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A Tribute to

FransVester

Musician, Scholar, Author

The prolific and incisive work of this Dutch scholar and
teacher, one of the 20th centurys greatest contributors to
flute playing and its repertoire, is described in this article by
a former student.

by Mia Dreese

36 The Flutist Quarterly Summer 2006

I studied with him for 11 years. Without a doubt he played a

major role in my development as a musician and as a human
being. I often think of him as my spiritual father.

The Teacher
Vester was an innovative teacher. He stimulated his students
with creative practicing procedures. He wanted us to
wake up, as he called it. He would say that everybody
was sleeping, and it was his duty to make his students
aware of their musical feelings. Consequently, we were
required to read a lot of books, including even Zen in the
Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel.
Vesters teaching emphasized music-making as the goal
and flute playing as the means. He used to tell us: Compare
music-making with the work of a carpenter: If you want to
build a beautiful bookcase, first learn to form a perfect
plank.
He paid detailed attention to phrasing, direction, tempo,
vibrato, and style. And he also had a remarkable sense of
rhythm. One of his methods for teaching rhythmic feel was
to teach his students to conduct. Although he had never been
a student of Marcel Moyse, he always told me that he had
learned to play Mozart by listening to Moyses recordings of
the Mozart concertos.
He loved one-liners: Dont try, but play. Fingers always
play allegro. Emphasize heavy parts of the measure. Upbeats
are light.
And his slogan is unforgettable: Reckitts blue! In his
youth, his mother used to add special powder to whiten the
wash. The Reckitt Company made this magical powder. For

ADRIAAN VAN WOUDENBERG

y former teacher Frans Vester was a scholar with a

sharp wit and insatiable curiosity. He influenced
many musicians, including flutists, in the
Netherlands and abroad both with his flute playing and his
views on performing and musicianship in general. The
Danzi Woodwind Quintet (19581970), of which he was
founder and artistic leader, performed worldwide. His lectures
and articles about playing the flute and performance practice
made him well-known to many flute players.
True musicianship meant for Vester taking on responsibility
and truthfulness toward composers and their compositions.
According to Vester, the interpretation of a composition
should be based on knowledge and not on personal
intuition. Proper knowledge for interpreting a piece is
acquired by adequately studying musical sources. All activities
of Vester were based on this clear philosophy. The myriad editions of flute music that he prepared are examples of his
scholarly and truthful approach.
Frans Vester was born May 22, 1922, in The Hague and
studied flute and piano at the Amsterdam Conservatory.
During World War II, he studied composition to evade
working for the Nazis in Germany. His status as a student
helped lower his chances of being forced to join the
Arbeitseinsatz. On May 3, 1987, just before his 65th birthday,
he died from lung cancer.
In 1962, I became a pupil of one of Vesters students. I first
met Frans Vester when he visited my lessons. We had long
talks and played duets together. I often went to his concerts. In
1965 I became his student at the Royal Conservatory of
Music in The Hague, where he was professor of flute. There

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him, these somewhat ridiculous words had become a sign that

even when all went wrong during a concert, if he was able to
think of something crazy like that, he could certainly finish his
performance. He had a great sense of irony and humor.
Another anecdote: Vester didnt like vacations. As long as
the conservatory was open he was sitting in his room. All
students were welcome to have a lesson. So one day I came
in at 10 a.m. and left at 5 p.m. And we didnt even play duets
that day.

Chamber Music
The Danzi Quintet toured the world and gave premieres of
many important woodwind quintets, several of which were
written for the Danzis. As part of the tours, Vester gave workshops that brought foreign students from all over the world to
The Hague.
Whoever hears the remastered recordings of the Quintet
will hear a way of music-making that resembles well-known
string quartets. One can hear that each member of the
group knows exactly what the others are doing. They listen
to each other and know what they want to say with the
music. Nobody is a soloistor, better stated, each is a
soloist, but in the right way.
I doubt if Vester preferred one special musical style. For
him, music-making was made of the same general substance,
although each period had its own language.
Baroque music was one of his specialties. When he was
young, he read the Versuch by Quantz in addition to many
more books about 18th-century music. He regarded these
books as his teachers, because it was from them that he
learned basic performance practice rules. In the beginning of
the 1950s, when he was 30 years old, Vester recorded the Bach
Partita live on the radio, playing on a traverso from his own
collection. Later he always hoped that this recording would be
lost, because over time he grew uncertain about his original
interpretation.
In the 1970s, the Netherlands was, together with Austria
(and its Nikolaus Harnoncourt), a pioneer in the performance
practice of baroque music. Vester formed an ensemble with
the recorder player Frans Brggen, cellist Anner Bijlsma, and
harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt. They played on period
instruments, including Vester on flute or (again) traverso. At
that time, he was well into his 50s. One of his most deeply
moving recordings is that from 1971 of the Mozart Concertos
on a traverso.
He never urged his students to play on period instruments,
because he believed that the music was more important than
the instrument. He provided his students with traverso fingerings by Hotteterre and Quantz, but his instructions for playing the ancient to the modern flute were the same. His only
requirement was that all of his students had to compile their
own scholarly reference library.
The first movement of the Solo Sonata by C.P.E. Bach was a
work for which Vester had very strong ideas. The changing
feelingsthe passions or affectsin this complicated piece
were of utmost importance. The harmonic progress was
essential, as was rhythm, but the tempo was rather free; he
almost played it like an improvisation.

Vester, left, Koen van Slogteren, Adriaan van Woudenberg, Brian Pollard,
and Pem Godrie.

Editor and Author

Frans Vester paid extra attention to notation. He was convinced that written notes hardly showed the possibilities for
interpretation of a piece. Since printers and editors were often
careless while copying, or even translating, a piece, it is not
surprising that notation disturbed him. Before a student started practicing a piece, Vester appeared with his pencil and
entered slurs and dynamic signs, and even corrected notes. For
many pieces he owned the manuscript or an original printed
version, and he was always willing to loan a copy.
He was most active in a time when copy machines did not
exist, thus had to copy many scores by hand. When I started
practicing the Boulez Sonatina I was astonished that he gave
me a copy in his handwriting, which had the page turns
organized for a better performance version. That must have
been quite a job. He enjoyed copying by hand because, in the
process, he was able to gather a solid impression of each piece.
His first editions were the 100, the 125, and the 50 Classical
Studies, a collection of studies chosen from books written
between 1700 and 1900. Not only are they useful for fingering
technique and style, but they are also musically interesting. I
remember how relieved I was that I no longer had to require
my own students to buy all those separate books. Their parents were also relieved not to have to pay for an endless number of separate volumes.
Two collections with lesser-known but still very interesting
German and French baroque sonatas illustrate the nature of
the chamber music pieces Vester edited. In these editions, the
dynamic signs are correctly placed, slurs are added in brackets,
the continuo part is written out for harpsichord and not for
piano, and a foreword from the editor introduces the material, so additions or changes can always be clearly seen.
Whenever I visited Vester at his home he was thrilled by some
new musical discovery. He could speak for hours about music,
always over a glass of whisky, a bowl of peanuts, and the
unavoidable cigarette.
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A TRIBUTE TO FRANS VESTER, MUSICIAN, SCHOLAR, AUTHOR

Quantz describes it. For example: tenderness, gaiety, pathos,
flattery, heroism, sadness, anger. Quantz wrote that music
should rouse and still the passions. Along with the passions
there must always be contrasts: loud/soft, expression/no
expression, tension/relaxation, difficult/easy.
Vibrato was used in special places, including long
appoggiaturas, long or very expressive notes, and, according
to Vester, when the player felt it was unavoidablewhich
would be in exceptional cases. A tone without vibrato was
the starting point. That is why vibrato was considered an
ornament.

Romantic Music

On the occasion of his retirement as professor of flute at

the Royal Conservatory in 1984, the Dutch Government
asked Vester to write a book on the performance practice of
music by Mozart. Published after his death, W.A. Mozart
On the Performance of the Works for Wind Instruments is a
major achievement in musicology for 18th-century music,
and its integrity is beyond reproach.
Vesters rules, as laid out in the book, are based on books,
treatises, and his own experiences.
The dictatorship of the barline means that in 4/4 bars,
the 1 and the 3 are emphasized, the 1 more than the 3. In 2/4
and 3/4 bars, only the 1 is emphasized. This explains why the
word diminuendo in Mozarts music does not appear very
often. The diminuendo was natural and did not need to be
notated. In those days every performer understood this principle. To avoid these little accents, the composer could make
use of slurs, ties, dots, or syncopation.
Articulation is very important in what Vester called talking music. Slurs are always combined with a diminuendo,
and generally the last note under a slur is shortened, to make
the beginning of the next articulation clear. (Marcel Moyse
told me the same thing.) Articulation shows us the emphasized notes amidst the light ones. It is Mozart, not Mozart.
Moyse said: I love you and not I love you. A slur always
gives more expression to the notes than separated notes or
notes with dots.
Phrasing is like articulation: clear, as in speech.
Although the word affect was used less in Mozarts day
than in the baroque, the concept was still alive, a normal part
of performance practice and used in the spirit in which
38 The Flutist Quarterly Summer 2006

The Catalogs
Vesters Flute Repertoire Catalogue appeared in 1969. In that
precomputer era, he had written all the information on
thousands of small cards, contained in little baskets all over
his house. The catalog has sold more than 80,000 copies and
has been out of print for years.
This was followed by his Flute Music of the 18th Century.
(He compared this work with compulsive peanut munching.) The 18th-century catalog lists as completely as possible all written chamber music and ensemble combinations
that include the flute. It is also invaluable as a reference
book for articles and relevant writings about the most
important flute works. In addition, it notes the library where
the music can be found. The book is an important source of
information for flute players and musicologists.
Vesters enormous collection of historical and modern
scores was cataloged in 2002 and is available in two parts.
A large part of the collection came out of his interest in
18th-century flute literature. Because of his artistic leadership
of the Danzi Quintet, the amount of music for wind quintets
in the collection is immense. In addition, there are pieces
for flute solo, flute with orchestra or piano accompaniment,
chamber music with flute, and homogeneous flute ensembles.

COURTESY VESTER FAMILY

Frans Vester at 11, circa 1933.

Vesters knowledge of the flute literature was so complete

that his students were all working on different pieces.
Consequently, we were introduced to lesser-known
composers such as Johann Nepomuk Hummel, Carl
Czerny, Albert Franz Doppler, Francois Borneand
Friedrich Kuhlau, the Beethoven of the flute. In a period
during which well-known composers interest in the flute
as a chamber music instrument diminished, Kuhlau wrote
some 130 works using the flute in different combinations.
The collected works of Kuhlau are indeed a treasure that
Vester found useful for pedagogical purposes and for
performances.
The six Divertimenti by Kuhlau appeared in 1825. It is
remarkable that the piano part was added ad libitum,
probably on request of the editor. In the first edition, in a
Danish magazine, it is a solo piece. Although Kuhlau stated
that he was able to play the flute only a little bit, this piece
shows that he understood it very well. It is no doubt that
his friendship with Anton Berhard Frstenau was an
inspiring influence on his compositions for the flute.

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Selected Works of
and About Frans Vester
Publications by Frans Vester
De Fluit (J.J. Lispet, 1948)
Flute Repertoire Catalogue (Musica Rara, 1967)
Flute Music of the 18th Century (Musica Rara, 1985)
Blazer en vibrato (Wind Player and Vibrato)
(Mens en Melodie, 1961, Het Spectrum, Utrecht, the Netherlands)
Concerning the Flute (Broekmans and Van Poppel, 1984)
Catalogus van de Nederlandse Fluitliteratuur
(with Rien de Reede) (F. Knuf, 1988)
Beter een originele geest dan een origineel instrument
lectures and articles (F. Knuf, 1992)
W.A. MozartOn the performance of the Works for Wind
Instruments (Broekmans and Van Poppel, 1995)

Publications by Others
Catalogue Collection Frans Vester, Part 1: Editions before 1900;
Part 2: Editions after 1900 (MuziekGroep Nederland, 2002.)
Frans Vester, ed., The Flute Library series (F. Knuf, Buren)
J. de Vaucanson: Le Mchanisme du Fluteur Automatique
(Paris, 1738)
An Account of the Mechanism of an Automation or Image
playing on the German Flute (London, 1742, reprint 1979)
C. Delusse. LArt de la Flte traversire (Paris, 1760, reprint 1979)
M. Corrette. Methode pour apprendre aisment jouer de la
flte traversire (Paris, 1735, reprint 1978)
J.G. Tromlitz. Ausfhrlicher und grundlicher Unterricht die
Flte zu spielen (Leipzig, 1791, reprint 1973)
Ueber die Flte mit mehreren Klappen (Leipzig, 1800, reprint
1973.)
A. Hugot and J.G. Wunderlich. Mthode de Flte. (Paris,
1804, reprint 1975)
J.J.H. Ribock et al. Bemerkungen ber die Flte (1782,
reprint 1980)

Editions
Broekmans and Van Poppel (Amsterdam)
M. Blavet, Gigue-en-Rondeau and Rondeau. Flute solo
Concerto in A MinorRecueil des pices, 9 pieces for 1 and
2 flutes (Couperin, Hotteterre, Blavet)
F.A. Hoffmeister. Three duets for two flutes, op. 20
W.A. Mozart. Grand duo pour deux fltes, op. 76
I. Pleyel. Duo deux fltes
B.T. Berbiguier. Trois duos pour deux fltes, op. 61
K. Kummer. Trio for three flutes, op. 58
A. Reicha. Trio for three flutes, op. 26
W.A. Mozart. Don Giovanni for two flutes and cello/bassoon
or flute, violin, violoncello (or flute, oboe, bassoon)
M. Blavet. Troisime livre de sonates pour la flte traversire
avec la basse
V. de Michelis. Notturnino for four flutes, op. 37

Universal (London)
100 Classical Studies for Flute
125 Easy Classical Studies for Flute
50 Classical Studies for Flute
F. Kuhlau. Three Fantasies for Flute Solo op. 38
J.S. Bach. Flute Obbligatos from the Cantatas
W.A. Mozart. Six Sonatas for Flute and Piano, Book I and II
W.A. Mozart. Six Duets for Two Flutes, Book I and II
C. Czerny. Duo Concertante op. 129 for flute and piano
J. Haydn. 12 Pieces for the musical clock for flute and piano
G.P. Telemann, J.F. Kleinknecht, J.G. Mthel. German Baroque
Sonates
F. Couperin, L. de Caix dHervelois, J.M. Leclair. (French
Baroque Pieces)
W.A. Mozart. Five pieces for three flutes
F.X. Gebauer. Quintet no. 2 E-flat Major, for wind quintet
A. Reicha. Two andantes and adagio for flute, cor anglais,
clarinet, horn, and bassoon
J. Haydn. Seven pieces for the musical clock, for flute, oboe,
clarinet, horn, and bassoon (adaptation by Frans Vester)
L. van Beethoven. Adagio and Allegro for the musical clock,
for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon (adaptation by
Frans Vester)
L. Spohr. Concerto in modo duna scena cantante (version for
flute and piano)
Universal (Vienna)
A. Hugot. 25 Grandes Etudes, Op. 13, Book I and II
W.A. Mozart. Rondo in D fr Flte und Orchester, K. Anh.184
Musica Rara (London/Monteux)
F. Lachner. Quintet no. II in E-flat Major (1827) for wind quintet
F. Danzi. Quintet op. 68, no. 3 in D Minor for wind quintet
A. Reicha. Quintet op. 99, no. 2 in F Minor for wind quintet
F. Schubert, W. Matiegka. Notturno, D 96 for flute, guitar,
viola, cello
Mills Music (London)
W.A. Mozart. Andante fr eine Orgelwalze, K. 616, transcribed
for wind quintet by Frans Vester
Fantasie fr eine Orgelwalze, K. 608 transcribed for
wind quintet by Frans Vester.

Recordings
Danzi Quintet speelt Reicha & Onslow, vol 56 (Philips)
(A list of most of the recordings can be found in Concerning
the Flute.)

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A TRIBUTE TO FRANS VESTER, MUSICIAN, SCHOLAR, AUTHOR

Vester also had an amazing amount of first editions of
19th-century music, including music that was published in
magazines. These magazines provided original and edited
music for entertainment and study for a large number of
dilettante flute players.
Contemporary music was very important to Frans Vester.
He believed with a passion that composers are entitled to
hear their music performed. And he loved working with
composers, even collaborating with them. He premiered
many important compositions, several of which were written
for him.
We may be forever grateful to Frans Vester for sharing his
talents with so many of us. Perhaps his significant role in
musical life in the Netherlands is best characterized by an
incident that took place a week after his death. My agent
asked me if I could now play Bach normal again!
Frans Vester, the musical devil, could not have wished
for more. >

40 The Flutist Quarterly Summer 2006

Barthold Kuijken and Mia Dreese with Vester at his 60th birthday in 1982.

was a professor of flute at the Groningen Conservatory in

Holland and now privately teaches flute, traverso, and the
historical development of the flute. Dreese is president of the
Dutch Flute Society and editor of the quarterly, FLUIT.
Editors note: The author presented a version of this information
in a lecture recital held August 13, 2005, at the 33rd National
Flute Association Convention in San Diego, California.

PETER VAN MUNSTER

Mia Dreese studied flute with Frans Vester at the Royal

Conservatory in The Hague, the Netherlands, where she
received the First Prize with Distinction. She consequently
studied traverso with Frans Vester and Frans Brggen. In 1976
she was awarded the Prix dExcellence (the highest award in
the Netherlands). She has won the Silver Fock-Medal prize and
the Silver Vriendenkrans prize of the Concertgebouw. Dreese
has performed throughout Europe, Israel, and the U.S. and on
radio and television throughout Europe. She has performed
professionally on both modern and historic instruments,
including the traverso and the romantic keyed flutes. Dreese