THE ANVILS
A blacksmith’s anvil is never brought into the Orchestra when “anvils” are required. The effect is produced by means of steel bars. The player beats them with a hard metal “beater.”
The famous Anvil Chorus in Il Trovatore is played on such a substitute. Wagner calls for no less than eighteen “anvils” in Das Rheingold to give an idea of the prodigious industry of the Nibelungs. They are of three sizes—small, medium and large—and the music for them is written in nine parts to get the effect that Wagner wanted.
THE CUCKOO
This toy instrument consists of two tiny pipes, made of wood and mounted on a pair of tiny bellows. The pipes are stopped with a plug that is pushed in and pulled out to get the sound of the bird’s voice.
The cuckoo is used in Haydn’s Toy Symphony and in Humperdinck’s fairy opera of Hänsel and Gretel.
BELLS
Bells are sometimes wanted by a composer. Meyerbeer used a big bell in low F to give the signal for the massacre of the Huguenots and combined it with bassoons and clarinets, which give the music a sinister quality that is very impressive. Rossini has a bell in the second Act of Guillaume Tell and Verdi has a prison bell ring in Il Trovatore.
“There is nothing more false,” says Lavignac, “than the saying ‘who hears a bell hears one sound only,’ for of all sound-producing agents the bell is perhaps the one which develops the greatest number of over-tones, often discordant even, which sometimes causes a difficulty in discovering which is the fundamental musical tone.”