Michael Praetorius, trombones from the Syntagma musicum, 1614-1620. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
London, Saturday 1 September 2012. In the orchestra pit of the Royal Opera House, Wagner’s Die Walküre is in rehearsal. Christopher Goldscheider, the orchestra’s viola player, is in his place in the row. Behind him, a few steps away, sits the full brass section: eighteen instruments among trumpets, trombones, horns and tuba. During the rehearsal the sound at his stand reaches peaks above 130 decibels. Goldscheider leaves the hall with hearing damage that will never go away.
Six years later, on 28 March 2018, the High Court in London finds in his favour, in a judgment that the English press calls unprecedented for the world of music. The measurements reported in the judgment speak plainly: at Goldscheider’s stand the average level was about 92 decibels, above the threshold of 85 beyond which British noise-at-work law obliges the employer to act. The theatre appeals, arguing that music cannot be treated like the noise of a factory floor, because in an orchestra sound is not a by-product of production but the product itself. On 17 April 2019, the Court of Appeal rejects the argument: the orchestra pit too is a workplace, and the noise rules apply there as elsewhere.
The case answers, obliquely, a question that anyone who has watched an orchestra has asked at least once. Why are the brass at the back? The main reason, which we have told on Melos in writing about the geography of the stage, is power: a trumpet and a trombone send their sound forward, straight, through a bell that works like a megaphone, and placed in front they would cover everything. The horns are an exception only in appearance: their bell points backwards, and the sound reaches the hall after bouncing off the wall or the acoustic shell behind them.
The orchestra is built like a landscape in perspective. In front the most numerous and weakest voices, the strings; then the woodwinds; at the back the metal and the percussion, which need no help to be heard. Wagner carried this logic into architecture. In the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth, inaugurated in 1876 precisely with The Ring of the Nibelung, the pit descends in steps beneath the stage and is covered by a hood: the strings sit on the highest level, near the opening from which the sound exits towards the hall, while brass and percussion sit at the back, at the deepest and most hidden point. The audience hears a softened orchestra, over which the voices float.
All of this works for the listener. For the player, the perspective has a flip side. The sound that the hall receives smoothed arrives full, with no distance, for those who sit a metre in front of the bells. In an opera house the problem gets worse, because the pit is narrow and the rows cannot move as far apart as they would like. Wagner, besides, asks of the brass a mass that Mozart’s orchestra did not know. Inside that space, on 1 September 2012, sat the eighteen brass of Die Walküre and, right in front of them, the violas.