this has been bothering me for a while. who made the flutes that all the top players in germany used in the 1800’s? it then begs to ask why do we never hear about these german masterpieces, cuz surely there had to be highly-skilled master craftsmen making flutes in germany. so, again, if german flutes are no good, what did germans play?
Didn’t they play repertoire in which the flute was called upon to be sweet rather than loud?
Regardless, isn’t poor intonation usually cited here as the most prominent complaint, more than tone?
I’ve been assuming that’s because they aren’t designed for irish/whistle fingerings. We aren’t using the equipment as designed, so calling it badly made strikes me as unreasonable.
Yes, that may be part of it. I’m interested in seeing the responses here.
I think it’s not that all German flutes are duff; rather, when demand was high, they started banging them out at a rapid clip, and the quality slipped. Cheers,
Rob
Daiv, my original Meyers flute, not a Nach, is a great player. There were also a few other makers in Germany that made quality instruments. The problem was the industrial revolution, when they made millions? of low quality flutes, that still show up on eBay. They were sold mail order in the Sears catalog. I could just imagine that they were hard to return, when they were showing up in some little sleepy knoll, no UPS pickup out there!
In addition to Jon’s fine response, many of these flutes were not designed to play at our pitch. I recall posts where some of these out of tune flutes played well in tune at say A=435 or A=445.
Eric
This is true, however I have had German flutes in my shop that were not in tune with themselves, at any frequency! Mainly between the octaves, due to a conical bore that was just wrong.
Take a look at some of the fine German flutes at: http://www.oldflutes.com/german.htm
The German ideal for the tone of the flute wasn’t so much that it be “sweet,” but rather that it blend seamlessly with the sound of the other woodwinds in the orchestra.
Wagner is noted as having hated the Boehm-system flute. He called it a “sound cannon,” precisely because of the nature of its tone to cut through and be heard separately over the other woodwinds instead of blending with them.
–James
Just a further point: even given that there are good German flutes out there, you still couldn’t recommend them to a beginning flutist, because they wouldn’t be able to tell the good from the bad.
–James
Good heavens what ever you do… don’t bring up the war.
Toward the end of WW1, in a last ditch effort, Germany flooded the world with poorly made, out of tune flutes, worse then the mustard gas, were these foul creations…