'Bonnie Sweet Recorder': some issues arising from Arnold Dolmetsch's early English recorder performances

Abstract

The work of Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940) with the recorder was crucial to the subsequent mass revival of the instrument in England. This article discusses in particular two newly discovered recorder programmes of his, dated 1900; it examines the significance of these and some of his later programmes in terms of overall instrumentation and repertory, and questions some long-held beliefs about the nature of Dolmetsch's work with the recorder. The instrument's renaissance in England is placed within its broader musical and cultural context. From the late Victorian era the recorder developed alongside and sometimes in conjunction with the revival of Shakespeare's plays; there was a clear relationship between the attempts to understand and re-create the English musical successes of the 16th and 17th centuries and the efforts made by the establishment to rejuvenate the nation's culture in terms of new composition. Using Dolmetsch's recorder programmes as a starting-point, it is suggested that the chief figures of the English musical renaissance were more conscious of and indebted to the contemporaneous revival of early music than has hitherto been acknowledged.

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