Arnold Dolmetsch

Artist Info

Arnold DolmetschLe Mans, France, 1858 - 1940

Dolmetsch, (Eugène) Arnold (1858–1940), maker of musical instruments, was born at Le Mans, France, on 24 February 1858. He came from a family of musicians. His grandfather, of Bohemian origin, settled in Zürich in 1808. There his father, Rudolf Arnold Dolmetsch, was born and became a piano maker; he was also known for his performances of Bach on the clavichord. His mother was Marie Zélie Guillouard, daughter of Armand Guillouard, a piano and organ maker who taught Arnold instrument making and how to play. Arnold was the eldest son. After his father's death he went to the Brussels Conservatoire for a general musical education and took violin lessons with Henri Vieuxtemps. In 1883 he entered the newly founded Royal College of Music in London, where he studied with Henry Holmes and Frederick Bridge, and was encouraged by its director, Sir George Grove, not only in his professional career as music master at Dulwich College but also in his investigations into the early English instrumental music which he found in the British Museum in 1889.

Thereafter Dolmetsch's life work became the study of the performance of early music and the instruments on which to play it. Confronted with a lack of appropriate instruments he began to construct copies of lutes, virginals, clavichords, harpsichords, recorders, and ultimately viols and violins, and taught himself and others to play them. Dolmetsch made his first lute in 1893, his first recorder in 1919, his first clavichord in 1894; his first harpsichord, produced at the suggestion of William Morris, was shown in 1896. He also worked as an instrument builder in the USA (1905–11) and Paris (1911–14).

Dolmetsch's main contributions to the English musical renaissance, which until then had concentrated mostly on the repertory for voices because of the lack of authentic instruments and players who could use them, were the rediscovery of a school of English composers for consorts of viols (of whom the chief were John Jenkins and William Lawes) and the re-establishment of the recorder as an instrument of popular music. By providing the environment for its performance and instruments, he initiated a movement which has burgeoned into prolific scholarship and technical mastery. In 1915 he published a landmark performance text, The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, the first work of its kind. He settled soon after at Haslemere, Surrey, establishing instrument workshops there and starting, in 1925, an annual festival dedicated to performing early music. Here music that Dolmetsch had unearthed was often played for the first time since its composition on the instruments for which it was intended and in what was hoped to be the original style. The performers were Dolmetsch's family and distinguished circle of friends and pupils, which eventually included the young lutenist Diana Poulton, who was a close family friend in spite of finding Arnold an impatient, bad-tempered, and otherwise poor teacher. Regardless of his shortcomings as a teacher, Dolmetsch introduced many musicians to this repertory, providing them with instruments and the impetus to teach themselves to play. Sir Henry Hadow correctly commented that he ‘opened the door to a forgotten treasure-house of beauty’. The festival concerts lacked the polish that later performers were to achieve, but Dolmetsch remained unabashed. He insisted: ‘This music is of absolute and not antiquarian importance; it must be played as the composer intended and on the instruments for which it was written with their correct technique; and through it personal music-making can be restored to the home, from which two centuries of professionalism have divorced it’ (DNB). This passionate and almost obsessive belief led him to turn his children—Hélène, Cécile, Nathalie, Rudolph, and Carl—into versatile performers on many instruments. With his third wife, Mabel, the family formed a domestic consort every evening, frequently augmented by friends, in which all the participants were expected to perform on several different instruments.

Dolmetsch's improved harpsichords encouraged the use of that instrument for the basso continuo of eighteenth-century operas and oratorios, now a standard practice. His work for viols and lute—exemplified by his three articles in The Connoisseur (1904)—was of the greatest antiquarian, although of less musical, interest. His restoration of the recorder reopened early music to the amateur world, and, although his work making early instruments was quickly eclipsed by other specialist builders, the family name is still synonymous with finely crafted recorders.

In 1928, in honour of Dolmetsch's seventieth birthday, the Dolmetsch Foundation was incorporated for the ‘encouragement of the revival of early instrumental music’. In 1937 he was granted a civil-list pension; in 1938 he was created a chevalier of the Légion d'honneur; and in 1939 he received the honorary degree of doctor of music from Durham University.

Dolmetsch's private life was complex, especially in the decade before 1903. He was thrice married: first, on 28 May 1878 (just after the birth of their daughter, Hélène), to Marie Morel, of Namur, from whom he separated in 1894 (they were divorced in 1898); secondly, on 11 September 1899, in Zürich, to Elodie Désirée, divorced wife of Dolmetsch's brother Edgard (this marriage also ended in divorce, in September 1903); thirdly, on 23 September 1903, to Mabel (1874–1963), one of his pupils and thirteenth of the fourteen children of John Brookes Johnston, an insurance broker, of Denmark Hill. Dolmetsch's eldest daughter, Hélène, was a fine viola da gamba player, but was estranged from her father from 1901 almost until her death. With his third wife—a musicologist and viol player—he had two daughters and two sons: Rudolph, generally believed to have been the most talented of all the children, died during the Second World War, while Carl Dolmetsch (1911–1997) perpetuated the style and approach of his father's work. Although the early music revival in Europe was largely due to Dolmetsch's work, his research did not move on as more information became available, and, despite the careful perpetuation of his tradition after his death—at his home, Jesses, Grayswood Road, Haslemere, on 28 February 1940—its influence soon waned as other views about the performance of early music came to predominate.

H. C. G. Matthew and Julia Craig-McFeely

Sources

M. Dolmetsch, Personal recollections of Arnold Dolmetsch (1957) [with bibliography of Dolmetsch's writings] · M. Campbell, Dolmetsch: the man and his work (1975) · R. Donington, The work and ideas of Arnold Dolmetsch (1932) · The Times (1 March 1940) · W. McNaught, ‘Arnold Dolmetsch and his work’, MT, 81 (1940), 153–5 · DNB · New Grove · D. Poulton, ‘The lute and I’, The Lute, 33 (1993), 23–30