viola

Italian viola came from Old Provençal viula, which came from Medieval Latin vitula. The trail goes cold there, but one theory traces vitula to Vitula, the Roman goddess of joy and victory, whose name may derive from the Latin verb vitulari, meaning to celebrate or to sing joyfully. If this is true, the viola — the instrument musicians most love to mock — is named after a goddess of happiness. The irony has not been lost on violists.

The Provençal troubadours of the 12th and 13th centuries played a bowed string instrument they called the viula or vièla. It was the ancestor of the entire viol family, which in turn produced the modern violin, viola, and cello. The viola is the middle child: larger than a violin, smaller than a cello, tuned a fifth lower than the violin. It has a darker, warmer tone that orchestra composers have chronically underused.

By the 1530s, the Italian viola da braccio (arm viola) had taken its modern shape. Andrea Amati of Cremona made some of the earliest surviving examples around 1555. The instrument was essential to ensemble music but rarely given solo passages — a support role that persisted for centuries. Mozart, himself a violist, wrote almost nothing for solo viola. It took until the 20th century, with works by Bartók, Hindemith, and Walton, for the viola to get concertos worthy of its voice.

The viola joke is its own genre. Why is a viola solo like a bomb? By the time you hear it, it is too late to do anything about it. These jokes are as old as the orchestra and as tiresome to violists as they are amusing to violinists. They persist because the viola occupies an uncomfortable position: too important to remove, too quiet to notice, too close to the violin to get its own identity. The goddess of joy, if she lent her name, has a dark sense of humor.