Tributes paid to early music revivalist Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch

Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch. Photo: Michael Chevis

A LEADING figure in the revival of interest in early music, from Haslemere has died aged 76.

Jeanne-Marie Dolmetsch, elder twin-daughter of Dr Carl Dolmetsch CBE, and his first wife Mary, grew up amid a whirlwind of music-making that encompassed teaching, concert-giving both at home and abroad, and musical-instrument making at the family’s Haslemere workshops.

They were established in 1917, when Arnold Dolmetsch and his young family, including Carl, moved from London, to escape the bombing by Germany’s Zeppelin airships.

Moving from The Royal Naval School (now the Royal School) to the Royal Academy of Music in London, she studied violin and piano, although she had appeared on concert platforms and in recordings on the recorder and the viol from her early teens.

In later life, she combined the skills of an instrument maker with those of a professional musician.

Jeanne-Marie was quite undaunted when, only a few hours before a concert in Northern France, she had to make playable, a locally-sourced double-manual harpsichord in poor regulation and tuning.

From the 1960s she, and her twin sister Marguerite, joined musical colleagues including Andrew Pledge and Nigel Foster, to perform programmes of early music to clubs and societies throughout the UK, and overseas.

Jeanne-Marie (left) and Marguerite Dolmetsch. (Photo courtesy Dolmtesch online)

For more than 40 years, Jeanne-Marie researched, scripted and presented many hundreds of lectures on aspects of musical and cultural history, illustrated with live and pre-recorded music and sumptuous slides. Faced with a six-week tour of Australia and New Zealand, she had to convert the programmes into digital format, and learn to master the unfamiliar technology.

Each summer she would assist her father in directing the annual Haslemere Festival of Early Music, which her grandfather Arnold had established in 1925. The twins were able to invite many of their academy friends to perform at the festival, adding the vigour of youth to its established stars.

She succeeded as director in 1997.

From 1997, Jeanne-Marie was also musical director of The Dolmetsch Foundation, which publishes an annual journal that university and music school libraries around the world subscribe to.

A memorial service will take place at All Saints Church, Grayswood at 2.30pm on April 6.

First published at the Farnham Herald, December 2, 2018

Addendum by Tony Magee (site administrator): Twin sisters Jeanne-Marie and Marguerite Dolmetsch were featured in the 1970 BBC television documentary, "So You Thought it all Started with Bach?", written and produced by Herbert Chappell, presented and narrated by Clement Freud. The twins were both aged 28 at the time.

This is the narration and dialogue from the Dolmetsch segment in the program:

Clement Freud: These carved scrolls are from the Dolmetsch Collection. Old Arnold Dolmetsch was in the habit of portraying actual members of his family. This is Aunt Cecile - isn’t she lovely!

And this is a self portrait of Arnold Dolmetsch himself, who started it all nearly a century ago.

Darkest Hazlemere - deep in the heart of the Dolmetsch country.

Playing the viol is Marguerite, on the recorder her twin sister Jeanne-Marie, old Arnold’s granddaughters.

On the harpsichord is Joseph Saxby. After 35 years of accompanying the Dolmetsch’s he is virtually one of the family himself.

Blowing the treble recorder - Carl Dolmetsch - the twins’ father and present head of the firm, which produces thousands of old instruments, especially recorders, each week.

“My father, Arnold Dolmetsch was born in 1858. He came from a stock of musicians and musical instrument makers on both sides.” says Carl.

“His first teacher had once been a band master at the Battle of Waterloo. As he taught the piano, he used the antique method of a little stick to hit the fingers who played wrong notes.

“He was colourful, unconventional, very sincere, very practical. His friends were among the Pre-Raphaelite set - the unconventional, in fact the avant-garde naughty boys of the 1880s and ’90s.

“There were people like William Morris, Selwyn Image, and men of letters like Herbert Horne, writers like George Moore, artists like Burne-Jones. His greatest supporters were people like Bernard Shaw.

“Forever in our childhood, these important people, still alive, would come and we thought nothing of Bernard Shaw just coming in through the back door.” he says.

The days of Shaw and William Morris are, as they say, alas no more, but the family home is still a musical Mecca, attracting devotees from all over the world. There must be something in the soil, for here everything flourishes.

There’s the factory, the museum, the annual festival, and of course the Dolmetsch’s themselves.

Their ancestry goes back to the time of Bach and they’re all intensely brilliant, bright eyed, music mad, generation after generation.

We’ve speeded them up a bit to get them all in. This film has a cast of thousands, and most of them are Dolmetsch’s.

The twins are matched in hand right from childhood, in Dolmetsch tradition. They’ve regarded music not as a job, or even a hobby, but as inevitable.

“It’s completely natural to us and we used to have a lesson every night, but we didn’t think of it as a music lesson - more like a bedtime story.” says Marguerite Dolmetsch.

Marguerite Dolmetsch receiving her examination certificates from The Queen Mother; Royal Naval School 
annual speech day in 1959. (Photo courtesy Dolmetsch online)

“It was the most natural thing, and we grew up learning to play.” says twin sister Jeanne.

“So the family just found these instruments placed in their hands and then just left to get on with it.” says Marguerite.

The twins were recently involved in a Beatles recording session, providing the backing for a Mary Hopkin track.*

“They wanted a background of six recorders, so that they would get a sound rather like a small organ, and we enjoyed it because we didn’t know what was happening next,” Jeanne says.

Marguerite says: “We had no idea of what sort of music it would be and we saw it for the first time at the studio, and about 5 minutes later we had one run-through and we started recording. We played it at least 25 times, while Paul McCartney kept having new ideas.”

“Yes, they kept having different approaches to it and altering the rhythm, but in the end it sounded really, very nice.” says Jeanne.

*The Game, composed by George Martin, produced by Paul McCartney.

Related post: Carl Dolmetsch (1911 - 1997)

Related site: Dolmetsch Online