The Voice in the Middle: A Short History of the Viola

An instrument caught in between

Some instruments claim the room the moment they sound: the violin with its brilliance, the cello with its warm depth. And then there is the viola, which has made its home somewhere in between. In the string quartet it rarely carries the melody and almost never the bass. It fills the harmony, connects, mediates, holds things together. Listen closely, though, and you notice that the essential things often happen right there, in the middle.

On 16 October, Incense of Music No. 76 brings three violas to the stage at once: AJ Nilles, Grégoire Simon and Yodfat Miron. A good reason to listen to this idiosyncratic instrument at length.

Where it comes from

The viola is as old as the violin itself – perhaps even a little older. Both emerged in northern Italy in the first decades of the sixteenth century as the family of viole da braccio, “arm viols”, as opposed to the viole da gamba, which were held between the knees. From that braccio, German derived its word “Bratsche”; Italian simply kept “viola”, and in French it is called “alto” – after the voice it takes in the ensemble.

Among the earliest pictures of this new family of instruments are the music-making angels Gaudenzio Ferrari painted in the 1530s in the dome of the pilgrimage church at Saronno near Milan. The oldest surviving instruments come from Andrea Amati of Cremona, who built violins, violas and cellos around the middle of the century – in shapes that remain essentially valid today.

In the music of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the middle register was often covered twice or three times over: there were alto and tenor violas in different sizes. Many of the large tenor violas were later cut down, because they were awkward to play and musical textures changed. Only a few have survived in their original size.

An impossible instrument

The viola is tuned a fifth below the violin, C – G – D – A, which puts it exactly an octave above the cello. Acoustically speaking, its body would need to be more than fifty centimetres long for that tuning. But such an instrument could no longer be held under the chin. So violas are usually built somewhere between roughly 38 and 43 centimetres – a compromise between physics and the human arm.

That very compromise defines its sound. For its range, the viola is really “too small”, and you can hear it: its tone is slightly veiled, dark, a little nasal, sometimes austere, often touched with a quiet melancholy. Hector Berlioz, one of the first composers to take it seriously, praised its deeply melancholic character in his treatise on orchestration. Many listeners feel it is the string instrument closest to the human voice – an alto voice that does not need to shine in order to move you.

It has a peculiarity on paper, too: the viola reads alto clef, a C clef on the middle line. Hardly any other instrument still uses it regularly – one more thing that makes violists a small, close-knit community.

The great makers

Alongside Andrea Amati and his descendants in Cremona, it was above all the Brescian school that produced large, powerful violas: Gasparo da Salò and his pupil Giovanni Paolo Maggini built instruments of impressive size and dark strength that violists still seek out today.

Antonio Stradivari made hundreds of violins but very few violas – only around ten survive. Each of them is a legend. The tenor viola of the so-called Medici Quintet of 1690 can be seen in Florence, the “Archinto” of 1696 belongs to the Royal Academy of Music in London, and the viola of the Spanish “Cuarteto Real”, also from 1696, is kept in the Royal Palace in Madrid. When the “Macdonald” viola of 1719 was offered for sale in 2014, the minimum bid was 45 million dollars – it found no buyer. Not a single viola is known by Giuseppe Guarneri “del Gesù”, Stradivari’s great rival.

In the twentieth century, makers kept trying to solve the size problem. The violist Lionel Tertis developed his own particularly sonorous “Tertis Model” together with the luthier Arthur Richardson; later makers experimented with asymmetrical, ergonomic shapes promising more resonance with less weight. The perfect viola, musicians like to say, does not exist – only instruments that handle their compromise especially beautifully.

Music for the viola

For a long time the viola was an instrument of the inner voices. Yet even in the Baroque there were exceptions: Georg Philipp Telemann wrote one of the earliest viola concertos, and Johann Sebastian Bach left out the violins altogether in the Sixth Brandenburg Concerto – two violas lead the piece. Mozart, who liked to play viola himself in quartets, gave it an equal solo role alongside the violin in the Sinfonia concertante K. 364; to make it sound more brilliant, it is even tuned a semitone higher there.

In the nineteenth century Berlioz wrote the symphony “Harold en Italie” with solo viola for Paganini – who found the part not virtuosic enough and never played it. Brahms composed his two late sonatas op. 120 for clarinet or viola. The real breakthrough came in the twentieth century: Paul Hindemith, himself an outstanding violist, wrote sonatas and concertos for his instrument and gave the premiere of William Walton’s Viola Concerto in 1929. Béla Bartók was working on a viola concerto when he died; his pupil Tibor Serly completed it. And Dmitri Shostakovich’s last work, finished in 1975, is a sonata for viola and piano – a farewell in dark, quiet colours.

New music in particular has loved the viola, perhaps because it leaves so much space between the notes. Giacinto Scelsi wrote “Manto”, a piece in which the violist begins to sing in the third part. Luciano Berio dedicated one of his “Sequenzas” to it, Morton Feldman the cycle “The Viola in My Life”. György Ligeti opened his Sonata for solo viola with “Hora lunga”, a “long song” recalling Romanian shepherds’ melodies. Two of these works – Ligeti’s “Hora lunga” and Scelsi’s “Manto III” – will also be heard at the concert on 16 October.

Left: Antonio Stradivari, tenor viola of the “Medici Quintet”, 1690, Galleria dell’Accademia, Florence – photo: Yair Haklai, CC BY-SA 4.0. Right: Lionel Tertis, c. 1920 – Bain News Service, public domain. Both via Wikimedia Commons

The great voices of the viola

That the viola is regarded as a solo instrument today is owed above all to one man: Lionel Tertis (1876–1975). The Englishman gave concert after concert, arranged works for his instrument and persuaded composers to write for him. He was followed by the Scot William Primrose (1904–1982), whose virtuosity finally proved that the viola can do everything the violin can – only in a different colour. Bartók’s concerto was written for him.

In the following generation, Yuri Bashmet, Kim Kashkashian, Nobuko Imai and Tabea Zimmermann shaped the image of the instrument – Zimmermann, incidentally, also as a long-standing professor in Berlin. Today Antoine Tamestit, who plays the 1672 “Mahler” Stradivari viola, Lawrence Power and Maxim Rysanov are among its best-known voices. And far beyond classical music, John Cale drew a droning trail through rock history with his amplified viola in The Velvet Underground.

The middle as a place

No instrument is the butt of as many jokes as the viola. Those who play it know them all – and usually laugh the loudest. Behind the teasing lies a quiet admiration: the viola does not have to push itself to the front in order to be indispensable. It is the instrument of in-between tones, of resonance, of listening.

Perhaps that is why it suits incense so well. A scent, too, does not impose itself; it spreads, fills a room from within and connects what was separate before. On 16 October, three violas meet frankincense from Yemen and white sage – and in “Under the Voice”, a composed improvisation for three partially muted violas, the voice in the middle itself becomes a space.

Incense of Music No. 76 – AJ Nilles, Grégoire Simon, Yodfat Miron: Friday, 16 October 2026, 8 pm, PANDA Platforma, Berlin. Program & tickets · Subscribe to the newsletter