Giuseppe Maria Cambini's 3 Wind Quintets:
Introductory Commentary

by Charles-David Lehrer

© International Double Reed Society: Boulder, Colorado, USA - 2003


The prolific Parisian composer, Giuseppe Maria Cambini (1746-1825) is best remembered today from an unfortunate situation which arose with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart during the 1778 season of the Concert Spirituel, in which the concert director Joseph Le Gros, on Cambini’s advice, cancelled a performance of Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante (K297b) for flute, oboe, horn, bassoon and orchestra, and substituted a work of Cambini’s for the same combination The former work, much to every musician’s frustration, has never resurfaced.

As to the compositions at hand, Cambini published his set of Trois Quintetti concertans for flûte, hautbois, clarinette, cor et bassoon with the House of Siéber in Paris during the year 1802. All three quintets carry the plate number 1571. On the title page the clarinet is placed first, clearly because of the dedication of these works to the clarinetist, Jean Xavier Lefèvre. The importance of these compositions lies in the fact that they are the first known series of quintets for a set of five single wind instruments to be composed after the groundbreaking Eb Major Quintet of c. 1780 for flute, oboe, clarinet, dalie [cor anglais], and bassoon by Cambini’s contemporary, Franz Anton Rosetti (1746-1792).

It so happens that Antoine Reicha was present at the Court of the Öttingen-Wallersteins shortly after the Rosetti premiere and surely would have been acquainted with that work; but no quintets by him have been found prior to his Grand Quintetto in F Major of 1811, a work which preceded his great published set of 24.

Both the Cambini and Reicha series of wind quintets utilize the hand horn rather than the cor anglais of the Rosetti. The three Cambini quintets maintain the three-movement form found in the Rosetti Eb Major Quintet, while all 25 of Reicha’s known quintets (with the exception of his three single-movement quintets with cor anglais rather than oboe) contain four movements.

The only known preserved copy of the Siéber parts of the Cambini quintets is found in the collections of the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. As was common in the early 19th century, no score was published with the parts. The original manuscript score and parts have not surfaced.

As of this writing, there are two complete editions of these works in publication, one by McGinnis & Marx and the other by Bärenreiter. In addition, Quintette No. 2 in D minor has been issued separately by both Leuckart and Musica Rara.

The keys of the three Cambini wind quintets are as follows:

Quintette No. 1: Si b majeur
Quintette No. 2: Re mineur
Quintette No. 3: Fa majeur

Although the frontispiece of the Cambini quintets is in French, the five individual parts maintain Italian with few exceptions [fin for fine]. Each instrument’s title contains the modifier ‘obligato’. While it must be said that the Siéber parts are beautifully printed, unfortunately they abound in discrepancies, especially as regards dynamics, articulation, and stenographic ornamentation. One gets the distinct feeling that markings made by the original performers into Cambini’s hand-written parts have been included in the Siéber publication.

These are big wind quintets, all the more remarkable because they are the first examples known to us for the standard combination comprising flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon. One wonders who joined the clarinetist Jean Xavier Lefèvre in the first performances. His colleagues at the Paris Conservatoire and Opéra, the oboist Antoine Sallantin; the hand horn player, Frédéric Duvernoy; and the bassoonist, François-René Gebauer are likely candidates; but we do not know for sure.

Each of the three quintets is structurally unique: Quintet No 1 is concerned with the transfer of the Sinfonia Concertante genre (of which Cambini composed 82) to the wind quintet; Quintet No. 2 is a study in Sonata Form; and it is readily noted that Cambini’s conception differs considerably from that of the contemporary Viennese masters, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. Quintet No. 3 concentrates on Sonata Form in the first two movements, but is it brought to a conclusion with a Rondo. All three works demonstrate that Cambini possessed a remarkable knowledge of the five wind instruments. The horn part was clearly composed for a high horn specialist in mind, for there are no extreme low notes in any of the parts.

I should like to acknowledge the assistance of several persons who helped make the IDRS on-line edition of Cambini’s Trois Quintetti concertans a reality:

Yoshi Ishikawa: IDRS On-Line Publications Editor
Nancy Lehrer: Senior Architect: JumpStart Wireless Corporation
Felix Skowronek: Professor Emeritus: University of Washington
Karen Moses: Music Division: Library of Congress
Chamisa Redmond Nash: Photoduplication Service: Library of Congress

Charles-David Lehrer
Thousand Oaks, February 7, 2003

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