These compositions by the horn player Carl Oestreich show that fame is not always a sign of quality music — nor, conversely, is obscurity proof of the opposite. Carl Wilhelm Eduard Oestreich was born on 18 April 1800 in the town of Spremberg in the Niederlausitz region. He was the eldest son of Johann Carl Gottfried Oestreich, a town musician in Spremberg.
His musical training on the horn began around 1816 in Dresden with members of the Royal Court Orchestra. His teachers may have included the Haase brothers (August and Louis) from that orchestra, to whom he later dedicated a composition. From 1820 he was probably active as a musician in the theatre orchestra in Frankfurt am Main; an early piece of evidence for this is an inscription on a work for horn and orchestra.
On 1 August 1824 he registered in the muster roll of the city of Frankfurt, where he gave his place and date of birth. This document lists him as a member of the local theatre orchestra. On 12 October 1824 Oestreich married — though the wedding took place in his native town of Spremberg. As early as 1832 he was pensioned off due to illness, and he died in Frankfurt in 1840.
Oestreich must have been a successful horn player, since his compositional output is quite extensive. It repeatedly includes pieces for "seconde" horn — works that make principal use of the instrument's middle register. Very little of his music was ever printed, however: for example, only 12 trios for 3 horns were published, by the Frankfurt music publisher Dunst around 1830.
The present works for 3 and 4 horns survive in manuscript in the music department of the Frankfurt City and University Library. The horn quartets (shelfmark Mus Hs 793) and horn trios (Mus Hs 791 & Mus Hs 792) testify to Oestreich's spirit of experimentation and his extraordinary experience with the instrument. They were composed at a time when the valve horn was gradually gaining ground over the valveless natural horn.
Valve instruments offered continuous chromaticism, but at the cost of some of the natural horn's tone colour and sound. Some composers, however, turned what was seen as the drawback of hand-stopping technique — muting the bell with the hand to produce notes outside the natural harmonic series — to their advantage. Minor-key passages could be rendered more plastic and sensitive this way; stopped notes sounded aggressive and piercing in forte passages, yet never overwhelmed the orchestra's overall volume. Schumann, and above all Brahms, continued to prefer the natural horn for this reason, going so far as to call the valve horn a "brass violin."
Whether Carl Oestreich's horn quartets and trios were intended for valve horn or natural horn cannot be established with certainty. What is clear is that Oestreich was familiar with the valve horn. A review of the 12 horn trios from 1830 described them as "exceptionally difficult, and certainly easier to play on the valve horn" — a hint that they were indeed conceived for it.
