Adolf Borsdorf
French Horn player
Friedrich Adolph Borsdorf 25 December 1854 – 15 April 1923), was a German player of the French horn.
Borsdorf was born in Dittmansdorf, Saxony, in 1854. He studied the French horn at Dresden Conservatoire, and played in a military band. In 1879 he moved to England, where he stayed for the rest of his life, becoming the most important horn player in England. The conductor Hans Richter offered him a job in the orchestra at Covent Garden. In 1904 he joined the newly formed London Symphony Orchestra. The four horn players in that orchestra, all excellent players, were often called "God’s Own Quartet".
Borsdorf and his colleague Franz Paersch had learned to play on wide-bore horns that were made in Germany. However, both changed to playing narrow-bore instruments made in France by Raoux. Though not quite as powerful as the German models, they produced a particularly clear sound.
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This entry incorporates text from “Adolf Borsdorf” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.