Viola

• 1. Introduction

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  The viola sits at the heart of every string quartet, every symphony orchestra, every chamber ensemble that has filled a concert hall for the past three centuries. It looks like a violin. It plays like a violin, almost. But from the moment a bow touches its heavier strings, you hear something different: a sound darker, warmer, and just slightly more reluctant than its smaller cousin. That reluctance is not a flaw. It is the instrument's character.

  Tuned to C, G, D, and A, the viola occupies the middle space between the violin above and the cello below. It has spent much of its history filling in the harmony, threading the inner voices of a chord while violins carry the melody overhead and cellos anchor the bass. For centuries, composers treated it as furniture. Then, slowly, they began to listen more carefully.

  How did an instrument so central to ensemble music end up with so few concertos written for it before the twentieth century? Why do some of the greatest composers in history, including Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, prefer playing it to the violin when they sat down in a chamber ensemble? And what happens when makers start bending and melting the viola's shape to solve a problem the instrument has carried since its earliest days?

• 2. A Name With Many Faces

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  The word viola comes from Italian, and the Italians had a habit of calling the instrument viola da braccio, meaning literally "of the arm." The Germans heard the Italian word Brazzo and turned it into Bratsche, the name still used in German-speaking countries today. French musicians went their own way entirely.

  In France, the small viola was called the cinquiesme. A large one was the haute contre. A tenor-sized variant carried the name taile. Today the French have abandoned all three and settled on alto, which simply describes the instrument's vocal range. That shift from a bewildering array of regional names to a single functional label reflects something real about the instrument's past: for centuries, the viola was not standardized the way the violin eventually became.

  Prior to the eighteenth century, a large viola known as a tenor was built specifically to reach lower notes. A smaller version, the alto viola, handled the higher register. The instrument's body length could vary by as much as 100 millimeters compared to a full-size violin, and makers made choices about size and shape that varied from workshop to workshop and decade to decade. That variability never fully disappeared.

• 3. The Problem of Size

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  A full-size viola body runs between 38 and 46 centimeters in length, with an average of 41 centimeters. Violas for children start at 30 centimeters. Those dimensions might seem modest, but they create an ongoing tension between the physics of sound and the limits of the human arm.

  For the viola to produce its characteristic tone, it needs a sound box large enough to resonate at its lower pitches. But the larger the body, the harder it is for a human player to hold the instrument under the chin and reach across the fingerboard. For centuries, makers have tried to resolve that tension without fully solving it. Hermann Ritter built a viola alta measuring about 48 centimeters, intending it for use in Richard Wagner's operas. The Tertis model, developed around the violist Lionel Tertis, took a different approach: wider bouts and deeper ribs to improve tone while keeping the overall length manageable.

  More recent innovations went further. The Otto Erdesz "cutaway" viola has one shoulder removed to make shifting between positions easier. Joseph Curtin's "Evia" model uses a moveable neck and a maple-veneered carbon fibre back to reduce weight. Bernard Sabatier's violas in fractional sizes are described in the source as appearing to have melted, recalling the imagery of Salvador Dalí's paintings. David Rivinus built his Pellegrina model along similarly unconventional lines. Harry Partch, the American composer, fitted a viola with a cello neck so it could accommodate his 43-tone scale, calling the result simply the "adapted viola". Each of these experiments asks the same question in a different form: how much can you change the viola before it stops being the viola?

• 4. Inner Voices, Occasional Stars

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  In string quartets and in the orchestral string section, the viola typically plays what musicians call the inner voices: the middle harmonies that bind the outer parts together. It is more likely to play accompaniment than melody. In early orchestral music, the viola part was usually limited to filling in harmonies, with very little melodic material of its own.

  The Brandenburg Concertos by J. S. Bach stand as an early exception. The third concerto in the set calls for three violins, three violas, and three cellos plus basso continuo, and the viola parts demand genuine virtuosity. The Viola I part includes a solo in the last movement that is still commonly required at orchestral auditions. In the sixth Brandenburg Concerto, two violas take the primary melodic roles entirely, with the ensemble built around two violas concertino, cello, two violas da gamba, and continuo.

  Richard Strauss gave the viola a starring role in his tone poem Don Quixote, alongside a solo cello and orchestra. Hector Berlioz built Harold en Italie around a main viola line running through a full symphony. The "Ysobel" variation in Edward Elgar's Enigma Variations, the pas de deux from act 2 of Adolphe Adam's Giselle, and the "La Paix" movement of Léo Delibes's ballet Coppélia all feature substantial viola solos. Gabriel Fauré's Requiem, in its original 1888 scoring, divided the viola sections and dispensed with violin sections almost entirely, leaving only a solo violin for the Sanctus. These moments of prominence are not accidents. They reflect what the viola can do when a composer decides to use it.

• 5. The Soloists Who Changed Everything

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  Lionel Tertis changed what the viola could be. In the earlier part of the twentieth century, composers began writing for the instrument in far greater numbers, and Tertis was a central reason. Arthur Bliss, Edwin York Bowen, Benjamin Dale, Frank Bridge, Benjamin Britten, Rebecca Clarke, and Ralph Vaughan Williams all wrote substantial chamber and concert works, many of them commissioned by or written directly for Tertis.

  Tertis also recorded that Elgar, Alexander Glazunov, and Maurice Ravel each promised a viola concerto, yet all three died before doing any substantial work on them. The promise alone says something about the instrument's new standing. William Primrose, the other great pioneering violist of the century, lent his name to the Primrose International Viola Competition and the Primrose International Viola Archive at Brigham Young University, which holds scores, recordings, instruments, and archival materials from many of the world's leading violists.

  William Walton, Bohuslav Martinů, Tōru Takemitsu, Tibor Serly, Alfred Schnittke, and Béla Bartók all wrote well-known viola concertos. The concerti by Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Carl Stamitz, Georg Philipp Telemann, and Walton are considered major works of the viola repertoire. Hindemith was a violist himself, and he performed his own works regularly. His concerto Der Schwanendreher is among the most performed in the solo repertoire he assembled.

• 6. Organizing the Faithful

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  Paul Hindemith and Vadim Borisovsky made an early attempt to organize the viola world in 1927, founding the Violists' World Union. It did not last. It was not until 1968, when the Viola-Forschungsgesellschaft was established, that a durable international organization took shape. That group is now known as the International Viola Society, or IVS, and it has twelve chapters around the world.

  The largest chapter is the American Viola Society, which publishes the Journal of the American Viola Society and sponsors two competitions: the David Dalton Research Competition and the Primrose International Viola Competition. Research publications devoted specifically to the viola began appearing in the 1960s. Franz Zeyringer's Literatur für Viola first appeared in that decade and has been revised several times, with the most recent edition published in 1985. Maurice Riley produced the first comprehensive history of the viola in 1980, followed by a second volume in 1991. The IVS published its multi-language Viola Yearbook from 1979 to 1994.

  Among pre-twentieth-century violists of note, the source names Stamitz, Rolla, Antonio Rolla, Chrétien Urhan, Casimir Ney, Louis van Waefelghem, and Ritter. From the twentieth century, the pioneers include Tertis, Primrose, Hindemith, Théophile Laforge, Cecil Aronowitz, Maurice Vieux, Borisovsky, Lillian Fuchs, Dino Asciolla, Frederick Riddle, Walter Trampler, Ernst Wallfisch, and Emanuel Vardi, who became the first violist to record all 24 of Paganini's Caprices on the viola. Csaba Erdélyi remains the only violist ever to win the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition.

• 7. Beyond the Concert Hall

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  John Cale of The Velvet Underground used the viola in rock music at a time when bowed string instruments were almost entirely absent from the genre. His electric viola appears in the drone textures of "Venus in Furs" and in melodic passages across his solo work. Electric violas differ fundamentally from acoustic ones: they have little or no body, can be made from materials other than wood, and rely entirely on amplification to produce volume. They are mostly violin-sized, since the large soundbox of an acoustic viola is not needed when a speaker does the work.

  Other groups and artists have since brought the viola into popular contexts: alternative rock band 10,000 Maniacs, Imagine Dragons, folk duo John & Mary, British Sea Power, The Airborne Toxic Event, and Marillion. Geoffrey Richardson of Caravan is named as another notable player of the electric viola. Jazz has also seen violists, from string section players in the early 1900s to soloists and quartets that began emerging from the 1960s onward.

  Contemporary composers and violists Kenji Bunch, Scott Slapin, and Lev Zhurbin have written a number of works for the instrument. At the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, Professor of Viola Jodi Levitz has paired a composer with each of her students through "The Viola Project," resulting in recitals of entirely new works written and performed for the first time. The viola's range, its overtone spectrum in the lower partials, and its particular resistance to easy familiarity have kept drawing composers and players back to it, generation after generation.