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The timbre of the ophicleide’s lower notes is rough, but it can do wonders in some cases when placed below a mass of brass instruments. The highest notes have a raw quality which have perhaps not been sufficiently exploited. The middle range, particularly when the player is not very skilled, is all too reminiscent of the sound of the serpent and the cornet. I think it is best for them not to be left exposed. There is nothing more vulgar, I would even say more monstrous and less designed to blend with the rest of the orchestra than those more or less fast passages written as solos for the middle range of the ophicleide in some modern operas. It is rather like a bull escaped from its stable and frolicking in a salon.

The middle range, particularly when the player is not very skilled, is all too reminiscent of the sound of the serpent and the cornet.

MileMarkerZero wrote:An oldie, but a goodie:

THE OPHICLEIDE

The Ophicleide, like mortal sin,
Was fostered by the serpent.
Its pitch was vague; its tone was dim;
Its timbre, rude and burpant...

"That sounds disgusting!!!....what is it?"

An clearly unsympathetic Conductor Edo De Waart at a rehearsal for Sydney Olympics opening ceremony.

A certain young man played the Ophicleide,
the crowd when they heard it, "take 'im off" they cried!,
But he puffed and he blew,
'til he won them quite through,
"It's so sweet and so true and so soft" they sighed.

"Before he left he stood in wonder before a monstrous piece of musical plumbing called the Ophicleide which stood, dusty and majestic, in a corner....and dammit it really was a twelve-keyed, 1824-era, 50-inch, obselete brass Ophicleide. The storekeeper explained how his great-grandfather had brought it over from the old country and nobody had played it for two generations except an itinerant tuba-player who had turned pale green on the first three notes and put it down as if it was full of percussion caps."

(Theodore Sturgeon, And Now the News....,Short stories, 1954)

-"...and his uncle who tried to commit suicide by shutting his head in a carpet bag, and his father who played Ophicleide and died insane as they all do..." (Virginia Woolf, Selected letters/to Vanessa Bell-1916)

The psychiatrist . . . drove off [into the mountains] . . . he began to pray that nothing would go wrong with the car, and sure enough, ten minutes later he thought something had. Any car that made a noise like the one he began to hear was strictly a shotrod, and he pulled over to the side to worry about it. He turned off the motor and the noise went right on. . . It was sort of like music, but like no music currently heard on this or any other planet. It was a solo voice, brass, with muscles. The upper notes, of which there seemed to be about two octaves, were wild and unmusical, the middle was rough, but the low tones were like the speech of these mountains themselves, big up to the sky, hot, and more natural than anything out to be, basic as a bear’s fang. . . And he was playing, or anyway practicing, the ophicleide, and on his shoulders was a little moss of spruce needles, a small shower of which descended from the tree every time he hit on or under the low B-flat. Only a mouse trapped inside a tuba during band practice can know precisely what it’s like to stand that close to an operating ophicleide.