The Cor anglais

The cor anglais is the orchestra’s great mourner. A fifth below the oboe, with a wider bore and a closed pear-shaped bell, it speaks in a voice that the oboe cannot quite reach — darker, slower to ignite, and more inward. Composers have always understood this. From the shepherd of Tristan to the Largo of the New World, the instrument is summoned when a melody needs the weight of memory upon it.

It is, in effect, an alto oboe — the same fingerings, the same embouchure, the same family of reeds. Most orchestral oboists double on it. But the family resemblance can mislead. The cor anglais is not merely a transposed oboe; it is a different instrument with its own gravities, and writing for it as a low oboe is the surest way to misuse it.

The body is grenadilla, in two joints, stained almost black. The reed is double, slightly larger than an oboe’s, and is mounted not on a staple driven into the wood but on a slim curved metal tube — the bocal or crook — which lifts it to the lips at a natural angle. At the lower end the bell flares not outward but inward, into a closed pear shape called the Liebesfuß: the same bell that gave the older oboe d’amore its name and that gives the cor anglais much of its veiled tone.

The keywork is, in essentials, that of the modern conservatoire oboe — the same Boehm-influenced system perfected by the Triébert workshop and then by Lorée. The instrument therefore poses no fingering puzzle to the player who knows its smaller cousin. What changes is the air, and the patience required of it.

Berlioz, in his Treatise, called the tone of the cor anglais “melancholy, dreamy, and rather noble — a kind of distant echo, the voice of a bygone age.” It has not since been improved upon as a description. The instrument carries within it a faint air of pastoral — the shepherd’s pipe, the ranz des vaches — and composers have rarely tried to argue with that inheritance.

The middle and lower registers are where it lives. There the sound is warm, slightly nasal, candid; the player can shape a long phrase with the directness of a singer. The upper register exists, and is used, but with care: above the staff the tone narrows, the reed strains, and the instrument begins to lose what made it itself in the first place.

“Melancholy, dreamy, and rather noble — a kind of distant echo, the voice of a bygone age.”

— Hector Berlioz, Treatise on Instrumentation

Use the instrument when the music wants for inwardness. It will repay any composer who treats it as a soloist first and a member of the choir second.

Most players come to the cor anglais from the oboe. Write for it as though for that other instrument, but a slower, graver one — and a few habits will serve you well.

• i.Notate in F. Write a perfect fifth above the sounding pitch, in treble clef. The instrument has been written so since Wagner, and the player expects nothing else.
• ii.Live in the middle. Most of the great solos lie between written E₄ and E₅. Stay there for the singing material; venture above and below for colour, not for distance.
• iii.Allow the doubler to change. A second oboist switching to cor anglais needs eight to ten bars of rest, and a moment to settle the reed. Build the change into the music, not against it.
• iv.Spare the highest fifth. Above written A₅ the tone hardens and the instrument’s particular grace is lost. If you must climb that high, climb briefly.
• v.Trust the silence around it. The cor anglais is heard best out of texture, not within it. Thin the accompaniment to a held chord or a pizzicato pulse, and the solo will carry by itself.

For all else, write as you would for the oboe — and then ask the player. Cor anglais soloists are, almost without exception, generous teachers of their own instrument.

Five passages — a beginning, not a survey — by which to know what the cor anglais has been asked to do, and what it has consented to give.

1. № 01

   Dvořák — Symphony No. 9, From the New World

   Largo

   The most famous cor anglais solo ever written — a melody so settled it has been mistaken, more than once, for a folk tune older than itself.

   Listen on Spotify
2. № 02

   Sibelius — The Swan of Tuonela

   Lento

   The instrument as the swan itself, gliding on the river of the dead. Almost the entire tone-poem is given to it.

   Listen on Spotify
3. № 03

   Wagner — Tristan und Isolde

   Act III, opening — the shepherd’s lament

   A solo of more than two minutes, alone behind the curtain — Wagner’s clearest portrait of grief without a witness.

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4. № 04

   Berlioz — Le Carnaval romain

   Andante sostenuto

   A love song lifted from the unfinished Benvenuto Cellini — wide, unhurried, taking the long way home.

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5. № 05

   Rossini — Guillaume Tell

   Overture, Ranz des vaches

   A pastoral dialogue with the flute, set above bare strings — the Alps in two reeds and a bow.

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Further entries will be added as our study deepens.

The cor anglais traces its descent to the oboe da caccia — the curved hunting oboe of the early eighteenth century, for which Bach wrote some of the most affecting obbligato lines in the Passions. From its bent body and pear-shaped bell came the silhouette and the sound that the modern instrument still preserves.

The first instruments recognisable as cor anglais — straight-bored or gently angled, with a closed Liebesfuß bell — appeared in Silesia and Vienna around 1750. The name itself is a small mystery. Neither English nor a horn, the instrument is sometimes said to derive its French name from the older cor anglé (angled horn); the explanation is plausible, contested, and now beyond settling.

Wagner’s Act III shepherd in Tristan und Isolde, in 1865, is the moment at which the cor anglais became fully itself. Two minutes of unaccompanied solo — the longest of its kind in the orchestral repertoire — settled both the instrument’s expressive territory and the manner in which composers would, ever after, deploy it: alone, at a distance, marked the burden of a remembered grief.

In Paris, F. Lorée — heir to the Triébert workshop — produced toward the end of the nineteenth century the cor anglais of the modern conservatoire system: even in scale, accurate in pitch, and at last the unambiguous equal of its smaller cousin. The Lorée pattern remains, with refinements, the instrument played in nearly every professional orchestra today.

The cor anglais of the present is, in essence, the late-Romantic instrument with quieter keywork and steadier intonation. It is the one Sibelius wrote for in The Swan of Tuonela, the one Shostakovich wrote for in his symphonies, the one Copland called upon in Quiet City. Its repertoire grows still, but slowly: the instrument is rarely written for casually, and that, perhaps, is part of why it has aged so well.

Specifications

A summary, for the composer’s desk.