Music recorder and scholar

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33965, 4 October 1975, Page 10

Music recorder and scholar

Dolmetsch: The Man and His Work. By Margaret Campbell. Hamish Hamilton. 318 pp. N.Z. price $11.50. Even to New Zealanders acquainted with the Haslemere Festivals in Surrey, “Dolmetsch” may evoke little more than a superior brand of recorder. Perhaps it is only to be expected that Arnold Dolmetsch (18581940) is chiefly remembered as the first man to discover how to construct this instrument in modern times. Margaret Campbell's new study not only introduces us more fully to Dolmetsch the man, but widens the limited viewpoint of him as a celebrated craftsman to that of an unusual musical all-rounder who deserves recognition also for his achievements in performing, teaching and musicology. Thanks to the availability of the large volume of surviving letters to and from Dolmetsch, and the amount of discussion of his work in papers and periodicals (both of which are extensively quoted) Mrs Campbell, with support and co-operation from the present-day family has been able to construct an apparently comprehensive account of his career. This was devoted almost exclusively to the authentic interpretation of early music on the instruments for which it was written. His early training as a piano tuner and repairer in the family business at Le Mans and his innate ability as a craftsman gave Dolmetsch a sound basis for his life-long work in restoring and reproducing old instruments. But he was no collector of antiques for museum purposes and his gift of perfect pitch and basic violin technique was the starting point of a parallel performing career, in which he initially involved his family to form a viol consort. In an age when, as Ernest Newman remarked: “Scholars do not, as a rule

perform; while not one performer in a thousand has any pretensions to scholarship,” it is only to be expected that Dolmetsch’s research into music of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should have been viewed with suspicion by the Musical Establishment. Yet his pioneer work on old manuscripts, initiated in the library of the Royal College of Music, furthered in museums and libraries throughout the world, and culminating in his book: “The Interpretation of the Music of the XVII and XVIII Centuries” (London, Navello, 1915) has given later musicologists like Dart and Donington an irreplaceable basis for extension. Not that this is a book for the student of early music alone. Inevitably a man of Dolmetsch’s forceful personality, in addition to the pioneer nature of his work, impinged dramatically on the musical scene of his day. We gain in passing, interesting insight not only into such things as concert activity and performing practices, but also into details commonly overlooked, the status and remuneration of university professors, to quote one example. Leading figures in other walks of life also figure in the narrative: George Bernard Shaw, Sir Hubert Parry, Percy Grainger, Dame Sybil Thorndike, James Joyce and Segovia to name but a few. Dolmetsch the man emerges as a paradoxical figure endowed with patience and vision, yet prone to Intolerance and irascibility. In not attempting to emphasise the good at the expense of the bad, Mrs Campbell has achieved a most convincing character portrayal. All in all this biography, the first about Arnold Dolmetsch to be published, justifies its existence at the least, as yet another illustration of the fact that knowledge and opportunity we nowadays take for granted, were only achieved by the perseverance and vision of a dedicated pioneer.