Viotti established and settled for ever the fundamental principles of
violin-playing. He did not attain the marvelous skill of technique, the
varied subtile and dazzling effects, with which his successor, Paganini,
was to amaze the world, but, from the accounts transmitted to us, his
performance must have been characterized by great nobility, breadth, and
beauty of tone, united with a fire and agility unknown before his time.
Viotti was one of the first to use the Tourté bow, that indispensable
adjunct to the perfect manipulation of the violin. The value of this
advantage over his predecessors cannot be too highly estimated.
The bows used before the time of François Tourté, who lived in the
latter years of the last century in Paris, were of imperfect shape and
make. The Tourté model leaves nothing to be desired in all the qualities
required to enable the player to follow out every conceivable manner of
tone and movement--lightness, firmness, and elasticity. Tartini had made
the stick of his bow elastic, an innovation from the time of Corelli,
and had thus attained a certain flexibility and brilliancy in his bowing
superior to his predecessors. But the full development of all the powers
of the violin, or the practice of what we now call virtuosoism on this
instrument, was only possible with the modern bow as designed by Tourté,
of Paris. The thin, bent, elastic stick of the bow, with its greater
length of sweep, gives the modern player incalculable advantages over
those of an earlier age, enabling him to follow out the slightest
gradations of tone from the fullest _forte_ to the softest _piano_,
to mark all kinds of strong and gentle accents, to execute staccato,
legato, saltato, and arpeggio passages with the greatest ease and
certainty. The French school of violin-playing did not at first avail
itself of these advantages, and even Viotti and Spohr did not fully
grasp the new resources of execution. It was left for Paganini to open
a new era in the art. His daring and subtile genius perceived and seized
the wonderful resources of the modern bow at one bound. He used freely
every imaginable movement of the bow, and developed the movement of the
wrist to that high perfection which enabled him to practice all kinds
of bowing with celerity. Without the Tourté bow, Paganini and the modern
school of virtuosos, which has followed so splendidly from his example,
would have been impossible. To many of our readers an amplification of
this topic may be of interest. While the left hand of the violin-player
fixes the tone, and thereby does that which for the pianist is already
done by the mechanism of the instrument, and while the correctness of
his intonation depends on the proficiency of the left hand, it is the
action of the right hand, the bowing, which, analogous to the pianist's
touch, makes the sound spring into life. It is through the medium of
the bow that the player embodies his ideas and feelings. It is therefore
evident that herein rests one of the most important and difficult
elements of the art of violin-playing, and that the excellence of a
player, or even of a whole school of playing, depends to a great extent
on its method of bowing. It would have been even better for the art
of violin-playing as practiced to-day that the perfect instruments of
Stradiuarius and Guarnerius should not have been, than that the Tourté
bow should have been uninvented.
The long, effective sweep of the bow was one of the characteristics
of Viotti's playing, and was alike the admiration and despair of his
rivals. His compositions for the violin are classics, and Spohr was
wont to say that there could be no better test of a fine player than
his execution of one of the Viotti sonatas or concertos. Spohr regretted
deeply that he could not finish his violin training under this
great master, and was wont to speak of him in terms of the greatest
admiration. Viotti had but few pupils, but among them were a number of
highly gifted artists. Rode, Robrechts, Cartier, Mdlle. Gerbini, Alday,
La-barre, Pixis, Mari, Mme. Paravicini, and Vacher are well-known names
to all those interested in the literature of the violin. The influence
of Viotti on violin music was a very deep one, not only in virtue of his
compositions, but in the fact that he molded the style not only of many
of the best violinists of his own day, but of those that came after him.