Haydn: Three Favorite Concertos

Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809) wrote his Concerto in E-Flat Major for Trumpet and Orchestra in 1796, when he was in his sixty-fourth year. The Concerto owes its existence to the invention by Anton Weidinger, in the 1790s, of a radically different instrument, the keyed trumpet. (Its predecessor is called the natural trumpet, a larger instrument restricted by its physical characteristics to the notes of one harmonic series.) Now at last, the trumpet was able to play all notes of the chromactic scale and, thus, to modulate to different keys and respond to the orchestra in any of them. Haydn was intrigued by the keyed trumpet – an instrument which, however, was short-lived, replaced in 1813 by the more versatile valve trumpet that we know today.