Music: Militant Antiquarian

Time changes all things—even “immortal” music. The notes Beethoven put down on paper are the same notes today, but the instruments Beethoven wrote them for are not the same instruments. He wrote for an orchestra about half the size of the modern symphony orchestra, for mechanically imperfect horns that brayed uneven melodies, for oboes that bleated out of tune. His piano had shorter strings, his violin a shorter neck; both were different in tone quality from their modern equivalents. Eighteenth-Century Bach’s violin was played with a bow shaped like an archer’s. It drew a mere twitter compared to that of Mischa Elman’s. Handel used obsolete instruments like the recorder and the harpsichord, which are replaced in most present-day performances by the wholly different flute and piano. The Elizabethans played lutes, viols and virginals. Music, even a hundred years ago, sounded very different from music today.

Today’s musical instruments are mechanically more perfect, louder toned, technically more flexible than any in history. But are they better? No! rails England’s bearded little musical Medievalist Arnold Dolmetsch. And he can prove it. Today in the little old-world Surrey hilltown of Haslemere, an hour’s drive from London, he continues to build lutes, recorders, rebecks, clavichords, teaches his family and friends to play them, scolds critics and virtuosos, lectures on thesuperiority of preclassical music. To Dolmetsch great music did not begin with 17th-Century Johann Sebastian Bach; it ended with him. Each summer, disciples and music-lovers from all over the world flock to Dolmetsch’s annual Haslemere Festival, sit enthralled while Dolmetsch and his pupils play bardic tunes, Elizabethan airs and 18th-Century cassations.

Last week was Arnold Dolmetsch’s 80th birthday. He left the seclusion of his workshop home in Haslemere to attend a celebration in his honor at London’s Art-Workers’ Guild. Present were 150 intimate friends, and a representative of the French Ambassador, who bestowed the insignia of the Cross of the Legion of Honor on the aging musicmaker. Music was supplied by Wife Mabel Dolmetsch, who plays the violone (ancestor of the double bass); their daughter Cecile, who sings and plays the treble viol (ancestor of the viola); Daughter Nathalie, who plays the recorder (a nobler wooden ancestor of today’s 10¢ tin whistle); Son Rudolph, who plays the harpsichord (ancestor of the piano); Rudolph’s wife Millicent, who plays the viola da gamba (ancestor of the cello); Son Carl, who plays several of the ancient instruments, and Carl’s wife Marie, who plays two of them. A large white birthday cake sported 80 candles; on its edges were inscribed in frosting the words of 16th-Century King Henry VIII: WithouteDyscorde and Bothe Accorde now let us be.

Cosmopolite Dolmetsch, son of a piano maker, was born at Le Mans, France, of Bohemian, German, Swiss and French ancestry, started out to be a violinist, studied with famed Violinist Vieuxtemps at the Brussels Conservatoire. But in 1889, while poking about the musical archives of London’s British Museum, he happened to come across manuscripts of a 17th-Century English music for viols. Violinist Dolmetsch had heard 17th-Century scores revived by modern musicians on modern instruments, and, like many, had found the results flat as saltless soup. But as he studied the old scores, he began to see that they contained subtleties that could not be translated into present-day musical terms. Other old English scores confirmed his idea. Fired with enthusiasm, he began to collect viols, lutes, virginals and other old instruments, studied their construction and taught himself how to play them. Increasing fame as an authority brought him a seven-year engagement in 1902 with Boston’s Chickering & Sons, for whom, he made clavichords, harpsichords.

Since the early part of the World War he has lived quietly in Haslemere, making his own instruments just as the 16th and 17th-Century craftsmen made theirs, piecing together bits of historical information on how they should be played, playing the old music, teaching others how to play it. The idea of artistic progress rouses Dolmetsch’s fiery disdain. Says he in his time-resisting French accent: “There has been no improvement in any art, at any time, anywhere! There have been little changes—like in fashions—but you usually find that where you’ve gained something you’ve at the same time lost something else that makes up for it. … The modern piano is the impurest, the beastliest instrument that the world has ever seen.”