1827—Dresden, Germany

British traveler Edward Holmes hears a solo trombone performance at a public park: “In this garden it is not unfrequent that concertos or solos on the bass trombone (the pausan, in Germany) are to be heard. The other evening there was a waltz with variations played, which for tone, the rapid tonguing of the notes, and extraordinary shifting, was delightful. On my complimenting the youth who had thus signalized himself, he smiled and said, ‘It requires good lungs;’ a conviction which had pressed upon me before from seeing his inflated cheeks, and the suffusion of moisture on his skin. The cavity of his chest in supplying this enormous tube must have been at every blast as the exhausted receiver of an air-pump; and the appearance of exertion would have been laughable, had not the effect counteracted any tendency of that sort. It is no more possible to affect east in an achievement of this kind, than it was for a stout man whom I once saw scrambling up a garden wall to get out of the reach of a mad dog that was pursued in full hue and cry down a country lane” (Holmes 204-5).