Arnold Dolmetsch Simulacrum

The Life

Arnold Dolmetsch was born in Le Mans, France, in 1858, into a family of piano and organ makers. He studied violin at the Brussels Conservatory under Henri Vieuxtemps and later at the Royal College of Music in London, but his decisive formation came through his own research in the British Museum and the Bodleian Library, where from the 1880s he began studying the manuscripts and prints of English Renaissance and Baroque music. He taught himself to play the viol, the lute, and the recorder, and — more consequentially — to make them, applying his family’s craft training to instruments that had fallen out of use for more than a century. In 1894 the Dolmetsch family exhibited their reconstructed instruments at the Royal Society of Musicians, marking the first serious public appearance of purpose-built early instruments in modern England.

He worked in Boston for the Chickering piano firm from 1905 to 1911, and in Paris for the Gaveau firm from 1911 to 1914, building historical keyboard instruments and consorts of viols and recorders for American and French patrons. In 1917 he settled permanently at Haslemere in Surrey and established the workshop that would remain the centre of his activity for the rest of his life. In 1915 he had already published The Interpretation of the Music of the XVII and XVIII Centuries, the first systematic modern treatise on historical performance practice. In 1925 he founded the Haslemere Festival, the annual gathering that presented his instruments and repertoire to an increasingly convinced public. He died at Haslemere in 1940. The workshop continued under his children, and the modern historically informed performance movement traces its direct descent from his work.

The Thought

Dolmetsch’s central conviction was that the music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — and by extension of earlier periods — had to be performed according to the conventions documented in the sources of its own time, not according to the performance conventions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that had been applied to it as if universal. The Interpretation of the Music of the XVII and XVIII Centuries (1915) set out the project systematically: rhythm and tempo, with attention to notes inégales and the specific rhythmic conventions of each national school; the full taxonomy of ornament signs and their realisations, drawn directly from the tables of CPE Bach, Couperin, D’Anglebert, Quantz, and Leopold Mozart; expression and articulation appropriate to each period and instrument; the use of the lute, the viol, the clavichord, and the harpsichord in their proper roles. The period treatise was authoritative; modern convention was not.

Alongside this textual scholarship ran an argument about instruments that was both practical and theoretical. The instruments a piece was written for were not incidental to the music but essential to its sound, articulation, and expressive character: a Bach keyboard suite played on the piano became a different piece, legitimate perhaps as a transcription but not the same music. The project of historical performance therefore required not only correct ornamentation and phrasing but correct instruments, and since most of them had fallen out of manufacture, they had to be made. The Dolmetsch workshop at Haslemere became a laboratory in which each reconstructed lute, viol, recorder, clavichord, or harpsichord was in effect a three-dimensional theoretical hypothesis: this is what the music sounded like. The argument was empirical and could not, in the end, be refuted by words — only by building a better instrument.

The Legacy

The historically informed performance movement of the second half of the twentieth century — led by figures such as Gustav Leonhardt, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the various Dolmetsch descendants and pupils, and the early-music consorts of Oxford and Cambridge — is the direct institutional descendant of Dolmetsch’s Haslemere workshop and Festival. The recorder’s restoration as a serious concert and pedagogical instrument; the viol consort’s return to active repertoire; the harpsichord’s recognition as the correct instrument for most seventeenth- and eighteenth-century keyboard music; the disciplined consultation of period ornament tables and treatises as analytical sources — all trace to his work.

By the 1980s, historically informed performance had become a mainstream tradition within the concert world. Dolmetsch, dismissed as an eccentric outsider when he began, had been vindicated by the course of the century. He was the first modern performer-scholar to take seriously, in practice, the idea that the performance conventions of a past period are themselves a form of knowledge — and that recovering that knowledge requires the ear, the hand, and the workshop as well as the library.