Mahillon's Wagner Tubas

Author(s): John Webb

Source: The Galpin Society Journal, Vol. 49 (Mar., 1996), pp. 207-212
Published by: Galpin Society
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/842402
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 MAHILLON'S WAGNER TUBAS

Some years ago I acquired an instrument (Fig.l) from the esta

late Alan Civil. His widow, Shirley Hopkins, recalls him comin
with it one night and announcing that he had 'a type of Wagne
is about the size of a British brass band baritone (58 cms high), b
F with four straight-through, in-line Perinet valves and, of cou
more tubing. Its mouthpipe takes a narrow-bore trombone mou
On the bell is stamped: 'C. MAHILLON / FOURNISSEUR
BREVETE / DE L'ARMEE / ET DES / CONSERVATOIRES /
BRUXELLES'. Above the inscription is a German-silver plaqu
the Belgian royal warrant. There is no number. Half the tubin
valves open) is cylindrical, all seamed. It has the sound
trombone, is constructed and plays superbly, like all Mahillon in
in my experience.
The Royal Academy of Music had a set of these Wagner tub
B6, two in low E They were bought in 1895 for the format
Queen's Hall Orchestra and the introduction of the Promenade
Concerts.1 A Dr Cathcart put up the money on two conditions: one, to
establish low pitch; the other that Henry Wood be engaged as permanent
conductor. Cathcart, a throat specialist, felt that English high pitch did
untold harm to singers' voices.
The wind players refused initially to buy new low-pitch instruments,
so Wood bought them himself from Mahillon in Wardour Street and lent
them to the players for the first season. The players never thought that
low pitch would last. At the end of the season, however, most of the
wind players bought the low-pitch instruments, though no one invested
in a Wagner tuba. Even today, most sets are the property of the orchestras
and opera houses.
Three from the Academy set were sold fairly recently; the fourth, a B%
instrument, is mnissing. The surviving three are engraved with the initials
'HJW' (Henry Joseph Wood), and they are stamped in English: 'Gold
Medal / Paris / C. MAHILLON & Co /LONDON / MADE AT
THEIR BRUSSELS WORKS'. Again, no numbers. There are slig
differences between the two F instruments and my own one (see
for a comparison). They have four water-keys (mine, only two), a
slightly longer format. Their P&rinet valves, too, have the later stag
ports. The bore of all the instruments (including mine) is 12 mm.
An extract from The Stage, of February 1896, describes a concert at
Queen's Hall conducted by Mottl, one of the leading contempo
German Wagnerians:
The concert will be remarkable for the introduction in this country of th
trumpet and four tenor tubas. On former occasions the parts have been play
a trombone and four horns. The difference will be very marked, for the
tubas are very noble instruments. Although the passages in question take o

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 FIG. I. Mahillon Wagner tuba in F.

FIG. 2. Mahillon Wagner tuba in F (ex-R.A.M.).

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few minutes to play, the instruments are being specially built, and some players
will study them on purpose. Another interesting feature of the concert will be
that Parisian normal pitch will be adopted. What a blessing this will be if this
were generally employed.

In Henry Wood's autobiography he writes of the Wagner concerts he

conducted at the Norwich Festival in 1908: 'They were made more
interesting by my employing four Wagner tubas made specially for me by
Messrs Mahillon of Brussels.' This innovation added to his work. The
four players lived in Kettering. He had to leave the train there and
rehearse with them for two hours. 'I had done this for two years, but it
repaid me. I obtained the effect Wagner wanted, which was the main
thing.'
Later in the book, for 1911 (the year when he was knighted), he writes
of a performance of Elgar's 2nd Symphony for the London Festival at the
Queen's Hall:
It was about this time that Mahillon made the four valve trombones of which I
have already spoken. Elgar was delighted with the beautiful legato these
instruments produced in the finale but I did not care for the horn-like quality of
them. They now repose in my library at the R.A.M., probably silenced for ever.

This statement is rather mysterious. The only previous mentions of

Mahillon brass instruments concern the Wagner tubas; there is nothing at
all about trombones. So, could these have been one and the same? Elgar's
2nd Symphony is scored in the brass for four horns, three trumpets, three
trombones and tuba. On this occasion, presumably the trombones were
replaced (for greater legato) by three of these 'valve trombones', which -
since they sounded too 'horn-like' for Henry Wood's taste - surely must
have been Mahillon Wagner tubas! Sir Henry's remark that they are now
'probably silenced forever', was probably written many years later: his
book was published in 1938, by which time modern European Wagner
tubas had already been adopted.
In the Naples Museum is a bass trumpet and four Wagner tubas, all by
Mahillon, donated by Duke Ernesto del Balzo, accession numbers 580
and 583-6. The catalogue contains no pictures, and the instruments are
currently stored away, awaiting rehousing, and are not accessible for
photography. They are described as having four pistons: two instruments
in Bb, two in F, each bearing the same inscription, in French, as mine.
Another set was recently discovered in the Royal Opera House,
Covent Garden, together with a bass trumpet, also by Mahillon. The
inscriptions on these are in English, the same as the R.A.M. set; but the
valves are earlier, like mine.
A Mahillon catalogue of 1896 shows a page of B? euphoniums
described as 'tubas or basses'.2 Two of them (one in Continental oval
format) have rotary valves; two have pistons, with the fourth, for the left
hand, placed horizontally (as on standard British 4-valve euphoniums).

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The fifth of these instruments (see Fig.3) is captioned 'Tuba in Bb with 4
pistons, new model. Price: 90 guilders' One of the R.A.M. Bb
instruments is shown in Fig.4, for comparison. Later in the catalogue are
listed instruments made for specific operas, like Lohengrin, Othello and
Aida trumpets. For the Ring cycle, among others, are a B6 contrabass
valved trombone, a Bb contrabass bombardon, a bass trumpet (70
guilders) and, of course, a tenor tuba in Bb with four pistons (65 guilders)
and a bass tuba in F with four pistons (75 guilders). Unfortunately, none
is illustrated.
We know that Wagner visited the Sax workshops in Paris in 1853
where he saw and heard the maker's saxhorns (patented in 1845). It is
possible he even heard the Distin family who were still touring Europe at
that time, having recreated their quintet using early Sax bell-forward
saxhorns as far back as 1844.3
The composition sketches for Das Rheingold were begun later that
year. In the 1854 orchestral sketch he scores for two tenor tubas in E6,

baritone
for eight tuba inthree
horns, Bb, bass tuba inbass
trumpets, B6 trumpet,
and contrabass tuba in E6,4
three trombones andas well as
contrabass trombone. The final orchestral disposition changes the tubas
to two tenors in B6, two basses in F and one contrabass tuba. At this stage
he decided that the extra instruments were to be played by the second
section of horns, presumably unaware of the difficulties that would be
imposed on players doubling on horn- and trombone-sized mouthpieces.
In 1865 he wrote to Ludwig II that he had become acquainted with
the 'extra instruments' needed in the Ring, at Sax's workshop;5 but he
goes on to say that suitable instruments in the required keys could not be
found anywhere, not even in the military bands of Munich and Vienna.
By the time he began the score of Die Walkiire (1855), he notated the
tenor tubas in El and the basses in Bb, apparently for ease of reading by
the players. Gevaert (1885)6 said he could not understand this. He
thought the German performers anyway always played the 'tuben' parts
on alto horns in E6 and euphoniums in Bb, in other words, on alto and
bass saxhorns.
Wagner continued with the El and B1 notation in Siegfried and
G6tterdaimmerung,7 requests to Alexander and Moritz for B6 and F
instruments having been ignored. In the meantime he seemed satisfied
with saxhorns, stating that they could be found everywhere under
different names, especially in Vienna with the Military.8
According to Ernst,9 the first 'true Wagner tubas' (by Moritz) were not
built until 1877, too late for the first performance of the Ring. Fig.5
shows a later Moritz model from a 1900 catalogue. Note that, like the
saxhorns (and the cornophones in France), it is still a right-handed
player, though with a horn mouthpiece and leadpipe. Altenburg (1911)
shows a quartet of military musicians with similar, right-handed Wagner
tubas.10 The Alexander Brothers first supplied a set (of the type we

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 FIG. 3. Mahillon tuba in BX FIG. 4. Mahillon Bb Wagner tuba.
'New Model' (1896).

FIG. 5. Moritz Wagner tuba (1900).

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recognise today) to Bayreuth in 1890. The first set in Britain by the same
maker was ordered by Sir Thomas Beecham as late as 1935 for the
London Philharmonic Orchestra." It has been claimed that, 'in London,
brass band instruments were used until 1935'.12 But rather than that
having been the case, were these not perhaps the very same Mahillon
instruments we have been discussing?
Considering all the above evidence, it seems unlikely that Wagner ever
heard tubas of the kind he originally had in mind, not realising back in
1854 that he was writing for instruments that did not exist. Throughout
his lifetime and well into the twentieth century, military and brass band
musicians played the parts on saxhorns, cornophones, euphoniums, etc.,
with a bias, in Britain anyway, towards the Wagner tubas of Mahillon.'3
JOHN WEBB

REFERENCES

I Henry J. Wood, My Life of Music (London: Victor Gollancz, 19

2I am indebted to Ignace de Keyser of the Brussels Museum f
photocopies of the appropriate pages.
3 Adam Carse, 'Adolphe Sax and the Distin Family', The Mus
(1945), p.193.
4 Baritone and bass tubas in many makers' lists were of the same pitch, the bass
usually having a fourth valve and a wider bore.
5 Otto Strobel (compiler), Kiinig Ludwig II und Richard Wagner, Briefwechsel
(Karlsruhe: Braun, 1936), vol.1, p.184.
6 E A. Gevaert, A New Treatise on Instrumentation (Paris: Lemoine, 1885).
7 For a full exposition of the anomalies in notation throughout the Ring, see
James Harvey Keays, 'An Investigation into the Origins of the Wagner Tuba',
D.M.A. dissertation, University of of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign, 1977.
8 Wilhelm Altman, Richard WVagners Briefe nach Zeitfolge und Inhalt (Leipzig:
Breitkopf & Hirtel, 1905).
9 Friedrich Ernst, 'Die Blasinstrumentenbauer - Familie Moritz in Berlin',
AiMusikinstrument XVIII (1969).
' Wilhelm Altenburg, 'Die Wagnertuba und ihre Einfiirung in der
Milithirmusik', Zeitschrift fir Instrumentenbau XXX (1911).
11 This set of instruments is now in the University of Edinburgh Collection of
Historic Musical Instruments.
12 R. Bryant & A. Baines, 'Wagner tuba', in The New Grove Dictionary of
Musical Instruments, ed. S. Sadie (London, 1984).
3 Editor's postscript: After presenting an earlier draft of the above paper, at the
Symposium on Musical Instrument History (Edinburgh, 10-13 June 1994),
Mr Webb staged a practical demonstration of short extracts from works by
Wagner and Bruckner, played on an actual set of Mahillon Wagner tubas. Players
(in order of pitch) were Trevor Herbert, John Webb, David Rycroft and Anthony
George.

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