preserved in the museums of the Brussels Conservatoire and of
the Berlin Hochschule (Snoeck Collection). The tubes are of great thickness
and the holes are bored obliquely through the walls. Both instruments are
in A.

Attempts were made in Italy to overcome the mechanical difficulties by
making the bore of the bass clarinet serpentine. A specimen by Nicolas
Papalini of Pavia[3] in the museum of the Brussels Conservatoire has the
serpentine bore pierced through two slabs of pear-wood; the two halves,
each forming a vertical section of the instrument, are fitted together with
wooden pins. The outside length is only 2 ft. 3-1/2 in. and there are
nineteen finger-holes.

Joseph Uhlmann of Vienna[4] constructed a bass clarinet, also termed "bass
basset horn," with twenty-three keys and a compass from Bb through four
complete octaves with all chromatic [v.03 p.0492] semitones. These
instruments resemble the saxophones (_q.v._), having the bell joint bent up
in front and the crook almost at right angles backwards, but the bore of
the saxophone is conical.

Georg Streitwolf (1779-1837), an ingenious musical instrument-maker of
Goettingen, produced in 1828 a bass clarinet with a compass extending from
Ab to F, nineteen keys and a fingering the same as that of the clarinet
with but few exceptions. In form it resembled the fagotto and had a crook
terminating in a beak mouthpiece. The Streitwolf bass clarinet was adopted
in 1834 by the Prussian infantry as bass to the wood-wind.[5] Streitwolf's
first bass clarinets were in C, but later he constructed instruments in Bb
as well. Like the basset horn, Streitwolf's instruments had the four
chromatic open keys extending the compass downwards to Bb. The tone was of
very fine quality. One of these instruments is in the possession of Herr C.
Kruspe of Erfurt,[6] and another is preserved in the Berlin collection at
the Hochschule.

It was, however, the successive improvements of Adolphe Sax (Paris,
1814-1894), working probably from Grenser's and later from Streitwolf's
models, which produced the modern bass clarinet, and following up the work
of Halary and Buffet in the same field, he secured its introduction into
the orchestra at the opera. The bass clarinet in C made its first
appearance in opera in 1836 in Meyerbeer's _Huguenots_, Act V., where in a
fine passage the lower register of the instrument is displayed to
advantage, and later in _Dinorah_ (_Le pardon de Ploermel_). Two years