Trumpet Concerto in E‑Flat Major

The trumpet in the late 18th century was little more than a brass tube with a mouthpiece and a bell. The fashion for melodic playing in its very high register—think of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2—had fallen from favour and the instrument was relegated to playing fanfare-like figures on the limited notes of its lower range. Nowadays pistons make the trumpet a chromatic instrument, but players of the natural “trumpet” experimented with slides and vent holes to make more notes available. A young player called Anton Weidinger (1766-1852) developed an instrument with three keys covering a row of holes and in 1796 persuaded Haydn to compose a concerto for this organisierte Trompete or Inventionstrompete. Weidinger meanwhile continued to perfect the instrument and finally premiered the concerto in Vienna in 1800, going on to give performances in Leipzig, Paris and London. Audiences must have been astonished at the new instrument’s ability to play chromatic melodies low in its range—especially in the central “Andante”—and to articulate rapid passages cleanly. They would also have been struck by its mellower, oboe-like tone. Haydn exploits all these characteristics throughout the concerto: each of the three movements unfurls streams of melody in a style and range of keys that had hitherto been way out of the reach of trumpeters, while not forgetting the instrument’s military and ceremonial associations. In composing this, his last purely orchestral work, Haydn at once created not only his best-loved concerto but also the first true trumpet concerto—and still the finest in the repertoire.