TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
Collector Series
OLD VIOLINS
[Illustration:
AUTOGRAPHS AND ENGLISH
MANUSCRIPTS The Collector Series WATER-COLOURS
STAMPS TAPESTRY LACE AND MINIATURES
EMBROIDERY
OLD
VIOLINS
BY
REV. H. R. HAWEIS
EDINBURGH
JOHN GRANT
1910
FINE PRINTS ENGLISH
BOOK PLATES
COINS PICTURES
PORCELAIN OLD BIBLES ANCIENT GLASS
]
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
PRELUDE 7
I. VIOLIN GENESIS 15
II. VIOLIN CONSTITUTION 22
III. VIOLINS AT BRESCIA 30
IV. VIOLINS AT CREMONA 42
V. VIOLINS AT CREMONA (_continued_) 60
VI. VIOLINS IN GERMANY 91
VII. VIOLINS IN FRANCE 104
VIII. VIOLINS IN ENGLAND 118
IX. VIOLIN VARNISH 146
X. VIOLIN STRINGS 153
XI. VIOLIN BOWS 161
XII. VIOLIN TARISIO 171
XIII. VIOLINS AT MIRECOURT, MITTENWALD, AND
MARKNEUKIRCHEN 186
XIV. VIOLIN TREATMENT 198
XV. VIOLIN DEALERS, COLLECTORS, AND AMATEURS 214
POSTLUDE 237
DICTIONARY OF VIOLIN MAKERS 239
BIBLIOGRAPHY 281
DESCRIPTION OF PLATES 287
OLD VIOLINS
PRELUDE
What is the secret of the violin? Why is it that when a great
violinist appears all the other soloists have to take a back seat?
The answer is: the fascination of the violin is the fascination of
the soul unveiled.
No instrument--the human voice hardly excepted--provides such a rare
vehicle for the emotions--is in such close touch with the molecular
vibrations of thought and with the psychic waves of feeling. But
whilst the violin equals the voice in sensibility and expression, it
far transcends it in compass, variety, and durability.
Consider the singular completeness and perfection of this instrument
as a sort of physical and vibratory counterpart of the soul. The
four strings no doubt limit and define its compass, and only in
the quartet and collectively, is it capable of extended effects of
complex harmony; but as a tone-producing instrument and within its
limits it is perfect--every gradation of sound between tone and
semitone is attainable, and for no other instrument can this be
claimed.
Next I observe that the violin possesses a trinity in unity of power
which invests it with a quite singular and felicitous completeness of
its own:--
(1) _Accent_--and in staccato passages almost the accent of
percussion.
(2) _Sustained sound_--to a degree far beyond the capabilities of the
human voice.
(3) _Modified tone_--and in such refinement of gradation, that the
melting lines of the spectrum can alone supply us with a parallel or
analogy.
Your piano possesses _accent_, but once strike a note, soft or loud,
and it passes beyond your control.
The piano has little _sustained_ and no _modified tone_.
Your organ has _accent_ and _sustained tone_, but in a very imperfect
sense _modified_ tone; and a brief survey of all musical instruments
now in use will convince the student of acoustics that nowhere but
in the violin do we find to anything like the same degree, that
trinity in unity of power summed up in _accent_, _sustained_ sound,
_modified_ tone.
But the half has not yet been revealed. The trinity of power in
the violin is placed under the immediate control of two hands--of
ten fingers, each hand functioning differently. The hand on the
finger-board is engaged in pressing the strings; the other hand
wields the bow, and not only sets the strings in vibration, but
drives, tears, plunges, caresses, checks, prolongs, magnetises and
regulates, in an altogether marvellous fashion, the outpourings
of sound, which are in reality the outpourings of the musician’s
soul,--and further:
Has it ever occurred to you, my reader, how differently the same
piece of music, or, for the matter of that, the same violin, sounds
in the hands of two different players?
A few of Paganini’s solos were written down, and Sivori, who passed
as his only pupil, was in the habit of playing some of them; yet no
one was ever wrought to frenzy or melted into a passion of tears by
that elegant performer. I have often heard him. The gentlemen in the
orchestra remained calm, and listened with admiration and approval.
But when Paganini played, the drummer on one occasion so shook with
excitement that he was utterly incapable of playing his part at all,
and Professor Ella, then a violinist at the first desk, went up and
did it for him, whilst the other violinists were so lost in wonder
that they could hardly concentrate their attention sufficiently to
come in at the “tutti.”
When Paganini raised his bow on high, it came down on his four
strings with a crash. What made it sound like thunder? It was the
thunder in his soul! When his violin wailed with sweetness long drawn
out, why did the tears roll down the faces of hardened orchestral
veterans, and even great virtuosi like Lindley and Dragonetti? Why
did the people just go off into fits of laughter when a comic vein
seized the prodigious Maestro in the midst of his variations on the
Carnival de Venise?
I have heard Wieniawski play his since much hackneyed “Legende”--it
may have been somewhere in the sixties. I never heard anything so
weird--spirit voices in the twilight--the wail of lost souls--one
positively saw ghosts. I have heard the “Legende” a hundred times
since by Neruda, Nachez, Sarasate, and I know not how many more, but
I have never again seen ghosts.
What was it? It was the mystery of _touch_. The language of touch is
but half understood, but the language of touch is the language of
soul, and the perfection of touch is reached when a sensitive finger
controls a vibrating string or nerve and sends its own psychic thrill
along the waves of sound or sensibility.
The same no doubt is true of the pianoforte touch, though in a less
degree, because a percussive touch can never have the power of a
sustained and modified pressure.
Recent science has thrown some curious sidelights upon this same
sense of touch. It affirms that the trained fingers of the blind
actually acquire from exercise, practice, and adaptation, new
nerve-cells filled with grey matter exactly similar to the thinking
and feeling grey nerve matter of the brain--in fact, the fingers
of the sensitive musician have the power of thought and emotion
delegated to them; and just as thinking matter is not confined to
brain cells, but extends all down the medulla oblongata, which
responds to stimulus, even when the head is cut off--so we now know
that brain cells may be acquired, I had almost said cerebrated, and
used even by the fingers.
Now, supposing we bring these thinking, pulsating finger-tips and
wed their subtle pressure to waves of sound, who shall say that these
special sound waves may not be so impregnated with brain waves as
that sound thus charged with soul may convey through the auditory
nerve to other souls the passion, the emotion, the sorrow, the
joy, and whatever else is generated in the heart and brain of the
musician? ’Tis not more inconceivable than thought-reading.
This goes far to account for the personal fascination which players
exercise through their art. Their soul waves becoming brain waves,
float out, charged with whatever is in the musician; and if there is
nothing in the musician, as not unfrequently happens, they float out
charged with nothing!
The witchery of the violin for collectors is perhaps more difficult
to explain. Very often these fanciers don’t play, and still more
often they seem to have an objection to other people stringing up
their treasures and playing on them. It is the construction, not so
much the sound of the violin, that deprives the collector of his
senses; but we ought to be very thankful to these monomaniacs, for
without them there would be few masterpieces still extant; through
them the violin goes into a period of Devachan, or enforced rest. At
all events, it cannot be worn out, or chipped, or rubbed, or trifled
with by repairers whilst in the collector’s cabinet.
All the finest violins are known and carefully stalked--the health
of their owners watched; and when the time comes, they either find
their way to the open market or are picked up briskly by the great
dealers, sometimes for fabulous sums. Mr Hill of Bond Street thinks
nothing of a thousand pounds for a really fine specimen of Strad.
Watch the collector exhibiting his treasures to a select company
after lunch. You will soon see he is not the daft creature whom the
uninitiated who only want to _hear_ the fiddle are apt to suppose.
He knows the influence which that old Gasparo or Maggini had upon
the Cremona school. He marks with admiration the emergence of the
Amati and Guarnerii from the Brescian models; for him even the quaint
long ∫ ∫’s of the old makers stand in lovely contrast with the more
graceful but still pointed sound-holes of Joseph or more rounded ones
of the great Antonius. To him that ancient viola cut down from a
larger-sized model of viol now extinct, and placed side by side with
an Amati tenor, is as interesting as the study of comparative anatomy
to a scientist.
Then your collector is never tired of dwelling on the perfection of
those forms which slowly emerged as the survival of the fittest in
that exciting quest for the sensitiveness, sweetness, and sonority
of tone which occupied the lifelong meditations of Nicolo Amati
and Stradivari. Anon he will call your attention excitedly and
sympathetically to the grace of the curves, the surface never flat
or board-like, but full of a variety of levels like the satiny
surface of a fine human body. You might almost believe that a whole
system of muscle--a very living organism--lay beneath the “back”
and belly, which to his eyes are alive with swelling and undulating
grace;--and then think of the varnish like a sheet of thin jasper,
at once shielding from decay, whilst revealing as years roll on the
transparent filaments of the mottled maple or sycamore and the pine,
and crossed between the fibres with millions of tiny rays which
betray the desiccated cells--now fit for resonance--through which the
sap once flowed!
But I must not anticipate matter which more properly belongs to
violin manufacture. I only wish to affirm, in justification of the
existence of players, hearers, and collectors alike, that the violin
charm has its own rationale.
I may perhaps be pardoned if I close this prelude with some words
which I used before the Royal Institution in 1872.
“The violin is perennial. It grows old with its perpetual youth.
There is no reason why it should ever wear out. It sings over the
graves of many generations. Time, that sometimes robs it of a little
varnish, has no power over its anointed fabric.
“The hard durable substance steeped in silicate-like varnish has
well-nigh turned to stone, but without sacrificing a single quality
of sweetness or resonance.
“The violin is the only fossil which still lives, and lives with a
fulness of life and a freshness that contrasts quaintly enough with
the fleeting, sickly, and withering generations of man. Even should
mishap bruise or break its beauty it can be endlessly restored. It
is never fit for death; it survives a thousand calamities; nay,
even when cut up and dismembered, its several parts, scattered
through a dozen workshops and three hundred years, live on with a
kind of metempsychosis in new forms, and still cling strangely to
their individuality, so that men taking up a patchwork violin say,
‘It is fine--the front is poor, the head is tame, but see here is a
Stradivarius back!’
“Thus human in its power and pathos, superhuman in its immortal
fabric, the violin reigns supreme, the king and queen of all
instruments--and, in the hands of a Paganini, a Joachim, an Ernst, or
a Sarasate, the joy and wonder of the civilised world.”
CHAPTER I
VIOLIN GENESIS
To me it has always appeared unimportant and not very interesting
to answer the question, “Were or were not the ancients--by which we
usually mean Babylonians, Egyptians, or Greeks and Romans--acquainted
with the fact that stretched strings could be set in tonal vibration
by means of horse-hair, reed, or some other fibre?” They knew most
things, and how much they knew we are only now beginning to discover.
At one time we thought that even the Romans did not know that water
rose to its level, but they were well acquainted with the fact.
We pride ourselves upon the triumphs of modern surgery, but we
now find that the Egyptians were also great surgeons and operated
successfully for calculus.
The wonders of electric telegraphy are doubtless of modern origin,
but the Greeks were at least aware of the attractive properties of
amber, which they called “Electron,” though they made no use of
electricity, and they may very likely have been acquainted with the
principle of rubbing, as they certainly were of plucking, a string in
tension to produce a sound--without ever elaborating the idea in an
instrument for musical purposes.
Both Fêtis and Vidal deny that any instrument of the viol tribe
existed in antiquity, apparently on the slender grounds that the
few fragments of pottery, papyrus, or mural decoration known to
us have not yet revealed the fact. I think it probable that these
savants are wrong. Like the use of the wheel, bow and arrows, bow and
string for drilling holes, the bow or something like it employed for
musical purposes is likely, on _a priori_ grounds alone, to be of
immense antiquity, and at least as old as the knowledge of percussion
instruments such as the drum, or of wind instruments such as the
pan-pipes.
I don’t lay any great stress upon pictures of stringed instruments
with something like a bridge taken to prove the existence of a bow,
especially if the bow happens to be absent--a guitar has a bridge
but no bow, so has the zither and the bandoline, which are plucked
with the fingers or a plectrum. The much-talked-of Canino Vase (fig.
103, vol. iii. of Micali’s _Storia Degli Antichi Popoli Italiani_),
showing apparently a sort of instrument with apparently a sort of
bow, has been held by some to be conclusive that something like the
violin tribe was known to the Etruscans. Possibly! Personally I am
not satisfied that it is a musical instrument at all which is figured
on that same vase--it might be anything, from a rattle or a torch to
a broom or a dust-pan. The strongest point in its favour as a musical
instrument is not the rough image on the vase, but the fact that a
musician, astronomer, and doctor, by name Chiron, is seated beside it.
We probably see the descendants of any such instruments as may have
existed in those times in the Ravanastron, which has been recognised
by some as the oriental precursor of the occidental fiddle.
Altogether, I think that, from the musical point of view, too much
time, and a surplus of barren antiquarian lore, have been bestowed on
the origin of the viol tribe.
Our business begins not even with the building up of the viol out of
the Rebek, Crouth, and Rotta (see “Music and Morals,” p. 382), but
with the emergence of the violin tenor, violoncello, and double-bass
out of that confused, tentative, and often grotesque crowd of viols
and viol da Gambas, specimens of which are still exhibited behind
glass in our Art Museums and Loan Collections. We have little to
do with them. They are of no more living account than the Egyptian
mummies in the British Museum. A few retain a gleam of practical
importance for the violin collector, because they have been cut down
for tenors or otherwise used up during the last three hundred years
by violin makers: the others remain of interest to musicians only;
like the bones of fossil crocodiles, they are curious studies in the
comparative anatomy, not of reptiles, but of musical instruments,
that is all.
No, it is with the distinct evolution of the violin, by which I
mean the violin tenor, violoncello, and double-bass types, from the
nondescript, dusky, tubby, ungainly machines, muffled in sound and
dubious in form, that for me at least begins the history and the
interest of the violin tribe.
The genius of these elect types is inseparably connected with
song--sacred song.
Viols were used in churches to play chants in unison with the monks’
voices (probably also to assist their defective musical ear). When
the singing-schools of Italy arose and divided the voice into treble,
alto, tenor, and bass, a suitable viol was told off as the companion
of each voice. Soon after this the modern divisions, the octave and
the discovery of the perfect cadence, laid the foundation of the art
of modern music (Monteverde, 1570). The violin emerged.
The endless discussions as to exactly when the violin proper made
its appearance, or the tenor proper, or when the viol da Gamba got
modified into the current violoncello size and shape, will probably
continue to agitate those whose minds have a special aptitude for
such researches. A very general statement will probably satisfy
general readers, and even special lovers of the violin.
The name of Duiffoprugcar haunts this dim transition period,
and although the violins extant under his name have all been
discredited, and not always distinguished from Vuillaume’s clever
forgeries, I remember one of the first judges in Europe, who was
certainly quite alive to the tricks of the trade, showing me a
reputed Duiffoprugcar (hung and labelled in the South Kensington
Museum), which he then believed to be genuine. It had lost the
tubby characteristics of the viol tribe; it was, in fact, an early
Brescian violin, linen-lined, but its claim to be a Duiffoprugcar was
withdrawn.
[Illustration]
Duiffoprugcar was born in 1514 at Fussen, in the Bavarian Tyrol. He
was an inlayer and mosaic worker. He is now known to have visited
Paris, and to have worked at Lyons. There is a fine portrait of
him etched by the engraver Wariot in 1562, and a curious viol is
extant by him, with a map of Paris inlaid at the back, once owned
by Vuillaume, and within recent years secured for the Brussels
Conservatoire Museum by its intelligent curator, Mr Victor Mahillon.
Mr Donaldson’s beautiful viol da Gamba is the only other known
specimen of his work. There is no evidence that Duiffoprugcar ever
made what we should call a violin, and very good negative evidence
to the contrary. In a curious old print exhibiting his portrait, a
copy of which is owned by Messrs Hill, amongst the various viols
represented no such instrument as the violin appears.
It is easy to see how inevitable was the differentiation of the
violin tribe from the first moment that a vocal quartet came to be
conceived of. First the viol is selected to double a part, next a
viol is made in a modified way to suit the part, and very soon the
modification assumes the forms and proportions known as violin,
viola, and violoncello.
But in the early days of violin genesis the instrument was
quite subordinate to the voice; it only gradually conquered its
independence with the emergence of the string trio and string
quartet. It would happen thus:--
Two people would meet to sing, and the missing tenor or bass voice
would be supplied by a viola; or three would meet who could not sing
at all, when it would occur to them that the vocal parts might be
played instead, and with even more accuracy perhaps than the very
average voices would attain to.
The instrumental trio and quartet thus at once came into being.
Next, music would be written independently for such combinations, and
the voices would be egged out altogether, and presently the treble
or violin would show a tendency to throw the others into the shade,
and at last be thought worthy of a solo _all to itself_, and thus the
independent position of the instrument would quickly be established.
All attempts to date exactly the stages of this differentiation of
the violin tribe are likely to be misleading.
You cannot say exactly when perspective was discovered or
rediscovered by the Italian painters, it developed gradually; and so
the violin developed gradually, born of new musical needs and new
musical knowledge.
In the midst of the old chaotic world of viol noises that preceded
it, the struggle to displace the old viol players and the slow
disappearance of the whole clumsy craft is aptly summed up in the
words of one who lived at the moment of transition. He writes--
“In former days we had the viol in
Ere the true instrument had come about;
But now we say, since this all ears doth win,
The violin hath put the viol out.”