Social Victorians/People/Dolmetsch

Also Known As

 * Family name: Dolmetsch
 * Arnold Dolmetsch
 * Mabel Dolmetsch

Although many people were working on finding and preserving music and instruments from before the 18th century, Dolmetsch is by many considered to be the founder of what is now seen to be the Early Music movement. Dolmetch's genius lay in the practicalities rather than the theory, and it is as a result of his indefatigable work that individual instruments, books, and manuscripts were collected, restored, and preserved.

Demographics

 * Nationality: Arnold, Bavaria, then France, then Great Britain; Mabel, British

Residences

 * Haslemere, Surrey

Family

 * Arnold (Eugene Arnold) Dolmetsch (24 February 1858 – 28 February 1940)
 * Mabel Dolmetsch
 * Rudolph Dolmetsch ( –1942)
 * Nathalie Dolmetsch
 * Carl Frederick Dolmetsch (23 August 1911 – 11 July 1997)
 * Cecile Dolmetsch

Friends and Acquaintances

 * Sir George Grove, trained to be an engineer, on the board of the Royal College of Music, founded 7 May 1883.
 * George Bernard Shaw
 * Florence Farr
 * William Butler Yeats
 * Annie Horniman
 * Diana Poulton
 * Countess Valda Gleichen
 * Herbert Horne
 * William Morris
 * George Moore
 * William Rothenstein

Appeal for Civil Pension for Dolmetsch

 * Robert Donington
 * Ramsay MacDonald
 * Donald Tovey
 * R.C. Trevelyan
 * George Bernard Shaw
 * John Masefield
 * William Butler Yeats
 * T.S. Eliot
 * Laurence Housman
 * Walter de la Mare
 * Siegfried Sassoon
 * Bertrand Russsell
 * The Earl of Lytton
 * Lord Berners
 * David Lloyd George
 * Sybil Thorndike
 * Walford Davies
 * Vaughan Williams
 * Henry J. Wood
 * Thomas Beecham
 * Adrian Boult
 * Henry Hadow
 * Arthur Somervell
 * Percy Scholes
 * Granville Barker
 * Granville Bantock

Arnold Dolmetsch

 * Royal College of Music (1883–1889)

Timeline
1878 May 28, Arnold Dolmetsch and Marie Morel married.

1893, Arnold Dolmetsch used Barnard's Inn for concerts beginning in 1893. The Artworkers' Guild was there at the same time; rented to Dolmetsch?

1898, Arnold Dolmetsch and Marie Morel divorced.

1899 September 11, Arnold Dolmetsch and Elodie Désirée (ex-wife of his brother) married.

1902 June 3, William Butler Yeats wrote Dolmetsch, asking him to "chair ... a lecture he [was] soon to give": "You are the only one, I suppose, in the world now, who knows anything about the old music that was half speech, and I need hardly say that neither Miss Farr nor myself, could have done anything in this matter of speaking to notes without your help" (Campbell 142). Campell goes on to say that Yeats's "confidence" in Dolmetsch "is reflected in a letter from Frank Fay to Yeats when discussing a stage production in Dublin: 'What a pity there is not here someone like Dolmetsch, who would do for our [i.e., Celtic] old music what he has done for other old music.'"

1903, Arnold Dolmetsch and Elodie Désirée divorced.

1903 September 23, Arnold Dolmetsch and Mabel Johnston (one of his students) married.

1936 July, an appeal for a Civil Pension for Dolmetsch was made to Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister.

Questions and Notes

 * 1) Eugene Arnold Dolmetsch was "barely five feet tall" "[a]s a grown man."
 * 2) Dolmetsch played the music for the films The Lady of the Lake and Colonel Blood.
 * 3) Did Annie Horniman attend his concerts?
 * 4) Who funded the trip to Florence in 1896?
 * 5) Where did the Guarneri quartet come from?
 * 6) Where did the funds come from for the 27 April 1891 concert?
 * 7) Campbell describes Herbert Horne: "Horne was also a critic of art and literature and a student of the Caroline poets. With Mackmurdo he designed the Savoy Hotel and later migrated to Florence to write his great biography of Botticelli to which he gave years of intensive research. His home, a Trecento palace of the Brugess type, filled with his collection of works of art, is now a museum." And "Horne was later to play a significant role in assisting Dometsch to gain recognition among the 'Bloomsbury Set.'"

General Background

 * "Arnold Dolmetsch." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arnold_Dolmetsch (accessed August 2020).
 * "Carl Dolmetsch." Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Dolmetsch (accessed August 2020).

Works Written by the Dolmetsches

 * Dolmetsch, Arnold. The Interpretation of the Music of the XVIIth and XVIIIth Centuries. 1915.
 * Dolmetsch, Mabel. Dances of England and France 1450–1600.
 * Dolmetsch, Mabel. Personal Recollections of Arnold Dolmetsch. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958.