1

The History of the Clarinet

The history of the clarinet is a complicated affair. The instrument was in a continuous

state of evolution, both in terms of its mechanics and in the way it was treated by composers,

from the time it first appeared at the beginning of the eighteenth century, until it reached its

modern form (more or less) in the mid-late nineteenth century. To further add to the confusion,

the clarinet has been built to play in virtually every key imaginable, and it has many close

relatives in the same family of instruments, the bass clarinet, alto clarinet, and basset horn being

the most notable examples. This essay will primarily be concerned with the development of the

soprano clarinet in B♭ and A, which since the nineteenth century has been the most commonly-

used clarinet in Western music. It will outline the most influential instrument-makers and their

innovations, and touch on the difference between the French and German systems, a split that

dates from the mid-nineteenth century. Additionally, it will discuss a few of the most important

composers for the clarinet during the most crucial period of the instrument's development, and

show how their relationships with the performers they wrote for influenced the further technical

development of the clarinet.

The invention of the clarinet is attributed to Johann Christoph Denner (1655–1707), an

accomplished and well-regarded woodwind instrument-maker from Nuremberg, in the first

decade of the eighteenth century, or perhaps a few years earlier. 1 It is generally agreed that the

clarinet evolved from a simpler single-reed instrument called the chalumeau, although there has

been much debate in scholarly circles as to exactly what constituted the difference between

chalumeaux and the earliest clarinets. These debates stem from the question of whether the

1 Albert R. Rice, The Baroque Clarinet (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 40-42.

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incomplete instrument by J.C. Denner, housed at the University of California at Berkeley, is

actually the earliest extant clarinet, or some form of modified chalumeau.2

Fig. 1: Early clarinet (or chalumeau), attributed to J.C. Denner

(Courtesy of University of California, Berkeley, http://music.berkeley.edu)

Be that as it may, scholars seem to have reached the consensus that the crucial innovation

separating the clarinet from the chalumeau was the addition of the register or “speaker” key,

which allowed the player to easily overblow the instrument's fundamental register by the interval

of a 12th. This key distinction between the two instruments was reflected in their respective

treatment by composers during the time when the two instruments coexisted, before the clarinet

eventually supplanted the chalumeau. Early clarinets were designed to achieve the purest sound

in the overblown register (called the “clarinet” or “clarion” register), to the detriment of the

lower fundamental register (named the “chalumeau” register after its progenitor), and as such

composers usually avoided writing for low clarinet, preferring to assign those notes to the

chalumeau. The reverse was also true: while in theory the chalumeau could also overblow at the

12th, it was not designed for this and it is rarely called for in the literature. It was only as further

2 For a more detailed account of this debate, see T. Eric Hoeprich, “A Three-Key Clarinet by J.C. Denner,” The
Galpin Society Journal 34 (March 1981): 21-32; Cary Karp, “The Early History of the Clarinet and Chalumeau,”
Early Music 14, no. 4 (Nov. 1986): 545-551; Colin Lawson & Albert R. Rice. “The Clarinet and Chalumeau
Revisited,” Early Music 14, no. 4 (Nov. 1986): 552-555; and Albert R. Rice, The Baroque Clarinet (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1992), 59-63.

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technical improvements were made to the clarinet later in the century that composers began

writing demanding parts for the chalumeau register of the instrument.3

Aside from the doubtful J.C. Denner instrument mentioned above, the earliest surviving

clarinets are three instruments made by his son, Jacob Denner (1681–1735), dating from the first

quarter of the eighteenth century (historical documentation is spotty, making it difficult to date

them precisely). These are all two-key instruments (the register key and the front-facing a' key),

one pitched in D and the other two in C. Most early clarinets were made of European boxwood; it

was not until the latter part of the nineteenth century that the African blackwoods most

commonly used today came into vogue. Nicholas Shackleton succinctly describes the range and

operation of these early clarinets:

The bottom note of the two-key instrument was f. If the hole for the right fourth finger on
the foot joint was doubled, opening one of the holes would yield an f#, from which point
an ascending chromatic sequence of acceptable quality might have been obtainable
[presumably using forked fingerings], with the assistance of liberal ‘lipping’, to g′ (all
fingers off). Opening the front key would give a′, and opening the rear in addition b♭' …
A key for g#′ was added only at the beginning of the 19th century, but early tutors refer to
the speaker key as the g# key; opening the speaker key alone could produce a g#′, though
it is not known from when this practice dates … From c′′ onwards, a chromatic sequence
(rather better in tune) would be obtained by repeating the same series of fingerings with
the speaker key open.4

Fig. 2: Two-key clarinet by Jacob Denner

(Courtesy of Musical Instrument Museum, http://www.mim.be/en)

3 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Clarinet.,” (by Nicholas Shackleton), http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed April 10,
2012).

4 Ibid.

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 One of the major shortcomings of these early clarinets was that since f was the lowest

note, clarion b' was unavailable, there being no low e to overblow. This shortcoming was the

next obstacle to be addressed by instrument-makers, who began adding a third key on the lower

half of the instrument to provide e and b'.5 A fourth key for f#/c#' was added in France sometime

after 1750, and around the same time in Germany an a♭/e♭'' key; eventually these innovations

were combined to create the five-key clarinet that was predominant in the latter part of the

eighteenth century.6 Again, poor documentation makes it difficult to date precisely when such

changes became standard. Matters are complicated even more by the fact that there were so

many instrument-makers at the time experimenting with the same innovations independently,

making it nearly impossible to credit these and other improvements made to the clarinet during

the eighteenth century to specific individuals. 7

Fig. 3: English five-key clarinets, c. 1770–1805

(Courtesy of Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi)

5 Rice, The Baroque Clarinet, 55-56.

6 Albert R. Rice, The Clarinet in the Classical Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 25 & 36.

7 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Clarinet.,” (by Nicholas Shackleton).

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 This is a good place to discuss the first great composer/clarinetist pairing, arguably the

most influential in the instrument's history: that of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) and

Anton Stadler (1753–1812). Although Mozart was undoubtedly aware of the clarinet before he

met Stadler in 1781, his association with the Viennese virtuoso dramatically changed his

approach to the instrument. In his earliest works featuring the clarinet, such as the Divertimento

in E-flat major, K. 113, and the “Paris” Symphony in D major, K. 297, Mozart treated the

clarinet rather carefully in terms of the technical demands imposed on the performer, presumably

because he didn't trust the ability of the clarinetists available to him. 8 Alan Hacker has suggested

that most orchestral clarinetists in eighteenth century would not have been proficient in both the

clarion and the chalumeau registers of the instrument, and that therefore composers avoided

writing parts that required mastery of both. 9

All that changed when Mozart met Stadler, a performer of such an order that he was

equally fluent in every register of the clarinet's wide range. Stadler most likely played a five or

six-key instrument made by Theodore Lotz, to which either Lotz or Stadler himself added a

peculiar extension that expanded the range of the clarinet downward by four semitones to written

c.10 Mozart exploited Stadler's virtuosity to great effect in such monumental works as the Clarinet

Quintet in A major, K. 581, and the Clarinet Concerto in A major, K. 622. While by today's

standards these works are by no means virtuoso showpieces, in Mozart and Stadler's day, they

would have required an unprecedented facility on an instrument that was still plagued by various

8 Martha Kingdon Ward, “Mozart and the Clarinet,” Music & Letters 28, no. 2 (April 1947): 128-129.

9 Alan Hacker, “Mozart and the Basset Clarinet,” The Musical Times 110, no. 1514 (April 1969): 359.

10 Colin Lawson, Mozart: Clarinet Concerto, Cambridge Music Handbooks (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1996), 25-27 & 48.

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technical flaws. In making subsequent improvements to the clarinet, instrument makers of the

early nineteenth century were not so much seeking to add more notes to the clarinet's range (by

that time it was capable of a full chromatic scale from e to g''' and theoretically even higher), but

rather to improve intonation and ease of response; to facilitate the playing of passagework and

eliminate the need for awkward forked fingerings; in short, to render such masterworks as

Mozart's Clarinet Concerto more accessible to would-be performers.

From the last decade of the eighteenth century until the mid-1840s, the clarinet was

subjected to a veritable firestorm of innovation, as composers and performers began to push for

instruments that could handle the increasingly chromatic passagework of early Romantic-period

music. This was the period that saw the close collaboration of Carl Maria von Weber (1786–

1826) with the great clarinetist Heinrich Baermann (1784–1847), and the composer Louis Spohr

(1784–1859) with clarinetist Johann Simon Hermstedt (1778–1846). Spohr composed four

concertos for Hermstedt between 1808 and 1828. In his preface to the 1810 edition of his

Clarinet Concerto in C minor, op. 26, Spohr wrote that in order to perform his concerto, the

performer would need an instrument with at least eleven keys. This is an accurate assessment, for

the concerto contains many challenging passages that are difficult to play even on a modern

instrument. Similarly, performances of the two Clarinet Concertos and the Concertino that Weber

wrote for Baermann in 1811 would be impossible without an instrument considerably more

advanced than the standard five-key “classical” clarinet. 11

Some of the innovations that made performances of these works possible were the

invention, in about 1790, of a left-hand c#/g#' key, credited to the Frenchman Xavier Lefèvre.

11 Rice, The Clarinet in the Classical Period, 167-174.

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Jacques François Simiot (1769–1844) of Lyons, working around 1808, made a seven-key clarinet

in B♭, adjusting the size of the instrument's bore and widening the tone holes to produce an

instrument that could play considerably louder with more evenness of tone between registers, an

important development. As early as 1827, Simiot was producing nineteen-key clarinets, although

his fingering system did not catch on and was not imitated or improved-upon by other

instrument-makers.12 Other important instrument-makers of the early nineteenth century were

August and Heinrich Grenser and Stephan Koch.

The work of the clarinetist and instrument-maker Iwan Müller (1786–1854) stands out as

the most important improvement made to the instrument prior to the Klosé/Buffet revolution of

the early 1840s. No instruments known to have been made by Müller himself are extant, but

there are many contemporary descriptions of his work, and instruments made by others based on

his designs, enough to give a high degree of certainty as to the nature of his craft. Working out of

Paris around 1811–12, he produced a thirteen-key clarinet that he dubbed the nouvelle clarinette,

or clarinette omnitonique, so called because it enabled the clarinetist to play music written in any

key with (relative) ease. Up until Müller's day, the technical limitations of the instrument caused

composers to write for the clarinet only in easy-to-play keys, choosing an appropriately-pitched

instrument to correspond to their needs; hence Mozart's decision to score his Concerto and

Quintet in A major for clarinet in A (fingered C), and Weber's frequently setting his clarinet

works in E♭ and B♭ for the B♭ clarinet (fingered F and C). Müller boasted that his clarinette

omnitonique in B♭ would render clarinets in C and A obsolete. 13 His prediction obviously never

12 Grove Music Online, s.v. “Clarinet.,” (by Nicholas Shackleton); Rice, The Clarinet in the Classical Period, 63-
65.

13 By this time, clarinets in B♭, A, and C were the most common varieties, while the higher-pitched instruments in
D so popular earlier in the eighteenth century had fallen out of favor.As the nineteenth century progressed, the C

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came true, but his inventions did give performers and composers greater flexibility in their

musical treatment of the clarinet. 14

Given the importance of Müller's improvements, it is worthwhile to describe them in

some detail. Perhaps the most significant change was his addition of a new key for f/c'', operated

by the right pinky. The addition of this key allowed for the relocation of the f/c'' and a♭/e♭''

tone holes to a lower position on the instrument, which significantly improved the sound quality

and intonation of those notes. Müller also added the throat g#' key for the left hand, an A-B trill

key, and built alternate-fingering keys for f#/c#'' and a♭/e♭'' , to be operated by the right

thumb. The combined effect of these improvements was to enable the player to move from note-

to-note with greater facility than was previously possible, thus validating Müller's claim that is

was now possible (though by no means easy) for the clarinetist to play in any tonality. 15

Müller was also the first to mount the clarinet's keys on pivoting screws that were

attached to posts protruding from the instrument's body, and he updated the method used to seal

the keywork. Former usage had the flat undersides of the keys fitted with thin strips of leather

that covered the tone holes to effect a seal; Müller's keys had concave undersides that were fitted

with tiny, wool-stuffed leather pads, which achieved a considerably more effective seal. Today's

clarinets use a very similar concept, but fish-skin, cork, or synthetic pads are often substituted for

leather. Finally, Müller subtly widened the clarinet's bore and further enlarged the tone holes,

allowing for louder and more powerful playing, and invented the metal ligature (a twine ligature

clarinet also gradually fell out of usage. Clarinets in B♭ and A remain the most commonly called-for to this day.

14 Eric Hoeprich, The Clarinet, Yale Musical Instrument Series (New Haven: Yale University Press), 2008: 132-
138.

15 Ibid.

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was previously the most often used). From a historical perspective, the importance of Müller's

innovations cannot be overstated, since his work was imitated and improved-upon by virtually

every other instrument-maker that came after him. 16

Fig. 4: French and Dutch-made Müller-system clarinets, c. 1840-1860

(Courtesy of Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi)

It is in the period after Müller's improvements took root that we begin to see a

proliferation of clarinets constructed according to different “systems”. It is also where we begin

to see a marked difference between the French and German schools of clarinet-making. The

relationship between all these different schools and systems can be confusing, but the most

important thing to remember is that all of these took the Müller-system clarinet as their point of

departure, from which they each went on to develop in different directions.

The French system came into being in 1844, when Louis-Auguste Buffet (1789–1864)

patented his clarinette à anneaux mobiles (“clarinet with moving rings”), developed in

collaboration with Hyacinth Klosé (1808–1880), renowned professor of clarinet at the Paris

Conservatoire. The basic idea behind their design for the clarinet, that of the addition of ring-

keys, was inspired by Theobald Boehm's revolutionary approach to the flute, and therefore their

16 Hoeprich, The Clarinet, 132-138; Rice, The Clarinet in the Classical Period 65-70.

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model of clarinet is most often referred to as the Boehm-system clarinet, even though Boehm

himself had no direct involvement in its creation. Eric Hoeprich has given a very clear and

complete account of the construction of the first Boehm-system clarinets:

Ring-keys allow the player to open and close holes which could otherwise not be
conveniently reached with the fingers, simultaneously improving intonation and clarity
by allowing each tone hole to be placed in the acoustically correct position. Most of the
so-called fork-fingerings are eliminated; the player simply raises one finger at a time to
play the natural scale. On the clarinet, duplication keys for R4 and L4 [pinky keys]
obviates the necessity of sliding from key to key and makes it possible to play f#/c#'' and
e/b' by pressing only one key, with either R4 or L4. To achieve this, Buffet devised a key
design with interlocking parts. Also, e♭'/b♭'' can be played either as a raised d'/a'' with
the side key for R1 or cross key for L3, or as a forked L1, R1, referred to as the “long”
fingering … For the ring keys, Buffet developed the needle-spring, a piece of tempered
steel rod. The first complete instrument had seventeen keys and six rings, and a total of
twenty-four tone holes – the same as today's standard Boehm-system clarinet. 17
Readers familiar with the modern Buffet clarinet will no doubt recognize in this

description the instrument they know so well. It is a tribute to the elegance and efficiency of

Buffet's design that it has gone virtually unchanged for more than a century and a half. Of

course, small modifications have been made over the years, but the Boehm-system clarinet

created by Buffet and Klosé remains the definitive example of the French school of clarinet-

making, which has become the most widely-used model virtually everywhere in the world

outside Germany.

Fig. 5: Boehm-system clarinets by Buffet Crampon & Cie., Paris, c. 1923-30

(Courtesy of Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments, http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi)

17 Hoeprich, The Clarinet, 173.

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 While the French branch of the clarinet family free is quite straightforward, in Germany

the boughs become somewhat more tangled. Many German clarinetists were reluctant to take up

the French Boehm-system instruments, citing the undesirability of learning a new system of

fingerings, and expressing reservations about the effect that Buffet's changes had upon the

instrument's tone. Therefore, even after 1844 many German instrument-makers continued to

experiment with the basic Müller model, trying to improve functionality without sacrificing the

rich, dark tone quality that had come to be associated with German clarinet playing.

At the forefront of these efforts was another performer/instrument-maker team: that of

Carl Baermann (1810–1885), son of the aforementioned Heinrich Baermann, and the Munich-

based maker Georg Ottensteiner (1815-79). Together they developed the Baermann-system

clarinet around the year 1850. Like their counterparts in France, they applied Boehm's concept of

ring-keys to improve intonation and increase facility, but without changing the basic fingering

system of the Müller clarinet. Again, Hoeprich nicely summarizes the basic difference in

fingerings between the Boehm system and German models based on the Baermann-system: “On

German instruments fitted with ring-keys, the note b/f#'' is produced by closing all the holes of

the left hand plus R1. On Buffet's clarinet, the note given with this fingering is b♭/f'', or a half-

tone lower…”18 It is likewise for the left hand fingerings, and in addition, many of the side keys

serve different functions than those on Boehm-system instruments. Richard Mühlfeld (1856–

1907), the virtuoso clarinetist from Meiningen who so inspired Brahms, played on boxwood

Baermann-system clarinets made by Ottensteiner. 19

18 Ibid., 146.

19 Ibid., 175-177.

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 The German clarinet reached its present, modern form with the innovations of clarinetist

Oskar Oehler (1858–1936). Oehler brought his experience playing in the Berlin Philharmonic

Orchestra to bear on his instrument-making; his clarinets are admirable examples of acoustical

and mechanical engineering, very well-suited to the demands of performance. The Oehler-system

is based on the Baermann system, but Oehler's instruments are notable for having more keys:

twenty-one versus Baermann's seventeen (today's Oehler-system clarinets often have even more),

providing a great many alternate fingering possibilities. So, while this abundance of keys makes

the layout of the Oehler clarinet much less intuitive and streamlined than Boehm-system

instruments, it does have an advantage over its French counterpart in terms of flexibility of

intonation.20

Fig. 6: Modern Oehler-system clarinets in A and B♭

In conclusion, it is important to bear in mind that the foregoing outline of the clarinet's

history comprises only the most important developments and innovators. Countless other models

were put forward during the nineteenth century; some even gained a fairly widespread following,

such as the Belgian-made, Albert-system instruments popular in Britain and the United States at

the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. But these have been mostly

20 Ibid., 178-179.

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supplanted by the Boehm and Oehler systems, which together account for a large majority of the

clarinets in use today by both amateur and professional clarinetists.

Bibliography

Hacker, Alan. “Mozart and the Basset Clarinet.” The Musical Times 110, no. 1514. (April 1969):

359-362.

Hoeprich, Eric. The Clarinet. Yale Musical Instrument Series. New Haven: Yale University

Press, 2008.

. “A Three-Key Clarinet by J.C. Denner.” The Galpin Society Journal 34 (March 1981):

21-32.

Karp, Cary. “The Early History of the Clarinet and Chalumeau.” Early Music 14, no. 4 (Nov.

1986): 545-551.

Lawson, Colin. Mozart: Clarinet Concerto. Cambridge Music Handbooks. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 1996.

, ed. The Cambridge Companion to the Clarinet. Cambridge Companions to Music. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Lawson, Colin and Albert R. Rice. “The Clarinet and Chalumeau Revisited.” Early Music 14, no.

4 (Nov. 1986): 552-555.

Poulin, Pamela L. “Stadler, Anton (Paul).” Grove Music Online. http://www.grovemusic.com

(accessed April 10, 2012).

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Rice, Albert R. The Baroque Clarinet. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.

. The Clarinet in the Classical Period. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Shackleton, Nicholas. “Clarinet.” Grove Music Online. http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed

April 10, 2012).

University of Edinburgh. “Edinburgh University Collection of Historic Musical Instruments.”

http://www.music.ed.ac.uk/euchmi/ (accessed April 11, 2012).

Ward, Martha Kingdon. “Mozart and the Clarinet.” Music & Letters 28, no. 2 (April 1947): 126-

153.

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