THE BASS TUBA
This huge instrument, with the enormous bell standing upright, with valves and horizontal mouthpiece and great coils of shining tubes, is over three feet long! We can never mistake it; for it is the biggest of all the brass instruments. It has the deepest notes in the entire Orchestra. Its compass is immense! Four octaves! Having pistons, it can give sharps and flats. Consequently, it is a chromatic instrument. The sound of its voice is solemn, mysterious and lugubrious. It is very rich in its deepest notes. If we do not try to listen for them we shall not be able to distinguish them from the other bass instruments of the Orchestra.
The tone of the bass tuba might be described as partaking of both the trombone and the organ. Many of the beautiful effects in Wagner’s Nibelungen Ring are due to this great tuba of five cylinders. Wagner uses it to describe the deep, dark caverns under the Rhine and to suggest the first heavy roll of the waves in Das Rheingold; and it is the instrument on which the dragon, Fafner, speaks in Siegfried. It is heavy and ponderous like Fafner’s own heavy coils; and it is dark and deep and mysterious, just as we imagine a dragon’s voice might sound in the forest, where his mutterings and threatenings are understood.
The bass tuba appealed very strongly to Wagner’s imagination; and the Rheingold, Walküre Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung are full of its impressive tones.
The tuba was invented by a German composer, W. F. Wieprecht (1802-1892), with the help of J. G. Moritz.
The bass tuba, like every other instrument, had a direct ancestor. In some families the new generations are nobler and more refined than their ancestors. This is the case with the tuba. As he belongs to the group of horns and trombones, with even a slight relationship to the organ in his deep rolling voice with more velvet in it than even the organ possesses, the tuba might not care to be reminded that his parent is the ophicleide and that he came down in a straight line of ancestry from the rather commonplace and blatant Cornet Family.
The cornet is nothing more nor less than a bugle, a development of the old post-horn. There is nothing elegant, nor distinguished about the cornet (the old zinke of Mediæval times). Quite the contrary. But several centuries ago it was used to play the upper part in the Sackbut group;[27] and as there was a bass sackbut, there was no need for a bass cornet.
After a time a French priest, named Guillaume, who was canon of Auxerre, invented the serpent. This was a huge wooden instrument covered with leather pierced with holes on the side and furnished with a big, cupped mouthpiece.
This serpent was the bass of the cornet family. It is now obsolete. It is hanging up in the wall in the instrument-maker’s workshop facing page [40].