“This is a man of penetrating, tenacious, bright mind, persistent and firm in any test. He is simultaneously a mathematician, an acoustician, a chaser, a foundry worker and a turner. He knows how to think and do - he invents and does it himself. G. Berlioz
The joiner-carpenter Charles-Joseph Sax and Marie-Jose Masson from the Belgian town of Dinant had eleven children, seven of whom died before becoming adults. Their firstborn named Antoine-Joseph, whose bicentennial was celebrated last year, was born on November 6, 1814, lived 80 years and became famous for the invention of the “mouthpiece ophicleide”, patented under this name in 1842 and now known to everyone and everyone.
We should not be embarrassed that this name and title say nothing to our ears.
Antoine-Joseph from about the age of 16 began to be called Adolphe Sax, and shortly after his official birth, the ophicleid was “baptized” again by Hector Berlioz and received from him light hand the name saxophone, after the inventor. It is noteworthy that the instrument, by its very shape, seems to glorify its creator, imitating his initial by the bend of the body.
Charles-Joseph Sax, being a skilled carpenter, even before the birth of children in his workshop at the house on New Rue Dinant (since 1896 bearing the name of his son), somehow decided to try his hand at building a piano. The attempt was successful, and he also took up stringed instruments. Although he was and remained self-taught, his violins were approved professional musicians, and he decided to expand production, starting to manufacture wind instruments, and in 1815 he ventured to move to Brussels, where the quality of his bassoons and clarinets was appreciated by a high-ranking music lover - Willem the First, King of the Netherlands, to which then Flanders and Wallonia, the future Belgium, belonged territorially. From 1820 Charles-Joseph Sax became a courtier music master. During his life, he received more than a dozen patents for the improvement of copper and wooden tools, participated in many exhibitions, had distinctions, was personally involved in the supply of wind instruments to the Orchestra of the Royal Guard, and served music faithfully and passionately, which did not save him from ruin.
Charles-Joseph noticed early on that his eldest son had inherited his interest in music and especially brass.
By the age of ten, imitating his father and learning from his workshop, the boy could carve a thinly curved pipe, grind valves, assemble an instrument from parts, and by the age of sixteen he had made his first flute and clarinet on his own. With the help and support of his father, young Adolf took up the continuation of the family business. He gushed with ideas, invented, improved and reproduced instruments tirelessly. In 1830, he took part in the Industrial Exhibition in Brussels, where he put on a show with a clarinet and two flutes carved by him from ivory. By the age of twenty, he came up with a completely new type a clarinet with 24 valves, followed by a bass clarinet, which was noticed and appreciated by the director of the Paris Opera François-Antoine Habenec, who specially came to Brussels for this exhibition and, by the way, spoke of the clarinets of other masters as "barbaric" .
As at any time, not everyone was to the liking of such a rapid ascent and recognition young talent. At an audition in the Grande Harmonie of the Royal Brussels Orchestra, which at the same time became a test exam for the instruments of a novice master, the soloist of the orchestra refused to play Sax's clarinet offered to him, citing the fact that the instrument comes "again from this pet."
Adolf took this as a challenge and stated that he agreed: let the soloist play his clarinet, and he will play his.
The contest in the spirit of Apollo and Marsyas took place, and, according to the documented protocol, passed under four thousand listeners. Not only the clarinet won, Adolf himself was accepted into the orchestra and became its soloist. According to the remaining evidence, during his work in the orchestra, such complex inserts and cadenzas were written especially for him, which then no one could repeat. ( Music world never stinted on the creation of such legends. But the notes of the archives do not lie: everything was so.)
Reviews of contemporaries about the character of Adolf Sax have also been preserved. He was very independent, distinguished by energy, courage, perseverance. And he, as befits a young daring man, recklessly believed in his strength. He turned down an offer to start his own business in St. Petersburg, just as he turned down an invitation to settle in London with vaguely outlined likely prospects. He believed in his talent and wanted to realize it in Europe, only outside of Belgium, which had become too close for him.
1842 was the year of the great turning point in the life of Sachs.
At that time, Sachs himself considered his own instrument simply a technical novelty in the old well-known family. His legitimized French name ophicléide was made up of Greek words"snake" and "key", and was patented in the year of the birth of Adolf himself by the Parisian Jean-Hilaire Aste, as an instrument of the clan of klappenhorns (byugelhorns with valves), similar to a bassoon. The design invented by Sachs was a reed wind musical instrument, which, according to the principle of sound extraction, belongs to the family of reed woodwinds. Wherein new tool It had a metal conical body, a mouthpiece with a single reed (borrowed almost unchanged from the clarinet), a system of annular valves by T. Boehm, but at the same time it had a “serpentine” shape, or, as contemporaries noted, a funny shape of a smoking pipe.
Hector Berlioz, reserved and reserved, listened for several hours to the impulsive Belgian,
promising to think and give an answer in a few days. Sachs spent these days in understandable excitement: Berlioz possessed great influence V musical environment Paris and had a wide range of valuable contacts, including among critics, on whose opinions in the press so much depended.
On June 12, 1842, in Le Journal des Débats, Berlioz published an article that looked more like an ode, in which he literally praised the master and his innovation, for the first time calling the instrument a saxophone, after the master, which was immediately picked up by the French and Belgian press. “This is an instrument with a full, pleasantly vibrating sound, huge in power and easy to soften. His main merit, in my opinion, is the diversity of the beauty of sound, sometimes with an accent, sometimes without, full of passion, sometimes dreaminess and melancholy; an echo echo, a faint howl of wind in the forest, or rather, the mysterious flickering echoes of a bell after it has struck. Not a single instrument that I have known so far has such a strange sound at the limit of silence, ”wrote Berlioz.
This review served as the beginning of Sax's fruitful and productive life in Paris.
Inventor, composer and performer, he was now accepted in all salons, interacted with a large number of composers who believed in him, arranged presentations of instruments in his studio and in famous halls. Berlioz himself soon wrote Chorale for Voice and Six Wind Instruments, which, in addition to the saxophone, used other instruments designed or improved by Sax, and personally conducted his work in 1844. In addition, he included an article on saxophones in his essay The Art of Instrumentation. The novelty immediately began to be used in their opuses by A. Thomas, F. Halevi, J. Meyerbeer, J. Massenet, C. Saint-Saens and J. Bizet. Since 1857, Adolf Sax opened a saxophone class at the Paris Conservatory, taught there himself and published manuals for the school of playing on all the instruments he invented.
In essence, Sachs became the father of not one instrument, but a whole family,
uniting four main types: saxhorns, saxtrombones, saxtubes and saxophones proper. Of the fourteen varieties of saxophone he designed, seven are now in use: sopranino, soprano, alto saxophone, tenor, baritone, bass and contrabass. (For one only "Bolero" by M. Ravel, three of them are required at once: sopranino, soprano and tenor.)
The shape of the parabolic cone, fortunately found by Sachs, and the principles of acoustic ratios he subtly studied, constitute the technical secret of the saxophone and are the source of its unique timbre.
But not everything was cloudless.
Fame went hand in hand with the inevitable envy, hostility, inertia and speculation. Sax was opposed by less fortunate windmakers who challenged the exclusivity and primacy of his instruments, the brand was declared invalid, and the markings of saxophones were constantly changing. He had to cancel his patents, he was pecked by critics, newspapers were full of cartoons, he was forced to endlessly drag around the courts, tired of attacks and accusations, surrendered under the onslaught of claims, lost and was declared bankrupt three times: in 1852, 1873 and 1877. Sax was saved from the fourth fiasco by the intervention of Emperor Napoleon III, who was his admirer. All this was like a trial in the case of counterfeiters, where the tragedy of the situation was that it was not the scammers who had to dodge and invent, “distracting” their counterfeit coinage, but the most honest owner of a legitimate and genuine treasure. In 1853, Adolf's father, also unable to maintain his own business and workshop in Brussels, moved to Paris to support his son and until his death, which followed in 1865, lived side by side with him, helping him in the production of saxophones, glorifying the name of the family.
Adolf Sachs was devotedly engaged in the service of music during the years of legal persecution and financial failure.
By 1845, the military bands and chapels of France were breathing their last breath and almost ceased to exist. Sachs presented to the Minister of War, General Rumigny, the work of musical reorganization of the orchestras and proposed both his reforms and his instruments. A special commission was convened, which decided to arrange a competition between the traditional system and the one proposed by the restless Belgian. Is it necessary to say that the formula for the resuscitation of wind military ensembles, suggested by Sachs, won?
The list of inventions and improvements introduced by Sachs was very long. He taught both at the conservatory (its director at that time was D. Aubert, who inherited the post from L. Cherubini), and in military orchestras. He defended his dissertation on the effect of playing wind instruments on the human lungs, wrote instructions for inventors, excellent studies on the acoustics of various halls, projects to improve the sound of brass and woodwinds, - in total about forty original works, showing that the inventive spirit of Sachs was not broken by economic problems.
Due to the wobbly financial position or not, Sachs never officially married.
He lived in an unmarried marriage with the Spaniard Louise-Adela Maor, and they had five children, whom he unconditionally recognized, but, nevertheless, never sought to present to the general public, probably also because of the very humble origin of their mother.
Adolphe Sax died in poverty on February 7, 1894, and was buried in the Paris cemetery of Montmartre in a family crypt, which depicts a saxophone, and where six other members of his family are buried besides him. family affairs music factory continued by his son, Adolphe-Edouard, and since 1928, she passed into the possession of the Parisian company "Selmer".
His best offspring continues to live and to this day is in good health.
At the beginning of the 20th century, jazz penetrated Europe, where the saxophone became one of the dominant instruments and had big success. Along the way, in the 1920s, there was a new surge of interest classical composers to the saxophone. D. Milhaud, M. Ravel, and later P. Hindemith, A. Honegger, A. Berg, S. Prokofiev, D. Shostakovich and many other composers included it in their orchestral scores. There is also a wide range of works for solo saxophone, including opuses by A. Glazunov, C. Debussy, J. Ibert and others. , at the suggestion of Professor Dunnels, the example of Paris was followed by the Brussels Conservatory.
Since 1954, the stone of the house in Dinant has been engraved with the inscription "Ici naquit Adolphe Sax. 1814-1894" ("Adolf Sax was born here"). In Dinant, there is a monument to Sax, depicted sitting on a bench with a saxophone in his hand; you can sit next to and take a picture in an embrace. Before the introduction of the euro, Sax and his creation were featured on the 200 Belgian franc note.
In memory of the inventor and musician, since 1994, a international competition saxophonists.
On the popularity of the instrument in wide circles, from amateurs to professionals, from classical performers to jazz players, from students to presidents, and there is no need to say.
The Brussels Museum of Musical Instruments, which opened in June 2000 in the city center in an amazing building of the Art Nouveau "Old England", owns a wide collection of wind instruments, including the rarest specimens of serpents, ophicleides, cornets, flugelhorns, experimental and outlandish instruments. The works of Sachs and his factory can be seen in the display cases of the museum. In autumn, during the days of the 200th anniversary, there was a special exhibition dedicated to the great master and the marvelous creation that bears his name.
We rarely think about musical instruments Where did they come from, who invented them. Indeed, many of them arose so long ago that hardly anyone can know it. But among them there is one relatively young, but today already one of the most famous and beloved, whose sensual and soulful sound pierces the soul - this is a saxophone. And he has a very specific creator, whose name is immortalized in the very name of this instrument - Adolf Sax.
The world heard the voice of the first saxophone less than 180 years ago. There are a huge number of fans of this great instrument and its enchanting sounds all over the world. And today the saxophone is a bright symbol jazz music and blues.
Monuments to the saxophone in the world
The history of the birth of this miracle
The opportunity to enjoy the incredible beauty of the sound was given to us by Adolf Sachs, the son of a musical instrument maker, originally from small town Dinan in Belgium, who inherited an interest in wind instruments from his father.The Sax family moved first to Brussels and then to Paris, where Adolphe opened his workshop for the manufacture of wind instruments. It was here, on the basis of the bass clarinet, that he created his miracle, which at first he called the mouthpiece ophicleid.
The public was rather skeptical about the new instrument of a strange appearance and with a no less strange nasal voice, very far from its today's sound, and Adolf had to spend a lot of time and effort to bring his newly-made ophicleid to perfection.
Introducing his instrument in 1842 famous composer Berlioz, Adolf found in him an enthusiastic connoisseur and friend. The composer was fascinated by the saxophone, published an enthusiastic article in one of the magazines, in which he first called the instrument a saxophone.
« This is an instrument with a full, pleasantly vibrating, huge in strength and well softened sound. His main merit, in my opinion, is the diversity of the beauty of sound, sometimes with an accent, sometimes without, full of passion, sometimes dreaminess and melancholy; an echo echo, a faint shriek of the wind in the forest, or, rather, the mysterious flickering echoes of a bell after it has struck. No other instrument I have ever known has such a strange sound at the limit of silence.", - wrote Berlioz.
And about Sax himself, the composer spoke like this: “ This is a man of penetrating, tenacious, bright mind, persistent and firm in any test. He is simultaneously a mathematician, an acoustician, a chaser, a foundry worker and a turner. He knows how to think and do - he invents and himself performs».
For the saxophone, Berlioz also wrote the first works. Acknowledgment came to Saks, but the saxophone was used mainly as an additional wind instrument in the orchestra. And gradually in Europe, interest in the saxophone almost died out, which was also facilitated by the war that began in 1870.
In addition, many competitors questioned the authorship of Sachs and flooded the courts with numerous lawsuits. Litigation, which lasted for years, although they ended mainly in his favor, but took a lot of nerves and time, in addition, they were accompanied by considerable financial expenses, which practically ruined him.
In 1894, in Paris, a great and talented musical master passed away in poverty.
The rebirth of the saxophone
At the end of the 19th century, a new direction in music, jazz, was born and spread very quickly in America, and the saxophone became the main soloist of jazz compositions along with the trumpet.
Finally, the saxophone has the opportunity to reveal its full potential. The country is getting sick saxophonomania”, which soon spilled over to Europe.
In our country, with its rejection of jazz, until the 70s, playing the saxophone was not even taught anywhere, only the clarinet was held in high esteem.
A special, reverent attitude to the saxophone is observed among the inhabitants of Japan. The Japanese saxophone is gentle, sensual, romantic, sentimental… The same is the music…
Antoine Joseph Sax (under the pseudonym Adolf Sax) was born on November 6, 1814. V small town Belgium - Dinan, in the family famous master wind instruments. His father, Charles Joseph Sax, was a professional, and when the king noticed him, he became the court's music master. This man was not the creator of the saxophone, but without his efforts, Antoine could not have become a talented master inventor.
Charles Joseph Sachs
Charles was respected for the fact that he had golden hands, and at the same time he was tireless and hardworking. He also had great abilities, he constantly improved the already created tools, making them more convenient and changing them. sound characteristics V better side. It was this person who was able to develop own theory about how the column of air is distributed in the tube of a wind instrument. This discovery helped him make holes on the barrel of tools with maximum precision. Many contemporary masters have used his technique for decades. Charles Sax had many awards, medals and diplomas for the qualitative improvement of wind instruments. Between 1825 and 1852, he received 12 copyright certificates for his work.
Adolphe Sax Childhood
It is not surprising that the children of the Saks family grew up in an atmosphere of creative work. Four of the six sons followed in the footsteps of their father, but only one son, Antoine, did it better than the brothers. Father noticed that Adolf had excellent musical abilities, sang well and skillfully played the flute. Instead of hanging out with friends, Antoine sat in his father's studio and watched his actions for hours. The father did not lose such a chance, because it was Adolf who could continue his father's favorite work, and decided to make him his student, who would inherit all the developments and the music workshop. Charles showed Adolf all the subtleties and painstakingly taught his favorite business.
First successes
At the age of 12, Adolf Sachs, without the help of his father, made a casting, a point, polished valves, assembled parts for woodwind instruments, and rolled the horn tube. Such processes require considerable experience, knowledge and skills. Already at the age of 16, he sent to the exhibition carefully finished two flutes and a clarinet made of ivory.
Biography of Adolf Sax
The young man's interests in wind instruments led him to the Brussels Conservatory, where he learned to play the clarinet with the most respected clarinetist and conductor Valentin Bender. Clarinet proficiency helped Adolf test the sound qualities of the instruments he made in his father's workshop. Its purpose was not related to concert activity, he liked to disappear for days in the workshop, honing his abilities. But in the future, performing was very useful in order to promote their inventions.
When the guy was 20 years old, his father entrusted him with the management of his workshops. It was at this time that he takes the first steps, designing wind instruments. At this time, Adolf greatly improved the German system clarinet, equipping it with valves so that its sound became homogeneous. At the same time, the clarinet rose specifications, and sound tuning has become more precise. These works brought him not only awards and money, but also a lot of experience. His new sample For some reason, the clarinet did not become widely used by musicians, but became a good model for other masters of this direction.
Among other things, it is worth noting the improvement of the bass clarinet, which has come down to our times with the same design and shape that Adolph Sax invented. The inventor completely redesigned the bass clarinet, having done some serious work with the location of the sound holes. He also eliminated the timbre heterogeneity of the registers and expanded the range of the instrument. He also added a second blow-off valve, which made the instrument bright-sounding and easy to blow. The old bass clarinet was very bulky, so the Saxo completely redesigned it, adding a curved tube to the top with a wooden mouthpiece on which to put a reed. In the lower part, he placed a metal bell bent upwards, and placed 4 valves on it.
Sachs completely perfected the bassoon and english horn, developed a method that allowed in a matter of minutes to rebuild the registers of the piano and much more. After such successes, an ordinary master became a genius, received many awards and copyright patents, earned popularity and gained experience that allowed him to come up with something of his own, and not improve other people's ideas.
The idea of creating a saxophone
Here he had the idea to create a completely new unique tool which the world has not yet seen. Having studied the composition symphony orchestra Adolf got excited about the idea of creating an instrument that would be brass in itself, but with the principle of woodwind sound production. This idea came to him because the composition of the symphonic and brass band includes woodwinds and brass. Brass has a powerful rich sound, while woodwinds are weak and narrow. Why not make such an instrument that could play on a par with the strong, and at the same time did not drown out the weak, that is, something universal.
They say that the saxophone is an instrument that can most closely convey warmth and tenderness, similar to human voice. Without a saxophone it is difficult to imagine the orchestra of Glenn Miller, best songs Bruce Springsteen, "Money" Pink Floyd…. and all this thanks to one person - Adolf Sachs, who was born on November 6, 1814. Soyuz.Ru remembers the master, whose life story in itself could become the plot of a novel, and also offers to listen to 10 famous compositions with a saxophone.
“... A certain Sax -
Alchemist, power engineer and master,
Herr, naturlich, although not a minister,
Suddenly he invented his ingenious sax”,
So wrote Mike Naumenko in a playful poem "Letter to a friend about music." Of course, the Belgian Adolf Sachs has never been an alchemist, or a master, or even a herr (that is, a German). He was born in the town of Dinant on the banks of the Meuse and from the very beginning seemed to be trying to go beyond what was permitted - he fell from a height of three floors and swallowed pins, drank water with sulfuric acid, mistaking it for milk, was badly burned, experimenting with gunpowder, and once almost drowned.
However, there were also experiments of another year: since childhood, Sachs worked with his father, a musical master, and constantly looked for ways to improve the instruments he helped create. The clarinets and bassoons of Charles-Joseph Sax quickly gained recognition in Brussels, and in 1820 King William I appointed him court music master, entrusting the production and supply of wind instruments for military bands. The clarinet also became the first instrument of Sachs Jr.: Adolphe Sachs studied at the Brussels Conservatory under the direction of the conductor of the orchestra of the First Belgian Infantry Regiment, Valentin Bender. And over time, he thought about how to fill the timbre space between the wooden and brass sections of brass bands, replacing with something common then bass ophicleides - bulky and imperfect instruments resembling a bassoon in shape. According to Sachs, the sound of the new instrument should be closer to string instruments, but more powerful and intense than them.
Interestingly, over the course of his lifetime, Sachs filed about 50 more patents and certificates with patent offices, among them an improved sound system for railways, project concert hall in the shape of an egg, as well as a tunnel under a hill in Montmartre and "Saxocannon" - a giant mortar for firing half a kiloton projectiles capable of leveling an entire city. And yet his main invention was inspired not by cannons, but by the muses: having arrived in Paris in 1836, Sachs became interested in the upcoming reform in local military bands and realized that the powerful wind instrument he was developing would be most welcome both in parades and at war. The first such instrument, in which Sachs combined a conical tube with a clarinet reed, an oboe valve mechanism, and the outline of a bass clarinet, was presented at the 1841 industrial exhibition in Brussels. The musician who introduced it played behind a curtain: the instrument was not fully completed, and the theft of ideas was not uncommon in those days.
Soon, the notorious Hector Berlioz became a passionate champion of the saxophone, who in June 1842 published an article in the Parisian Journal des Debats about the instrument, which he first called the saxophone. He also became the author of the first composition with the participation of the saxophone - Chorale for voice and six wind instruments, in which other instruments designed or improved by Saks were also used. In the same year, the saxophone was presented at an industrial exhibition in Paris.
"Branded" saxophone produced by Adolf Sachs
Continuing to fight for participation in the reform of military bands, Sachs proposed a reform project that included, in addition to the active use of his own tools, and some changes in the training of military musicians. His rivals, led by a certain Michel Carafra, insisted on the same composition of instruments and the same teaching methods and, of course, won over to their side. most tool manufacturers. Nevertheless, in April 1845, a kind of competition took place on the Champ de Mars in Paris, as a result of which saxophones, along with other instruments designed by Sax (such as the saxhorn and saxotrum), were introduced into French military bands in place of oboes, bassoons and horns. The competition, which one of the journalists compared with the Napoleonic wars, was attended by 20,000 people.
On March 21, 1846, Sachs received a patent in France for a "system of wind instruments called saxophones", which included eight varieties. And just five months before receiving the patent, Sax was accused of "fraud and falsification" - the court decision stated that "a musical instrument called the saxophone does not exist and cannot exist." Nevertheless, little by little, saxophones began to be produced in France, and not only at the Sax factory: competitors repeatedly tried to accuse him of allegedly stealing their idea, but failed when the master challenged them to a competition, offering to design new model tool.
The triumph of Sachs could not but arouse the envy of competitors: having united in the "Association of United Instrument Manufacturers", they began to act in the most shameless methods. Patents for the saxophone and other instruments of Sachs were repeatedly tried to be declared invalid through the courts, they tried to lure the workers, the wind instrument factory was burned to the ground, and two assassination attempts were made on him. In 1854, the court nevertheless recognized the right of Sachs to the instrument he invented, but when he tried to receive compensation moral damage for the illegal production of saxophones, legal costs and new processes followed.
Sachs himself by that time managed to prepare many first-class musicians, teaching saxophone at the military school at the Paris Conservatory, but in 1870 most of the students went to the front of the Franco-Prussian war, and after some time the school was closed. The master himself was declared bankrupt in 1877, his factory was closed, and materials and tools were sold at auction (how can one not recall the bitter joke of the Satyricon that if the author of such and such an invention died in poverty, then he is the real inventor). Sachs really died in poverty on February 7, 1894, and a few days later he was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre.
It seemed that the same sad fate awaited his instrument: in 1903, Pope Pius X issued an official ban on the use of the saxophone in music, the publishers of the American “The Ladies Home Journal” directly accused saxophone listeners that they “cannot distinguish between good evil,” and the Nazis released a poster in the 1930s showing a black man playing the saxophone wearing a Star of David. Fortunately, time turned out to be wiser: the music of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Ravel's "Bolero" rehabilitated the saxophone, making it an integral part of jazz, and then rock, modern pop music and R'n'B. The brainchild of Adolf Sax has been changing for the second century and is not going to go out of fashion - and for this we must say thank you to the person with early childhood not afraid to put much, if not all, at stake.
Top 10 Saxophone Songs
Henry Mancini - Theme from The Pink Panther
Dave Brubeck - "Take Five"
Belgian inventor of musical instruments, most known for invention saxophone and saxhorns.
His father, Charles Joseph Sax, was famous master wind instruments, self-taught. The clarinets and bassoons he made were so High Quality that in 1820 he was appointed court music master, and since then he has received many honorary diplomas and medals, more than a dozen copyright certificates
evidence. Musical ability and interest in design was transferred to the children of the master, and most of all to the eldest of eleven children - Adolf (Antoine Joseph).
In 1836, Sachs emigrated from Belgium to France. He has many followers and no less enemies. In 1842 Adolphe Sax opened to Paris
e factory of wind instruments, where he became widely known as an inventor and designer.
Adolphe Sax perfected almost everything known to mankind wind instruments. He created a whole group of instruments for military brass bands "saxhorns".
world fame brought from
shaving the saxophone. Adolf Sachs took the clarinet, replaced wood with metal, adapted a more comfortable mouthpiece and changed the section, making the instrument flaring downwards, providing the new instrument with more progressive oboe and flute fingerings. A patent for the saxophone was received on June 23, 1846.
6 months before obtaining a patent, Sacks lost the case in court - he was accused of "fraud and falsification." A court decision has been preserved stating that "a musical instrument called the saxophone does not and cannot exist."
Leading composers of France spoke enthusiastically about
new tool. Since 1857, Adolf Sax taught the saxophone class at the Paris Conservatory and published manuals for the school of playing on all the instruments he invented.
However, Sacks soon fell victim to unfair competition. Other musical instrument makers have repeatedly sued him for
accusing him of plagiarism (that is, they tried to prove that Sachs stole his inventions from them). As a result, legal expenses ruined Sachs, his musical instrument company went bankrupt, and years of litigation undermined his health.
Having lived long life, Sachs did not live up to jazz and died in
