by Johannes Dengler
I recently had the great pleasure of presenting the instrument of my famous predecessor, Franz Strauss, with my colleague Milena Viotti. The Bavarian State Orchestra is celebrating its 500th anniversary this year, and for this occasion a number of short videos relating to the history of our orchestra have been produced. For 30 years now, I have been able to play as a solo horn player in the same chair in the Bavarian State Opera, and so for me, my first encounter with this original instrument triggered a memorable and impressive journey into the past, and I want to tell you about it.
Much has been handed down, researched, and published about the personality of Franz Strauss and his position and importance in music history; I can't contribute anything new in terms of content. But if you approach the instrument purely phenomenologically in the present, there is still a lot to say.
On the one hand, the craftsmanship is striking. Every screw, every small part does not come from perfect industrial mass production, as it does today, but from small editions that were mostly made by hand and which had a much greater spread in quality. I can only imagine that the raw materials market, e.g. for brass, was completely different in 1867 than it is today. The special form of the instrument, with a long cylindrical portion and a very conical bell, can also be ascribed with high probability to a collaboration between the master builder Ottensteiner and Franz Strauss. The underlying artistry of everyone involved, to achieve the best result on all levels with few attempts and little experience, seems remarkable to me. Certainly it was not possible to simply provide many identically constructed horns in tried-and-tested versions from which to choose, as is the case today.
In many respects, this horn is a starting point, and the repertoire premiered with it (e.g. Rheingold in 1869, Walküre in 1870, and Meistersinger in 1868), was not even known at the time it was made. Personally, I would even go so far and not rule out that the experience with the premiere of Tristan in 1865, two years before the Ottensteiner Horn was made, could have persuaded Franz Strauss to move from the basic tuning in F to a B-flat horn. Tristan on the 3-valve Bb horn seems almost impossible to me, as there are many muted single tones in legato passages that can‘t be played well. In doing so, he consciously violated the general convention of playing an F horn and chose his individual path, as we know from reports, against considerable resistance and hostility from his colleagues and some conductors.
From the anecdotes about Franz Strauss at that time, one can understand on the one hand his great artistic sensibility and on the other a high pressure to perfection. When I only played a few notes on the razor-sharp mouthpiece and saw in the service lists that Franz Strauss played these Wagnerian works alone, without the possibility of changing or assistants, with countless rehearsals in the authoritarian times of the era, I suddenly recalled my own early days in our orchestra. I remember the associated normal initial overstrain with this repertoire vividly. However, I was able to fall back on all the experiences of my colleagues and a systematic training. Franz Strauss had to fight for all this with an unimaginable talent.
From these circumstances, the inner rejection that Franz Strauss is said to have had towards Wagner is revealed to me personally as immediately and physically plausible. I'm really thinking in terms of my own experiences with world premieres today.
The shape of the instrument and the nature of the mouthpiece (very large bore, narrow inner width and sharp edge) seem to correlate with Franz Strauss' efforts at the time to find the tonal "sweet spot" of the National Theater in Munich. The Munich theater, with its more than 2000 seats, was gigantic in that era when the city had about 150,000 inhabitants. As one can gather from the admiring testimonies of his contemporaries up to and including Richard Wagner, he seems to have succeeded with this horn, producing an open, vocal phrasing style of playing of natural beauty, which was able to project into the entire theater. In order to achieve this goal, he went his own way by choosing the basic tuning in B flat. This was partly due to his strong personality, which did not shy away from conflict, but also partly to a scrupulous and sensitive reaction to the excessive demands of the new repertoire.
Franz Strauss' individual style as a horn player has become a living and formative history in the work and horn parts of his son Richard where we find the spiritual ideal of the horn sound with which Richard Strauss himself grew up. This style was shaped by the architectural and acoustic conditions of the Munich National Theater as well as by the examination and the necessary adaptation to the challenges of the new repertoire.
Finally, I would like to mention one more point: had it not been for such a capable, gifted, and ultimately courageous personality as Franz Strauss on the first horn of the Royal Court Opera in Munich, Richard Wagner's way of writing for the horn would probably have not been the same, namely from Tristan where Wagner worked together with Franz to write the horn part. From that point, Wagner began writing differently for horn. Before that, it would have been unthinkable to make the horn a full, even central element of his opera compositions. The history of our instrument and the subsequent horn parts depend directly on this one unique personality.
Today, for horn players, all of this can still be taken as an inspiring example. The "right" sound and the right dynamics in a certain hall and our own individual way of playing should determine our choice of instrument and mouthpiece and drive our will to choose the best setup without too much consideration for the general conventions of our time. Moreover, this can inspire us to work together with instrument makers on the further development of our horns. It is time now to carry the fire further into the future, and to convince future composers and the listening public of the versatility and expressiveness of our instrument.
