This is one of a series of twelve concert-etudes, each for a different instrument and each having a specific emotional character or mood. The bass clarinet has been chosen to embody anguish, distress, and affliction, a role which has frequently been assigned to it, beginning with its earliest use in the operas of Meyerbeer and Verdi, and continuing today with its most typical use in mystery and suspense sound tracks in motion pictures and television. Although it had occasionally been used in small chamber ensembles by several Latin-American composer, this appears to be the first solo work published for the bass clarinet outside Europe and the United States. Its composer, Estéban Eitler, was born in Bozen (South Tirol) in 1913 and had been a flutist with orchestras in Budapest before moving to Buenos Aires in 1936.¹ The work is dedicated to Eitler's friend and colleague, the clarinetist Cayetano Bibbo.

Anxiety is convincingly evoked by the piece's interwoven large intervals and its rapid runs ascending from a pp low E to a high ff trill in the manner of a violent outburst. The middle section of the A-B-A form has a feeling of lurking anticipation at a very soft dynamic level before returning to another outburst of the opening material. The tempi indicated are muy movido (♩= 152), comodo (♩= ♪), and movido como antes. A very rapid legato technique, as well as light articulation and clarity at ppp dynamic level are required in the instrument's deepest range while a ff is required at the upper end of the tessitura.

The work is constructed entirely from an octatonic scale, the major and minor seconds of which are arranged according to the pattern 1-1⁄2-1⁄2-1-1-1⁄2-1-1⁄2. The piece as well as both its outer subsections, begins and ends with the pitch E, while the middle section concludes with B. The range extends two octaves and a major seventh, from E to d-sharp''. The instrument's dark low octave predominates. Proportions of range use are:

French notation is used.

¹ J.C.P., "Estéban Eitler," in "Angustia," by Etéban Eitler (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Musicales "Politonia," 1946).