Arnold Dolmetsch

Eugène Arnold Dolmetsch (24 February 1858 – 28 February 1940), was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey. He was a leading figure in the 20th-century revival of interest in early music.

About

• Out of the conquered Past
    Unravishable Beauty;
  Hearts that are dew and dust
    Rebuking the dream of Death;
  Flower of the clay down-cast
    Triumphant in earth’s aroma;
  Strings that were strained in rust
    A-tremble with Music’s breath!
  Wine that was spilt in haste
    Arising in fumes more precious;
  Garlands that fell forgot
    Rooting to wondrous bloom;
  Youth that would flow to waste
    Pausing in pool-green valleys—
  And Passion that lasted not
    Surviving the voiceless Tomb!
  • Arthur Upson, "After a Dolmetsch Concert" (in or before 1906)

• I have seen the God Pan and it was in this manner: I heard a bewildering and pervasive music moving from precision to precision within itself. Then I heard a different music, hollow and laughing. Then I looked up and saw two eyes like the eyes of a wood-creature peering at me over a brown tube of wood. Then someone said: Yes, once I was playing a fiddle in the forest and I walked into a wasp's nest. ... When a man is able, by a pattern of notes or by an arrangement of planes or colours, to throw us back into the age of truth, a certain few of us – no, I am wrong, everyone who has been cast back into the age of truth for one instant – gives honour to the spell which has worked, to the witch-work or the art-work, or whatever you like to call it. Therefore I say, and stick to it, I saw and heard the God Pan; shortly afterwards I saw and heard Mr. Dolmetsch.
  • Ezra Pound, "Affirmations" in Literary Essays (1915)

• It was Dolmetsch, the Belgian [sic] musician, who first taught me what a great musician Sullivan really was; till then I knew nothing of him except as a writer of the comic operas; but Dolmetsch taught me the splendor of 'The Golden Legend' and the beauty of some of his songs, such as 'Oh Mistress Mine' and 'Orpheus with His Lute'. Dolmetsch explained many musical problems to me. Of course, everyone knows that he was the first to make the harpsichord and clavichord as in the earlier days, but to hear him play Bach on the instrument that Bach had written his music for was an unforgettable experience: it was like hearing a great sonnet of Shakespeare perfectly recited for the first time.
  • Frank Harris, My Life and Loves (1925)

• Has he tempered the viol’s wood
  To enforce   both the grave   and the acute?
  Has he curved us the bowl of the lute?
      Lawes and Jenkyns guard thy rest
      Dolmetsch ever be thy guest.
  • Ezra Pound, "Canto LXXXI" (1948)

External links

• Brian Blood, "The Dolmetsch Story", Dolmetsch Online (6 January 2022)