Background
Arnold Dolmetsch was born on 24 February in 1858 at Le Mans, France to Rudolph Arnold Dolmetsch and his wife Marie Zélie.
Arnold Dolmetsch was born on 24 February in 1858 at Le Mans, France to Rudolph Arnold Dolmetsch and his wife Marie Zélie.
Arnold studied music at the Brussels Conservatoire and learned the violin with Henri Vieuxtemps. In 1883 he traveled to London to attend the Royal College of Music, where he studied under Henry Holmes and Frederick Bridge, being awarded a Bachelor of Music degree in 1889.
Arnold Dolmetsch devoted his life to the study and performance of music composed by Bach and his predecessors. To make the performances authentic, he restored old instruments or built modern replicas. His treatise, The Interpretation of the Music of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1915), is a classic. In 1925 he established an annual festival at Haslemere, England, to reintroduce early music, at which the music is largely performed by members of his family, who have carried on his ideas and crafts.
Arnold Dolmetsch married three times. On May 28, 1878, he married to Marie Morel of Namur, Belgium (a widow, ten years his senior) but was divorced in 1898. His second wife, to whom he was married on September 11, 1899, in Zürich, was Elodie Désirée, the divorced wife of his brother. This marriage ended in divorce in 1903. Thirdly, he was married on September 23, 1903, to Mabel Johnston, one of his pupils.