Klarinet Archive - Posting 000983.txt from 2000/10

From: Daniel Leeson <leeson0@-----.net>
Subj: Re: [kl] Critics
Date: Wed, 18 Oct 2000 07:37:22 -0400

What an absolutely marvellous quotation. All of it, but particularly,
"The devil himself could not make the basset horn sparkle." Thank you
Michael!!

Dan Leeson
Michael Bryant wrote:
>
> 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."
>

--
***************************
** Dan Leeson **
** leeson0@-----.net **
***************************

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Unsubscribe from Klarinet, e-mail: klarinet-unsubscribe@-----.org
Subscribe to the Digest: klarinet-digest-subscribe@-----.org
Additional commands: klarinet-help@-----.org
Other problems: klarinet-owner@-----.org