Johann Nepomuk Hummel
(1778-1837)
Allegro con spirito
Andante –
Rondo
This is one of the most often played of all trumpet concertos. It is also, nowadays, just about the only work of its composer in the standard repertoire. Trumpet players have seized on it as the first work for standard Classical orchestra which exploits the capacities of the modern trumpet.
The history of this concerto is tied up with the most popular trumpet concerto of all, Haydn’s, composed just a few years earlier for the same player, but not quite the same instrument. Just a little way into the orchestral introduction, another famous musician makes his bow, in an obvious crib from a phrase of Mozart’s ‘Haffner’ Symphony. For this composer, Johann Nepomuk Hummel, to echo Mozart is hardly surprising, since he came as a boy from his native Bohemia to live in Mozart’s household for two years as a pupil-apprentice. Mozart conducted one of his own piano concertos for Hummel’s Vienna debut in 1787.
The natural trumpet, just a length of tubing folded on itself, could only play melodies in its highest register, and the late 18th century had lost the taste for that exciting, but strenuous and penetrating sound. Haydn wrote his trumpet concerto in 1796, five years after Mozart’s death, persuaded by the first successful attempt to make a trumpet which could play melodies in the middle and low registers, where the trumpet could sound rounded and mellow. Anton Weidinger was a trumpeter in the Imperial Court Orchestra in Vienna, inventor of the first keyed trumpet that worked. His four-keyed instrument, which he called the ‘organisierte Trompete’ [systematised trumpet] was capable of a full chromatic scale, filling in the notes missing in the lower range of the natural trumpet.
Like most inventions, this one’s bugs needed ironing out, and the four years before Weidinger premiered Haydn’s concerto in 1800 may have elapsed because it took that long for Weidinger to play Haydn’s music to the composer’s satisfaction. Maybe neither was really satisfied, because soon after Weidinger added two more keys, to improve the muffled sound and insecure intonation of his keyed trumpet. By the time Hummel wrote his concerto for it, Weidinger’s trumpet could play almost all the notes of the chromatic scale convincingly, and may have been less tiring to play, since Hummel’s concerto is considerably longer than Haydn’s. Weidinger’s tone was compared to a sonorous oboe or clarinet. A review of 1803 admired his ‘tones never heard before’. *
By 1803 when his trumpet concerto was composed, Hummel had emerged in Vienna as a leading pianist. The coming of Beethoven shook Hummel’s self-confidence, and divided admirers of the rival pianists into hostile camps, but the two musicians became friends. Haydn, too, took an interest in Hummel, and lobbied successfully to make him his successor in the service of the Esterhazy family. The trumpet concerto was one of Hummel’s first works for his new employers, and was premiered at the Castle in Eisenstadt, ‘alla tavola di Corte’ (court dinner music), on January 1, 1804.
The borrowings from Mozart, and perhaps also from Haydn (his Symphony No.83, ‘The Hen’, in the repeated clucking woodwind notes accompanying the trumpet’s second solo subject) may be due to Hummel’s inexperience, in 1803 as a composer for orchestra. He was to become a prolific composer in all genres, though mainly remembered for his piano music. His very difficult and showy piano concertos are enjoying something of a modern revival. No innovator, Hummel is perhaps best regarded as one of the most accomplished composers of the Silver Age of Viennese Classicism, accepting as given the formal devices copied from Haydn and Mozart, embellishing them with his gift for charming melody, freely unfolding ideas, and elaborate virtuoso decoration. In another sphere Hummel was a pioneer – a shrewd businessman, he systematised multi-national music publishing and led the composers’ fight for uniform copyright laws.
From the trumpet’s very first entry, it is clear that Hummel is writing to the astonishing new features of Weidinger’s trumpet, with an emphasis on the middle and low registers, songful melodies, trills, and rapid semiquaver figures. Trills may have been one of Weidinger’s specialities, since a wavy line over some notes in the slow movement seems to call for a slow trill. The listener may be distracted from this feature, heard at the beginning of the slow movement, by another blatant crib – this time from the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C, K467 (‘Elvira Madigan’) – the same figure exactly of lapping strings over basses rising in plucked arpeggios. Hummel develops the hints of dreamy Romanticism in his Mozart model, but not at great length, leading without a break into the lively Rondo with a subject in repeated notes, runs up the scale from low to high, expressive episodes (but always tailing off into virtuoso fast-note display), and trills.
First published by Symphony Australia for the Australian orchestras, 2001
(Half way to being fully chromatic, Weidinger’s ‘Haydn’ instrument was pitched in the key of E flat, whereas his improved model may have sounded better in E, the key of Hummel’s concerto. Some time after the application of valves to the trumpet for the first time in 1813, Hummel’s concerto was published in an edition transposing it into the easier key of E flat, and it wasn’t until after Edward Tarr’s edition was published in 1972 that most performances were again given in Hummel’s original key.)