Aubertin

Aubertin. For many trumpet players this is still a name to conjure with. At the age of 82 Louis Aubertin, the last representative of this family of makers, lives alone at no. 10 rue Bordier in the French town of Aubervilliers. As he is on the verge of oblivion, we at BRASS BULLETIN felt we should pay tribute to him.

A few words of history

Louis knows very little about his grandfather apart from the fact that he was an apprentice valvemaker with Courtois around 1850 and that he was not very happy in business. It was Louis’s father Alfred, born in 1874, who was the kingpin of the organisation and gave it its reputation. He was an impeccable craftsman.

I often advised him to expand the business, Louis relates, but he didn’t want to take on any employees. He was no businessman!

Alfred was the worrying type, anxious to have regular work. His only son Louis, born in 1905, started a hard, rigorous apprenticeship with him immediately after the first world war. He played the cornet a little. He was completely devoted to his father’s business and “never got round” to getting married. When Louis came back from his military service in 1927, he started his masterpiece, as journeymen had done in the days of the guilds. Taking more than 1200 working hours (this was before the Aubertin trumpets started), he made five wonderful miniature instruments (a trumpet in C/B/B♭/A, a B♭ cornet, an E♭ alto horn and a valve trombone). Perfect, indeed exceptional craftsmanship. In his son, therefore, Alfred had found an unusually able colleague. The Aubertin valvemakers were to become the famous Aubertin trumpet makers.

Aubertin’s heyday was between 1935 and 1968. Most of the trumpets at the Paris Opéra and in the great French, Swiss, and Belgian orchestras (Bernard Jeannoutot, Roger Delmotte, Maurice André and many other famous soloists) and elsewhere began to play these fine instruments built with such care.

We only made trumpets, sometimes some cornets and flugelhorns. Our mouthpieces were greatly sought after too. — Louis smiles

Remember that we never did any advertising and never had any brochures or catalogues printed. My father and I together produced about twelve to fifteen trumpets a month.

Summoned by Vincent Bach

On 8th July 1946 Alfred Aubertin received a letter from his illustrious American counterpart, Vincent Bach. It contained an order for “one of those nicely built B♭ trumpets”, — 880 vibrations — and with a valve bore of 8,5 mm up to 11,66 mm.

Until 1954 Vincent Bach kept trying to get the Aubertins to work with him, but without success. Alfred’s answer:

Given the size of your business, I do not think it would be possible for us to work together

(21st January 1955).