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At early dawn the grandchildren had already assembled there to hear the drums, oboes, clarinets, trumpets, and cornets played upon by the military, the city musicians, and whoever else might furnish his tones. The New-Year's gifts, sealed and superscribed, were divided by us children among the humbler congratulators; and, as the day advanced, the number of those of higher rank increased.
Then he wrote great symphonies and in them the clarinets for the first time unfolded the resources from which the modern orchestra has profited so abundantly. Originally the clarinet played a humble rôle, as the name indicates. Clarinetto is the diminutive of clarino, and the instrument was invented to replace the shrill tones that the trumpet lost as it gained in depth of tone.
One of the last works which Clement executed as a matter of pleasure, was the building of an organ for his own use. It will be remembered that when working as a slater at Great Ashby, he had made flutes and clarinets, and now in his old age he determined to try his skill at making an organ in his opinion the king of musical instruments.
Over a waving accompaniment of clarinets, the other wood-winds strike up a more lyric and hopeful strain, and a soliloquy from the 'cello ends the slow introduction, the materials of which are taken from the two principal subjects of the overture, which is built on the classic sonata formula.
Every hearer must be struck with its mysterious beauty, and it has been the subject of many theoretical discussions. There is, however, one thing to be noticed in this melody. This instrument therefore has a distinct melody of its own, consisting only of two notes, but still heard as a kind of sigh, and quite different from the merely filling-in part of the clarinets and bassoons. V' celli. Eng.
Though it grows out of the main theme, yet the change is clear in a return to the subject, now in true variation, where the saxophone has the longer notes and the clarinet and oboe sing in concert. There follows a pure interlude, vague in motive, full of dainty touches. The oboe has a kind of arioso phrase with trilling of flutes and clarinets, answered in trumpets and harp.
Learn, then, that their national orchestras are composed of "zournas," which are shrill flutes; "salamouris," which are squeaky clarinets; mandolines, with copper strings, twanged with a feather; "tchianouris," violins, which are played upright; "dimplipitos," a kind of cymbals which rattle like hail on a window pane.
The dome of the wheat market is an English jockey cap, on a grand scale. The towers of Saint-Sulpice are two huge clarinets, and the form is as good as any other; the telegraph, contorted and grimacing, forms an admirable accident upon their roofs. Saint-Roch has a door which, for magnificence, is comparable only to that of Saint-Thomas d'Aquin.
Now Sacchini, for some reason or other which I do not know, did not use clarinets once in the whole score. Benoist was commissioned to add them when the work was revived, as he told me as we were chatting one day. Berlioz did not know this, and Benoist, who had not read Berlioz's Traité, knew nothing of the romantic musician's enthusiastic admiration of his work.
Yet it is the weakest of his orchestral works the weakest and the least characteristic. There is much Liszt in the score, and a good deal of Wagner. Only occasionally as in the pianissimo passage for flutes, clarinets, and divided strings, following the first outburst of the full orchestra does his own individuality emerge with any positiveness.
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