Cimbasso

Cimbasso is now called a bass or contrabass valve trombone with 4-5 cylinder valves in Eb, F, C, or B. The Cimbasso has about the range of a tuba, but mixes sound better with the trumpets. Valve trombones are used in brass bands, as well as in the Italian Banda, who often appears as incidental music in opera. The modern Cimbasso is a German development of the deep valve trombone and is often used in the opera orchestra for Italian operas of the 19th and 20th centuries. Its use is controversial from the perspective of historically informed performance practice.

History

The word first appears in Cimbasso opera scores by Bellini (Norma, 1831) and Verdi. Verdi uses this name, originally c. in basso ( corno in Basso, corno inglese di basso ) means a collective term for the common deep conical instruments of the time as bass horn ( "Russian bassoon " ), Serpent, or the more modern Ophicleide. Also the Bombardon, a Viennese development of Ophicleide with valves (ie, an early form of bass tuba ) engineered the Cimbasso voice. - An indication that there was an instrument called Cimbasso at that time does not exist. It is simply meant the deepest voice of brass, while the concrete instrument changed.

An indication that the later Verdi the Posaunenklang estimated in the bass, but there is: When he covered his ideal of an orchestra in his Milan time, he wished next to the two tenor trombones, a bass trombone and a bass trombone in B, which he by the Milan-based company G. Pelitti had built. This trombone section writes in his operas Otello Verdi before, Falstaff and the Sacred Pezzi. He referred to the fourth voice but not with Cimbasso, but with " Trombone basso ".

The Trombone Contrabbasso with four rotary valves, the various instrument makers manufactured in Italy, such as G. Palmisano in Verona, on the other hand often Cimbasso was called, because the instrument performed the deepest voice.

Presence

Today the " Cimbasso " voice that opera is often played by tuba player on the Cimbasso today so-called, which is equipped to a cup mouthpiece. This instrument has a cylindrical bore thus belongs to the trumpet instruments. Hector Berlioz is known in his Treatise on Instrumentation (1844 ) also no bass trombone with valves. It is an instrument that is fundamentally different from the historical instruments in the function of Cimbasso to do the orchestral sound of the 20th century abundantly, in which especially the trumpets are sounded considerably stronger than in the orchestra of the 19th century, in the long still dominated the so-called Baroque trumpets.

The modern denoted by Cimbasso instrument was developed by the German instrument expert Hans Kunitz in the 1950s. The bass trombone of Kunitz was still a slide trombone with two valves to facilitate the chromatic passages in Verdi. They were made by the Gebr Alexander Mainz from 1959 under the name Cimbasso bass trombone. The instrument maker family Thein in Bremen developed from it in consequence a pure - valve bass trombone in F with five cylinder valves, which they also called Cimbasso.