The Baroque Violin & Viola

A Fifty-Lesson Course Volume I & ll

WALTER S. REITER
Professor of Baroque Violin, The Royal Conservatory of the Hague
This highly readable book guides the reader step-by-step through seminal works of the
Baroque violin repertoire, offering violinists and violists a comprehensive and practical course in
Historically Informed Performance. It contains historical, musicological and cultural information,
detailed technical and interpretive suggestions and exercises.
• Lessons include detailed practical analyses akin to those offered in the studio
and classroom
• Combines treatises of the Baroque period with the experience of a Baroque
violinist with over four decades of performance experience
• Includes primary source material and contextual and background information in
numerous useful appendices
After more than half a century spent teaching and playing the violin, the last thirty of which have
been devoted almost exclusively to the Baroque violin, the author offers this two-volume book
as a gift to all violinists and violists curious to share the insights he has gathered pertaining to the
performance of music from the Baroque period.

As a teacher I have found that the best results are achieved by a detailed examination of seminal
works from the early 1600s through to J. S. Bach in which stylistic, musicological and technical
issues can be explored in depth. However, it gradually became clear to me that too much
classroom time was being spent in giving out the same information on these works to each
student in turn. Therefore, in order to free up more time to work with the individual issues every
student has, I decided to write that information down, enabling the students to prepare their
lessons more efficiently and in their own time.

The results of this experiment were so encouraging that I decided to form the Lessons into a
book, offered to professional violinists and violists, interested amateurs, conservatory students
seeking information not provided by their regular course of studies, and teachers hoping to
learn how better to inform their pupils. The book takes the form of a carefully designed, step-
by-step course of ‘Lessons,’ guiding the reader through the repertoire of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries in an historically-informed manner, with technical and musical guidance at
every step of the way and with copious quotations from historical sources.

In the ‘Observations’ sections there are bar-by-bar analyses of the text, with musical, interpretive
and technical suggestions, relevant quotations from historical sources and thoughts on
the holistic approach to playing, while 125 specially devised Exercises help broaden an
understanding of a vast range of issues. The scores, transcribed for both violin and viola, are
published on the website, and there are six accompanying videos.

The subject of Rhetoric, at the heart of the Baroque way of playing, pervades the book; the
starting point is the playing of words, reproducing their rhythms, stresses, consonants and
vowels, with the help of audio clips. The study of the early Baroque sonata is preceded by an
examination of its origins in vocal music: thus the historical transition from vocal to instrumental
music is re-enacted within the experience of the reader.

The identification and communication of emotions and the means to achieve this is taught
throughout the book, starting with the cultivation of responses to simple intervals and the
‘Emotional Information’ these contain.

There are Modules on Ornamentation, ‘Interludes’ of historical and cultural interest and Lessons
focusing on topics including temperament, shifting, vibrato and dance.

Walter Reiter can be contacted at baroquelessons@yahoo.com and his books, in paperback,

hardback or in digital format can be purchased through bookshops or directly from Oxford
University Press at www.oup.com.