Arnold Dolmetsch

Arnold Dolmetsch (1858-1940), English musician who devoted his life to the study and performance of music by German baroque composer Johann Sebastian Bach and Bach’s predecessors. Dolmetsch was born in Le Mans, France, and worked in Boston, Massachusetts, and Paris, France, as a restorer and maker of early musical instruments before establishing his workshop in Haslemere, England, in 1917. He resurrected forgotten repertoire and performed it on historically reconstructed instruments. In doing so, he revived interest in the practical performance of solo and consort music for lutes, recorders, viols, and early keyboard instruments.

In 1925 Dolmetsch established an annual festival in Haslemere to reintroduce early music. At these festivals the music was largely performed by members of the Dolmetsch family, who carried on the ideas and crafts of Arnold Dolmetsch. Dolmetsch wrote a treatise, The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, which was published in London in 1915 and is considered a classic.