Chapter 3: “Der Posaunengott”

Carl Traugott Queisser, Ferdinand David and Christian Friedrich Sattler

Carl Traugott Queisser

Not quite five years Belcke’s junior, Carl Traugott Queisser was born into a musical family in Döben (now a part of the town of  Grimma), a village approximately 35 kilometers southeast of Leipzig, on January 11^th 1800. His father, Carl Traugott Benjamin Queisser was the local innkeeper and also employed at Döben castle.  Having undergone a very broad apprenticeship under a certain August Barth, Stadpfeiffer in Grimma, during which he learnt the basic techniques of virtually every orchestral instrument known at the time, it seems Carl Traugott Jr. became particularly interested in the seemingly unlikely combination of violin and trombone, teaching himself to play the latter instrument to a high level. His two younger brothers also later became fine brass players, Johann Gottlieb was to become one of the first trombonists to be employed permanently at the Dresden Court Opera, and Friedrich Benjamin became one of the leading trumpeters of the day in the same orchestra, and much admired by Wagner[1]. Carl Traugott Jr.  moved to Leipzig at 17 to continue his studies with the Stadtmusikus Wilhelm Barth (who apparently was the very last Stadtpfeiffer employed by the city of Leipzig[2], and the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s principal clarinetist 1802-1835[3])  studying violin (and viola) with the Concertmaster of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, August Mattäi. Sebastian Krause, in his article “Der Posaunengott”, quotes the unnamed author of Queisser’s obituary who attested...

“... when it came to the trombone, he couldn’t find specific instruction, because at the time the instrument- in the hands of the municipal bands- was at a very low level of development. All anyone could do was to show him the slide positions. He realized that his only option was to pursue study of the instrument independently. Today, the astonishing level of mastery that he achieved on this difficult instrument is known to the whole world”[4] [5]

His progress on both violin and the trombone was indeed rapid, and he was to make his debut as trombone soloist at the Gewandhaus whilst still a student of Wilhelm Barth, on October 7^th 1821, playing the same Meyer Concertino that Belcke had performed six years earlier. A critique in the Allgemeine musikalisches Zeitung quoted by Krause noted...

“... he justifiably received unanimous acclaim. Not only does he overcome great difficulties on this normally awkward instrument, but he plays perfectly cleanly, precisely and with a surprisingly agreeable delicacy.” [6]

This performance was to be the first of no less than 26 occasions on which Queisser was to appear as a soloist with the Gewandhaus Orchestra. This is in itself extraordinary considering the comparative neglect of the instrument before Belcke´s 1815 debut in the same hall, but is even more astonishing considering that Queisser was to maintain a parallel career as a violinist and violist in several organisations. He was appointed to the Gewandhaus orchestra as first viola in April 1825[7], and played the viola in the Gewandhaus Quartet, led by his teacher Matthäi, apparently until at least 1836.  Furthermore in 1829 he was one of the founders and occasional first concertmaster of the “Euterpe” orchestra, a semi professional orchestral association that performed in the Buchhändlerbörse (the building of the publishers association in Leipzig), and even found the time and energy to form a wind band in competition with the remnants of the Stadtpfeiffer[8]. In 1834 this latter ensemble was to merge with the town band and Queisser was elected to be the director of the new ensemble. And if all this musical activity was not enough to fill his time he also owned and ran a country inn called the Kuchengarten, which he and his young wife Dorothea had taken over from her family. He also organized a great many concerts at the inn and performed there often as soloist.

As one of the most prominent musicians in the city, Queisser was on friendly terms with the leading musicians of the day, notably the composers Felix Mendelssohn (who had been appointed Gewandhaus Kapellmeister in 1835), and Robert Schumann, 10 years Queisser’s junior (and to whom the moniker “Der Posaunengott” {the trombone god} is attributed[9]), who had moved to Leipzig in 1828 to study law and had settled there with his young wife Clara. Although Queisser was firmly establishing himself as a trombone soloist (if at that time on a mostly local level) it’s also worth noting that he appears not to have been employed at any time in that capacity in the Gewandhaus orchestra itself. It would be not until 1842 that a permanent section of three trombonists would be added to the orchestra’s ranks, and Queisser remained as principal violist after that date.

Queisser also appears to have performed a rather small repertoire of pieces. In spite of performing 26 times as a soloist with his own orchestra between 1821 and 1843, he performed only six different pieces in all. The Meyer Concertino (which had been performed by Belcke) was performed five times. A Concertino by Christian Gottlieb Müller, a violinist in the orchestra, received no less than eleven performances, and Queisser's own arrangement of Carl Maria von Weber’s Concertino for Horn was performed twice. A concertino by the Dresden cellist Friedrich August Kummer upon themes from William Tell was performed once in 1831, at an outdoor benefit concert,[10] and a Concerto Militaire by Ferdinand David received a single performance in 1841. Unfortunately the material of both these pieces is lost, in the case of the latter sadly so, since it was to be the Concertino. Op 4 by David (1837) that was to be the only piece in Queisser’s repertoire which was to have had any lasting impact on trombone solo repertoire. After Queisser’s death in 1846 this work received several more performances at the Gewandhaus during the rest of the 19^th century, the last of which was to take place in 1876. It was to be another 100 years after that before another trombonist would perform as a soloist at the Gewandhaus Orchestra concerts![11]

Ferdinand David and his Trombone Concertino op. 4

Queisser’s violin teacher and Gewandhaus concertmaster August Matthäi died in 1835, soon after the appointment of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy to the position of Gewandhauskapellmeister, and was replaced by the then 25-year-old Ferdinand David, who had been attracted to Leipzig by Mendelssohn. David and Mendelssohn had been linked since early childhood, and had much in common. They were born a year apart and in the same building in Hamburg, and David had been taken in by the Mendelssohn family after the early death of David’s parents. The two went their separate ways but were to be reunited in 1835 upon the death of Mendelssohn’s father, and it was in Berlin that Mendelssohn offered David the position of concertmaster in Leipzig[12] and they formed a highly productive and artistically significant partnership. It was David who was to advise Mendelssohn on technical matters of violin writing and also was the soloist at the premiere of the latter’s famous violin concerto in 1845. At his first appearance as a soloist at the Gewandhaus on December 10^th 1835, he presented two of his own compositions (a violin concerto and an Introduction and Variations for violin and orchestra)[13]. In January of 1836 he presented three string quartet evenings with Queisser as the violist, and in February took up his position as concertmaster, although his official appointment was to take place in October of 1836, after which he was to remain in that position until his death on a walking holiday in 1873.

It appears that David and Quiesser quickly became colleagues and collaborators, as well as friends, soon after David had moved to Leipzig. By the time of David’s accession to the concertmaster-ship of the orchestra, Queisser had already performed 18 times with the orchestra as a trombone soloist and had been a member of the Gewandhaus string quartet for ten years at least. David was to be named godfather (along with the publishers Zimmermann and Kistner) to Queisser’s youngest son , Karl Julius Ferdinand, baptized on 10^th of June 1837[14], and in that same year David was to produce a new Concertino for Queisser, his opus 4. The first performance of this work took  place on the 14^th of December 1837, in a concert under Mendelssohn’s direction, which included the latter’s Hebrides Overture, a Mozart Concert Aria and a scene from Handel’s Judas Maccabeus, both sung by the acclaimed English soprano Clara Novello, and the second symphony of George Onslow. Rolf Handrow quotes a review for the Allgemeinen musikalisches Zeitung,

 “We are familiar with Mr. Queisser’s nobly powerful and rich tone throughout all registers, its clarity and precision in fast moving passages, it’s mild and gracious expression in simple melodies. It’s “forte” is reminiscent of the most beautiful organ pedal: and in “piano” we could imagine hearing a true master of the horn.”[15]

As I mentioned earlier, this was to be the only work in Queisser admittedly limited repertoire to have had lasting impact in terms of performance frequency, and it is indeed the only work of David’s that receives any regular performances in the present day. David was eventually to produce at least 45 opuses including two symphonies  (performed in Leipzig in 1841 and 1848 respectively, but unfortunately apparently now lost) and five numbered violin concertos (a number of which have also been commercially recorded). During David’s lifetime theTrombone Concertino was of his most popular works and was performed at his own memorial concert on 2^nd October 1873 by August Bruns who appears to have inherited Queisser’s trombone- see below). David’s posthumous fame rests mainly on his work as soloist, violin pedagogue and editor. He was to become the owner of an excellent Guarneri violin, which was later to be the instrument of Jascha Heifetz, and which is at present owned by the Museum of Fine Art in San Francisco, and on loan to the concertmaster of the San Francisco Symphony. He also wrote a highly valued violin method, and his name will forever be immortalised as the dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto.

After the 1837 premiere Queisser was to perform the Concertino op.4 a further three times. In 1841 he premiered a second concerto by David, the Concerto Militaire, which was unfortunately never published and the orchestral material has not been preserved. Only the solo part survives in various solo albums.

David’s Concertino was also taken up later elsewhere by Belcke, who performed it most notably in Paris in 1844 with the Orchestre de la Société des Concerts du Conservatoire. There Belcke was received as the “Trombonist to the King of Prussia”[16] and honoured with the Gold Medal of the Société. The work remains the standard test piece for orchestral auditions in German, and still remains one of the greatest challenges to the modern trombone soloist. In spite of its conventional idiom somewhat reminiscent of Weber and other early Romantic composers, David displays admirable melodic invention and an engaging energy, and since the work is the closest trombonists come to a conventional Classical/ Romantic concerto we must remain forever grateful to David and Queisser for their efforts.

Queisser’s instruments: Christian Friedrich Sattler

Although no instrument that had been owned or used by Queisser is known to be in existance today, circumstantial evidence points us toward the famous Leipzig brass instrument builder Christian Friedrich Sattler as being the maker of Queisser’s instrument(s), at least during the height of the latter’s performance career. Of course the instruments with which the young student Stadpfeiffer first learnt to play may not have been of particular quality. Most probably they would have been of local manufacture and property of the Town Band of Grimma, and the instrument must have presented many challenges to the young man, not least due to the virtual absence of any pedagogical material at all. Whether Queisser was familiar or not with Fröhlich’s 1811 treatise we cannot discern. But once Queisser had settled in Leipzig and established himself as a prominent member of the musical establishment, there is little doubt that he would have made the acquaintance of Sattler, whose workshop at  Querstrasse 1217 was situated directly on Queisser’s route from his cafe “Kuchengarten” to the town where he rehearsed and performed at the Gewandhaus. Sattler had been born into a family of artisan  musical instrument builders and had established himself as an independent brass instrument builder in his home town of Leipzig in 1809. His father Carl Wilhelm Sattler had been established as a builder of woodwind instruments just inside the city gates on the Grimmaischenstrasse,  the street along which the young Queisser often must have travelled between Leipzig and his home town of Döben. Christian Friedrich Sattler had learnt his trade not from his father however, but from his uncle, Carl Leo Sattler, who had established his brass instrument building business in 1763 (a date that even C.F.Sattler’s successors J.C.Penzel and G.E.Ullmann used to signify the establishment of the workshop), and continued his apprenticeship at the workshop of J.G. Moritz in Berlin (1805-9). He married and set up his own workshop in Leipzig in 1809, in the Quergasse (later Querstrasse). It is also certain that the young Sattler would have been well acquainted with the progressive larger bored trombone models of the Crone workshop (mentioned in chapter 1), since his father Carl Wilhelm had had a long and close business relationship with the Crone family.[17]

According to Dullat, C.F. Sattler was a particularly innovative instrument builder[18]. Not only is he generally credited with the introduction of the first models of a significantly larger bore tenor trombone (or Tenorbaßposaune), although he may have been following some trends which were already developing as I have speculated elsewhere, but he was also one of the very first innovators in the field of applying valves to brass instruments. Indeed Herbert Heyde, in his reference Das Ventilblasinstrument, places Sattler as the first producer of the double tube pump valve (Doppelrohr Schubventil), which places him historically as the third innovator in the field of the invention of valves for brass instruments, after Friedrich Blühmel and Heinrich Stöltzel. As early as 1819 he had produced a horn with three valves based on the Stöltzel model with which the horn players of the day could retain their familiar posture, something that Stöltzel’s valves did not allow (since those valves needed to be engaged using the player’s right hand).[19] Furthermore only a year later he had developed his own valve designs which he had applied to both trumpets and trombones (although it appears that no instruments with his valves are extant). Luckily Sattler’s inventions were documented and advertised at the time in the Allgemeinen musikalisches Zeitung, and several of his designs are re-imagined and printed in Heyde’s book.[20] Examination of the drawings reprinted by Heyde show that the trumpet must have been quite difficult to handle ergonomically, and it is not surprising that these designs did not catch on with the early players, compared to the later designs of Perinét (the now ubiquitous piston valve) and Reidl (who was to patent the rotary valve familiar from modern French horns in 1835). In any case Sattler’s valve design would later be further developed and applied to the horn in Vienna by Leopold Uhlmann. Indeed it is this style of valve that is known as the Vienna Valve (Wiener Pumpenventil) which gives the modern "Vienna" F horn its characteristic look and sound, and which has never been replaced in the Viennese orchestras to the present day.

Of course it is Sattler’s innovations in the field of the slide  trombone that must concern us in the current context. And Sattler’s significance in this regard can hardly be underestimated. Certainly the oldest extant set of large bore trombones with oversized bell diameters come from his hand (the 1841 set of alto tenor and tenor-bass that he built for the Thomaskirche, preserved in the Grassi Museum in Leipzig which form one of the pillars of this study). His 1839 application of a valve in the bell section of a large bore trombone to lower the instrument into F (see Chapter 5) was decidedly equally important. The fact that Queisser enthusiastically endorsed the new F valve, and was the first to perform on the instrument would lead us to suggest that he must have had a significant hand in its development. Of course all the literature on Queisser that I have examined (Rasmussen, Krause, and Handrow) pinpoints the probable relationship between instrument builder and artist, however Rolf Handrow goes one step further and was able to quote a review, by a certain Hermann Schiff, of a  performance by the trombonist August Bruns (who according to the account was performing upon Queisser’s instrument) in Hamburg around 1860 (fourteen years after Queisser’s death). Also of interest is the comparison with Moritz Nabich, one of the few trombone soloists, together with Bruns who were attempting to carry the mantle of Belcke and Queisser forward.

“The famous trombone of the lamented Queisser of Leipzig has come into the hands of the  great master’s  thoroughly worthy successor, the trombonist Bruns, of the Hamburg City Theater.... we noticed this young artist after he performed an aria form Rossini’s Stabat Mater and a “Lied” by Belcke with organ accompaniment in the Jacobi-Kirche... Queisser’s trombone, made of heavy silver brass, (the thin metal makes too much noise) displays an especially rich, soft tone. It was in very safe hands,  and when through the humidity of the breath, when one blows into it, the inner silver oxidises, the tone becomes progressively softer and nobler, but loses its stability and projection in later years....

We heard a certain Saxon here, Nabich, several years ago. He came from London calling himself the Non Plus Ultra of trombonists, and also had an excellent instrument. What an enormous power we heard on this trombone. He also trilled not in whole tones but in minor thirds, and his sound was not particularly round...

What a difference to hear our Hamburg trombonist last Monday in the Jacobi Kirche. The higher notes could be exchanged with a  horn and the possession of an excellent well schooled breathing technique allows Bruns to perform melodies on this powerful instrument with elegance and lightness. The brilliant breath control was laid bare with a minute long trill in piano with crescendo and diminuendo, whereby we could scarcely believe what a human chest could achieve. Respect for such an instrument, such a virtuoso.”[21]

This quote raises several questions about Queisser’s trombone. The author of the above, Schiff, describes the instrument as being made of “heavy silver brass” (starkem Silberblech). This description is of course not clear, since it could be referring to solid silver, or nickel silver (Neusilber), an alloy of nickel, zinc and copper, which is also sometimes known in English as “German Silver”. The alloy “silver brass” could also pertain to silver plated brass and this technique was certainly available to instrument builders at the time, although not often used in brass instrument manufacture. Schiff as a layman was of course reporting what he saw and perhaps whatever information he had been able to glean, perhaps even from Bruns himself.  In any case instruments built in either silver, silver plate (an expensive process before the general availability of electroplating after 1844), or nickel silver were very rare before the 1860’s, although one surviving Sattler tenor trombone in Markneukirchen could possibly be built from silver (it is unfortunately badly tarnished and not available for close examination, so I was unable to determine the material used). We must also take into consideration the fact that Queisser outlived Sattler by four years, and his last instrument could possibly have been built by another builder (in that case almost certainly Sattler’s successor Penzel). There are several instruments of Penzel extant, indeed I own one of his later trombones, and Penzel was certainly a builder who used the hardy alloy nickel silver for various parts of his instruments. Schiff’s comment about the thin brass trombones being noisy is amusing to me, since my practical experience in the tonal property of the various metals is quite contrary to this view. Nevertheless, it appears Queisser’s last trombone which Bruns had acquired had a silver look about it, and was undoubtedly one of the finest trombones that one could have purchased in the 1840’s.

Perhaps in the light of the above speculation it is also worth paying more attention to Sattler’s invention of the F valve for trombone as reported in the Allgemeinen musikalisches Zeitung no 13 March 1839. (see Chapter 5). The fact that Sattler had been designing and manufacturing his own pump valve design does not necessarily mean that the first F (thumb) valve used on a trombone was of his own invention. Of course valves had been applied to the trombone since the 1820’s but then only as an alternative to or, as was claimed by many builders at the time, an improvement to the then cumbersome hand slide. The 3-valved trombone appears never to have caught on in Leipzig and Saxony in general at least, although it flourished in other centres, notably Austria and Bohemia until later in the century. But when Sattler applied a valve to the bell section to extend the lower range of the tenor trombone into the traditional F bass trombone register (to low C) it is generally presumed that he used a rotary valve. In 1839, the rotary valve as we know it now had been only available since 1835, and was certainly still under patent to its inventor, the Austrian Joseph Riedl. Of course while this presumption seems perfectly reasonable, closer examination of the chapter[22] concerning this invention in Herbert Heyde’s “Das Ventilblasinstrument”,  would cast doubt on this proposition purely on the grounds that hardly any instruments using this valve were successfully built before the mid 1840’s, and it was not until much later in the century that the rotary valve had become the standard valve used on German built instruments. I have yet to locate a trombone furnished with an F valve by any builder, including Penzel, dated from the 1840’s let alone 1850’s. Despite Otmar Schrieber’s assertion[23] that Sattler’s Tenor-Bass trombone with F valve had wide currency soon after it’s invention,[24] I have searched in vain for an actual instrument pre-dating the 1860’s. Certainly Sattler’s son in law and successor Penzel was known to have produced a great number of trombones and was considered (according to Dullat) to be a specialist in building the instrument[25], yet a Tenorbaßposaune with valve seems not to have survived. In any case the instruments of Penzel will be covered in the following chapter, which also takes  the year 1839 as it’s starting point, that being the first ever performance in Leipzig of Schubert’s “great” C major Symphony under Mendelssohn’s direction after Robert Schumann’s discovery of the manuscript in Vienna in 1838.

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August Bruns 1834-1902

Christian Gottlieb Müller (1800-1863) Source: Thüringisches Staatsarchiv

Ferdinand David (1810-1873)

Source:Regionalkundliche Bibliotheek Leipzig

Kuchengarten (Cake Garden)     

Source: Private collection Sebastian.Krause