Oboe Da Caccia - The Oboe Da Caccia After Bach and Modern Reconstruction

The Oboe Da Caccia After Bach and Modern Reconstruction

After Bach, the oboe da caccia quickly fell out of use. The knowledge of its exact sound and construction was lost, and instruments once believed to be oboes da caccia have proven not to be this instrument at all or to consist only of parts of one. The consensus amongst scholars during the first half of the 20th century was that no known instruments from Bach's time had survived to the present day. Curt Sachs, in his Real-Lexicon der Musikinstrumente (1913), for example, included a crude and rather speculative drawing of an oboe da caccia. Interest in the da caccia was revived in the early 1970s, in part due to the ongoing Telefunken Records project to record the complete cantatas of J.S. Bach, conducted by Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Gustav Leonhardt. The taille, a straight two-key oboe pitched in F, had previously been used for the da caccia parts in period-instrument recordings, with mixed results.

It fell to Cary Karp, a curator at the Music Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, to make the discovery that in fact two well-preserved (but unplayable) Eichentopf da caccias existed in museums in Scandinavia: one of them in his own museum, and another in a museum in Copenhagen. The results of his research were published in the Galpin Society Journal article. Using measurements taken from the two instruments, oboist and instrument maker Paul Hailperin of Zell im Wiesental, Germany made the first modern-day copies, and these were used in the Harnoncourt recording of the Weihnachtsoratorium that appeared in late 1973.

Modern-day makers of oboes da caccia include Sand Dalton of Lopez Island, Washington, United States ; Richard Earle in the UK; Marcel Ponseele in France; Henri Gohin in France; and Joel Robinson in New York City .