Weber, Bassoon Concerto

How often have you been to a concert or recital featuring solo bassoon? Probably not many, if any at all. Unless you’re a music student attending the performances of your friends, or required to attend a ongoing series of student performances, you might miss out entirely. The bassoon has not risen to stardom as a solo instrument.

Check out the programming for you local orchestra. Violin and piano concertos fill the season, and famous violinists and pianists fill the seats. Which raises another point: Can you name a famous bassoonist? Well, I suspect someone has started a society for the promotion of bassoon music to address this problem, and we should wish them every success.

But the instrument needs no help finding a prominent role in the orchestra. You might be able to identify some famous passages featuring bassoon: the opening of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring or the counter-melody to Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the Ninth Symphony, for example. It adds color, poignancy, and often humor perhaps better than any other instrument. It has character, and that’s part of the problem. Instruments with very distinctive sounds often don’t lend themselves to sustained prominence.

Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) wrote one of the few Romantic-era concertos for bassoon. Mozart had composed one in 1774. These two are the most frequently performed. Although Weber has a reputation as a pioneer of Romanticism—Der Freischütz (1821) is considered the first German Romantic opera—this concerto retains a very classical form.