Notes for: July 30, 2013
The composition of this piece has been traditionally attributed to Richard Wagner. While it is still so listed in some sources, we now have strong contrary evidence. Here are the facts as reported by John P. Newhill, an expert on music for the clarinet.
The Adagio was discovered in manuscript by Michael Balling in Würzburg, Germany, in 1922. The story told to Balling by the owner was that the work had been commissioned by the clarinetist Christian Rummel from Wagner when the latter was in Wiesbaden in 1833-4. It was then published under Wagner’s name in 1926 by Breitkopf & Hartel, with the story that Wagner composed it while “enjoying himself with boon companions in the local taverns and in excursions into the country.”
From the date of its publication, many musicians felt that the work could not have been written by Wagner, as stylistically it belongs to an earlier period of music. In the absence of further informa¬tion, however, it was referred to as “Wagner’s Adagio for Clarinet and Strings”.
The Adagio is, in fact, the second movement of the third clarinet quintet, Op. 23, by Heinrich Baermann. The correct source was first revealed in a short paragraph by Hans-Georg Bach in the Neue Zeitung fur Musik (1964), and Pamela Weston then gave English readers the correct composer in her book Clarinet Virtuosi of the Past. The Wiirzburg story, however, is still repeated on the sleeves of current recordings, and many clarinetists are unaware of this clarifying research.
Baermann was one of the greatest clarinetists the world has known. He was employed in the court orchestra of Munich from 1807 until his retirement in 1834 when his son Carl succeeded him. The father and son were drinking companions of Felix Mendelssohn and shared with Mendelssohn a love for food and cooking. Further, Baermann senior influenced the Romantic clarinet repertoire by commissioning works by Weber and Meyerbeer as well as Mendelssohn.
Parallel to Baermann’s career, the clarinet was undergoing a series of developments in key and mouthpiece design to facilitate greater agility and flexibility in playing and a greater dynamic range. Baermann was an exponent of this new style of playing, and owned a modernized instrument that enabled him to play chromatic passages with greater ease. This luminous Adagio was one of a series of pieces that he composed to demonstrate his control and beauty of tone.