Contemporary Makers
Historic Makers
Historic Instruments
Instrument Collections
Quotations
Recordings
Societies
Study
Login
Recorder Home Page Databases
Home
/
Quotations
/
View
First Date
1903
Last Date
unknown
Title
L’Allegro up to Date,
Punch
124-125 (16 December 1903: 424.
Author
A.A. Sykes
Quote
But come, thou Mistress FLORENCE FARR,
So buxom, blithe, and debonarr,
Haste thee, nymph, and bring with thee
Care dispelling jollity . . .
The old forgotten dancing-lore,
The steps we cannot understand,
DOLMETSCH agrees to take in hand,
These on the well-trod stage anon,
When next our learned sock is on,
We’ll show, while ARNOLD, Fancy’s child,
Tootles his native wood-wind wild.
These delights if thous canst give,
Miss Farr, within thy Club* I’ll live.
Notes
*The Sesame Club, where Florence Farr and her dancers performed in that year.
It is not hard to recognise this portrait of Arnold Dolmetsch, "tootling his native wood-wind wild." But this presents something of a mystery. Is this verse curiously prophetic (as Cambell (1975: 151) has it, or was Arnold Dolmetsch actually tootling on a recorder before he purchased the original Bressan recorder in 1905 (now in the Horniman Museum, London)?
References
Cambell (1975)
Recorder Home Page Databases (1996—2014). All rights reserved.