Michael Kube's recent Urtext editins of Johann Nepomuk Hummel's now-familiar concerto for ‘Tromba principale’ in E (1803) is initially striking for its wealth of documentation. The piano reduction, from G. Henle Verlag, includes the original E-major setting along with an E♭-major transposition, which is favoured by those who perform the work on a modern piston-valve B♭ trumpet. Offering the soloist more performance options, the Henle volume contains four separate solo trumpet parts, pitched in E♭ E, B♭, or C. The full orchestra scores, which appear in separate E and E♭ versions, are provided exclusively by Breitkopf & Härtel. Although it might seem a daunting or expensive task to collect the many components of Kube's Urtext, Breitkopf assures us that the collection benefits from a ‘uniform concept’ under the ‘careful coordination’ of a single editor, which is undoubtedly true. The documents display consistent and clean notation, and the overall layout is above reproach. Kube's editorial decisions about articulations and dynamics are forthright and logical, and the reader has faith that the scores will not contradict the parts – whichever key (and trumpet) is chosen for performance. Soloists, accompanists and conductors who desire a crisply minted and eminently readable publication, unsullied by years of scribbles and erasures, will find a welcome place for Kube's edition in their libraries.

But even with such careful coordination among its many constituent elements, something is fundamentally lacking in the overall execution of this edition. Whether the word ‘Urtext’ has been carelessly applied or used merely as a promotional ploy, or both, the scholarly work fails to meet Breitkopf's aspirational claim that the publication ‘incorporates the latest musicological findings, and [is] edited with a profound knowledge of performance practices’ (back cover). Promotional statements such as these must be seriously evaluated, especially when one finds evidence to the contrary: the editorial approach guiding this superficially admirable set of publications fails to tackle performance practices with any profound historical awareness. Rather, the preface of this Urtext does much to discount such inconvenient matters; it eschews the problematic fact that the solo trumpets commonly used today to perform Hummel's concerto are quite unlike the historical instrument for which it was composed.

Indeed, much of the prose printed upon the edition's fine paper stock subversively discounts the composition's historical instrumentation, its ‘original’ performance contexts and some qualities of musical expression that cannot be attained through modern-day musical techniques and technologies. For the editor of a self-dubbed ‘Urtext’ – a term that implies the scientifically faithful transference of historical data – Kube seems quick to dismiss the very impetus behind Hummel's manuscript: the once-radical keyed trumpet designed and played by Anton Weidinger. The preface does address some fundamental facts about the work, but the lack of substantive historical information on Weidinger's instrument or his musical culture often accompanies understated justifications for current performance conventions.

In his vague and speculative reception history Kube deems the trumpet of Hummel's concerto to exhibit a ‘fatal future’ (Henle, v). Yet the editor might not realize that modern cultural biases against the instrument, especially when published in a widely distributed Urtext, actively shape that ongoing future. Thus, we read how Weidinger's unique trumpet, when taken alongside other keyed brass instruments, amounted to ‘novelties [that] appeared sensational at the time’ [emphasis added], in other words originally. Only at a later date, we are told, were these instruments criticized for ‘a loss of sound quality.’ Although Kube's chronology remains unclear, it would be wrong to suggest that public opinion turned against Weidinger or his instrument during the musician's lifetime.Footnote ¹ An 1815 article in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung continued to relate praise for the ‘nuanced and smooth’ (Feinheit und Sanftheit) tone that Weidinger elicited from his keyed trumpet.Footnote ² Yet, according to Kube, the salvation for its acoustical problems rested with the instrument consumers of his publication are familiar with today. The Urtext editor explains:

The historical problem that Kube – and perhaps the two professional trumpet soloists who advised him on this edition – considers to have been solved by today's instruments is a false one – one that assumes that nineteenth-century composers and performers, Hummel and Weidinger included, considered the plethora of even-sounding chromatic notes afforded by valve technology to be of paramount musical importance. His comment implies that the modern trumpet's homogenous tone and gamut would be more agreeable to historical ears, if only such technology existed at the time. But such a position is indefensible when challenged by actual research on the topic. Nineteenth-century valve trumpets, often pitched in F (a fifth below the valve trumpets commonly played in orchestras today), were not normally considered to be concerto-worthy. Rather, they were used in the orchestra mostly as replacements for less forgiving natural trumpets. And although these arcane long-form valve trumpets are pivotal to his narrative of sonic resolution, Kube never suggests performing Hummel's concerto on these instruments, nor does he supply parts for them. And whether or not valve trumpets really do result in a ‘similar quality of sound in all registers’ is a moot argument – no trumpet can project an even timbre without the aid of human breath control and finely honed muscle tissue. Trumpets do not play themselves.

Unbridled support for new, ‘improved’ instruments is usually the stuff of commercial advertisements, and it is unsettling to find similar rhetoric within a scholarly Urtext. The Yamaha Corporation similarly occludes historical repertoire and its corresponding instrumentation to further a narrative of musical progress, when the company explains how its ‘high-pitched trumpets feature brilliant tone with crisp clear attacks and excellent control in the high register. [Although] originally used [by twentieth-century performers] primarily for Baroque music … [the YTR-9635] features a heavyweight bell for the rich full sound of a big [B♭ or C valve] trumpet. It comes with two bells and sets of slides to convert it to either E or E♭ which makes it especially suitable for both Hummel and Haydn concertos.’Footnote ³ Described here is the perfect instrument for the modern age: a single valve-trumpet for a ‘one size fits all’ musical culture. Baroque cantatas, classical concertos and symphonic masterworks can all be played with that ‘similar quality of sound’ favoured by Kube, his editorial advisors and perhaps many of his consumers. Nothing seems to be lost in this sonic utopia, where the easier and ‘more even’ a modern trumpet plays, the better it must be for all historical repertoires. In both Kube's above comment and Yamaha's promotional blurb, we read about the modern instrument's technical advances minus any of its drawbacks. So it is ironic to note that, where richness of timbre and weight of construction is concerned, a modern trumpet such as the one described above pales in comparison with the natural trumpets heard in Bach cantatas, or, for that matter, the long-form valve trumpets once heard in Bruckner and Mahler symphonies. The ‘lengthened air column’ Kube mentions as essential to the trumpet's sonic success has been shortening since the early twentieth century, so that the instruments currently sounding the keyed-trumpet concertos today produce fewer overtones than larger nineteenth-century models. Indeed, the modern E♭/E trumpet is acoustically duller than historical valve trumpets because of a shortened air column. In terms of sonic brilliance, size matters. So drastic were acoustical differences between valve trumpets of ever-shortening dimensions that, in 1895, trumpeter-scholar William Morrow called the B♭ trumpet – the now-standard ‘big’ trumpet on which modern students first learn the Hummel concerto – a ‘trumpetina,’ which ‘is in reality only a cornet.’ He argued:

The instrument technologies marketed today for their ‘big,’ ‘rich’ and ‘even’ sound, with their ‘lengthened’ and ‘heavy’ metallic construction, were not always considered so sizable, sturdy or mellifluous. Yet Kube implies that the modern soloist – who is likely playing this concerto on one type of modern valve trumpet – should embrace the unmitigated acoustical progress found in their anachronistic instruments.Footnote ⁵

The criticisms Kube offers in support of a keyed-trumpet ‘dilemma’ in sound do not apply to Weidinger's invention specifically, but to other instruments, which were not necessarily of the same design or quality, and were certainly not performed with Weidinger's level of virtuosity.Footnote ⁶ Kube's main source for discounting the Klappentrompete of the Hummel concerto comes by way of Mendelssohn, who in 1831, almost three decades after Weidinger's premiere, reported that in Rome ‘the trumpeters, generally, blow away at those dammed keyed trumpets, which seem to me like a pretty woman with a beard, or a man with a bosom – they even don't have the chromatic tones and just sound like a castrated trumpet, so dull [matt] and unnatural.’Footnote ⁷ But such delightful observations, when quoted in service of modern biases, are easily taken out of context. What Mendelssohn primarily recounts is a poor level of performance, the fundamental causes of which were poor performers – the seldom-acknowledged reasons why any historical instrument, alongside its repertoire, ‘fails’ for a time. Indeed, the success of any instrument is often predicated on players’ abilities, and not the instrument technology itself. For instance, few would consider B♭ piston-valve trumpets successful instruments today if they were limited to the bleats of countless high-school band members.

Mendelssohn related a similar situation in his letter, going so far as to compare Roman musicians to amateurs found in provincial Bavarian village orchestras. He disdained the first clarinettist, the oboist, the double bass player and the bassoonists, all of them being out of tune. The drummer, contrastingly, was in tune but out of time. And if heard anywhere else in Europe, the singers would be considered hacks. Only at the end of his petulant report, does Mendelssohn mention the trumpeters, who seemed wholly ineffective, since they seldom if ever sounded the ‘newly-found’ notes outside of the natural harmonic series – a development that for many was the only reason to use keyed or valve trumpets instead of natural trumpets. Ultimately, Mendelssohn described an impoverished, localized musical culture, where all the musicians were below average and the keyed trumpeters played natural-trumpet music on the wrong instruments for the job. (His favour slightly turns when mentioning that they also performed variation-works, which seemed an appropriate repertoire for their instruments.) Thus, however insightful Mendelssohn's comments are about performance practices in Rome circa 1830, they have no discernible historical or cultural connection to Weidinger's solo performances of the Haydn or Hummel concertos.

It is true that any keyed trumpet, as Kube states, ‘lost some power’, and many besides Mendelssohn recognized that its musical personality was something neither here nor there. Due to the ‘unnatural’ vent-and-key mechanism, the trumpet realistically sounded and looked like a hybrid instrument, halfway between woodwind and brass. But Kube fails to relate the import behind these past criticisms: the weakness perceived in keyed trumpets did not correlate to a desire for today's ever-louder, larger-bore valve trumpets. Nineteenth-century critics were not awaiting a modern trumpet tone and piston technology to rescue Hummel's concerto from musical oblivion. Rather, past comments explained how the keyed trumpet lost both visual and sonic potency when placed against the valveless natural trumpet, an instrument that had always projected acoustical might, glory and martial power. The rarified timbre and image of the traditional trumpet was deeply intertwined with cultural ideals of strength, as Christian Schubart (1739–1791) codified in Ideen Zu Einer Ästhetik Der Tonkunst:

He is not speaking of a diminutive three-valve trumpet built by the Yamaha Corporation. Pining for former days, A.B. Marx also cherished the ancient and idiomatic tone-personae of natural brasses, where ‘in the old orchestra…splendour, power, warlike fire, and festive grandeur sounded out of the trumpets and trombones.’Footnote ⁹ It cannot be denied that Weidinger's unique instrument, in conjunction with Hummel's concerto, intentionally broke from these musical and cultural expectations – subverting martial and majestic tropes during a time when trumpets were trumpets, pure and natural. Nevertheless, Weidinger's keyed trumpet, as evinced by Hummel's concerto, attained something the natural trumpet could not: new capacities for musical contrast, variation and artistry, which placed the brass instrument on an expressive par with the violin, fortepiano and occasionally the human voice. Hummel's experimental concerto was unusual if not radical; it indeed touched upon the new trumpet's feminine sensibilities, traits that were heard with relish on other solo instruments of the age. To hear a trumpet in the principale [lower, non-diatonic] tessitura that could juxtapose fanfare motifs and martial rhythms with cantilena phrases, delicate ornamentation and chromatically inflected passages – in both major and minor key areas – was to experience instrumental gender bending at its most blatant.

In citing its seemingly fatal dilemmas, Kube does not mention that the same criticisms hurled at the keyed trumpet – its weakness, its femininity in relation to the traditional trumpet – often applied to nineteenth-century valve instruments as well, and that these misgivings spanned into the next century. Adding any contraption to the formerly impressive, elongated brass instrument challenged what it meant to play, hear and view a ‘real’ trumpet. (Even in current iconography, angels seldom play stubby trumpets with valves.) Marx especially loathed piston technology, which deadened the typical tone of the once-natural, male-sounding instrument. A ‘notable feature of the new orchestra,’ he said, ‘is the emasculation of the trumpet and French horn…by means of valves and pistons.’Footnote ¹⁰ For many, valve trumpets offered no sonic benefits beyond chromatic note expansion – a meagre gain when compared to acoustical setbacks. Kube's claim for the valve trumpet's ‘similar quality of sound’ was not shared by Marx, who stated how ‘the new notes [in valve trumpets] are mostly impure, the natural notes have lost their characteristic clearness and peculiar colouring, and the sonorous power of the instruments is broken.’Footnote ¹¹ Nearly a half-century later, in Orchestral Instruments and their Use, Arthur Elson likewise found that a valve trumpet ‘sounds best where the open [i.e. natural] tones predominate.’Footnote ¹² Indeed, it cannot be assumed that a similar sound ‘in all registers’ was either a favourable or achievable quality in nineteenth-century valve-trumpet performance. According to Marx the musical world suffered an incredible loss of sonic vitality, not due to Weidinger's instrument, but through ‘asthmatical and impure valve trumpets and horns’ with their uneven, lacklustre colour and increased volume.Footnote ¹³ In 1891, A.J. Hipkins best summarized the problems with the still developing, still imperfect technology:

No favourable sonic resolution heard here. And although narratives of progress are highly persuasive when selling cars and mobile phones, such modernist claims – that the best machines for the job are the ones currently popular and procurable – are easily challenged when found in organology, as evidence presented here only begins to illustrate. Indeed, despite Kube's pitting of a keyed-trumpet ‘dilemma’ against a valve-trumpet ‘resolution’, the nineteenth century witnessed more mellow-sounding cornets dominating the brass family's soprano range in some places, especially Great Britain, where, according to Morrow,

The ‘dull’ and ‘emasculated’ valve trumpet, for many at the turn of the twentieth century, was thought to exhibit a ‘fatal future’ similar to that of the keyed trumpet. But Morrow did not consider the popular nineteenth-century cornet a preordained resolution to a musical dilemma. Like his contemporary Hipkins, he recognized that when comparing a modern brass instrument to an historical one, some technical aspects are gained (e.g. ease of playing, note expansion) while some musical qualities are lost (e.g. an idiomatic sound profile, expressive potency). Morrow and Hipkins did not proclaim a more popular instrument's victory over an historical trumpet's fatal flaws. They instead attested to trends in preference – human preference for one instrument over another. Ultimately, the value of any instrument is found in people's preferences, which, however misguided or whimsical they might be, are prone to change, sometimes over centuries and sometimes in the blinking of an eye.

Valve trumpets are therefore not the correctives to a speculative historical dilemma. Our now-familiar brass instruments do not improve the so-called ‘classical’ trumpeter's two cornerstone concertos – works originally written with the sonic capabilities of Weidinger's technology in mind. If they were alive today, Morrow and Hipkins might agree: our commonplace ‘small’ trumpets are merely expeditious and convenient for the concertos of Weidinger’, because for over a century many young musicians mimicking their teachers’ preferences have learned how to play these instruments effectively. Despite these socio-cultural and economic realities, Kube casts aside some revisions found in the manuscript, which he considers to be ‘not always musically convincing’, because they were likely in response to ‘the sonic weakness of the solo part’ (Henle, vi). Yet again, in dismissing the original instrument as being ‘weak’, powerless and doomed to failure, he correspondingly devalues the history of a composition, its original texts and the expressed intentions of its composer – all in order to validate current consumer preferences. The attitude further insults those who strive to study any instrument that remains enshrouded in misunderstanding and myth.

Favouring a modern instrument on the basis of an imagined formula, in which ‘strength’ and homogeneity of sound equals musical success, does not adequately explain the historical significance of Weidinger's instrument technology, which was neither an improvement on the natural trumpet nor the doomed, missing-link precursor to the valve trumpet. Weidinger's trumpet represented a bold and successful experiment, a different species of trumpet altogether, intended for a tailor-fit repertoire that exploited musical possibilities achievable on neither the traditional trumpet nor today's valve trumpet. A case in point: the ornament appearing in movemens II (bars 3–4, 47, 48 and 49) and III (bars 18–21) known as flattement is a fluty enharmonic alteration impossible to recreate with valves. Yet printed atop the first appearance of the ornament in the Urtext, an asterisk directs the soloist to Kube's accompanying footnote, which states: ‘On the modern [i.e. valve] trumpet [flattement] can be approximated most closely by an expressive vibrato or a semitone trill’ (Henle, trumpet part, 4). In fact, these ornamental techniques are not approximations, but rather replacements that are necessary when playing a different – not improved – musical instrument. Once Kube tells the modern valve-trumpeter that an ‘approximation’, an expeditious replacement of the original notated intention suffices, the Urtext's scientific façade noticeably cracks.

Does this then represent the state of the Urtext in our age? If so, scholars and performers should contemplate the true value of any such publication. Should a seemingly authoritative edition that dilutes the cultural basis of a composition command our respect over and above some fine amateur documents available on public-domain Website archives?Footnote ¹⁶ If we are meant to appreciate every original staccato and legato marking, every editorial consideration and notated divergence, then it is only logical to consider the aural implications of these visual details. Articulation, dynamics and nearly all elements of notation – resulting in a work's sounding pitch, the timbre of its key areas and the shape and duration of its rhythms – are variables influenced by the instrument at hand, and lip. Besides its unique capacity for flattement, Weidinger's keyed trumpet expressed chromatic and diatonic phrases, as well as forte, piano, legato and staccato passages with qualities unlike our ever-louder, ever-shortening and more ‘even-sounding’ valve trumpets. (For decades now, skilled natural-trumpeters have recognized how these qualitative distinctions apply to their respective repertoires.) Why then does this Urtext completely bypass such ‘profound’ performance practice issues? Surely, they must hold some important insights into the ‘originality’ of Hummel's composition.

Instead of attempting to uproot the deeply seeded connections between Weidinger's keyed trumpet and Hummel's concerto, the editor could have stimulated greater interest in the instrument's revival by offering a broader scope of historical documents that pointed more closely to the work's complete origins. And while the edition supplies four alternative solo parts for modern trumpets, the absence of a keyed-trumpet fingering chart reflects a failure of rigorous scholarship and editorial imagination. Furthermore, a discussion of Hummel's treatise Ausführlich theoretisch-practische Anweisung zum Piano-forte Spiel (1828) would have been a valuable opportunity to relate the trumpet concerto's ‘feminine’ traits with the composer's lessons to ‘artistic’ pianists of the age. Particularly useful for non-martial soloists are Hummel's comments about ornamentation, improvisation and the seldom-notated rhythmic inflections that ought to be gleaned from any given metre. At very least the edition should have supplied a bibliography and discography for those who find Kube's preface tone deaf to historical performance practices.

On the whole, this Urtext edition fails to acknowledge the complete birth, or life, of this concerto within its time and place. Its shallow concern for original instrumentation – not only of the solo part but the orchestra as well – is palpable. But since real-world expenses do limit the inclusion of appendices and accompanying apparatus, perhaps it is too much to ask for the combined publishing juggernaut of Breitkopf & Härtel and G. Henle Verlag to provide us with editions that reflect a ‘profound knowledge of performance practices.’ If cost is a real barrier halting editorial treatments that are more rigorous in their historical scholarship, then the problem must be with the single ill-defined word emblazoned on these publications, and not with the publications themselves. The solution is to reconsider the meaning of ‘Urtext’ by recounting the German prefix, since the ‘Ur-’ found here insufficiently signifies the composer's full intentions, original performance circumstances, historical aesthetics or instrumentation, to name a few factors that are devalued through the editorial process. Nor can the ‘Ur-’ stake claims to a dispassionate, scientific methodology, given that this edition covertly panders to strongly held modern biases regarding timber, expression and other intangible sonic qualities. Kube's commentary exemplifies how easy it is to dismiss cultural origins (e.g. Weidinger's trumpet, the Esterhazy orchestra) and original musical gestures (e.g. flattement) that underlie historical-musical texts in order to support the present consumer's anachronistic musical preferences.

But these problems cannot be directed to the editor alone, and it would be unfair to fault him for the problems of a much larger publishing culture. For it is the business of many so-called Urtext publishers to serve up similarly compromised editions that, while being eminently clear, are limited and crude in cultural perspective. The consumer is handed a documentary skeleton, the bare bones of musical understanding: correctly apportioned staccato and legato markings, conscientiously bracketed editorial indications – all perfectly aligned with computerized precision. But for today's inquisitive performers and scholars, something vital is lacking. Urtext editions often present such scavenged remains, a picked-over frame of past music sources separated from a ‘fatally’ rejected corpus of sonic culture, which, as exemplified by Weidinger's trumpet, once inspired – literally gave breath to – the compositional act itself. The prefix certainly demands reconsideration, for many similar Urtexts currently appear which are not truly ‘original’ in design, but are more accurately ‘primitive.’