Thoughts on Viola Size and Playability
Violists are peaceful people, but if you want to start a fight, simply express a strong opinion about viola size. "A fifteen-inch viola is just a fat violin!" "A viola over sixteen inches will injure you!" "A large viola has no resale value!" "Only a giant could play a seventeen-inch viola!" It's a contentious subject, but it is impossible for me as a viola alta player to avoid: to be seen playing an eighteen-inch viola alta is to expose one's unusual idea of what makes a viola playable and practical.
I have never experienced pain from playing my viola alta. Last week, however, I reluctantly handed it over to an excellent luthier to have some overdue work done on it. While I await its return, I have been playing on my backup instrument, a not particularly expensive 16¼" Chinese Maggini model. Now, I'm feeling some pain — and not just from the dull, nasal sound and sluggish response. My back muscles ache, and my thumbs tire rapidly. How can this be?
First, a defense of the instrument: it's not bad, especially for the price! It has a decent basic sound and pretty good flexibility, if you work at it; it's fairly lightweight, and it's not unattractive. For a spare instrument for outdoor and emergency use, it's a few hundred dollars well spent. But it has its problems: the fingerboard is canted toward the C-string, and the strings are a mile off of it, and the right- and left-hand effort it takes to get it to speak with a decent viola tone is ridiculously out of proportion to the size of the instrument and the resulting sound!
I recognize that I'm contrasting a more expensive, more carefully-made instrument that has had a century to mature with a cheap instrument mass-produced from poor wood less than a decade ago — but this still has something to tell us about viola size. It is one factor in playability, but far from the only one. All other things being equal, a smaller viola is probably easier to hold and finger — but no two instruments are alike, even discounting size. There are numerous features of an instrument more important than its body length, such as the width and shape of its neck, its weight and how it is distributed, its responsiveness, the care with which it has been set up — but none of those are as visible as its length. In some ways, a smaller viola is a disadvantage: the responsiveness and ease of bowing will be worse on a smaller than a larger instrument of similar quality.
There are, however, ways in which the viola alta is undeniably more difficult to play. The most superficially obvious is the distance between the notes in the first position, but for a reasonably large hand, that is easily managed. The greatest difficulty is reaching around the shoulder in the high range; above about the eighth position, it becomes difficult for me to keep the thumb in the crook of the neck. I've had to learn to allow my thumb to rest along the edge of the top plate. The high G♯ in the Bartók Viola Concerto (or the enharmonically similar A♭ in Heldenleben) is about the highest fingered note that can be played or heard comfortably; above that point the brilliance of the tone becomes unpleasantly harsh, aggravated by the difficulty of achieving a free vibrato. (Composers' insistence on writing such notes is no doubt why Hermann Ritter added a fifth string to his instrument later in his career.)