VIOLINS AT BRESCIA
The violin proper is an Italian creation. It comes from the north of
Italy. Stainer, it is true, is an early maker, and he bore a German
name, but his date is after all 1621-83, whilst that of Maggini is
1590-1632; and if you visit the frontier village of Absam, near the
town of Hall, where he lived, you will observe that he dwelt on the
high-road between the Tyrol and Italy, and that his training, his
talent, and his market were Italian.
But Brescia was really the home of the violin, and there is possibly
something in the heavy salt seasoning of the Tyrolean pines which
specially favours that peculiar resonance, sensitiveness, and
durability for which the Brescian and Cremonese schools are famous.
The name of Gasparo di Salò (Bertolotti was his real name), now
chiefly famous for his double-basses and violas, must ever be revered
by students as the master of the great Maggini, who was in reality
the father of the violin, in the sense of having clearly, at once and
for ever, differentiated the instrument as a distinct type.
Salò is a lovely spot on the shores of the lake of Garda, in the
province of Brescia, and about twenty miles from the big town. It
was early famed for its culture. Foreigners went there for the sake
of its schools, and the Corporation records show that sacred music
especially flourished there. It is now certain that Gasparo migrated
thence to Brescia and worked in that town. Maggini was as certainly
his pupil. This is proved by a legal document, dated 1602, which has
lately been discovered, bearing the joint signatures of Gasparo and
Maggini, who is termed his “garzone,” or apprentice.
Gasparo’s share in violin-making proper could not have been very
great, as the earliest violin orchestral music appeared in Italy in
1608, and Gasparo died in 1610 or thereabouts--a fact which, taken in
connection with the extreme rareness of any Gaspardian instruments
which can be called violins, seems to argue that the piccolo violino
which was presently going to be master of the situation was only just
creeping up.
I have seen and played on one very fine Gasparo violin, the property
of Lord Amherst--D and A strings rich and pure, 1st and 4th rather
muffled, but on the whole the tone is mellow and powerful.
This almost unique Gasparo violin is still bulgy, but a great
improvement on the old viol build; the head is long and
quaint-looking, but lacks that finish and character which later
masters put into their scrolls. Gasparo’s basses are still much
sought after, and Dragonetti possessed more than one.
A giant specimen, known as the Duke of Leinster’s bass, may still be
seen at the South Kensington Museum, and I exhibited it at the Royal
Institution in 1872. His work is heavy and lacks refinement, but his
tone is grand and full-bodied.
GIO. PAOLO MAGGINI was the child of his father’s old age, and born
at Botlicino, near the town of Brescia, which afterwards became the
family headquarters.
Brescia was at this time a strongly fortified place, and a print as
late as 1764 probably gives us a fair notion of what it looked like
between 1560 and 1632.
Swift brooklets ran down the streets, and outside the walls were
spreading woodlands and ploughed fields. It boasted of a splendid
brick palace, the Broletta, and a massive belfry of rough stone
(Torre del Popolo), a Castello, and an old Duomo; the streets were
adorned with frescoes. The Cathedral of San Pietro de Dom was famous
for its music, and had an organ and full orchestra. The viol-makers
and the monks were then, as they have since been, in intimate
relations, and it was a couple of monks who befriended Gasparo when
he was down in the world in health and fortune, and sadly needed it.
The princes of Italy at this time (1512-1630) were great patrons
of art, letters, and especially music. Brescia in 1600 was under
Venetian rule. The town or fortress was from its very position
constantly in the midst of wars and rumours of wars, and was
appropriately famed amongst other things for its manufactory of
swords and armour.
It is surprising how little military commotions seem to have
affected, either at Brescia or at Cremona, the manufacture of musical
instruments. There seems to have been an uninterrupted line of viol
and cither and lute makers at Brescia from 1300 and onwards.
But when it is remembered that war does not interrupt the functions
of religion or diminish the importance of the clergy (nay, often
enhances both), we can understand that the musical instrument makers
might have been as much in demand, in the stormiest times of the
Visconti and Medici, as druggists, soothsayers, or mountebanks; and
they probably made impartially for friend or foe--for any one, in
fact, who could afford to pay.
Up to within the last few years very little was known of this man
Gio. Paolo Maggini--Magino or Magicino. As he put only the name
and place, but not the date, on his labels (all dated Magginis are
therefore frauds), it is not easy to assign fixed dates to any of
his instruments, and the personal information to be squeezed out of
them is of the meagrest description. He worked in Brescia; few of his
instruments survive. His violas are as rare as Gasparo’s violins, but
he distances all other makers in the attention that he gave to that
newfangled and suspiciously regarded instrument, the true violin.
His handwriting, some of which survives, would lead one to suppose
that his education was very moderate, but the signatures of
illustrious princes of this period are no better. Recently, however,
the State Archives of Brescia have revealed some interesting gleams
of information which enable us to show him in his workshop with one
apprentice, Franchino, and a young wife, aged nineteen, Maddalena
Anna, who brought him a dowry, and afterwards children.
A picture of his house in the Contrada del Palazzo, Vechio del
Podesta, lies before me. It has but two storeys, and the family lived
upstairs, surrendering the ground floor to the violin business.
In a woodcut by Jost Anian, Zurich (1539-91), we have an authentic
picture of such easy, leisurely, calm workers as Maggini.
There is the rude substantial bench, the tools, the glue-pot, the
planks and the wood in blocks, bits of fiddles and strips of timber
hung up on the walls; the aproned artificer is carefully trying a
lute as he sits on his three-legged stool.
What simplicities! Were we to enter in imagination the studios in
which the greatest pictures in the world were being painted about
this time, the same meagre appliances and absence of superfluous
luxury would doubtless have greeted our eyes.
But our gorgeous modern studios hung with the spoils of the East, and
iridescent with precious pottery and curiously worked metals, our
modern workshops with their exquisite mechanical appliances and all
sorts of labour-saving machines, somehow fail to rival in quality of
production those old masters who sat on three-legged stools, ground
their own pigments, made their own glue and varnish, and chopped and
chiselled their own wood.
If you consider Maggini’s period (1560-1632) you will see how exactly
the direction of his genius was conditioned by the demands of his age.
The singing-schools of Naples had resulted in a call for stringed
instruments in increased numbers, but the old viols were seen to
correspond ill to the altered times, and the need for an instrument
which would render leading melodies effectively was felt just in
proportion as such melodies became multiplied with the rise of vocal
music, sacred and profane.
Most writers on the violin seem to have a passion for cutting up a
maker’s life into periods, as though a man could rise one morning and
say, “Go to now, let us enter upon period number three, in which the
back shall be sloped so, and the belly brought down thus, and the
curve of the bouts tilted, contracted, or elongated thus.” All that
can be safely said is, after such and such a time Maggini or Amati
dropped or adopted this or that feature as a rule, and we may infer
that a maker came under such and such influences, and so forth.
Now I come to speak of Maggini, I will trace roughly but clearly what
may be called his continuous development, rather than any so-called
three periods.
Naturally at first the pupil made like his master Gasparo. His
violins suggested big viols on a small scale. They had a heavy look;
they were of large size, which makes the sides seem lower than they
are, for in reality the ribs are not higher than those of the Amati.
The heads look rough, because, with the reduced size, no increase
of refinement or delicacy has yet been reached; now, they are cut
without symmetry; now, the fluting of the scroll is not smoothed,
even the grooves for the purfling are not neat, nor is the purfling
itself sharp.
Maggini’s early backs, sides, and bellies are cut on the slab--that
is, across the grain.
Then Gasparo’s sound-holes have got narrower in the hands of
his pupil, and Gasparo has probably got credit for some of the
improvements of Maggini, as there can be little doubt that some
violins labelled Gasparo are the work of his pupil, just as early
Stradivari violins are in existence signed Nicolo Amati.
If I may hazard the remark, in my opinion Maggini did not copy so
long or so seriously the work of Gasparo as did Stradivari copy
Nicolo. The reason is obvious. The stride between Gasparo and Maggini
is far greater than that between the late Nicolo and the Strad. By
the time Nicolo died the violin had already risen to that supreme and
independent individuality and dignity which it has never since lost.
Stradivari got the violin all ready made; it was Maggini’s glory to
have assisted at the individualisation of the “King” type.
Presently we become aware that Gasparo is dead and buried. The
Maggini bellies now cease to be cut on the slab, but show the long
parallel grain lines of the wood as in the Amatis; the art of wood
selection for sonority and sensitiveness seems already to have
reached the 1650 Cremona level. The sound-holes are more delicate,
but still a little quaint; they are invariably bevelled inwards, a
practice entirely discarded by the Cremona masters.
Sir Joseph Chitty’s, and Mr Sternberg’s, and the Dumas’ tenors are
good specimens of Maggini’s first independent work illustrating the
above characteristics. The Dumas family were friends of Beethoven,
and enthusiastic admirers of Maggini’s work. They possessed at least
one valuable “chest” of his instruments. A chest is described by an
old writer as “a large hutch with several compartments and partitions
in it, each lined with green baize” (we have since gone heavily into
velvet and plush).
There are only about eight violas or tenors of Maggini’s known; they
do not vary in their proportions.
The model of the Dumas viola is of the master’s most arched type--a
feature much exaggerated by Stainer and his followers. It is, like
almost all this master’s specimens, adorned with double purfling,
set close to the edge, with the usual Maggini bevel at the corner
joints. These corners give it a special physiognomy; they are short,
and make no appeal to the eye like the later Cremonas. The tenor’s ∫ ∫
holes are upright, short, and broad; they are higher than in the same
maker’s violins, the top curves as usual larger than the bottom ones,
the back and belly both in two pieces; the bass bar and blocks inside
have been strengthened; the rough tooth of the well-known Brescian
plane has left its mark on the wood inside. The Dumas tenor is in
exquisite condition; the varnish is unlike the old Gasparo brown, it
glows with rich golden tints. Its type is admirably defined; no one
in looking at this tenor can say, “This is a little violoncello,” or
“This is a big violin.” It is a distinct viola type, and it set the
type for all succeeding violas. The Cremona makers worked on it, but
they did not re-create the tenor; they could not.
The Dumas-Maggini violin is in equally fine condition; it looks
so new that some have supposed that, although eighty years before
Stradivari, it must be a copy made by Strad of the older master, but
it is absolutely authentic and genuine.
Before Maggini died, we notice that a very high standard of finish
has been reached, unknown to him in his earlier days, or, as for the
matter of that, to any of his predecessors. Observe the improved
purfling, the bouts and mitres cut with clear intention, but never so
marked in physiognomy as the Amatis, the sound-holes quite as sharp
as theirs; but, above all, the arching has at last come down--this
true hint, so early given, was not at once adopted by Maggini’s
Cremonese successors. Stradivarius at last fixed it and regulated
it in a model from which no later maker has found it safe to depart
with the exception of Duke and Klotz, who obstinately adhered to the
Stainer high bellies with deep side grooves.
Maggini’s later varnish runs out of the old Gasparo brown into
orange and golden yellow, as luscious as anything to be found in a
Joseph or a Strad.
[Illustration]
Although Maggini adhered to his double purfling, there are specimens
of his work in exhibitions without it; and at least one curiously
but not carelessly made instrument is known where the purfling at
the back is neither double nor even inlaid, but merely drawn sharply
in black lines. A very fine single-purfled violin, formerly in the
collection of Prince Caraman Chimay, now in the possession of Mr
Antonietti, possesses an unrivalled tone of the Maggini timbre. Many
of his violins retain the old taste for other inlaid ornamentation.
He does not run into maps and portraits, but a graceful clover-leaf
pattern is often found at top and bottom of his backs, twisted, as it
were, out of the purfling, and a sixfold trefoil sometimes occupies
the centre of the back; but an acute observer has noted that there
is no instance of the central trefoil combined with the clover-leaf
pattern.
Not less remarkable than this great maker’s definition of the
violin and viola types was his conception of the violoncello. The
Maggini ’cello is not the son of the double-bass, but the father
of the tenor. It is much more like a large tenor than like a small
double-bass; the proportions are, as it were, enlarged from the
tenor, not reduced from the flat-backed bass. Maggini’s bent was
entirely in the direction of the smaller violoncello pattern.
The early and even the later Cremona ’cellos were too large, and
there is very little doubt that the powerful influence of Maggini
can be traced in the evolution of those perfect but moderately sized
Strad ’cellos which date mostly after 1700.
The tone of Maggini is full, mellow, and plaintive, rather than
biting like Stainer, bell-resonant like Strad, or soft and sensitive
like Nicolo Amati; but great players like Vieuxtemps, Ole Bull,
Leonard, and De Beriot have found him sufficient, and if more have
not extolled Maggini, it may be on account of the rareness and
inaccessibility of his instruments.
It has been said by a competent authority that not more than fifty
extant Magginis are known, and in England at present (1897) about
thirty violins, ten violas, and but two violoncellos and one
double-bass.
Maggini died at the comparatively early age of fifty-one. All
researches made in the archives of S. Lorenzo, his parish church,
have failed to reveal the date of his death, and the worst of it is
that the registers of that church prior to 1700 have disappeared.
We hear plenty about his wife, Anna Foresti, who died 1651, aged
fifty-eight, and was buried in a neighbouring parish.
It is more than probable that Maggini himself was a victim to the
plague which raged at Brescia in 1632, and that he was hastily
interred, or, dying at the Pest House, no official note of his death
may have been taken. At any rate, in 1632, the year of the plague,
his son describes himself as “filius quondam Johannis Pauli”--the son
of the late Gio. Paolo.
His last income-tax return is dated 1626, and he was dead in 1632,
so he must have died at latest in 1632, and therefore could not have
been more than fifty-one. Maggini was doubtless well off, owned
considerable property in and out of town, was the father of six
children, and, what was of far more importance, the father of the
modern violin.