Cherubini called for four horns in his opera of Lodoiska.
Schubert opened his Symphony in C (No. 9) with a beautiful passage of eight bars for two horns in unison. Mendelssohn made a most poetic and dreamy use of it in the Nocturne in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Weber has an exquisite introduction for four horns, descriptive of the forest in the Overture to Der Freischütz.
“No other composer,” writes a critic, “has surpassed, or even equalled, Weber in his masterly use of this instrument. He evidently loved it above all other voices in the Orchestra. Besides abundant concerted music, the effective opening of the Overture to Oberon, the weird notes in that of Der Freischütz and the lovely obbligato in the mermaid’s song will rise into immediate remembrance. He fully appreciates its value, not only as a melodic instrument, but as a source, whether alone, or blended with other qualities of tone, of strange and new æsthetical effect.”[25]
In his opera of Preciosa Weber calls for eight horns.
“The horn,” says Berlioz, “is a noble and melancholy instrument. It blends easily with the general harmony; and the composer—even the least skilful—may if he choose, either make it play an important part, or a useful, or subordinate one. No master, in my opinion, has ever known how to avail himself of its powers more originally, more poetically, and, at the same time, more completely than Weber. In his three finest works—Oberon, Euryanthe and Freischütz—he causes the horn to speak a language as admirable as it is novel,—a language which Beethoven and Méhul alone seem to have comprehended before him.
“The horn is of all orchestral instruments the one which Gluck wrote least well for. We must, however, quote as a stroke of genius those three notes of the horn imitating the conch of Charon in the air of Alceste, ‘Charon now calls thee.’ They are middle C’s, given in unison by two horns in D-major; but the composer having conceived the idea of causing the bells of each to be closed, it follows that the two instruments serve mutually as a sordino; and the sounds, interclashing, assume a distant accent and a cavernous quality of tone of the most strange and dramatic effect.”
HORN, SYMPHONY SOCIETY OF NEW YORK
Josef Franzl