Arnold Dolmetsch

In the Schubert Club’s early decades, its still all-female and surprisingly adventurous “student section” devoted several evenings each season to special topics such as opera and oratorio, American and contemporary music. Among those presentations, the concert titled “Music of the Olden Time” presented on February 17, 1906 at St. Paul’s Park Congregational Church by the French-born, naturalized British violinist-cum-everything-else Arnold Dolmetsch stands out as a landmark in the Club’s history. At a time when early music was virtually ignored except as a subject of academic study, Dolmetsch became the key figure in the revival of older repertoire on original instruments. His passion and, with it, the ever-expanding movement it launched was ignited in 1879 when he attended a concert of Renaissance and Baroque instruments at the Paris Conservatoire. Afterwards, Dolmetsch bought and restored a viola d’amore and soon started acquiring and copying other historical instruments. He made his first lute in 1893 and his first clavichord in 1894. He also built spinets, viols, fortepianos, harps, rebecs and Baroque violins. It was said that “owning a Dolmetsch instrument became a status symbol in smart society”. Throughout this period he and his family – meanwhile having moved from France to England – gave concerts at home on their period instruments.

The first American Dolmetsch appearances were in 1903, mostly in and around New York and Boston. They were warmly received, and the family returned the following year. A planned seven-week tour was extended several times, and the American audiences’ enthusiasm, greater than that of the British, convinced Dolmetsch to stay in the US. After briefly settling in Chicago, he and his family moved in 1905 to Boston where he signed a contract with Chickering & Sons to establish and run a department for the manufacture of early instruments. Just before the outbreak of World War I, the family returned to England, and there he created an early-music center and perfected the first modern recorders built to Baroque specifications.

There is an excellent website dedicated to the life, career and influence this fascinating, pivotal figure in Western music history. (It also contains links to many other interesting Dolmetsch-related entries): https://www.dolmetsch.com/Dolworks.htm The author writes that Dolmetsch, “possessing a remarkable range of skills, those of performer, maker, scholar and promoter, was uniquely placed to understand the problems inherent in studying and re-presenting a tradition that, by the end of the 19th century, had completely disappeared. He had both the imagination and the musicianship to take a musical work that had become a museum piece and to make it speak to the people of his own time in a language intelligible to them.”