History
The celesta was invented in 1886 by Parisian harmonium builder Auguste Mustel. His father, Victor Mustel, had developed the forerunner of the celesta, the typophone or the dulcitone, in 1860. This consisted of struck tuning forks instead of metal plates, but the sound produced was considered too small to be of use in an orchestral situation.
Pyotr Tchaikovsky is usually cited as the first major composer to use this instrument in a work for full symphony orchestra. He first used it in his symphonic poem The Voyevoda, Op. posth. 78, premiered in November 1891. The following year, he used the celesta in passages in his ballet The Nutcracker (Op. 71, 1892), most notably in the "Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy", which also appears in the derived Nutcracker Suite, Op. 71a. However, Ernest Chausson preceded Tchaikovsky by employing the celesta in December 1888 in his incidental music, written for a small orchestra, for La tempête (a French translation by Maurice Bouchor of Shakespeare's The Tempest).
The celesta is also notably used in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 6, particularly in the 1st, 2nd and 4th movements, in his Symphony No.8 and Das Lied von der Erde. Gustav Holst employed the instrument in his 1918 orchestral work The Planets, particularly in the final movement, "Neptune, the Mystic". It also features prominently in Béla Bartók's 1936 Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. George Gershwin included a celesta solo in the score to An American in Paris.
The celesta is used in many 20th century opera scores, including Puccini's Tosca (1900), Ravel's L'heure espagnole (1911), Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), and Die Frau ohne Schatten (1918), while "an excellent example of its beauty when well employed", is the Silver Rose scene in his Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Busoni's Arlecchino (1917) and Doktor Faust (1925), Orff's Der Mond (1939), Menotti's Amelia Goes to the Ball (1937), Britten's The Turn of the Screw (1954) and A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960), Susa's Transformations (1973), and Philip Glass' Akhnaten (1984).
The keyboard glockenspiel part in Mozart's The Magic Flute is nowadays played by a celesta.
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