Bruce Dickey

This startling description of the cornetto comes from a book on musical instruments from the 1930’s. Though there were certainly better informed voices about at the time, Schwarz’ trashing of the cornetto perfectly illustrates the effect that obsolescence has on an instrument’s reputation. At the height of its popularity, the cornetto was the king of instruments, played by highly-paid virtuosi whose performances left chroniclers breathless with praise. Why, then, did the instruments die out, and when exactly did this happen?

The late sixteenth century was the cornetto's golden age, nowhere more so than in Venice where the leading player was the Udinese master, Girolamo dalla Casa. In his division manual, Il vero modo di diminuir, dalla Casa explains that the superiority of his instrument lies in its ability to imitate the human voice:

One of those who must have known and heard dalla Casa personally was the Bolognese theorist Giovanni Maria Artusi, best known for his disagreement with Monteverdi concerning the merits of "modern" music. Artusi had a high regard for the cornetto and for those who played it well:

The "Cavaliere del Cornetto" mentioned by Artusi is almost certainly the Cavaliere Luigi del Cornetto of Ancona praised so glowingly by Vincenzo Giustiniani in 1628:

The very amazement of these gentlemen, of course, suggests that they had more often heard the cornetto played with less "moderation and correctness." Indeed Monteverdi, who had certainly heard the best musicians of his time, seems to have held the view that cornetti and trombones belonged among the less refined instruments. While discussing in one of his letters the problems of setting a certain maritime text, he protests that, "the proper imitation of the text should depend in my view on wind instruments, rather than on the more refined strings. I am sure that the sounds appropriate to the tritons and other sea creatures should be entrusted to trombones and cornetts rather than to citterns, harpsichords, and harps, since this is a maritime performance and thus takes place outside the city... So the sounds and the instruments will be either elegant and inappropriate or appropriate and inelegant". Vincenzo Galilei even informs us, with some hyperbole, that cornetti and trombones were never heard in princely chambers:

Players like the Cavaliere del Cornetto and Girolamo dalla Casa were, no doubt, always exceptional, even in Venice. But by 1640 cornetto playing had declined (largely because of the plague of 1630) to a point where the Procuratori of St. Mark's found it necessary to take action, stating that the cornetto had been absent for some time not only from the musical chapel of St. Mark's but indeed from all the churches of Venice. Wishing to revive this instrument "which used to give much grace to the harmony", the Procuratori decided to offer stipends to two members of the chapel, the singer Marco Coradini and the instrumentalist Pietro Furlan, to encourage them to practice the cornetto. This first attempt seems to have failed, for the Procuratori tried again in 1643, arranging for Marco Pellegrini, a violinist in the chapel, to teach the cornetto to two young students. They were both accepted in the chapel within two years, their short period of training indicating, however, that the tasks demanded of them were not overly difficult. The days of brilliant cornetto virtuosi at St. Mark's were clearly gone.

Despite these difficulties, the cornetto managed to maintain a place in the chapel at St. Mark's until after 1714.  In Bologna, another center of cornetto playing, the instrument seems to have flourished somewhat longer.  Difficult cornetto parts turn up occasionally in the latter half of the 17th century in the works of local composers including Francesco Passarini and Maurizio Cazzati, although it is worth noting that it was Cazzati himself who brutally re-organized the musical chapel of S. Petronio in 1657, letting go en masse all the cornettists and trombonists, some of whom had given 30 or 40 years of service. They were replaced with violins and violoncelli.

Bologna also possessed one of the most famous ensembles of cornetti and trombones in Italy, the Concerto Palatino della Signoria di Bologna.  This ensemble existed for more than 250 years, usually in a formation of 4 cornetti and 4 trombones, and was not disbanded until 1779.  By this time standards on the cornetto had sunk so low that the city fathers voted to silence the Concerto Palatino, setting forth there reasons in the following deliberation:

In England, the Restoration and the ensuing change of fashion at court dealt the death blow to the cornetto.  Soon after his coronation, Charles II set about re-organizing the "King's Musik" along French lines.  John Evelyn bears witness to the effect of this change on the fortunes of the cornetto:

Probably the cornetto was not entirely "left off", as Evelyn puts it, much before 1700, though standards had surely slipped by the time Roger North writes in 1695 that, "nothing comes so near or rather imitates so much an excellent voice as a cornett pipe, but the labor of the lips is too great and it is seldom well sounded."

The cornetto survived longer in northern countries than in the south. After 1600 a striking influx of Italian musicians into Germany created a great flowering of cornetto playing there which lasted through most of the 17th century. By 1700, however, the cornetto was definitely regarded as old-fashioned, though it continued to be played, particularly by church musicians and Stadtpfeiffer, for a remarkably long time.  More and more, though, the instrument was no longer the province of professional virtuosi, but of humble town musicians. Mattheson writes, in his Neueroeffneten Orchester (1713), that, "the slight use of this instrument nowadays does not merit that anyone particularly apply himself to it anymore and so waste his breath in this activity. In the churches the cornetts still hold out now and then, but otherwise they are seldom to be seen." Where cornetti were heard, they are described as loud, rather rough instruments played with tremendous effort.  Joseph Majer's comment in 1732 is typical:

To the author of the Grosses vollstaendiges Universal Lexicon (1733) the instrument seemed so demanding that "the difficulty of playing it has presumably brought it out of usage here."

Still further to the north, in Norway, the cornetto enjoyed an even later flowering. In 1744, the German-immigrant Stadtpfeiffer and organist Johann Daniel Berlin published, in Trontheim, a treatise on the instruments in which he speaks of the cornetto:

Apparently Berlin did find some players who could manage the instrument exceedingly well, for a sinfonia by Berlin for cornetto and strings, in a manuscript in Trontheim, is extremely demanding on the player, who must play to the very top of the instrument's range and negotiate difficult leaps in a thoroughly Rococo manner.

The cornetto was still heard in Norway in 1782 as Lorents Nicolaj Berg relates in his Den frste Prbe for Begundere ude Instrumental-Kunsten:

The image of a simple village musician blowing, obviously very hard, on his cornetto is captured amusingly by Berg in an anecdote he says was well known at the time:

We have come a long way from the Cavaliere del Cornetto to this musician blowing on his "sausage", but, we are certainly nearer to Schwarz' "poor white trash among musical instruments."  As an instrument of the Stadtpfeiffer, played in all likelihood ever more poorly, the cornetto lasted until at least 1840, when Jean Georges Kastner, the French composer and musicologist, heard one in Stuttgart:

Kastner, being well acquainted with earlier descriptions of the cornetto, was, like Schwarz, at a loss to understand the instrument's former glory.  The "most excellent of wind instruments" had fallen on hard times.

©Bruce Dickey, 2009