Rediscovering Arnold Dolmetsch: going back to the sources of the early music revival

Abstract

This article provides a retrospective overview of the discussion of Arnold Dolmetsch, his family, students and friends in Early Music since its first issue in 1973. It connects these cases with a broad range of other literature, suggests the need to rethink and recontextualize the lifetime of Arnold Dolmetsch and considers the significance of archival materials in the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection newly available at Cambridge University Library (Ms. Add. 10371). In particular, it demonstrates the largely overlooked intercultural dimension of the Dolmetsch family’s contribution to the early music revival, highlighting their interactions with people and music cultures from beyond western Europe. Finally, it suggests a programme for possible future research on the Dolmetsch phenomenon.

Since the first issue of Early Music in January 1973, the names of Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) and many members of his family have featured regularly in these pages. As early as April 1974, Howard Schott’s article ‘The harpsichord revival’ offered detailed discussions of the Dolmetsch family’s contributions in that field.¹ The journal’s first three years also coincided with the final preparation and publication of a major biography of Arnold Dolmetsch by Margaret Campbell (1917–2015), who based her work on primary sources held in Haslemere and elsewhere, as well as on a wealth of interviews and secondary literature.²Early Music’s founding editor J. M. Thomson (1926–99) mentioned the book’s imminent release in his editorial for April 1975, promising that in the following issue it would be reviewed by Robert Donington (1907–90).³

A figure well known to readers of this journal, Donington studied extensively with Dolmetsch in his youth. He was instrumental in establishing The Dolmetsch Foundation, which from 1929 published The Consort (possibly the longest-established periodical devoted specifically to the early music revival and questions of historical performance practice). In an article for Early Music bearing the simple title ‘Arnold Dolmetsch’, he evaluated Campbell’s work positively and concisely (in two paragraphs), then went on to provide some detailed autobiographical recollections of his teacher, and views on the history and state of the early music revival.⁴ The journal’s next two volumes, for 1976 and 1977, included reflections of lutenist Diana Poulton (1903–95) and keyboardist Elizabeth Goble (1907–81) on their experiences and memories of Arnold Dolmetsch as a teacher.⁵

In January 1978 another student of Dolmetsch, viol-player Marco Pallis (1895–1989), contributed an article entitled ‘The rebirth of early music’, in which he wrote that ‘the universality of Dolmetsch’s musical vision placed him in a category apart [from other early music pioneers of his generation]: one can truly speak here of a prophetic mandate which, by the nature of things, remains unique’.⁶ The use of the metaphor of ‘rebirth’ or reincarnation, and the religious aspect of some of the language (such as ‘prophetic’) was probably no coincidence. Pallis—or Thubden Tendzin, to use his later Buddhist name—was an expert on Tibetan Buddhism and was instrumental in introducing Buddhist scholars and Buddhist thought to the United Kingdom (and further afield).⁷ He founded the English Consort of Viols and later taught viol at the Royal Academy of Music. As Pallis describes, he met the Dolmetsches in Liverpool after the First World War; having inherited money from his father, he was able to fund the expansion of the Dolmetsch workshop at Haslemere.⁸

Pallis’s article provides a concise list of what he saw as Dolmetsch’s major contributions: first, his discovery of old, forgotten repertory; second, his insistence that it ‘must be accepted on its own terms’; and third, that it required specific techniques to perform. Critiquing the ‘dogma of “progress”’ about ‘instruments and styles’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, against which Dolmetsch had railed, Pallis suggests that the ‘psychological consequences’ of the Second World War had made the public—especially younger generations—question ideologies about ‘progress’ inherited from the 19th century.⁹ The kind of ‘progress’ Pallis mentions does not refer to forms of political and cultural thinking that we label today with the adjective ‘progressive’. Rather, it pointed specifically to the technological realm, and was bound up with the pervasive impact of industrial modernity on societies around the world, and the destructive violence that was unleashed through warfare and various hegemonic forms of social control. In other words, it was what we now generally call ‘Western industrial modernity’. The reaction of these early music pioneers against technological ‘progress’ extended to resistance against general assumptions about teleology then prevalent in music history, which implied a kind of musical ‘survival of the fittest’. The revival of early repertory and instruments was one way in which individuals protested against such ideas.¹⁰ (Of course, there was a paradox here: Arnold Dolmetsch himself had attempted at times to ‘improve’ on the harpsichord design of the 17th and 18th centuries, with mixed results.¹¹)

In the early 1980s, several themed issues of Early Music made prominent references to Dolmetsch’s contributions in these respects: the ‘Plucked-string issue 1’ (January 1981), ‘The recorder: past and present’ (January 1982) and the ‘Tenth anniversary issue’ (January 1983).¹² The first of these includes an editorial by J. M. Thomson that mentions Arnold Dolmetsch at the outset.¹³ It also contains a review-article by Neal Zaslaw outlining what he calls the ‘Pandora complex’ among ‘distinguished senior musicologists’, who ‘once upon a time pioneered in urging for historically responsible performances of early music’.¹⁴ Zaslaw explains this complex as follows: ‘They opened the forbidden box of historical performance practice and all sorts of things flew out, many of which now displease them’.¹⁵ One of the ‘distinguished senior musicologists’ to whom Zaslaw refers is Donington, cited in an endnote. In the very next article, Donington responds to Zaslaw, giving his text the title ‘Pandora’s box’. He begins, perhaps unsurprisingly, by invoking the name of his teacher Dolmetsch, and describes him as ‘the rebel, and the pioneer to whom our loyalty ascribed an infallibility in matters of early instrumental performance no one would now wish to claim for him’.¹⁶ Elaborating on Zaslaw’s theme, he asserts that ‘Arnold Dolmetsch really was the man to have first opened [Pandora’s box] all those years ago’.¹⁷

Twelve months later, in the journal’s ‘Tenth anniversary issue’, another article by Donington, ‘Why early music?’, continues this line of thought with a bold statement about the field as a whole:

The story should begin with Arnold Dolmetsch; he was born in 1858, which makes it nearly a hundred years since he started to revive despised early music (initially the fine English chamber music of the viols) by the radical but effective expedient of recovering its own instruments and—as then becomes possible—its own manner of performance.¹⁸

He goes on to discuss the history of the early music revival after the Second World War, and mentions also the ground-breaking research into historical dance by Mabel Dolmetsch (1874–1963).¹⁹ (It must be noted here that this is one of only six articles in Early Music—according to the results that emerge during full-text searches on the journal’s website—that mention Mabel, who was in her own right a pioneer of the historical performance movement, in instruments and especially in dance. This is a gaping lacuna in studies of the early music revival that researchers including Fatima Lahham and Brian Blood have recently begun to address.²⁰)

In the ‘Observations’ section of the same issue, Elizabeth Roche writes about George Moore’s novel Evelyn Innes (1898), which features a character—Mr Innes, the father of the heroine—who was clearly based on Arnold Dolmetsch; Roche includes an 1897 drawing of Arnold Dolmetsch by Sir William Rothenstein.²¹ Moreover, Adrian Rose submits a letter that responds to an article on the pardessus de viole published the previous year (in July 1982), highlighting ‘Cécile Dolmetsch’s pioneering work, both in the field of pardessus playing and in her research into its most interesting literature’, and pointing out her world-premiere performance on this instrument some 50 years earlier, at the Haslemere Festival of 1933.²²

The Dolmetsch references in Early Music continue to the present day, but even this brief survey of the first decade’s worth of issues shows that many students and students-of-students of Arnold Dolmetsch have contributed to or been discussed in the journal since its inception. Besides Donington, Poulton, Pallis and Goble, they include Kenneth Skeaping (1897–1977) and Hugh Gough (1916–97), amongst many others. (In the Dolmetsch Foundation’s Bulletin and its own journal The Consort, there have of course been many additional tributes, but that is an enormous topic going far beyond the scope of the present article.) Outside the literary sphere of journals, the extent and influence of these networks in practical, pedagogical and social terms have reached long and far. Taking recent archival forays into account, as I discuss below, I suggest that it is worth thinking afresh about how the legacies of the vision and work of Arnold Dolmetsch have intersected with diverse aspects of the research and careers of subsequent performers and scholars in the field of historical performance practice.

Connections across time and space

In a keynote lecture given in Brazil in 2009, Toronto-based viola da gamba and violone expert Joëlle Morton observed: ‘It’s no exaggeration to say that even today, almost everyone involved in early music has been touched in some way by Dolmetsch, his students or his students’ students’.²³ Besides the contexts of Europe and the Americas, this statement also applies further afield. In Australia, for example, the influence of Dolmetsch spread not only through the efforts of Percy Grainger (1882–1961) in the 1930s,²⁴ but also via a number of Dolmetsch disciples after 1945 and the influence of tours by Carl Dolmetsch (1911–97) in the 1960s.²⁵ As Graham Strahle noted in the October 1979 issue of The Early Music Gazette (then edited by Richard Morrison; this was a supplement to Early Music, printed on plain, non-glossy paper and inserted at the back of issues):

The viol has been established in Australia for several decades. It was first introduced by Professor Donald Peart [1909–81] of Sydney who acquired his enthusiasm for viol-playing together with a profound knowledge of the viol-consort literature through contact with Arnold Dolmetsch in England before he emigrated … One way or another most Australian viol players can trace their initiation either to Donald Peart directly or to some contact with one of his disciples.²⁶

In the February 1998 issue, in a piece titled ‘Some memories of Haslemere’, Layton Ring (1922–2019) highlighted the New Zealand connections of the Dolmetsch phenomenon, mentioning that his own first contact with the Dolmetsches came through writing to Carl in 1945 ‘from the RNZAF [Royal New Zealand Air Force] base in Fiji, asking about harpsichords’, and describing how the 1953 tour of Carl Dolmetsch and Joseph Saxby (1910–97) to New Zealand provided an impetus for the foundation of the New Zealand Recorder Society.²⁷ There is also a growing literature on the Dolmetsch connections with Japan, the history of which spans from at least the 1920s to the present.²⁸

If genealogies clarify the connections between people as links in a chain of personages in music history, it is important moreover to emphasize that over time such chains of practice, aesthetics and materials will break and new ones begin. This observation, which relates to the pre- as well as post-Dolmetsch eras, has been articulated in various ways in Early Music. For example, writing in an editorial for the ‘Keyboard issue 1’ (October 1979), Thomson noted of the reaction of Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) to the first clavichord of Arnold Dolmetsch, made in 1894, that ‘the young Shaw’s uncanny prophetic sense foretold the veritable keyboard revolution of this century so that the broken tradition that existed when Dolmetsch and later Wanda Landowska [1879–1959] began their caravanserais is fractured no longer’.²⁹ The metaphor of the caravanserai employed by Thomson, although clearly orientalist, denotes simultaneously a kind of passage—and also comfortable portable lodging—across inhospitable terrain. Coincidentally, it seems to resonate with something that Arnold Dolmetsch himself wrote, about ‘unbroken’ traditions of musical performance, which he found outside Europe.

In a 1931 article for The Consort, ‘Instrumental accompaniments of early songs’, Dolmetsch reflected on his 1929 visit to Morocco, where he collaborated with local musicians steeped in the knowledge and practice of their craft: ‘There were songs closely resembling those of our troubadours. One famous Arab lutenist recognized at once some of our melodies, but he said: “You play them plain; we should embroider them!” And so they do, in the freest, most daring and effective way. They, thank heaven, have kept the tradition unbroken.’³⁰ (A much more detailed account of the family’s musical and cultural experiences in Morocco is given by Mabel Dolmetsch in the same issue.³¹) In Arnold Dolmetsch’s eyes (as in those of comparative musicologists of his era), many links to the past had been ruptured in western Europe, but preserved elsewhere. He saw his work as embodying a new link to that idealized past, ironically restoring older traditions by attempting to break more recent conventions.

In turn, some of Dolmetsch's students have been described—in the pages of Early Music and elsewhere—as ‘links’ to him. Donington, in an obituary for Elizabeth Goble (in April 1982), wrote that her death in 1981 ‘broke an old and valued link with the early music revival in its early days’ (italics original).³² Campbell, in her biography of Dolmetsch, described Donington as ‘the most important historical link between Dolmetsch’s genius and the academic world’.³³ Similarly, John Koster’s obituary in May 1998 for Hugh Gough, who studied clavichord with Arnold and later became a maker of historical keyboard instruments, included the comment that ‘with a career spanning six decades, he was a key link between the era of such lone prophets as Arnold Dolmetsch and the present, when early music has achieved full acceptance in musical life’.³⁴

Obituaries in Early Music are a poignant yet valuable record of the contributions of numerous individuals in the historical performance movement. Donington himself was given an obituary in November 1990 by Julie Ann Sadie, who—although not using the word ‘link’—described him as playing a ‘pivotal role in the early music movement’; she highlighted his connections and study with Arnold Dolmetsch, which ‘most decisively influenced the course of his career. Through Dolmetsch, he experienced at first hand the relationship between instruments in original condition and the surviving sources … pertaining to them.’³⁵ Later that decade, in February 1998, Layton Ring (in the same piece mentioned above) contributed a joint obituary of Carl Dolmetsch and Cécile Dolmetsch (1904–97); describing their passing as ‘the end of an era for the original Dolmetsch family’ (and mentioning also the earlier decease of other members of the family), he also paid homage to harpsichordist Joseph Saxby, Carl’s long-term musical collaborator.³⁶ In a more recent example (May 2012), an obituary for Montserrat Figueras (1942–2011), Tess Knighton noted that Figueras studied viol with Cécile Dolmetsch in Haslemere in 1966.³⁷

It is thus a testament to the depth of Arnold Dolmetsch’s long-lasting influence as a thinker, practitioner (in performance and instrument-making) and teacher that memories of his and his family’s activities have been regularly discussed and debated in the pages of Early Music since its beginning. Yet it is possibly because of the prominence of succeeding generations of the Dolmetsch family within early music circles, and the quasi-legendary space that Arnold Dolmetsch began to occupy, that the historical context of his own lifetime can be overlooked, as Donington mentioned in 1983 (discussed above). Some of the achievements for which Dolmetsch is principally renowned were accomplished relatively late in his life, but it must be remembered that he was a child of the second half of the 19th century. He imbibed many of the kinds of romantic thought prevalent at that time, associated with movements based on antiquarianism such as pre-Raphaelite art and the work of William Morris (1834–96), as we shall see.³⁸

Back to the beginning

Eugène Arnold Dolmetsch was born on 24 February 1858 in a France that was at that time under the rule of Emperor Napoleon III (1808–73; r.1852–70). To give some further background, it is worth noting that Arnold’s birth took place just eight months before the death (on 31 October) of Karl Thomas Mozart (1785–1858), a son of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) and Constanze Mozart (1762–1842). Other musicians born the same year include Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), Eugène Ysaÿe (1858–1931) and Alessandro Moreschi (1858–1922), ‘the last castrato’.³⁹ In writing about music history I am a great fan of giving dates for as many figures as possible, as I think it helps provide conceptual links between an individual’s stage of life, specific historical events and broader cultural patterns. Consideration of overlapping lifetimes from the mid 19th to early 20th centuries can help us to recontextualize the sound-worlds these individuals inhabited, which both preceded and coincided with the dawn of sound recording. It also reminds us of the immense technological and aesthetic changes they witnessed (and participated in), which formed part of the complex backdrop to the emergence of the early music revival.

Arnold Dolmetsch, whose father was Swiss and mother was French, came from a family of piano-makers and tuners.⁴⁰ His life has been well documented in a number of studies—such as those by Margaret Campbell and Harry Haskell—and I will mention only some salient points here, with further emerging areas of research outlined below.⁴¹ At an early age he appears to have had a thirst for travel: when he was 20 years old he eloped with Marie Morel (1848–1916); they married in London and lived there for a while, then crossed the Atlantic to Louisville, Kentucky, where Marie gave piano lessons and Arnold worked as a piano tuner and technician.⁴² Returning at an unknown date to the European continent, Arnold studied at the Brussels Conservatoire from 1879 for four years, taking private violin lessons with Henri Vieuxtemps (1820–81), before moving to other teachers (after Vieuxtemps’s departure due to ill health), and studying harmony and counterpoint with Ferdinand Kufferath (1818–96); it was there that he witnessed some performances on historical instruments, which made an impression on him.⁴³

In London from 1883 Arnold was among the first generation of students to attend the Royal College of Music. This institution was formally opened on 7 May 1883 and he took the entrance examination the very next day; the records show that he studied violin (with Henry Holmes, 1839–1905), composition (with Sir Hubert Parry, 1848–1918), counterpoint (with Sir Frederick Bridge, 1844–1924), and ensemble-playing from 10 May 1883 to 20 December 1884, receiving his testamur on 23 January 1885.⁴⁴ He then took a teaching post at Dulwich College, where he also met the music critic A. H. Fox Strangways (1859–1948)—founder of Music & Letters, and a researcher of Indian music, whose 1914 book The music of Hindostan became a classic for the time—who became a lifelong friend.⁴⁵

Mabel Dolmetsch records that the viola d’amore, which Arnold had heard in Brussels, became a way in to a new passion; she relates that Arnold bought an instrument made by Testore (illus.1) and that his search for appropriate repertory in the British Museum uncovered instead many other kinds of consort music for viols.⁴⁶ Sir George Grove (1820–1900) encouraged Arnold in his early pursuits, describing it as ‘a fine work’.⁴⁷ Arnold began to collect and restore old instruments, make reproductions, and produce performances of old repertory, attracting the attention of a community of artists in London. His concerts began in December 1891; one early programme, from 1896, has recently been reconstructed and performed by John Butt and the Dunedin Consort.⁴⁸ Much later in his life, in the programme for his 80th birthday concert in 1938 (see a photograph of Arnold at this event in illus.2), Arnold recollected this group of people who attended as ‘the poets, littérateurs, craftsmen, philosophers and lovers of the fine arts who abounded at the time, and made London a fascinating place to live and work in’.⁴⁹

In 1894 Arnold met William Morris, and the rest of his career was in many ways influenced by his association with the Arts and Crafts Movement.⁵⁰ John Butt describes this movement as ‘an early manifestation of a post-industrial tendency’ and observes that ‘the growth of the early music movement under Arnold Dolmetsch clearly fitted Morris’s Arts and Crafts ethos like a glove’.⁵¹ The Arts and Crafts movement railed against industrial production and called for a return to smaller workshop-based processes; its core was tied up strongly with left-wing politics but it later attracted people from the far-right who twisted its principles and adapted them into their own ideologies.⁵² Dolmetsch’s sympathies appear to have been part of the original spirit, however, as Pallis observed in 1974: ‘When I first got to know the Dolmetsch family in the years following the end of the First World War Arnold was still much under the influence of Bernard Shaw as well as William Morris, both of whom he had got to know through the Art Workers’ Guild founded by the latter. This association imparted a certain Fabian Socialist bias to his thinking.’⁵³

Relatively little is published about Dolmetsch’s political views, apart from what Pallis recollected, but archival materials show that he was extremely worried about the rise of Nazism in Germany, as expressed in a letter to Mabel in March 1936, in which he described a speech of Hitler as ‘an insult to the world’.⁵⁴ In 1935 he made note of a conversation on a train, in France, about anticolonial struggles in North Africa. He met the ‘wife of an officer, in Tunisia for six years, [who] was suddenly permitted to take leave’; he quotes her as saying that ‘things are very bad in Algeria and Tunisia, as in Morocco’ and in the next sentence continues: ‘The Arabs are oppressed by the French bureaucrats’.⁵⁵

The social milieux for the Dolmetsches’ early music activities from the early 1890s to Arnold’s death in 1940 were diverse and complex. I have followed other scholars in using the term ‘the Dolmetsch Circle’ to think and write about the community of people surrounding Dolmetsch, and the broader international networks in which they were embedded. This label was already in use in the early 20th century; I recently learnt that it had been applied prominently in 1928, by Christopher Mayson, in the very title of an article he wrote for the Royal College of Music Magazine.⁵⁶ The term and concept of the Dolmetsch Circle is worth considering in further detail as we reconsider the early 20th-century history of the early music revival, and especially one of the regular events at which many members of this group converged: the annual festival of music that Arnold Dolmetsch founded at Haslemere, as discussed below. Re-examining primary sources shines new light on the Dolmetsch Circle and the kinds of musical and scholarly activities in which they engaged, during the lifetime of Arnold as well as beyond.

Back to the sources: a fresh look at the archives

The Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection, a generous bequest made by the estate of Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch (1942–2018)—daughter of Carl and Marie Dolmetsch (1915–96) and the twin sister of Marguerite Blood, née Dolmetsch (b.1942)—to Cambridge University Library in 2019, contains archival materials that shed light on many unknown aspects of the Dolmetsch Circle, regarding not only musical practices but also their broader cultural interests and activities.⁵⁷ It includes the primary sources relating to the well-documented work of Arnold Dolmetsch and his family members on reviving the instruments, music and dances of western Europe, as well as items of a more diverse nature. The latter materials enable and inspire research into the international and intercultural reach of the Dolmetsch phenomenon. There are, for example, works by Mabel Dolmetsch that touch on African and Asian topics, together with draft and published articles on musical instruments and musical practices; her autobiographical writings and scripts for spoken presentations; poems on mystical and esoteric topics; notes taken from other publications; and various drawings and designs. The extensive collection of correspondence includes letters sent to Arnold, Mabel and other members of the Dolmetsch family from many places outside Europe, including Japan, India, Sri Lanka, Morocco, Australia and the Americas.

One of the most revelatory holdings in this collection is a set of diaries belonging to Arnold Dolmetsch—red annual volumes of the Collins’ Royal Diary, with one day per page—in which he recorded many of his activities from 1917 to 1939. Two volumes (1921 and 1922) are missing; the last, for 1939, also contains ‘reminiscences’ from 1940, recorded by Mabel. Written mainly in French, but with some English terms or phrases, Arnold’s entries cover such diverse topics as gardening, livestock (chickens and goats, and even pheasants), study of the playing of particular works, the weather, bombings during World War I, illness and health, arrivals and departures of family members or of guests, financial transactions, a record of letters written in the day, rehearsals and performances, lessons given, and other paid activities such as tuning. He habitually worked on Sundays. In many of these pages he recorded in minute detail every step and challenge involved in constructing an instrument, particularly where experimentation was involved. The diaries show that Arnold’s devotion to gardening (for produce) was intense, and globally diverse: for instance, in 1931 he received seeds from Canada.⁵⁸ In 1936 he was given penguin eggs, presumably for consumption (one wonders if they were freshly laid, at a zoo) along with foie gras pâté.⁵⁹ Margaret Campbell discussed many entries in Arnold’s diaries in her 1975 biography—as she points out, ‘the most consistently recorded events are the two main preoccupations of Dolmetsch’s life: his garden and the weather’—but there remain further details to be drawn from them.⁶⁰

In other parts of the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection, correspondence, plans for concerts, concert programmes and travel documents (including Arnold’s British passport, issued to him after his naturalization in 1930) show clear evidence of international integration and the maintenance of large networks. The Dolmetsches toured far and wide in the European continent and parts of the United States of America—the west coast as well as the east—in the early 1900s until their move to Haslemere in late 1917. From that point until Arnold’s death in 1940 they continued their travels around England and throughout France, and in late 1929 even undertook a voyage of musical discovery to Morocco, described in 1957 by Henry George Farmer (1882–1965) as a ‘pilgrimage’.⁶¹

The Dolmetsches knew scholars interested in the musics and cultures of many parts of the world. Besides Farmer, Pallis, Peart, Fox Strangways and Grainger, the Dolmetsches were also acquainted with Ananda K. Coomaraswamy (1877–1947), Marie-Thérèse de Lens (d.1948) and Kathleen Schlesinger (1862–1953).⁶² Connections have been noted between ethnomusicology and the early music revival of the late 20th century; John Butt wrote of the period 1970–2000, for instance, that ‘it cannot be fortuitous, I believe, that HIP and ethnomusicology flourish at the same time; a sense of cultural disorientation is assuaged by trying to establish something certain about the past and by trying to assimilate an entirely “other” culture’.⁶³ A similar observation might be made of the relationship between the early music revival and comparative musicology in the first three decades of the 20th century, albeit in profoundly different cultural, economic, social, political and intellectual contexts. As I hope to show in a future study, Arnold’s interests in these areas involved considerable correspondence and exchange with comparative musicologists or musicians who contributed to cross-cultural research. Incidentally, it is interesting to note that Arnold Dolmetsch used the term ‘World Music’ in print—with initial capital letters—as early as the mid 1930s, several decades before it entered general currency in English. (Its early use is generally traced to the 1960s.)⁶⁴

The Haslemere Festivals and visitors from afar

The major annual musical activity for the last 15 years of Arnold’s life was the festival he created in the town where he settled. Donington observed in 1975 that ‘the Haslemere Festivals, which from their start in 1925 attracted international attention, might be called the beginning of the wider movement, but in Dolmetsch’s own career they came as the culmination of an activity long-since established’.⁶⁵ They appear to constitute the earliest known example of an annual festival devoted to early music, and are documented by the programmes from 1925 to 2008 held in the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection.⁶⁶ They have already attracted detailed study: for example, Alexandra Williams used these sources to examine recorder performances there until 1940, as part of her 2005 PhD dissertation on the revival of the instrument in England.⁶⁷ Her analysis demonstrates the wealth of information that these programmes contain. Of course, the festival embraced a multitude of other instruments, voice types and genres; recent examination of the programmes suggests that they contain data that could throw much new light on the history of the early music revival—not just in Britain, but also other countries—before the Second World War.

The advertising brochures for the first year (but not subsequently, as far as I can see) were printed in two versions: English and German. Dolmetsch alluded to reconciliatory aims in a pamphlet that advertised the 1926 festival: ‘Performers and auditors were transported to another sphere where pure joy and rapture replaced the cares of life. People from alien countries, former enemies who had looked upon one another with suspicion, became friends. Peace and good will reigned in every heart, we all felt better and happier men and women.’⁶⁸ This pamphlet is an example of the kind of printed ephemera containing writings by Arnold Dolmetsch that were distributed before and during the festival. Such materials are not yet generally known or cited in musicological literature on Dolmetsch. They provide rationales and contexts for his programming, and highlight choices of repertory that were special, unusual or novel.

For example, Ludwig van Beethoven’s (1770–1827) Piano Concerto no.1 was performed at the Haslemere Festival of 1934, on ‘a piano of the Beethoven period’; this must surely be among the earliest examples (or possibly the first) of a 20th-century interpretation of a Beethoven piano concerto on period instruments (at least the keyboard, if not other instruments of the orchestra).⁶⁹ As Arnold wrote in a prefatory pamphlet to the 1934 festival, ‘I have also completed the family of Keyboard Instruments by the addition of a beautiful “Grand” Piano made in 1799. The Music of Beethoven, now oppressed by the heavy tone of modern pianos, regains its pristine freshness upon the instrument of his time.’⁷⁰ The programme for the 1934 festival, although it gives the names of all instrumentalists at the front of the booklet (with ‘wind instrument players’ listed separately from ‘the players’), does not specify who played the solo piano part; however, it was likely Ruth Eyre, who is in the list of players, and who is mentioned in Arnold's diary as rehearsing the concerto.⁷¹ In the following year’s festival (1935) Eyre was specifically named as playing ‘18th Century Pianoforte’ for the Beethoven Violin Sonata in C minor, with Carl Dolmetsch on violin.⁷² (Arnold Dolmetsch also played this original instrument, and there survives a recording of him playing the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight’ Sonata on it.⁷³)

Reports of the Haslemere Festival reached many parts of the world, including Australia and New Zealand.⁷⁴ During Arnold’s lifetime the performers included Ceylonese (Sri Lankan) and Russian musicians.⁷⁵ Visitors also came to the festival from far afield, including a Buddhist lama from Tibet and a writer on English literature from Japan.⁷⁶ In December 1932 the latter, Masao Ohno (c.1906–?), published a magazine article in Japan about his experiences of attending the festival that year, which he describes in vivid detail, together with a report of his dialogue with Arnold.⁷⁷ Dolmetsch told Ohno that he listened to Japanese music ‘and understood’, and asked Ohno if there were someone to play shakuhachi for him. Ohno suggested that there was a willingness on the part of the Dolmetsches to visit Japan: ‘He [Arnold] honestly thinks that Japan is a great country of the arts. He will most certainly be very glad to come to Japan and play clavichord for all of you.’⁷⁸ His article also expounded on the principles of Arnold Dolmetsch’s approach to the early music revival.

Outside the dates of the annual festivals, there were visits by other influential individuals to Haslemere. These were noted by Dolmetsch in his diary, although he sometimes leaves blank spaces; for instance, he records that he met ‘Mr [blank]’, the Minister for Education of Egypt, in Petersfield on 9 July 1923, and that the minister visited Haslemere the following day.⁷⁹ In June 1925, the noted Italian pedagogical theorist Maria Montessori (1870–1952) met him twice, and observed Dolmetsch’s methods of teaching children at Bedale’s school (Arnold’s approaches are described by Fox Strangways in an article published the following year).⁸⁰ On 26 March 1930 Arnold records a ‘very interesting visit of the organist of the Thomaskirche, Leipzig, a first-rate musician, who understands and admires my harpsichord and the other instruments’, although he does not mention this musician’s name.⁸¹ This organist must have been Günther Ramin (1898–1956), who held that post at the time (although he did not become Kantor until 1940).⁸² The diaries also provide evidence that Wanda Landowska and Arnold Dolmetsch met in Haslemere; he noted her visit on 25 May 1928 (‘Visite de W. Landowska’), although he gives no further details.⁸³ The silence perhaps reflects a particular attitude towards her; as Donington recalled in 1983 of the Dolmetsch Circle’s view of Landowska (during the lifetime of Arnold), ‘we were not allowed in Haslemere to attribute any great merit to her or to such other few rivals as rumour presently reported’.⁸⁴

Memories of conversations are nevertheless themes of other entries. For example, in his diary for 6 February 1936, Arnold notes: ‘There comes a lady and her son, who lived in China and who are interested in recorders’.⁸⁵ Royalty visited too: an unnamed Russian princess, and also Prince Akiki Nyabongo (1907–75) of Uganda.⁸⁶ Nyabongo knew Mabel’s brothers Sir Harry Johnston (1858–1927) and Alex Johnston (1877–1975); at the time of his visit (7 January 1937) he was working on his DPhil in Anthropology at The Queen’s College, Oxford.⁸⁷ According to Arnold’s diary, Nyabongo asked him to write an article on the Ugandan harp enanga (an example of which was in the house at Haslemere), although there is no evidence that this project was carried out.⁸⁸ Other visitors include an unnamed Australian lady who is likely to have been Louise Hanson-Dyer (1884–1962).⁸⁹ There are several entries about the Sri Lankan musicians Devar Surya Sena (1899–1981) and Nelun Devi Sena (d.1978), for whom Arnold, Mabel and Nathalie made an ‘oriental harp’ in late 1935 (as I will discuss in a forthcoming study).⁹⁰

One of Arnold’s harpsichord students, collaborators in performance, and frequent clients for tuning and care of keyboard instruments was Violet Gordon-Woodhouse (1872–1948), who had Sumatran ancestry and was occasionally subject to discrimination for this reason.⁹¹ She was also the first person known to have made a recording of the harpsichord, in July 1920.⁹² Arnold knew Sri Lankan-British intellectual Ananda Kentish Coomaraswamy and his second wife Ratan Devi Coomaraswamy (née Alice Ethel Richardson, 1889–1958) personally, and gave several series of music lessons to their two children.⁹³ Some years later, on Sunday 17 May 1931, Arnold notes in his diary: ‘Visit of ex-Mrs Coomaraswamy, pleasant. She sings some Indian songs, I do the “tambura” on the harpsichord. Charming effect.’⁹⁴ Ratan Devi and her former husband had published in 1913 a volume of songs from the Punjab and Kashmīr, and one wonders whether this was the source of any repertory on that occasion.⁹⁵

The intercultural links emerging from the Dolmetsch archive demonstrate clearly that the influence of the early music movement was not localized or obscure, but that it involved interactions with people from many places and cultural backgrounds, and attracted media attention not only in Britain but in many parts of the world. These aspects have not yet received sustained attention in Dolmetsch studies, and such findings suggest multiple avenues for further investigation; they are amongst the topics of various studies that are currently in preparation by this author.

Back to the sources: outline of a programme for future research

It seems appropriate in this 50th anniversary year of Early Music, which takes a retrospective look at the eponymous movement, to quote from a report of 1925 which did the opposite: it looked forward by half a century into the future to speculate on the kind of work that the Arnold Dolmetsches of 1975 would be carrying out. The author, Australian-born Walter J. Turner (1884–1946), then music critic for The New Statesman, commented:

It would not in the least surprise me if in another 50 years the pianoforte were an extinct instrument along with the viols and the harpsichord. Children alive to-day may come in their old age to festivals of nineteenth-century music much as we to-day go to Mr. Dolmetsch’s Elizabethan concerts and listen to a family playing on the viols and virginals. And at these nineteenth-century concerts the great feature will be, of course, pianoforte recitals. Here the Dolmetsch of 1975 will have one great advantage over our Mr. Dolmetsch. He will have gramophone records of the last of the great pianists, of Busoni, Hofmann and Paderewski, to show him exactly how these masters played the defunct but perhaps still beautiful pianoforte music of Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms and Liszt. And how incredibly old-fashioned all that music will sound then.⁹⁶

In light of recent and ongoing research into the utility of sound recordings in reconstructing historical performance practices, it is remarkable to see this approach so presciently predicted in 1925, although it was considerably later in the century when pianists began to study old recordings for these purposes.⁹⁷ Looking at overlapping temporalities of the past is of course the conceptual privilege of hindsight, but it is clear that thinking about the future was also on the mind of commentators on the early music movement. Turner’s comments of 1925 anticipate what the late Richard Taruskin wrote in his well-known book Text and act: ‘If we truly wanted to perform historically, we would begin by imitating early-20th-century recordings of late-19th-century music and extrapolate back from there’.⁹⁸ Whilst only a small number of recordings by members of the Dolmetsch family (and their circle) from the lifetime of Arnold survive, some unpublished recordings—digitized from acetate—have recently been placed on YouTube, and perhaps more may emerge.⁹⁹ In the meantime, a diverse range of textual and iconographic material can provide the basis of ongoing investigation.

Over the past two decades, the work of Arnold Dolmetsch and the Dolmetsch Circle has been the subject of new musicological research. Kathleen Nelson published detailed studies of the contacts between Percy Grainger and the family; and Kate Bowan wrote about the Dolmetsches’ work in the context of historical re-enactment, relating this to the thought of R. G. Collingwood.¹⁰⁰ Books by John Butt, Peter Holman and Nick Wilson have examined afresh the role of the Dolmetsches in the early music revival.¹⁰¹ In the August 2014 issue of Early Music, Dan Tidhar reported on the conference ‘Roots of revival’, held on 12–14 March of that year at the Horniman Museum—an institution that holds an extensive collection of instruments and papers relating to the Dolmetsches—commenting on the talks given there.¹⁰² Eric M. Lubarsky, in his 2017 doctoral dissertation on metaphors of life and living in historically informed performance, devoted an entire chapter to Arnold Dolmetsch and his antimodernist approaches.¹⁰³ Maia Williams Perez in her MMus thesis on the early phases of the early music revival, and Jessica Wood and Katherine Hawnt in their PhD dissertations on the harpsichord in the mid to late 20th century, have also discussed the Dolmetsches; so has Kailan Rubinoff in a number of studies.¹⁰⁴ Recently, Brian Blood has published new biographical details of Mabel Dolmetsch.¹⁰⁵ Masumi Yamamoto and I also contributed an article to The Consort that examines Masao Ohno’s 1932 essay on Dolmetsch and includes Yamamoto’s English translation of Ohno’s text.¹⁰⁶

Based on renewed scholarly interest in the work and legacies of the Dolmetsch family, and the new accessibility of primary source material, I would like to suggest an outline for a programme of research that could throw new light on many aspects of the early music revival before the Second World War. This is a provisional list of themes that I plan to examine and is based on findings thus far within the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection, as well as in related archives and in general secondary literature. First, detailed study of the extant correspondence in the collection will help establish the international networks through which knowledge and practice of the early music revival were communicated. In particular, a significant number of fascinating connections with people of colour (the Global Majority) are emerging from the archive.

Second, links with comparative musicologists and scholars of Asian and African cultures may shed further light on connections between the early music movement and intercultural research, as well as collaborative or ‘crossover’ performances.¹⁰⁷ The Dolmetsch family’s collaborations with performers of Moroccan music—in Haslemere as well as in Morocco—and Arnold’s attempts to imitate South Asian music on the viola d’amore in 1899 are some of the better-known examples of their activities in this respect.¹⁰⁸ In 1929 Mabel Dolmetsch produced a pasticcio work called The masque of Ishak and Tohfa, based on Spanish music but with orientalist costumes and an Islamicate narrative.¹⁰⁹ In 1935, at their home ‘Jesses’ in Haslemere, the family also performed early modern repertory from western Europe to Devar Surya Sena and Nelun Devi, who responded in kind by performing ‘Sinhala and Indian folk songs ... [with] Tambura, dilruba and talam pota as accompaniment’.¹¹⁰ In the words of Sena, ‘The Dolmetsches were entranced. There was a simplicity and purity in their’s [sic] and our music that made us kin.’¹¹¹ Despite the certain degree of exoticism or orientalism that is present in some of these contexts, it is worth noting the fascination held by the Dolmetsches for other cultures and the respect and empathy with which some of their interlocutors appear to have regarded the projects to revitalize old musics and dances.

Third, examination of the material dimension of the Dolmetsch workshop at Haslemere could reveal new information on pre-war research into woods and metals, and research into patents could yield further details on their technical work. While the Dolmetsch base in Haslemere gradually became internationally famous and had global repercussions, it also depended on intercontinental connections for the sourcing of materials.¹¹² In 1951, Charles Stuart published an article in The Musical Times entitled ‘“Dolmetscherie” today’, in which he noted the use of woods such as ‘olive, ebony, coromandel, padouk, rosewood, tulipwood, satinwood, and the like’ and commented: ‘Haslemere exports to the ends of the earth. While I was there packing cases were being nailed up for Brazil and New Zealand.’¹¹³ The material aspects of the movement’s transcontinental reach dated from Arnold’s own lifetime, decades earlier, and this suggests a pathway worth investigating.

Fourth, research into the programming of the Haslemere Festival from 1925 to 2008 offers potential for a deeper understanding of festivals in the 20th-century history of the early music movement.¹¹⁴ Fifth, further examination of the politics related to the Arts and Crafts movement—and Arnold Dolmetsch’s connections with William Morris and other key figures, as already explored by Andrew Heywood and Graham Strahle—could contribute to a deeper understanding of the early music revival as a form of social praxis.¹¹⁵ Sixth, the critique of colonialism is an essential dimension to all this research, as the links of many early 20th-century pioneers of historical performance to networks of empire are complex; for example Arnold made a ‘Beethoven piano’ for imperialist Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), and Mabel’s older brother Sir Harry Johnston was involved in British colonial administration in Africa.¹¹⁶ Seventh, questions of the spiritual and the numinous emerge, such as Arnold’s latent Catholicism (to which he returned late in life), Mabel’s family’s membership of the Catholic Apostolic Church early in her life and her later interests in aspects of Islam, and the deep involvement of their student, friend and benefactor Marco Pallis in Tibetan Buddhism.¹¹⁷ It is worth noting that the Dolmetsches’ work in the early 20th century was contemporaneous with revival movements within the Roman Catholic Church and also the work of the Plainsong and Medieval Music Society, founded in 1888.

Eighth, the prominent role of Mabel Dolmetsch in the revival of early music and dance (especially in cross-cultural aspects) calls for further investigation, as Lahham and Blood have already demonstrated. Her incorporation of aspects of South Asian performance practice in dance was noted by Pallis in 1964,¹¹⁸ and the catalogue of the library of the Dolmetsches made in 1967 by Ute Supper includes a number of works on South Asian music and dance.¹¹⁹ Mabel’s continuation and curation of the legacy of her husband’s work (see a late photo of them together in illus.3) is a final area that calls for further evaluation. In December 2022 I made an initial examination of Mabel’s letters to Virginia Randolph de Zayas (née Harrison, 1901–93), held in the Zayas Archive, Seville, thanks to the generosity of Rodrigo and Anne de Zayas.¹²⁰ Spanning from 1935 to 1959, and ranging through diverse subject matter, this substantial corpus of correspondence presents a fertile field for future research.

There are likely to emerge many additional avenues of investigation, as diverse evidence about the international nature of the Dolmetsches’ contribution to the early music revival is uncovered in the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection and other archival repositories. From these, new theories and frameworks for interpretation are also bound to suggest themselves. This article has reflected on how the Dolmetsch phenomenon has been treated in the first half-century of Early Music. With recent forays into primary sources, a new day for ‘Dolmetscherie’ is clearly dawning.¹²¹ One wonders what the results of renewed interest will be another 50 years hence.

David R. M. Irving is an ICREA Research Professor affiliated to the Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC, Barcelona, a Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and Honorary Senior Fellow at the Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of Melbourne. He is the author of Colonial counterpoint: music in early modern Manila (Oxford University Press, 2010), co-editor (with W. Dean Sutcliffe) of the journal Eighteenth-Century Music, and co-general editor (with Alexander Rehding) of A cultural history of western music (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming November 2023). He was Recording Reviews Editor of Early Music from 2011 to 2013.

Research in this field has been made possible due to the support of many individuals and organizations. Thanks must go to Brian Blood and Marguerite Blood (née Dolmetsch), the Dolmetsch Foundation and Anna Pensaert (Cambridge University Library), for their support of this work and their assistance in tracking down information and contacts. In 2021 I held a Visiting Fellowship at Clare Hall, University of Cambridge, which enabled me to undertake initial archival work on the Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch Collection in the University Library; I must express my gratitude to the President, fellows and staff of the college, and to ICREA and the Institució Milà i Fontanals de Recerca en Humanitats, CSIC for their support. This article has been published in Open Access thanks to CSIC’s ‘Programa de Apoyo para la Publicación en Acceso Abierto’. I am grateful to Tess Knighton, Sharya Scharenguivel, Rehan Kularatne, Fatima Lahham, Richard Wistreich, Rodrigo de Zayas, Anne de Zayas, Javier Marín and Victor Coelho for many inspiring conversations about the Dolmetsch phenomenon, and to Amoti Nyabongo for permission to cite the doctoral dissertations of both of his parents. Mariarosaria Canzonieri (Royal College of Music Library) kindly provided scans of archival materials, and Rodrigo and Anne de Zayas generously allowed me to consult archival materials. Finally, I must thank Stephen Rose, his fellow editors of this journal and an anonymous reader of the article for their insightful input in the making of this piece, and Ann Lewis for her skilful copy-editing.

Footnotes