Oboe d’Amore: The Serene Alto Voice of the Oboe Family

Overview

The oboe d’amore (Italian: oboe d’amore, “oboe of love”; less commonly French hautbois d’amour) is a double-reed woodwind instrument in the oboe family. Slightly larger and longer than the standard oboe, it produces a less assertive, more tranquil and serene tone — qualities that have made it a favourite of composers from the early eighteenth century to the present day, even though it has never displaced the standard oboe as the orchestra’s regular soprano double-reed voice. It is a transposing instrument pitched in A, sounding a minor third lower than it is notated. Hornbostel-Sachs classifies it as 422.112-71: a double-reed aerophone with keys.

The instrument is sometimes described as the alto of the oboe family, between the oboe (the soprano) and the cor anglais or English horn (the tenor — although the cor anglais is also sometimes considered an alto). Norman Del Mar memorably summed up the situation: “Theoretically the oboe d’amore and the cor anglais might be said to be the alto and tenor oboes respectively, but the oboe d’amore has remained something of a stranger in the orchestra, the cor anglais having supplanted it as the regular alto member of the family.” That stranger status is itself part of the oboe d’amore’s appeal — when a composer specifically asks for one, the result is a colour quite distinct from anything else in the modern orchestra.

Origin and History

The oboe d’amore emerged during the early eighteenth century and was used by Christoph Graupner in several of his sacred cantatas. From there it was rapidly taken up by the leading composers of the German Baroque. Johann Sebastian Bach was the instrument’s most important early advocate: he wrote a concerto for oboe d’amore (the original version of the keyboard concerto BWV 1055), used it in many of his cantatas, and gave it a particularly prominent role in the Et in Spiritum sanctum movement of the Mass in B minor. Georg Philipp Telemann also wrote frequently for the instrument.

The combination of Bach’s and Telemann’s interest gave the oboe d’amore a substantial Baroque repertoire, but the instrument’s popularity waned through the second half of the eighteenth century. As Classical-era orchestration crystallised around a more standardised wind section — pairs of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, with horns and trumpets in support — the oboe d’amore lost its place. By around 1800 it had effectively dropped out of regular use, and for nearly a century thereafter the instrument was essentially dormant.

The revival began in the early twentieth century, driven initially by composers exploring expanded orchestral palettes. Richard Strauss used it in Symphonia Domestica to represent the child; Claude Debussy gave it a long solo passage in Gigues (one of the Images pour orchestre); Maurice Ravel and Frederick Delius wrote for it; Gustav Mahler used it once, in the song Um Mitternacht from the Rückert-Lieder (1901); and Maurice Ravel’s Boléro (1928) provided the instrument with its most famous modern moment, when the oboe d’amore takes over the main theme from the E-flat clarinet on its second statement. Vladimir Ashkenazy’s orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition uses the oboe d’amore to highlight the plaintive solo of the Il vecchio castello movement. In 1984 Toru Takemitsu wrote Vers, l’arc-en-ciel, Palma with the instrument, and Philip Glass used it extensively in his 1983 opera Akhnaten to complement the countertenor register of the title character. American composer David Stock’s concerto Oborama features oboe d’amore as one of several oboe-family soloists alongside cor anglais, musette (piccolo oboe), bass oboe, and oboe.

Construction and Materials

The oboe d’amore is built in essentially the same way as the standard oboe, scaled up to bring its sounding pitch down a minor third. The body is made of dense hardwood — most commonly African blackwood (grenadilla), with some makers offering cocobolo, violetwood, rosewood, palisander, or cocus wood as alternatives. The bore is conical, like all members of the oboe family, but slightly wider than the standard oboe; this wider bore is one source of the instrument’s distinctive tranquility of tone.

Two physical features distinguish the oboe d’amore visually. First, the bell is pear-shaped, with a constricted opening that flares out again at the very end. This bell is called a Liebesfuß (“love foot”) in German and is shared with several other oboe-family members, notably the cor anglais and (in modified form) the heckelphone. The pear-shaped bell rounds off the upper partials of the tone and is largely responsible for the oboe d’amore’s calm, slightly muted character. Second, the reed is mounted on a curved metal crook (or bocal), similar to but shorter than that of the cor anglais. The crook bridges the gap between the upper part of the body and the player’s mouth, allowing the player to hold the longer instrument comfortably without straining the neck.

Modern key work follows the same general systems used on standard French-system oboes (with various conservatoire and thumb-plate options offered by individual makers). Modern makers of oboes d’amore include Howarth of London (in African blackwood or cocobolo), F. Lorée in Paris (in African blackwood or violetwood), and others such as Rigoutat, Fossati, and Marigaux in France; Bulgheroni in Italy (offering an unusually broad selection of woods including grenadilla, violetwood, cocobolo, rosewood, palisander, and cocus wood); Joseph in Japan; and Püchner, Mönnig, and Ludwig Franck in Germany. New instruments cost approximately £8,250 at 2016 prices, roughly $11,885 US, which is broadly comparable to a new cor anglais. Because of this cost, and because the oboe d’amore is called for less often than either the standard oboe or the cor anglais, many professional oboists do not own their own instrument but rent one when their work demands it. For the same reason, second-hand oboes d’amore tend to surface in very good condition (because they have been little used), although their resale value drops surprisingly little compared to new instruments.

Playing Technique

The oboe d’amore is played in essentially the same way as the standard oboe. Fingerings are nearly identical, embouchure is similar (allowing for the slightly larger reed), and the basic posture and grip are the same. A standard oboist can therefore pick up an oboe d’amore and produce a usable sound very quickly, although mastering the instrument’s distinctive tone and the small differences in response, intonation, and tuning takes longer.

As a transposing instrument in A, the oboe d’amore is read in treble clef and sounds a minor third lower than written. This means that what looks on the page like a written C sounds as A — slightly less awkward to read than the cor anglais’s perfect-fifth transposition, but still requiring an oboist to do the relevant transposition mentally if they need to relate the part to a concert-pitch score or to other instruments. Many oboists who specialise in early music or in twentieth-century repertoire that calls for the instrument simply learn to read the transposition automatically, in the same way that clarinettists handle B-flat and A clarinets.

The instrument’s tone has a serene, slightly veiled quality that fades smoothly into both the oboe (above) and the cor anglais (below). At soft dynamics it is one of the most expressive solo instruments in the orchestra, with a vocal, almost speech-like delivery. At louder dynamics it remains less assertive than the oboe — it cannot match the oboe’s brilliance and projection — but this is precisely why composers reach for it when they want a tone that suggests reflection, intimacy, or distance.

Cultural Context

The oboe d’amore’s name — “oboe of love” — is consistent with a small but persistent eighteenth-century group of d’amore instruments named for their soft, sweet character: the viola d’amore, the clarinet d’amore, the flute d’amore, and (more loosely) the chalumeau d’amour. In every case the d’amore designation marks an instrument that is slightly larger than its standard sibling, lower in pitch, and softer in tone — designed for chamber music and for affective writing rather than for orchestral display. The oboe d’amore is the most successful surviving member of this group, kept alive by the centrality of Bach’s and Telemann’s music in modern concert programmes and by composers’ continuing willingness to write for it.

In the modern orchestra, the instrument is essentially a doubling instrument: an oboist who is asked to play it on one piece will normally also play standard oboe and (often) cor anglais on other pieces in the same concert. This doubling pattern is reflected in the way modern orchestral oboists train, in the way oboe makers price their instruments (the oboe d’amore is treated as a specialist tool, not a primary instrument), and in the way conductors programme music that calls for the instrument (often pairing one oboe d’amore work with several pieces that don’t, so the same player can cover both). The IMSLP “List of Compositions Featuring the Oboe d’amore” gives a useful overview of the surviving repertoire and the editions through which it can be accessed today.

Notable Players and Examples

Most modern professional oboists in major orchestras play oboe d’amore as part of their normal duties, so there is no separate community of “oboe d’amore players” comparable to the small communities of heckelphone or sarrusophone specialists. Instead, the instrument’s modern profile is sustained primarily by recording projects centred on Bach’s cantatas, the Mass in B minor, and the BWV 1055 concerto (whose oboe d’amore reconstruction is now standard repertoire for early-music oboists), together with the small but distinguished list of twentieth- and twenty-first-century works that call specifically for the instrument.

A representative modern demonstration recording is the 2010s performance and talk by Gonzalo X. Ruiz of the Concerto in A major for Oboe (BWV 1055R), one of the most-watched introductions to the oboe d’amore on YouTube. The Bulgheroni and Howarth firms in particular have invested in researching the relationship between bore profile, bell geometry, and tone in modern oboes d’amore, and their publications and trade-show demonstrations are a useful technical resource for players and serious students.

Comparison with Related Instruments

Compared with the standard oboe, the oboe d’amore is slightly longer, slightly wider in bore, pear-shaped at the bell, equipped with a metal crook, and pitched a minor third lower (sounding A when written C). Its tone is less assertive and more tranquil. Compared with the cor anglais — pitched a perfect fifth below the oboe, with its own pear-shaped bell and longer crook — the oboe d’amore is higher in pitch, slightly more brilliant, and considered the alto rather than the tenor of the family. Compared with the bass oboe and the heckelphone, both of which are pitched an octave below the standard oboe, the oboe d’amore is much higher and lighter. Within the wider oboe family, including the piccolo oboe (musette), oboe da caccia, Wiener Oboe, contrabass oboe, and the modern Lupophon, the oboe d’amore occupies a stable middle-upper register that no other instrument quite duplicates.

Compared with the bassoon, the oboe d’amore shares the double reed and the conical-bore family but is much smaller and higher in pitch, and uses a single conical body rather than a folded bore. Compared with the clarinet, the oboe d’amore differs fundamentally in its double reed and conical bore (the clarinet uses a single reed and a cylindrical bore that overblows at the twelfth rather than the octave); but the two instruments do share the use of a transposing-A version that sounds a minor third (oboe d’amore) or a minor second (A clarinet) below the written pitch, and they often work together in late-Romantic and twentieth-century chamber and orchestral writing. Compared with the recorder, the oboe d’amore belongs to the louder, more flexible family of reed-driven double-reed instruments that displaced the recorder in the eighteenth-century orchestra. And although the saxophone is a quite different acoustic instrument (single reed, metal body, conical bore), it shares with the oboe d’amore the role of providing a “voice between voices” — a colour available to composers when neither the standard high nor the standard low instrument quite serves the expressive purpose at hand.