WHAT CONTRA FOR THE BRAHMS REQUIEM

Yesterday as we were rehearsing and then performing the Brahms Requiem, I was wondering what the contra players who originally encountered this piece were playing on. The Requiem was written in 1868, and there had just been a 25-year period between 1842, when Glinka wrote Russlan and Ludmilla, and 1867 when Verdi wrote Don Carlo, when no orchestral composer that I can document wrote for the contrabassoon. I think that the instrument was so primitive and so weak tone-wise, that composers quit writing for it. But during this time, all kinds of double reed contrabass instruments were being built. All manner of shapes and sizes, as well as materials were tried. The Requiem was one of the first pieces to be written which included the contra again, after this 25 year hiatus. But it was written a full 11 years before Heckel devised the configuration of the contra that we are familiar with. The experiments were still going on! So we can only guess what kind of instruments were used for the performances in the first decade or two of the Requiem's existence. Brahms was not shy about what he asked the contra to do in this piece, so I can only guess what the players went through to execute the part to their satisfaction.


(Picture to the left) The contrabassoon in this display case was built by Bradka, near Vienna, between 1850 and 1880, and it is on display in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It is a very sophisticated version of one of the old designs, which is essentially a giant bassoon with a big looping crook. It has beautifully crafted keywork. Click on these pictures for larger images.


The instrument on the right in this picture is a Contrabassophon, a contra design which did not survive. It was built around 1850 near Koblenz, and has a larger bore than even a modern contrabassoon. On the left is a Tritonikon, a metal double reed instrument which plays in the same register as the contrabassoon. These are in the Brussels Musical Instrument Museum. The feature of the contrabassophon is that Haseneier, who built it, re-configured the joints of the contra, and built it in what is called a four-fold wrap. This pointed the way for Stritter and Heckel to use the four-fold wrap for their redesigns of the 1870's, which Heckel patented in 1879, and which became the contra as we knew it for the next 120 years.

My apologies for the poor quality of the photographs! Instrument museums generally have terrible lighting and lots of glare from all the spotlights and glass, and one cannot get a picture of an entire instrument except to stand some distance back from the glass case.