Weber also wrote much chamber-music for the clarinet and gave it dreamy melodies in the Overture to Oberon and also some difficult arpeggios in company with the flute, known as “drops of water.”
Mendelssohn also used the clarinet for the idea of water. It is very evident in the Hebrides Overture and in the Overture of Melusine it suggests the rolling waves. It is conspicuous in Dvořák’s New World Symphony and it plays a solo in Tschaikowsky’s Francesca da Rimini.
And how Wagner enjoys it! Often he gives it a motive, or lets it sympathize with what is taking place on the stage! And in the third scene of Act I of Die Götterdämmerung, he has two clarinets play a duet for thirty bars!
THE BASSET-HORN
The basset-horn is a tenor clarinet with two additional keys and a longer bore than the clarinet. The last three notes are worked by the thumb of the right hand. The basset-horn is not a horn. It takes its name from a German maker named Horn, who made a little bass clarinet in 1770 and called it little bass horn as a modest compliment to himself. Its part is written a fifth higher than the actual sounds. Gevaert says its tone is one of “unctuous sweetness”; and those adjectives certainly describe its rich voice very accurately.
The basset-horn was new in Mozart’s time and he liked it very much, so much indeed that he gave it an obbligato to the aria Non più di fiori in his opera of Clemenza di Tito. In his Requiem he calls for two basset-horns.
BASS-CLARINET
This instrument is made like the ordinary clarinet only the bell points upward and outward something after the fashion of a big dipper. It is a slow-speaking and hollow-toned instrument. Wagner uses it a great deal. Liszt has a good part for it in his Mazeppa; and it is conspicuous in the Danse de la Fée Dragée in Tschaikowsky’s Nut-cracker Suite and also in the Don Quixote Variations by Strauss.
The bass-clarinet is doubled by the contrabass clarinet.
The contrabass clarinet is an octave below the bass-clarinet. The tube is partly conical and partly cylindrical. It is over ten feet long, and ends in a big metal bell turned upward like that of the bass-clarinet. It has thirteen keys and rings. It stands in the key of B-flat. The instrument is also called pedal clarinet. Its middle and upper registers are reedy, something like the ordinary clarinet tones, and the lower registers are deep rumbles. It might be described as a rival to the double-bassoon.