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Re: Favorite Clarinet Quotes

Author: Ken Shaw ★2017
Date: 2011-03-01 17:10

In the introduction to his collected music criticism, Music in London 1890-94, George Bernard Shaw wrote:

I was strong on the need [in 1888] for signed criticism written in the first person instead of the journalist 'we'; but as I then had no name worth signing, and GBS meant nothing to the public, I had to invent a fantastic personality with something like a foreign title. I thought of Count di Luna (from Il Travatore) 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 clarinet. 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 of 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....

If I had ever heard a note of it in 1888 I would not have selected it for a character which I intended to be sparkling. The devil himself could not make a basset horn sparkle.

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Favorite Clarinet Quotes new

curiousclarinetist

2011-02-28 12:20