The Viola d'Amore: An Instrument Between Worlds

PART nine

The Viola d'Amore Revival: Modern Composers & Players

The Twentieth Century Resurrectionist Brigade

In 1922, Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) penned his Kleine Sonate für Viola d'amore und Klavier, Op. 25 No. 2, which musicologists reckon ranks as one of the century’s most important jams for the instrument. Kleine Sonata initially declined to comment on tuning, but the 1976 edition eventually coughed up D-F#-A-D-F#-A-D.

But Hindemith wasn't riding solo: Sergei Prokofiev had a bash at it; Leoš Janáček stuck it in his opera Káťa Kabanová, as well as the String Quartet No. 2; Jules Massenet featured it in Le Jongleur de Notre-Dame; Hector Berlioz wrote for it in Harold in Italy; in Puccini's Madama Butterfly, at the end of the second act behind the scene with chorus a viola d'amore is prescribed by the composer, and Richard Strauss' Die Frau ohne Schatten got that viola d’amore juice, too.

d'Amorists Today

Garth Knox is the big cheese of contemporary viola and viola d'amore. His album Viola Spaces features miniatures and improvisations. He's commissioned works, written his own, and generally behaved like the Willy Wonka of sympathetic strings

The Hardanger d'Amore

Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh plays Salve Håkedal's Hardanger d'amore. Essentially what happens when you cross a viola d'amore with a Norwegian hardingfele. His work, including All Soundings Are True (with Garth Knox), demonstrates how historical instruments can inspire entirely new creations.

Dan Trueman explores instruments like the Setesdalsfele. His work as performer and instrument builder shows the viola d'amore concept continues to evolve like a particularly musical species of finch.

Jazz, World Music, & Other Unexpected Territories

Sara Caswell is one of the few jazz violinists working with the Hardanger d'amore. 

In Turkey, Hasan Esen has preserved the sine keman tradition with his album Sine Kemani Taksimleri, while Alper Asutay bridges Turkish maqam traditions with the viola d'amore, proving that sympathetic strings care not for national borders.

Jasser Haj Youssef. Dude's been pluggin' the viola d'amore into Arabic and jazz music, he's produced albums with names like Resonance and Sira that demonstrate the viola d'amore's adaptability to non-Western musical systems. His improvisations within maqam systems prove that sympathetic strings speak all languages.

The Historical Performance Brigade

The early music revival brought groups like The Academy of Ancient Music, Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, and Hespèrion XXI back to the viola d'amore. They’ve shown off the instrument in proper old-time fashion.

The Future

The viola d'amore's complexity and lack of standardisation have kept it marginal, but perhaps marginality is its strength. Freed from orchestral standardisation, it remains experimental, open to new techniques, new tunings, and new musical contexts.

Composers continue writing for it, attracted by its unique sound and associations with love, mystery, and the Baroque era.

'Wait,'
I hear you calling.
'You haven't mentioned the viola all'inglese, or the sultana!'

Ahhh, now we get spicy.

Remember back when I dropped that Herr Mozart Senior nugget about the viola d’amore? And that it had twelve strings, six for playing and six for resonating, right? Leo also wrote about an englische Violet (some people like to get creative and write violett), 'which differs' so HMS Leo writes, 'from the Viola d'Amore principally only in that it has seven strings above and fourteen below, and naturally rocks a different tuning' (und natürlich mit einer völlig anderen Stimmung aufkreuzt).

The viola all'inglese (English viol), on the other hand, wasn't this at all. Despite decades of scholarly confusion that conflated the two, the viola all'inglese was simply an ordinary viol: a standard member of the viol family with six gut strings, no sympathetic strings whatsoever, held upright between the knees, baby. The 'English' designation was geographical, not exotic. By the early eighteenth century, viols had largely disappeared from Italian musical life, but they remained common in England, which was known as the leading centre for their manufacture and cultivation. When Italians encountered these instruments, whether imported from London makers like James Jasbery or Christopher Wise, or rescued from dusty corners of Venetian institutions, they called them 'English viols' for the same reason you might call a particular cheese 'French': that's where it came from, and where people still knew what to do with it.

When Vivaldi received a salary increase in August 1704 for teaching the 'viole all'inglese' at the Ospedale della Pietà, he was teaching standard viols, likely a set he'd acquired (possibly from the nearby Mendicanti, where his father had worked and where a neglected consort of viols had been gathering dust). When he scored his oratorio Juditha triumphans in 1716 for a five-part consort of viole all'inglese, he used treble, tenor, and bass viols in their traditional da gamba position.

The English violet, meanwhile, remained what Leo described: a viola d'amore on steroids, with even more sympathetic strings for even more shimmer. It existed, but it was rare, and it certainly didn't come in complete consort families. Durkin says it is 'a simplification of the baryton, removing the ability to pluck the wire strings through an open-backed neck, but preserving its sweet sympathetic resonance.'

The confusion persisted because scholars wanted the viola all'inglese to be something more interesting than it was. A mundane viol seemed too ordinary for Vivaldi's attention. But sometimes a viol is just a viol.

By 1790, the Pietà's inventory no longer listed the viola all'inglese. The viols were gone, vanished along with the world that had briefly sheltered them.

The Sultana,  (or 'cither viol') Poulopoulos and Durkin reveal this was actually a misnomer invented by nineteenth-century organologists like Carl Engel. The instrument was historically called a psaltery or salter, a bowed wire-strung instrument with no sympathetic strings, developed in the mid-eighteenth century by makers like John Frederick Hintz in London and Thomas Perry in Dublin. It was a hybrid instrument combining features of the wire-strung viola d'amore with the double-course stringing and tuning mechanisms of the guittar. The more interesting question would be about the Uyghur khushtar found in western China; about the rebecs catalogued by Agricola, the pocket fiddle of Praetorius, or the particular violin shape depicted by Abdullah Bukhari. All of them, improbably, boast modern kin being crafted anew, right alongside the viola d’amore, still coming off the benches in Hengshui today.

The d’amore resists the myth of origin and destination, of a single musical baton passed neatly from East to West or back again. What we have is a centuries-long exchange, instruments passing ideas back and forth across the wide span of Eurasia.