Klarinet Archive - Posting 000969.txt from 2000/10

From: "Michael Bryant" <michael@-----.uk>
Subj: Re: [kl] Critics
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 02:49:22 -0400

In 1935 GBS wrote the following.
He know what a basset horn was
and assumed that the general public did not.

"I was strong on the need for signed criticism written
in the first person instead of the journalist `we';
but as I then had no name worth signing, and G. B. S.
meant nothing to the public, I had to invent a fantastic
personality with something like a foreign title.
I thought of Count di Luna (a character in Verdi's Trovatore),
but finally changed it for Corno di Bassetto, as it sounded
like a foreign title, and nobody knew what a corno di bassetto was.

As a matter of fact the corno di bassetto is not a foreigner with
a title but a musical instrument called in English the basset horn.
It is a wretched instrument, now completely snuffed out for
general use by the bass clarionet. It would be forgotten and unplayed
if it were not that Mozart has scored for it in his Requiem,
evidently because its peculiar watery melancholy, and the total
absence of any richness or passion in its tone, is just the thing
for a funeral. Mendelssohn wrote some chamber music for it,
presumably to oblige somebody who played it; and it is kept alive
by these works and by our Mr Whall. If I had ever heard a note of it
in I888 I should not have selected it for a character which I intended
to be sparkling. The devil himself could not make a basset horn sparkle."

MB

David B. Niethamer wrote /18 October 2000 04:55/Critics

>Dan, you're only saying those glowing things about Bernie because he used
>"Cor de Basetto" as his nom de plume! I wonder if he even knew what a
>basset horn is?

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