The thrilling life of the inventor of the saxophone

Not only was he battered by talent envious, he was also “Death” pursued at an early age with strange bad luck.

Pursuit of bad luck

Antoine-Joseph Sax was born on November 6, 1814 in Dinant, Belgium, in a family of 11 children. His parents were musical instrument designers, so from a young age he taught himself the trade, spending a lot of time in the family’s workshop. Even in his childhood, Adolphe showed an innate gift for music and a deep understanding of musical instruments.

At the age of 14, Sax managed to create his own version of the clarinet. At the age of 15, he achieved what his contemporaries considered impossible, creating a clarinet and two flutes out of ivory, promising a bright future.

However, the amazing thing is that he was often stalked by “Death” from a young age but always miraculously escaped death,

At the age of 3, he fell from the third floor stairs, hitting his head hard on the stone floor, unconscious. His parents thought that their child would not survive. However, after only a few days, Adolphe recovered from the disease without being affected.

That same year, Adolphe accidentally swallowed a large needle, the possibility of death from perforation of the stomach and intestines is very high. But the needle had somehow passed through the digestive system without causing any damage.

Not long after, Adolphe mistakenly drank dilute sulfuric acid, then a mixture of white lead, copper oxide, and arsenic, thinking it was milk. But strangely, he passed, without affecting his health.

A few years later, Adolphe suffered severe burns when he fell and landed on a burning stove. But he did not have the infection as predicted by the doctors and only had to bear the scar for the rest of his life.

Another time, while walking on the street, he was hit on the head by a large tile from a nearby roof, causing him to lose consciousness and fall into a coma. Everyone thought Sax could not survive this accident, but after a few days, he woke up and declared: “I’m still alive, Mom!”.

When he was 10 years old, he was in his father’s workshop when a barrel of gunpowder suddenly exploded, sending him flying. Aside from the mystery of why a musical instrument factory stockpiled gunpowder, what’s even more amazing is that Adolphe was unscathed.

Around the same time, he fell into a river. He couldn’t swim, but luckily he got caught in a windmill and was rescued by a random farmer passing by.

Adolphe Sax has outmaneuvered Death so many times, that he has been nicknamed “baby Sax, ghost” and “ghost child from Dinant”. His mother even said: “He is a child cursed by the devil, he will not live long”.

Adolphe Sax (1814 – 1894), father of the trumpet saxophone.

Fraudulent inventor

After that, Death seemed to have forgotten about Adolphe for a long time and he continued to create new instrument designs and other improvements. By the age of 20, he had invented a new fingering system for the clarinet and regularly entered many of his new instruments in competitions, especially at the Belgian National Exhibition, where he was supposed to have won a Medal. Gold but rejected because of young age.

Adolphe Sax is also known as a talented musician, having studied at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and is recognized as a skilled flute and clarinet player.

In 1842, Adolphe Sax came to live in Paris, designing new instruments for French military bands. He combined the sound of woodwinds with brass, what later became known as the saxophone, and patented it in 1846.

At the time, the saxophone was considered an innovative and ahead-of-time musical instrument, although it was slow to gain popularity in the music world. Many other instrument makers sought to antagonize him out of envy for innovations ahead of their time.

Sax began teaching at the Paris Conservatory in 1857 and went on to design many other musical instruments, but it was the saxophone that made him forever known, even if it didn’t make him rich.

Sax went bankrupt three times, designs were repeatedly pirated, and above all saxophones were not accepted in contemporary orchestras, very little used, other than military bands. In addition, Sax’s competitors, always trying to bury this new invention, used all kinds of tricks to smear Sax’s reputation.

Things got even worse, when Death didn’t seem to have forgotten him. Once, Sax’s piano workshop mysteriously burned down, but Sax was fortunate not to be present at that time.

Another time, an unidentified gunman, believed to be employed by Sax’s enemies, shot one of his assistants, claiming it was him. Once he was caught and brutally beaten by thugs, but miraculously, he survived.

From 1853 – 1858, Sax suffered from lip cancer, which was considered the equivalent of a death sentence at the time, but he made a miraculous complete recovery thanks to an Indian doctor.

This person merely treated him with herbal remedies. After drinking some concoction, the tumor grew so large that he was forced to eat through a tube, but then it gradually shrunk and completely disappeared.

Bad luck also lurked for his family, two of his five children died in infancy. Finally, Death prevailed in 1894, when Adolphe Sax was 79 years old, not a bad thing for a man whose bad luck had pursued since childhood.

After the death of Adolphe Sax, the saxophone found its way to the United States, where it became a craze with jazz musicians and eventually became a popular instrument worldwide.

Although Sax died in poverty, his invention changed the face of music forever, his saxophone design remains unchanged to this day.