Heckelphone: Wagner’s Idea, Heckel’s Instrument, Strauss’s Sound

Overview

The heckelphone (German Heckelphon) is a double-reed woodwind instrument of the oboe family, invented by Wilhelm Heckel and his sons and introduced in 1904. It is pitched an octave below the oboe — similar to the bass oboe — and is furnished with an additional semitone that takes its range down to A. It reads in treble clef sounding one octave lower than written. Hornbostel-Sachs classifies it as 422.112: a double-reed aerophone with keys.

What distinguishes the heckelphone from the bass oboe and the cor anglais is its substantially wider bore, which gives it a heavier and more penetrating tone than other oboe-family instruments at the same pitch. It was conceived as a way to provide a broad oboe-like sound in the middle register of the very large orchestrations that became fashionable around the turn of the twentieth century. In the orchestral repertoire it is used as the bass of an oboe section that already includes the oboe and the cor anglais, filling the gap between the oboes and the bassoons.

Origin and History

The story of the heckelphone begins with a meeting between Richard Wagner and Wilhelm Heckel in 1879. During that visit Wagner suggested the concept of an oboe-family instrument capable of carrying an oboe-like tone deep into the bass register, where the existing cor anglais (English horn) could not reach with the same characteristic timbre. Wagner did not live to see the project completed. It took the Heckel firm, working over more than two decades and across a generation of family instrument-makers, to bring the design to fruition. The heckelphone was finally introduced in 1904 and patented under that name.

The first orchestral use came almost immediately: Richard Strauss called for the heckelphone in his 1905 opera Salome. Strauss became the heckelphone’s most important early advocate, writing parts for it in Elektra, An Alpine Symphony (in which the part frequently descends below the heckelphone’s nominal range), Josephslegende, and Festliches Präludium. Strauss also took the trouble to distinguish the heckelphone from F. Lorée’s redesigned hautbois baryton (introduced in 1889) by name in his scores, and his 1904 revision of Hector Berlioz’s Grand Traité d’instrumentation et d’orchestration modernes explicitly mentions both instruments. This careful naming convention prevents the ambiguity that affected many other early scores in which “bass oboe” might mean either instrument — or, in some cases, an instrument the composer had not clearly distinguished from its near-twin.

After Strauss, the heckelphone was adopted by other composers writing for the very large orchestras of the early twentieth century. Edgard Varèse used it in Amériques (1918–21) and Arcana (1925–27); Carlos Chávez wrote for it in Sinfonía de Antígona (1933); Aaron Copland called for a single player to double on cor anglais and heckelphone in his Short Symphony (Symphony No. 2, 1931–33), with cor anglais as a permitted substitute if no heckelphone is available. Gordon Jacob included a heckelphone in his “Variations on Annie Laurie,” performed at the first Hoffnung Music Festival concert at the Royal Festival Hall in 1956. The Finnish composer Kalevi Aho is the heckelphone’s most prolific late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century advocate, scoring for it in his operas (Insect Life, The Book of Secrets, Before We Are All Drowned), in Symphonies 6, 11, 13, 15, and 17, and in his Piano Concerto No. 1, Contrabassoon Concerto, and Oboe Concerto.

Despite this distinguished list, the heckelphone has never become a common orchestral instrument. Only about 150 instruments have been produced in total, of which roughly 100 are believed to be extant. The Heckel firm itself remains the principal source of new instruments; no other manufacturer has put the heckelphone into series production.

Construction and Materials

The heckelphone is approximately 1.3 metres long — heavy enough that the instrument has to rest on the floor, supported by a short metal peg attached to the underside of its bulbous bell. The bell is known as a Liebesfuß (“love foot”), the same German term used for the pear-shaped bell of the cor anglais and the oboe d’amore. An alternate second bell, called a “muting” bell, is also available; it serves to muffle the instrument for playing in small ensembles. This pair of interchangeable bells is unique among double-reed instruments.

The bore is markedly wider than that of the standard oboe or even the cor anglais — this is the heckelphone’s defining technical feature, and the source of its heavier tone. The instrument is played with a double reed that closely resembles a bassoon reed or a large cor anglais reed: a substantially larger and broader piece of cane than an oboe reed. As on the oboe family generally, the reed is mounted on a metal staple inserted into the top of the body.

Smaller heckelphone variants exist as historical curiosities. A piccolo-heckelphone in F and a terz-heckelphone in E-flat were developed but were less successful than the baritone-range instrument; very few were made, and they have not been revived. A modern development is the Lupophon (Lupophone), essentially an extended heckelphone able to play lower notes such as those called for in An Alpine Symphony.

Playing Technique

A heckelphonist normally comes from an oboe background, since the fingering and key work are essentially extensions of oboe technique. The reed is much larger than an oboe reed — closer in size to a bassoon or cor anglais reed — so embouchure and air support have to be reshaped accordingly. The instrument’s weight requires that it rest on the floor on its peg, so the player’s posture is more like that of a bassoonist than an oboist; the instrument is held in front of the body, slightly to one side, with both hands on the body and the reed brought to the mouth via the bocal-like top section.

The wide bore gives the heckelphone a tone that, in its lower register, can sound almost like a bassoon — broader and more “weighty” than the cor anglais — while in its higher register it retains enough of the oboe family’s characteristic reediness to blend with cor anglais and oboe in section playing. Strauss exploited exactly this dual character: in Salome and Elektra, the heckelphone is used both as a deep extension of the oboe section’s color and as a distinct middle-bass voice in its own right, capable of carrying solo lines through dense orchestration.

Cultural Context

The heckelphone is essentially a creation of the late-Romantic and early-modern German orchestral aesthetic. Its arrival in 1904 coincided with the peak years of expansion in symphonic and operatic instrumentation, when Strauss, Mahler, and their contemporaries routinely scored for unusually large wind sections that included multiple cor anglais parts, contrabassoons, and bass clarinets. Wagner’s original 1879 suggestion belongs to the same compositional culture: a music in which the wind section is as expressively differentiated as the string section, and in which a missing instrumental color is a problem worth two and a half decades of luthiery to solve.

The heckelphone’s small player community has organised itself around a handful of focal points. The North American Heckelphone Society held its first annual meeting on 6 August 2001 at the Riverside Church in New York City, with six heckelphonists in attendance — possibly the first occasion on which six such instruments had been assembled under one roof. Later meetings reached as many as 14 instruments. The group met annually in New York through 2006. The centennial of the heckelphone in 2004–05 led to the publication of a number of articles on the instrument in organological journals, including two by Cologne player Georg Otto Klapproth in the German-language Rohrblatt, a comprehensive review article by Robert Howe and Peter Hurd (“The Heckelphone at 100”) in the 2004 Journal of the American Musical Instrument Society, and a two-part article by Michael Finkelman in the 2005 issues of The Double Reed. A book-length study by Holger Hoos, The Heckelphone: A Window into the History of Music (Tres Mundi, 2024), is now the standard modern reference.

Notable Players and Examples

Notable solo and chamber works for heckelphone include Hans Mielenz’s Concerto Op. 60 for heckelphone and orchestra and Eric Ewazen’s Quintet for Heckelphone and String Quartet. Hindemith’s Trio for Heckelphone, Viola, and Piano, Op. 47 (1928) is one of the most important chamber works to feature the instrument; Graham Waterhouse’s Four Epigraphs after Escher, Op. 35 (1993) uses the same instrumentation. American composer William P. Perry used the heckelphone as part of a double-reed quartet in his score for the film The Mysterious Stranger. Cecil Burleigh’s Two Sketches From The Orient, Op. 55 (arranged by N. Clifford Page, published by Oliver Ditson Company in 1926 and 1928) is one of the few concert-band pieces to call for the instrument.

Significant recordings include Robert Howe’s Centennial Recital for Heckelphone (Wilbraham Music, 2005), several Paul Winter Consort albums (Earth: Voices of a Planet, The Man Who Planted Trees, Miho: Journey To The Mountain, and Prayer for the Wild Things), Arthur Grossman’s recordings of Hindemith and his solo album Arthur Grossman Plays Heckelphone (released by the Wilhelm Heckel firm itself), and Martin Frutiger’s premiere recording of Fabian Müller’s Concerto for Heckelphone and Orchestra on the Uncommon Concertos album from ARS Produktion (2024). Demonstration videos of the heckelphone are also available from St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh.

Comparison with Related Instruments

The heckelphone is most often compared with the cor anglais and with the bass oboe — and indeed it is often confused with both, especially in earlier English-language scores that use “bass oboe” loosely. Compared with the cor anglais, the heckelphone is pitched lower (an octave below the oboe rather than a fifth) and has a much wider bore and heavier tone. Compared with F. Lorée’s hautbois baryton (the strict bass oboe), the heckelphone shares the same nominal pitch range but has a much wider bore, and the difference in tone — the heckelphone is darker, more penetrating, more “weighty” — is large enough that careful composers and conductors treat the two as separate instruments.

Compared with the oboe, the heckelphone is much larger, an octave lower, wider in bore, and supported on a floor peg; the family connection is clear, but the playing experience is quite different. Compared with the bassoon, the heckelphone occupies a related register but is a single-bored conical instrument rather than a folded one, and its tone is more concentrated and reedy. Compared with the clarinet, there is no direct family relationship — the heckelphone is a double-reed conical instrument, the clarinet a single-reed cylindrical one — but in late-Romantic orchestration the two often share section duties at the bottom of the woodwind register, and parts originally written for heckelphone are sometimes substituted by bass clarinet or contrabass clarinet when no heckelphone player is available. Within Adolphe Sax’s reed-instrument lineage, the saxophone family addressed a similar problem (carrying woodwind tone outdoors and into bass registers) with a quite different acoustic approach: a single reed and a metal body, rather than the heckelphone’s double reed and wooden one.