Berlioz's lost oboe? : exploring the forgotten last generation of the simple-system oboe in France

With the HIP movement pushing its frontier inexorably forward into the nineteenth century, modern-day historical oboists are increasingly confronted with a widening gap in the workplace between demand and supply. While the evolution of the oboe and its repertoire in nineteenth-century France have been studied to varying degrees, and while a corpus of treatises aimed at amateurs was published during the period, there is a current paucity of historically accurate instruments available, and no research to date has taken a practice-led approach to investigating the specialised performance techniques required to make the nineteenth-century French oboe practicable in high-level professional settings.
Engaging with an early nineteenth-century French oboe by Guillaume Adler (Paris, c.1835) that has been analysed as a case study, this thesis examines how the instrument’s performance capabilities respond to the needs of current-day HIP in a professional context. By exploring this specimen’s innate properties and the reciprocal relationship between player and instrument, the aim is to acquire embodied knowledge of the oboe in France between 1800 and 1850, in turn leaving a practical record of my findings for scholars and peers to mine according to their needs. The case study is structured as a database of this 185-year-old instrument’s inherent attributes, using source materials including reeds, treatises and repertoire as a starting point, then segueing into a personal narrative recounting my own empirical experience with the instrument, and
concluding with a folio of recordings.
Unearthing the performance techniques of the French oboe in its final phase as a keyed, simple-system hautboy and the corpus of neglected repertoire it was designed to perform provides a reassessment of the commonly-held view that the nineteenth century was a time of crisis in the
history of the oboe.