural and political perspectives.
Aside from the scientific discoveries of things Oriental made by learned professionals
during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe, European culture became
obsessed with the Orient, affecting every major poet, essayist, and philosopher of the period.
166
Ferrenc Bónis, “Csermák, Antal György,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 11 June 2010),
167Dezsö Legány and Szendrei, Janka, “Hungary,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy (Accessed 24 April
2010), http:www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
168
Gill, xii.
169
Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 52.
86
Study of Greek and Latin antiquity during the High Renaissance gave way to passionate
scholarship about India, China, and Islamic Lands in the nineteenth century.
While the nineteenth century was a period of heavy eastern influence on European
culture and thought, the beginnings of this movement date to the seventeenth century. Johann
Hottinger’s Historia Orientalis, appeared in 1651. Barthélemy d’Herbelot’s Bibliothèque
orientale, published posthumously in 1697, with a preface by Antoine Galland was a standard
reference on the Orient until the early nineteenth century. Galland was also the first European
translator of The Thousand and One Nights.170
Wars fought over eastern colonies throughout the eighteenth century furthered this trend.
Britain and France fought for the control of India until 1769 when the British gained economic
and political control of the subcontinent. Following this British victory, Napoléon took the
inevitable measure of separating Britain from India by invading its Egyptian throughway in
1798. After Napoléon’s Egyptian expedition, Europe began to study the people of the Orient
with a more empirical approach allowing Western European powers to rule over their eastern
colonies with greater authority and discipline than ever before. Almost from the first moments
of the occupation of Egypt, Napoléon encouraged French scientists and scholars to begin
meetings to compile data collected about Egyptian culture. Everything said, seen, and studied
was recorded in the encyclopedic Description de l’Égyptye published in twenty-three volumes
between 1809 and 1828.171 Egypt, and later other lands controlled by Western Europe were
viewed as the laboratory of Western knowledge about the Orient.
There was nothing in Germany that compared to the English and French presence in India
and North Africa. The German understanding of the Orient was almost exclusively a scholarly,
170
Said, 51.
171
Ibid., 52.
87
or at least a classical, construct: it was made the subject of lyrics, fantasies, and even novels, but
it was never derived from reality. Orientalist periodicals, beginning with the Fundgraben des
Orients (1809),172 multiplied the quantity of knowledge as well as the number of specialties in
the field of Orientalism.
The two most renowned German works on the Orient, Goethe’s Westöstlicher Diwan and
Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, were based respectively on a
Rhine journey and on hours spent in Paris libraries. Studying Sanskrit in Paris at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, Schlegel was both a scholar and an enthusiast of the Orient. Schlegel
looked eastward in search of deeper understanding of Germanic cultural ideals, as reflected in his
statement: “It is the Orient that we must search for the highest Romanticism.”173 His perspective
reflects the attitudes of his region—which Weber shared—a combination of fascination with a
fantasized construct of the Orient, expressed with the façade of complete expertise.
Despite the difference in quality of information between German Orientalism and the
Anglo-French perspective, both shared an intellectual authority over the Orient which pervaded
Western culture. Orientalist Scholar Edward Said wrote:
The construction of identity . . . involves establishing opposites and “others” whose

actuality is always subject to the continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of their
differences from “us.” Each age and society re-creates its “others.” Far from a static
thing then, identity of self or of “other” is a much worked-over historical, social,
intellectual and political process that takes place as a contest involving individuals and
institutions in all societies.174
Both Orientalism and Exoticism are based on the principal of the “other.” The construction of
identity is bound up with the disposition of power and powerlessness in Western society.
172
Said, 43.
173
Ibid., 98.
174
Ibid., 332.
88
Biological Developments
The irresistible rise of biological sciences in the nineteenth century shaped Western
culture to a considerable extent. The political and intellectual obsession with the “other” fueled
scientific endeavors. Orientalist studies and research in natural science influenced each other,
particularly with respect to those theories that attempted to explain the differences observed
between different people. The use of science to justify social biases is readily on display in the
writing of Heinrich Grellmann, who describes Gypsies as “an evident repugnancy, like the
biologist dissecting some nauseating, crawling thing in the interests of science.” 175
All academic disciplines, including music, intersect to expose the prejudices common to
the time. In 1791, the music theorist Johann Georg Sulzer wrote in Allgemeine Theorie der
schönen Künste:
In moral issues nature can be either cruder, as is the case with relatively primitive peoples
whose powers of reasoning are but little; or comparatively refined, according to the
length of time over which the arts, sciences, ways of life and customs of a people have
been developed.176
Carl Linnaeus’s Systems of Nature from 1735 lists each continent or climate as producing
particular characteristics in the indigenous people. 177 From their earliest appearances in
intellectual debate, biological theories have informed arguments over the human social and
political condition.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the natural sciences became increasingly dominant in
cultural and social thought. Although the discipline’s most influential work, Darwin’s The
Origin of Species, was not published until 1859, biological science profoundly affected the
philosophy of the entire nineteenth century. Scientists quoted poets and novelists to substantiate
175
176
Timothy Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham NC: Duke University Press,
2007), 67.
177
Ibid., 47.
89
their arguments, while poets and novelists wrote and edited magazine articles on astronomy,
physics or biology.178 Joseph Fröhlich exemplified this trend, carrying on parallel careers in
music, literature, science and law.179 The proliferating periodical publications of the day provide
an excellent resource for observing how scientific ideas were woven into the texture of
nineteenth-century cultural life. This combination of science and popular culture is also evident
in the fame of early works of science fiction, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Increasingly, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholars were interested in encyclopedic
histories that defined the world’s various populations. A narrative approach is found in the work
of Robert Chambers, a British writer who is best known today for writing Vestiges of the Natural
History of Creation (1844), one of the most important early documents on evolutionary theory.
Chambers also authored the first complete history of English literature from beginnings to the
present, in 1836.180 Rather than diluting his achievements in either field, these two interests
stimulated his understanding of each subject.
Weber, who briefly apprenticed to a lithographer, lived with his father in Freiberg in
1799, where they intended to start a lithography business. 181 Freiberg was teeming with
enthusiasm for scientific learning at the turn of the nineteenth century, as the home of Europe’s
first geological school, the Bergakademie, founded in 1765. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–
1859), a naturalist who Berlioz relied on for his orchestration treatise, was a leading scholar in
178
Anne-Julia Zwierlein, ed, Unmapped Countries: Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and
Culture, (London: Anthem Press, 2005), 4.
179
DaGrade, 3.
180
Klaus Stierstorfer, “Vestiges of English Literature: Robert Chambers,” in Unmapped Countries:
Biological Visions in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, (London: Anthem Press, 2005), ed. Anne-Julia
Zwierlein, 28.
181
Warrack, Carl Maria von Weber, 32-33
90
Freiberg. 182 Humbolt’s revelation of the wonders of natural science prompted some of the
German Romantic philosopher Novalis’ prose work.183
Another scientist whose career connects several disciplines was Johann Gotthelf Fischer
von Waldheim (1771-1853). Born in Saxony, Fischer became friendly with Goethe, traveled
with Humboldt, taught in various German Universities and finally, in 1804, moved permanently
to Russia as Professor of Natural History and director of the natural history museum at the
University of Moscow.184 Russia had a long-established tradition of importing scientists. In
1813, he published a bibliographic compendia of alternative systems for classifying objects, in
this case all genera of the animal kingdom. A massive fire that destroyed two thirds of the city
during the battle of Moscow in 1812 ravaged the university’s great libraries and museum
collections. Fischer then spent much of the rest of his career trying to raise money to restore the
library.185 This included significant help from Aleksei Kirillovich Razumovsky, the brother of
Beethoven’s benefactor.
The theory of “recapitulation” held that people of “lower” races were a less developed
biological entity than those that held economic and political power. Schiller, who Weber worked
with, wrote: “The discoveries which our European sailors have made in foreign seas . . . show us
that different people are distributed around us . . . just as children of different ages may surround
a grown-up man.” 186 In describing recapitulation, H. F. Autenrieth, argued in 1797 that the
completed forms of lower animals were merely stages in the ontogeny of higher forms.
Translating this concept freely to humans, Autenrieth speaks of “certain traits which seem, in the
182
Hugh MacDonald, Berlioz’s Orchestration: A Translation and Commentary (Cambridge University
Press, 2002), xix.
183
184
Gould, 115-116.
185
Ibid., 118.
186
Ibid., 408.
91
adult African, to be less changed from the embryonic condition than in the adult European.”187
For anyone wishing to justify slavery and imperialism, few biological arguments had more
appeal than recapitulation, with its insistence that “primitive” races are analogous to white
children, and that they may be treated as such—subdued, disciplined, and managed.
Women were considered to be an apt example of recapitulation for two reasons—the
social observation that men wrote all the textbooks and the morphological fact that skulls of
adult women were smaller than those of men. Since the child was a living primitive, proponents
of recapitulation believed that the adult woman must be as well. In 1821, Johann Friedrich
Meckel noted the lesser differentiation of women from a common embryonic type; he also
suspected that women, with their smaller brains, were innately inferior in intelligence. 188
Paleontologist Edward Cope, for example discoursed on the “metaphysical characteristics” of
women:
The gentler sex is characterized by a great impressibility . . . warmth of emotion,

submission to its influence rather than that of logic, timidity and irregularity of action in
the outer world. All these qualities belong to the male sex, as a general rule, at some
period of life, though different individuals lose them at very various periods . . . perhaps
all men can recall a period of youth when they were hero-worshippers—when they felt
the need of a stronger arm and loved to look up to the powerful friend who could
sympathize with and aid them. This is the “woman stage” of character.189
Granville Stanley Hall argued that women’s greater propensity for suicide expresses the
primitive stage of submission to elemental forces:
Woman’s body and soul is phyletically older and more primitive, while man is more
modern, variable, and less conservative. Women are always inclined to preserve old
customs and ways of thinking.190
187
Gould, 407.
188
Ibid., 411.
189
Ibid., 411-412.
190
Ibid., 412.
92
A contemporary audience will certainly find such research offensive, yet this can alternately be
seen as a study in the values of the society in which such ideas flourished.
Since early modern times, recorded observations have been an unavoidable part of
scientific method, and reliance upon observations recorded by others remains a social dimension
of epistemology that can never be purged from the practice of science. 191 In his book The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn points out “debates over theory-choice cannot
be cast in a form that fully resembles logical or mathematical proof.”192 Scientific knowledge
exists within a community of scientists who judge and approve of research based on certain
social factors. Since observations must be channeled through the human brain, a biological
rather than a mechanical principal governs not only what we observe, but how we observe it.
Since human instincts are designed by nature for survival; one cannot expect to be the master of
his or her perception.
In the same sense that scientists are limited by both the filter of the observer and theory
choices influenced by social factors, Weber’s Exoticism was defined by his own experience.
Weber never travelled to Hungary—he developed his conceptions about eastern music through
the study of musical and cultural writings recorded by his contemporaries. Willingly or not,
Weber’s music reflects the social perceptions and prejudices inherent to his secondary source
material. The character of the Andante e Rondo Ungarese—exhibiting fascination mixed with
condescension toward a foreign people—is derived from scholarly works that indulged all of the
trends in early nineteenth-century scholarship, including overlapping research in science, arts
and humanities, recapitulation and other biological theories, and an overriding obsession with
“otherness.” In this sense, Weber’s work is a prime example of Exoticism.
191
Zwierlein, 6.
192
Thomas Kuhns, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (The University of Chicago Press, 1996),
199.
93
CONCLUSIONS
By making connections to period performance practice and cultural thought, this thesis
strives to inspire a more comprehensive understanding of the genesis of Andante e Rondo
Ungarese and its implications. Three themes are critical to such an understanding: 1) the
importance of Weber’s use of the bassoon as the solo voice; 2) Weber’s exploitation of the
Western perception of Gypsies as the “others” to create a sense of Exoticism; and 3) the
disconnect between modern, specialized approaches to learning and scholarship, and the broader
approach taken in the nineteenth century, where the line between science and humanities was
blurred.
Though many scholars and musicians have expressed uneasiness with the fact that
Weber’s Andante e Rondo Ungarese was first written for viola and later minimally revised for
bassoon, few have undertaken to answer why Weber ultimately chose the bassoon for this work.
Brandt was an outstanding performer and was highly regarded by his contemporaries, especially
the conductor in Munich, Peter Winter. While performer-inspired compositions were common
and continue throughout the history of music, evidence suggests that the academically charged
world in which Weber immersed himself also played a part in the genesis of Andante e Rondo
Ungarese. Weber was spurred by his contact with Fröhlich, Gottfried Weber and Danzi—all
bassoon proponents. Although Fröhlich is rightfully criticized for stealing and claiming Ozi’s
work for his own, it is tenable that Weber did not feel confident enough to write for the bassoon
until he read Fröhlich’s tutor. Weber may have also found inspiration in Fröhlich’s praise of the
bassoon. Whatever the means, the end result was the creation of some of the bassoon’s greatest
music.
94
It is also likely that Weber felt confident writing for the bassoon because he had enjoyed
much success writing for the clarinet, which shared many expressive characteristics with the
bassoon. Each of Weber’s bassoon works were written simultaneously with a clarinet piece, so it
is plausible that he connected the two in his mind. Since expressivity was Weber’s highest goal,
the character of the bassoon expressed many of the affects that fascinated Weber—pathos,
heroicism, and a kind of earthiness.
Each of these considerations—the influence of Weber’s circle of academic
contemporaries, Brandt’s virtuosity, the bassoon’s expressive similarities to the clarinet—made
the bassoon ideal for the Andante e Rondo Ungarese. One way to judge how Weber felt about
this work is the fact that it received an opus number, not in 1809, but instead when he assigned it
to the bassoon in 1813. Based on Weber’s orchestrations and Fröhlich’s character descriptions,
it is clear the composer thought that this pathetic, comic, and noble piece had finally found its
proper voice in the bassoon.
The unique timbre of the bassoon—very close to the human voice—was particularly well
suited to the exotic color that Weber sought to create in his work. The awkward shape and size
of the bassoon in comparison to the other woodwinds make it an obvious outsider. The bassoon
evoked an “otherness” based on early outdoor associations with harmoniemusik, and its role as
the bass voice of the woodwinds. Although Fröhlich uses elevated language to describe the
bassoon, he explores admittedly awkward fingerings and intervals, indicating a certain inherent
roughness. The instrument’s outsider status made it an ideal vehicle to express the style
hongrois.
Weber’s work reflects the role of Gypsies as the “other” in nineteenth-century European
culture and scholarship. Because the Roma people had certain distinctive physical
95
characteristics they were seen as a different race, and according to period science, inferior.
Hidden within a seemingly frivolous bassoon solo piece is bigotry of the highest order. As
Susan McClary points out, “Hidden there in our would-be paradise of ‘absolute music,’ lurk the
serpents of dissent, coercion, and even what appears to be a kind of closet theology.” 193
Although Weber seems to place value in the performance style of Gypsies, it is more of a tool to
be harnessed toward the creation of true expression in high art, a potential owned exclusively by
the Germans. In his book Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World, Timothy Taylor
explains how the “other” in music is primarily employed as a means of defining “us.” By
establishing one’s opposite, one can find an identity. In order to feel superior, Germans
developed a “primitive” music, attributing it to other races to give evidence of their lack of
sophistication as a people. Andante e Rondo Ungarese, embodies the many inconsistencies that
Germans projected onto the Gypsies—condescension coupled with fascination. Therefore, the
style hongrois is neither a caricature nor purely noble and heroic. Instead, it represents the
contradictions of nineteenth-century European thought, which relished the raw emotions that the
Romantics attributed to the Gypsies even as the Germans looked down on them as a people.
The modern listener will surely approach Weber’s music with a different, and in some
respects narrower, perspective than a nineteenth-century audience. The current trend in both
academics and the workforce tends towards increasing specialization. Traditional musicology
focuses on works as self-contained entities, placing them in a context of style and extensive
personal biography of the composer; yet as Taylor points out, “history and culture continue to be
ignored or minimized.”194 “Classical music is akin to a religion in which composers are gods
and their works are sacred texts, with performers and sometimes musicologists vying for the
193
McClary, 160.
194
Taylor, 5.
96
position of high priest.”195 This idea, itself a nineteenth-century paradigm, perhaps accounts for
the fact that Andante e Rondo Ungarese, a work so often programmed, has received almost no
critical attention. The elevation of content above human experience is even more the case with
science, where, in an effort to understand complex equations, the lay person often forgets how
much humanity is involved in research. Science, like music, is ultimately a social construction.
The scope of knowledge increases beyond of the sum of its parts. Only after a
comparison of biography, analysis, performance practice, politics and the intellectual
fascinations that would have pervaded Weber’s experience does the vast web of connections
between all of these topics start to appear. It is encouraging to the “evolution” of music that
modern pedagogy provides a direct solution. As bassoonist Frank Morelli suggests, the
performer must choose to embody a theatrical character.196 Historical information can help to
inform the particulars of this character and the broader social context of the style hongrois.
Ultimately, Weber is asking the bassoonist to assume the role of the stereotyped Gypsy musician,
evoking a range of feelings from almost animal melancholy to fiery abandon.
195
Taylor, 3.
196
Frank Morelli, Weber’s Bassoon Concerto: “Putting New Life Into an old Warhorse,” Master class given
at International Double Reed Society Convention: (Norman, OK, 2010).
97
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DaGrade, Marvin Donald. A Translation and Study of the Bassoon Section of Joseph
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RECORDINGS
Davidsson, Christian. Weber: Andante Rondo Ungarese, op. 35, J. 158. Sundsvall Chamber
Orchestra, Nikolas Willén, conductor. Grammofon AB BIS, 1995. Compact Disc.
Geoghagen, Karen. Weber: Andante e Rondo Ungarese, op. 35, J. 158. Karen Geoghagen
Plays Bassoon Concertos. Chandos, 2008. MP3.
Kantorow, Jean-Jaques. Andante e Rondo Ungarese, op. 35, J. 158. Tapiola Sinfonietta,
Jaakko Luoma, conductor. BIS, 2009. MP3.
102
LeClair, Judith. “Andante and Hungarian Rondo.” New York Legends. Cala Records, 1997.
Compact Disc.
LeClair, Judith and Jonathan Feldman. Andante and Rondo for Bassoon and Piano. Works
for Bassoon, 2010. MP3.
Morelli, Frank and Gilbert Kalish. Andante e Rondo Ungarese, op. 35 for Bassoon and
Piano. Romance and Caprice, Solo Works for Bassoon and Piano, 2006. Compact
Disc.
Popov, Valery. Weber: Andante e Rondo Ungarese in C Minor, op. 35, J. 158. Russian State
Symphony Orchestra, 1998. Compact Disc.
Thunemann, Klaus. Andante and Rondo Ungarese for Bassoon and Orchestra, op. 35. The
Academy of St. Martin in the Fields and Neville Marriner. Phillips, 1991. MP3.
Tukovic, Milan. Weber: Andante e Rondo Ungarese, op. 35, J. 158. Stuttgart Radio
Symphony Orchestra, Neville Marriner, conductor. Cappricio, 1993. MP3.
Zukerman, George. Andante and Rondo in Hungarian Style, Op. 35. Württemberg Chamber
Orchestra. Musical Concepts, 2008. MP3.
103
APPENDIX A: SCORE
104
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DISCOVERING THE “HUNGARIAN” IN ANDANTE AND RONDO:

A HISTORICAL APPROACH TO A STANDARD BASSOON SOLO

SUBMITTED TO MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS

FOR THE DEGREE OF

DOCTOR OF MUSICAL ARTS

Other Historical Considerations ............................................................................................................................ 70

been made to create a comprehensively researched orchestral score.1

Andante e Rondo Ungarese is supplemented by a description of historical practices, and the

era, a bassoonist can aspire to a new level of competency as a performer.

developments involving exploration of foreign territory and domination of foreign peoples.

between biological entities and ultimately different races of people.

violinist-concertmaster, the establishment of a standard repertory, and increasingly public

praktische Musiklehre, published by Joseph Fröhlich (1780-1862) in 1810-11, as well as

hongrois, a musical attempt to define a culture foreign to the composer.

An Overview of Weber’s Career

music is important to understanding the later achievements of Romanticism.

Although best known as a composer, Weber actually enjoyed a diverse career. As a

Weber always enjoyed the company of scholars.7

still controlled by medieval guilds.

German spirit lay with her simple burghers.10

now call Romanticism.

form it and taking his voice from it.

Genovefa, a soprano, was briefly engaged for Goethe’s theatre in Weimar.14

Haydn, not the more renowned Franz Joseph.15

and aesthetic questions neglected in his earlier training. 16

commissioned by the Theater an der Wien.

singer Aloysia Weber enjoyed successful careers.

own theatrical works.

Vogler introduced Weber to many leading composers in Vienna, including Antonio

Later, however, Weber came to deeply admire and defend Beethoven.

and a repertory that did not always cater to popular taste.22

along the Romantic lines of inspiration in the exotic.”24

could believe in and encourage with practical advice.

a theme he found in Rousseau’s Dictionnaire de musique of 1768. 28 Turandot offers a prime

example of Weber’s fascination with Exoticism, even “Orientalism.”

Concertino and a Rondo for bassoon from 1814.32

Concertino, Opus 26.

Baermann performed the concertino on a concert of Weber’s works given on April 5,

influence is felt in the exotic rhythms as well as the virtuosic flourishes.

for the upcoming opera season.41

performing with the Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin’s Kapelle at Ludwigslust, had a well-

established reputation by 1811 when he met Weber.

precision” demonstrated by both musicals in a double concerto. 46 Praised for cleanliness,

Brandt became a member of the Munich Orchestra on September 9, 1806, and

subsequently a charter member of the Munich Academy, a “concert-giving corporation of vocal

Academy’s steering committee. He returned to Ludwigslust as a guest soloist in 1810. In

solo passages were accompanied by the combination of a chordal instrument, such as a

so that each new ritornello statement serves as a point of arrival.

before the final orchestral ritornello concludes the piece.56

notoriety as performers than ever before.

With an increased emphasis on soloists, the eighteenth-century concerto can serve as a

orchestra. In discussing Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Piano Concerto in G major, Susan

among artists and intellectuals.

important expressive elements in his instrumental solos. If theatricality sometimes overtakes

and dramatic which he introduced into Romantic prevalence.60