Reicha Could be Mistaken for Beethoven

No doubt there was only one Beethoven, and search where you may you probably won't find the likes of the Ninth symphony or the "Hammerklavier" emanating from anyone else's pen. But to hear the music of some of Beethoven's middle-European contemporaries is to recognize that there was a sonic nebulosity there from which a Beethoven could have congealed into being. Anton (ne Antonin) Reiche is a case in point. At the Sisyphean task of catching up with my backlog of unplayed records the other night, I turned to the two wind quintets of Reicha's. Two thoughts immediately struck me: (1) "How Beethovenian!" and (2) ''Where has a beautiful quintet like you been all my life?" And in my jaded September, it takes some doing to make that kind of impression.

Reiche was, of course, a friend of Beethoven, for the two were, in their early years, players in the orchestra at Bonn, which Reicha's Uncle Joseph conducted. He also studied with Albrechtsberger and Mozart's nemesis, Salieri, and became a friend of his own musical hero, Joseph Haydn, in the last decade of that worthy's life. Moreover, Reiche counted among his own pupils Liszt, Berlioz, Gounod, and Cesar Franck. He was widely and deeply read in many fields, both humanistic and scientific, and was that rare combination of thinker and doer. He taught musical theory at the Paris Conservatory, and he wrote much and thought profoundly about his subject. And he advocated such virtually un­heard-of notions as quarter-tones, polyrhythms, and modality, and (long before Edison was born) dreamed of something like electronic music.

Prolific as a composer, Reiche wrote in all forms, including the operatic and the symphonic, but he is perhaps best known for his chamber music, where he loved to experiment with odd combinations. Grove's lists a formid­able number of such works: a diecetto for ten winds and strings and a similar octet; 24 wind quintets; six string quintets; 20 string quartets; six string trios; six quartets for flute and strings; a quartet for flutes; a trio for 'cellos; six violin duets; 22 flute duets; and so on. (Folklore has it that Reiche invented the wind quintet--flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn--but that honor seems actually to be Cambini's.)

Among the chamber works are no less than 24 trios for French horns. Since valves were added to the horn to facilitate playing the chromatic scale about 1815 and Reicha lived twenty years beyond that, I should guess that he was exploring the potential of an improved instrument whose sonorities were already dear to romantic central-­European hearts. Since these works are quite unknown today (at least to musical laymen), I am surprised to discover that Supraphon in Czechoslovakia recorded the six of Op. 48 nearly twenty years ago. But the Czechs do take care of their own, phonographically speaking. I can find no mention of the horn-bassoon trios (a strange combination) and can't help wondering if the bassoon is optional for the third horn.