The Viola or: The Lonesome and Weeping Gael

Happy midnight or thereabout, my friends. On this night I shall speak in praise of one of the finest of orchestral instruments, the viola. I have a special love of the viola which I have harbored for many years, and the writing of viola parts has always provided me with immense pleasure, notably more so than other instruments. This is not without reason, and indeed this reasoning has not gone undone before.

The viola is a very profoundly melancholy instrument, and some of the best orchestral passages consist of a lonesome viola melody briefly weeping over some soft secondary part only to be swiftly swept away, leaving a longing in the listener for more of the same. The brilliance of the effect is just that: it necessarily evokes its intended expression in the listener. Berlioz observes this in his 1846 book, Treatise on Instrumentation. With my particular tastes in music (basically dark, otherwise aethereal), how could I fail to adore such sound?

Furthermore, the viola covers my favorite range of notes (my favorite note is perhaps Bb3) all the while using a somewhat archaic clef, which is of course the alto clef. Interestingly, there are also soprano and tenor clefs that use the same shape on different lines of the staff, the former being thoroughly unused today, and the latter finding most of its use in the upper trombone parts. This arose (like most musical matters) in vocal music. In using this alto clef, the viola defies its instrumental fellows, which is a fine thing for it to do. Indeed, the viola has reason to be lonely, for there is none like it, so it needs the friendship of those who see its individual might. We will not stand for those who say it is simply an enlarged, mutant violin. The viola is itself, and it deserves to be acknowledged as such.

Last, there are certain associations that the viola has developed in its history that are not to go ignored, and I refer particularly with its eighteenth century marriage with Ossianic poetry, another note of Berlioz. Admittedly, I do not know much about Ossianic poetry. Besides a general knowledge of its supposed Gaelic origins, I have read only very little of it, and that was quite by chance; however, the association is interesting to me, as it shows clearly that the viola is clearly the most Gaelic of all the instruments (just as the cymbals are the most Turkish of all the instruments), and this is its most important association, to the extent of my concern. This is a very significant point, but more on it later, I hope.

In summary, I think it is clear that the viola is absolutely indispensable, but that the writing of a viola part is not to be taken at all lightly, as it so often is. It is a basic point of orchestration (noted clearly by Rimsky-Korsakov in his Principles of Orchestration) that the strings are the most essential instrument type. This immediately brings the viola into a high position within the orchestra. It must now only be granted its due among the strings as more than some perpetual harmonic filler or doubler of some other instrument.

Anyone who has no love for the viola has no love for me. But anyone who has love of the viola has my love also.