Author of Beethoven's indigestion

Wilhelm Klingenbrunner (1782-mid-19th century), who worked full-time as a "landständischer Cassen-Beamter" at the Lower Austrian Landobereinnehmeramt, taught himself to sing, play the flute, clarinet, basset horn and guitar, as was customary in bourgeois circles at the time. However, playing music just to pass the time, as a "dilettante", was not enough for him. He was an excellent flautist, a member of the Society of Friends of Music, founded in 1812, and was active as a composer and - under the pseudonym Wilhelm Blum - also as a popular poet in the artistic circles of his time in Vienna. Almost 70 compositions of an unpretentious but pleasing character for flute or csakan have come down to us from him, as well as arrangements (e.g. of Mozart's Magic flute) and instrumental schools, such as a "flute school in two sections based on his own experience".

The works in this new edition are taken from the "New Theoretical and Practical Csakan School" published around 1815. This enjoyed great popularity within a short time, not least because of its instructions on recorder technique and performance practice. For example, the contemporary understanding of the "staccato repulsion sign" reads as follows: "passages marqued with punctures demand the special attack of each individual note", i.e. not a short note as is usual today, but a particularly emphasized note.

This selection, published in the "Diletto musicale" series, includes an informative preface and 25 short duets of increasing difficulty and varying character in the light-footed style of the Biedermeier period. Song-like movements and common dance forms such as minuet, waltz, alla polacca or angloise alternate.

Not only as a composer of "popular little works for the flute and the csakan" (as Gustav Schilling's Musical lexicon from 1840), Klingenbrunner seems to have shown talent. He always caught the fish for Beethoven and was therefore jokingly referred to by the latter as the fish warden. Once, however, he seems not to have caught any fresh fish, whereupon Beethoven wrote disgruntledly in his conversation book: "I have a spoiled stomach / Klingenbrunner / He is to the flute what Gelinek was to the piano / Nothing but variations on the usual beat."

Wilhelm Klingenbrunner: 25 small duets from op. 40, for two recorders in C (flutes / oboes / violins or other melody instruments), edited by Helmut Schaller and Nikolaj Tarasov, DM 1490, € 17.95, Doblinger, Vienna