Fig. 1. (From photographs lent by M. Victor Mahillon.)
Like the clarinet, the basset horn is a transposing instrument, its music being written a fifth higher than the actual sounds. The treble clef is used in notation for all but the lowest register. The technical capabilities of the basset horn are the same as for the clarinet, except that the extra low notes from A to F (actual sounds) can only be intoned slowly and staccato; the notes of the upper register being better represented in the clarinet are seldom used in orchestral music.
The tone of the basset horn is extremely reedy and rich, especially in the medium and low registers; the tone colour is similar to that of the clarinet without its brilliancy; it is mellow and sensuous, but slightly sombre, and therefore well adapted for music of an elegiac funereal character.
The basset horn flourished mainly in Germany, where at the end of the 18th century it was the favourite solo instrument of many celebrated instrumentalists, such as Czerny, David, Lotz, Springer, &c. Among the great masters, Mozart seems to have been foremost in his appreciation of this beautiful instrument. In his Requiem, the reed family is represented by two basset horns having independent parts, and two bassoons. Mozart has also used the instrument with great effect in his opera La Clemenza di Tito, where he has written a fine obbligato for it in the aria "Non piu di Flori"; in Zauberflöte; and in chamber music, viz. short adagio for two basset horns and bassoon, and another for two clarinets and three basset horns (Series 10 of Breitkopf & Härtel's complete edition). Beethoven employed it in his Prometheus overture. Mendelssohn used it in military music, and in two concerted pieces for clarinet and basset horn with pianoforte accompaniment, in F and D min., opp. 113 and 114, dedicated to Heinrich and Carl Bärmann.
The archetypes of the basset horn are the same as those of the clarinet (q.v.). The basset horn was the outcome of the desire, prevailing during the 16th and 17th centuries, to obtain complete families of instruments to play in concert. The invention of the basset horn in 1770 is attributed to a clarinet maker of Passau, named Horn, whose name was given to the instrument;[[2]] by a misnomer, the basset horn became known in Italy as corno di bassetto, and in France as cor de basset. In 1782, Theodore Lotz of Pressburg made some modifications in the instrument, which was further improved by two instrumentalists of Vienna, Anton and Johann Stadler, and finally in 1812 by Iwan Mueller, a famous clarinettist, who invented the alto clarinet in E♭ from the basset horn, by giving the latter a construction and fingering analogous to those of the clarinet in B♭, which he took as his model, instead of the clarinet in C.
See J. G. H. Backofen, Anweisung zur Klarinette, nebst einer kurzen Abhandlung über das Basset-Horn, with illustration, p. 37 (Leipzig, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1803); Iwan Mueller, Anweisung zu der neuen Clarinette und der Clarinette-alto, nebst einigen Bemerkungen für Instrumentenmacher (Leipzig, Freidrich Hofmeister, 1826, with illustrations); Gottfried Weber, "Über Clarinette und Bassethorn," Cacilia, Band xi. pp. 35-37 (Mainz, 1834); Wilhelm Altenburg, Die Clarinette, ihre Entstehung und Entwickelung bis zur Jetztzeit in akustischer, technischer u. musikalischer Beziehung (Heilbronn, 1904), pp. 16-32; good heliogravures of early basset horns in Descriptive Catalogue of the Musical Instruments at the Royal Military Exhibition, London, 1890, compiled by Capt. C. R. Day (1891), pl. v.