The English horn is neither English nor a horn
The cor anglais is really an alto oboe, about half as long again as its better-known sibling and prized for a mellow, plaintive voice. Its misleading name probably comes from a medieval German word for angelic, which by chance also meant English, and it barely reached England until the 1830s.
It is pitched in F, a fifth below the oboe, so its music is written a fifth higher than it sounds, and oboists usually double on it since the fingering is almost the same. It normally lacks the oboe's lowest key, so its range runs from the E below middle C up to the C two octaves above it. What gives the darker, veiled sound is a wider reed, a conical bore that widens over a longer distance, and a bulb-shaped bell known as the Liebesfuss. The reed sits on a slightly curved metal tube called the bocal. Within the family it plays the alto, with the oboe as soprano and the oboe d'amore, pitched in A, in between.
The instrument emerged in Silesia around 1720, when the Weigel family of Breslau put a bulb bell on a curved body like that of the oboe da caccia. Those older tenor oboes resembled the horns blown by angels in medieval religious art, which earned the German name engellisches Horn. Because engellisch also meant English at the time, the angelic horn became the English one, and the label stuck after the oboe da caccia fell out of use around 1760. A rival theory deriving it from the French angle, for bent, is rejected because nobody used that term before it was proposed in the late 19th century.
Its first known orchestral part comes in the 1749 Vienna version of Niccolo Jommelli's opera Ezio, with Gluck and Haydn following in the 1750s. Vienna became a hotbed: the Teimer brothers inspired a wave of trios for two oboes and cor anglais, among them one by Beethoven in 1795. In Italy bassoonists often played it, reading from bass clef, as in Rossini's William Tell overture. Ironically, France used it regularly only from around 1800, and the first printed English use of the name cor anglais dates from 1870.
Solo showcases stayed scarce until the 20th century, though Sibelius gave it the haunting lead in The Swan of Tuonela in 1893. Most modern instruments are made from African blackwood by firms such as Loree and Howarth, and British players simply call it the cor.
Source: Cor anglais
