Chapter I: Front Matter

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

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.”