Trumpet Concerto in E flat
Allegro con spirito
Andante
Rondo: Allegro
The name of Johann Nepomuk Hummel is not well known to us today, but it comes with the highest of recommendations. As a child-virtuoso he studied with Mozart and actually lived with him in Vienna; later he studied with Haydn, who thought so highly of Hummel that he recommended him to his great employer, Prince Eszterhazy. Hummel enjoyed a long, sometimes difficult relationship with Beethoven, but finally, like Schubert, was one of his pallbearers, and, at the master’s express wish, played at Beethoven’s memorial concert. In later life, as the most famous piano teacher in Europe, Hummel taught the young Mendelssohn, and Robert Schumann considered taking lessons with him but was deterred by the cost. In contrast to many of his contemporaries Hummel was a shrewd businessman and lived a comfortable life from the 1820s onwards, gardening and taking country walks. If his music has been eclipsed by Beethoven’s, there seems little doubt that Hummel was the happier and better liked of the two men during his lifetime.
The Trumpet Concerto is probably now the best known of Hummel’s works, and it gives us a snapshot of his musical personality at its most fresh and spontaneous. The piece is confident and high-spirited – with liberal doses of humour keeping it from pomposity – and dates from a key moment in Hummel’s career. At the end of 1803 Haydn had obtained for him the position of Konzertmeister to his own employer, Prince Eszterhazy, and the Trumpet Concerto was written for Hummel’s first concert in his new job, on January 1st 1804 at the Eszterhazy palace of Eisenstadt. Clearly, he needed to make a strong and positive impression on the Prince, and Hummel chose to write a concerto for one of Vienna’s most prominent instrumentalists, the Court trumpeter Anton Weidinger (1767-1852). Weidinger was the inventor of what he called "an organised trumpet", a trumpet with keys. Classical-era trumpet parts are usually very basic – the 18th century instrument was little more than a simple tube, restricted to the small range of notes allowed by its natural harmonic series. With keys, for the first time, trumpets could play outside of this range and could play melodies and chromatic scales like other instruments. Weidinger’s keyed trumpet was not the first, but it was the first to prove truly effective, and by writing for it Hummel was showing himself to be abreast of the very latest developments in instrumental music. He was also, perhaps, paying tribute to the revered Haydn, who had written his own Trumpet Concerto for Weidinger seven years earlier. And, of course, the trumpet was the perfect, festive, choice of instrument for a New Year’s Day concert.
We don’t know the Prince’s response to the concerto, but the Eszterhazys were jealously possessive of their exclusive right to their employees’ work and, although Weidinger continued to play the concerto for the rest of his career it was then effectively lost – and was not published, astonishingly, until 1957! Since then it has not been out of the repertoire, quite simply the most idiomatic, satisfying and enjoyable trumpet concerto between Haydn and Shostakovich. It’s easy to "spot-the-influences", and the most obvious candidates are all to be found – we hear echoes of Beethoven and Mozart’s concerto-openings in the powerful sweep of the opening paragraph, and the humour and playfulness of Haydn in the first movement’s second subject and the final Rondo. There’s a Mannheim-style crescendo to be heard in the first movement and the romantic woodwind trills and major/minor key-alternations of the Andante prefigure Weber and late Beethoven. And it’s believed that Weidinger assisted Hummel with the solo part, which is full of the chromatic passages and sudden key changes that his new instrument had made possible. But the overall achievement is wholly convincing, wonderfully entertaining, and Hummel’s own. His contemporaries appreciated that it was possible for a composer to be not as great as Beethoven or Mozart and still be extremely good. The concerto is scored for a full woodwind section, two horns, and strings and is in three movements.
R. G. Bratby, 2001
Copyright Classical Notes.co.uk 2000
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