Antonín Reicha (1770-1836)
Wind Quintet in B flat major, Op. 88, No. 5 • Wind Quintet in C major, Op. 91, No. 1
The death of his father in 1771 left the ten-month old
Antonín Rejcha in the care of a mother who was unable
to look after him properly. He ran away to his paternal
grandfather when he was eleven and then accepted the
offer of a home and education with his uncle Josef, a
highly respected cellist and the Konzertmeister at the
celebrated court of Oettingen-Wallerstein. Rejcha later
recalled that the worst moment of this second lonely
journey came when he had to feign eye trouble in order
to persuade a border guard to let him pass without any
proper documentation.
During the next three years Antonín learned to play
the flute, violin and piano, and in 1785 joined the
Elector’s orchestra in Bonn as a violinist and flautist.
There could hardly have been a better opportunity, for
the Elector already employed the young Beethoven as
an organist and viola player and the two young
musicians immediately established a firm friendship.
Both also had composition lessons with Christian Neefe
and in 1792 were offered the chance to study with
Haydn in Vienna. Beethoven accepted, but Rejcha
remained in Bonn until 1794, when the city was
occupied by Napoleon’s troops and the Elector fled.
Josef was too ill to travel but, fearing that his nephew
would be attracted by the revolutionary ideas of the
French army, sent him to the relative safety of
Hamburg. There Rejcha concentrated on composition,
teaching and philosophy, but found that the damp
climate affected his health. He therefore moved to Paris
in 1799 but soon decided that the political situation
there was too uncertain and after two years rejoined
Beethoven in the relative security of Vienna.
An ardent champion of change, Rejcha developed
his own philosophy of music and aesthetics, arguing
that “old” forms such as fugue could have a place in
modern music only if composers also challenged
accepted norms such as the need for bar-lines or for
works to start and end in the same key. He then
demonstrated some of these ideas in the Praktische
Beispiel, a set of 36 bizarre fugues for piano which
include unusual rhythms, time signatures and harmonies
and which he published in 1803. Before he could take
his ideas further, however, Napoleon’s troops arrived in
Vienna and Rejcha returned to Paris. There he
continued to publish theoretical treatises on aesthetics,
but had to find another source of income and, after
changing his name to Antoine Reicha, began to earn a
reputation as an effective and entertaining teacher. His
pupils included Berlioz, Liszt, Franck and Gounod, and
his reputation as a member of the French musical
establishment was confirmed in 1818 by his
appointment to teach composition at the Paris
Conservatoire.
Today Reicha is best known for his 25 quintets for
flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon. This combination
of instruments had been used occasionally before and
Reicha first tried it in 1811 but then studied each of the
instruments in detail before composing a pair of
‘incomparably superior works’ as the first two pieces in
his Op. 88. The remaining four quintets in the set were
written in 1817, and all six were published and
performed at the Théâtre Favart in Paris later that year.
The Parisian public welcomed them as great novelties
and in 1818 were rewarded with a second set of six
quintets, Op. 91. Two further sets of six followed,
Op. 99 in 1819 and Op. 100 in 1820, and the Paris
correspondent of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung
commented that, ‘if it is possible to surpass Haydn in
quartets and quartet composition, this has been achieved
by Reicha in these quintets’.
‘They created the same sensation thoughout
Europe’, recorded Reicha in his autobiography. John
Sainsbury was particularly impressed: ‘No description,
no imagination can do justice to these compositions’, he
wrote in England in 1825. ‘The effect produced by the
extraordinary combinations of apparently oppositetoned
instruments, added to Reicha’s vigorous style of
writing and judicious arrangement, have rendered these
quintets the admiration of the musical world.’ A
London critic who heard a quintet at the Philharmonic
Society in 1825 described it as ‘one of the most
intolerable pieces that we were ever condemned to
hear’, but most opposition was more temperate: Berlioz
found the quintets ‘a little cold’, and while Louis Spohr
felt that they were ‘too profuse with ideas’, he praised
their rich harmonies and effective scoring.
The players for whom Reicha wrote the quintets
were among the finest of the day. All but for the
bassoonist, Antoine Henry, had studied composition
with Reicha himself, and the clarinettist, Jacques-Jules
Bouffil, was the only one who did not hold a teaching
post at the Paris Conservatoire. ‘It is almost taken for
granted that M.Vogt has not a peer on the oboe’, wrote
the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung; ‘Every outstanding
player of this instrument here owes his entire training to
this artist.’ The flautist was Joseph Guillou and it is
clear from Reicha’s horn lines that Louis-François
Dauprat was a performer of the highest standard. He
also enjoyed a reputation as a teacher which was
second-to-none: his Méthode de cor alto et cor basse is
one of the most comprehensive and intelligent tutors
ever written.
The slow introduction which opens the Wind
Quintet in B flat major, Op. 88, No. 5, includes cadenzas
for horn and clarinet before leading into the Allegro non
troppo, an extensive, sedate and reflective movement
which gives all the players opportunities to display their
virtuosity. The gentle opening of the second movement
is interrupted by a stormy minor-key passage but this
quickly blows itself out. Characteristically, Reicha calls
his third-movement Scherzo a ‘Minuet’ but the
accompanying trio is most unusual, opening with an
eight-bar horn call which is then repeated eleven times
as an ostinato as other players weave new sonorities
around it. The finale canters along happily with only a
few occasions which cause the players any difficulty.
In contrast the Wind Quintet in C major, Op. 91,
No. 1, is one of only two of his wind quintets which do
not open with a slow introduction. Instead its bustling
first theme suddenly breaks off in favour of a short,
plaintive idea to which Reicha does not refer again. The
elegant Andante leads subtly into a Minuetto with a
characteristic sleight of hand: each instrument enters in
turn with a held note so that the triple metre of the
movement does not become apparent until the sixth bar.
The trio contrasts contrapuntal ideas with chattering
chords, and the finale uses counterpoint to such an
extent that parts seem almost Baroque.
John Humphries