Les tubas wagnériens entre réalité organologique et le concept de Wagner

The Tuben parts in Richard Wagner’s Das Ring der Nibelungen cycle were originally composed with saxhorns in mind. Wagner himself wrote in 1865 that he had used several instruments in orchestrating the Ring that he had learned about in Paris from their inventor, Adolphe Sax. Wagner scored the Ring so that the parts for two tenor and two bass ‘tubas’ were to be played by the musicians who played the 5th to 8th french horn parts elsewhere, as prescribed in the preface to the orchestral score of Das Rheingold published in March 1873. If saxhorns were used, or their German equivalents (Tenorhörner and Baritone), the doubling players would have to use two significantly different mouthpieces in the course of the same work. Alternatively, as often occurred, extra players were hired, usually from military bands. The introduction of the modern Wagner tuba which is played with a french horn mouthpiece cannot be reliably attributed to any one maker or a dated precisely: it is unlikely that Wagner ever heard instruments close to those that are used today. This article discusses Wagner’s concept in scoring for Tuben and the instruments that might have been used in the first performances of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in Munich in 1869 and 1870. The contributions of Georg Ottensteiner and other instrument makers are assessed, drawing on the fragmentary primary sources and the few surviving early instruments, to summarise what can be stated confidently about the earliest instruments made as Tuben.