Chapter XIII: Violins at Mirecourt, Mittenwald, and Markneukirchen

MIRECOURT

Mirecourt in Lorraine has the glory of being associated from so early a date as 1566 with the Cremona workshops.

Andrew Amati, who made six small fiddles for Charles IX. about that time, employed Nicolas Renauld of Nancy, who was a pupil of the celebrated Mirecourt lutist Tywersus, to assist him in finishing these important court orders, which did so much to establish the supremacy of the “petit violon” over the crowd of competing viols which then held the popular ear, and, as we have seen, died very hard.

The great princes of Lorraine occupied a castle of pleasure called Ravenel, at a short distance from Mirecourt.

These accomplished noblemen, touched with Florentine culture, often made excursions into Lombardy, and delighted in the refinements of the Italian princedoms and duchies.

They brought back with them pictures, ironwork, laces, musical instruments.

Tywersus, their private lute-maker, was deeply influenced by the work and models of the early Amatis, and from the school of Tywersus came Nicolas Renauld, Jean Medard, and Nicolas Medard. When Amati left Paris, whither he had gone to present his violins in person to Charles IX., he left behind him Nicolas Renauld, who slipped into the lucrative post of luthier to his French Majesty, and we find his friend and co-worker Medard installed in the same fat office under the Grand Monarque, Louis XIV., who, with his expensive mistresses, certainly spared no money or patronage to secure those who could in any way minister to the extravagant court pomp and artistic amusements of the Pompadour and the Petit Trianon.

Meanwhile Mirecourt, in the heart of the Vosges mountains, with easy access to the grand timbers of their ancient forests, within beck and call of Lombardy, and in close touch with the great Italian fiddle-makers, Mirecourt long held supremacy as one of, if not the most important mart of fiddle manufacture.

It shared with Mittenwald and Markneukirchen the honour of supplying that rapidly growing violin market which was now springing up, and whilst Cremona made largely for home consumption and a few foreign courts, Mirecourt undertook the more modest but equally useful duty of multiplying Cremona school violins, which circulated far and wide throughout the French provinces, and frequently reached our own shores; indeed the fiddles often passed for Cremonas.

The popularity of these Cremona replicas brought on that inevitable deterioration in quality which always follows over-rapid production and cheap wares, and at one time Mirecourt, in spite of its elaborate industry, was fast becoming a byword for bad fiddles. Happily the danger was seen and speedily checked, and Mirecourt now stands out as perhaps the greatest and most excellent emporium of modern violin manufacture.

All who wish to know what can be known, go to Mirecourt, just as people who study art go to Rome and Florence, or people who study the fashions go to Paris.

To Mirecourt we owe Rambaux, who was born there in 1802 and died there only in 1870.

Francis and George Chanot both came from there.

The Lupôt family are claimed as natives of Mirecourt, although the greatest of them, Nicolas, whose violins run some of the finest specimens of Cremona very hard, was a native of Stuttgard. His father was a Frenchman, and came from Mirecourt. All his traditions belong to Mirecourt, and these, as we all know, he carried with him to Paris, where he died in 1824, and was succeeded by Gand.

The names of Maucotel, Medard, Menegand, Silvestre, and Deragay, and above all Vuillaume, must always shed an imperishable lustre upon the little town in the Vosges mountains.

Every one of the Vuillaumes, eight in number, including the immortal Jean Baptiste, were born at Mirecourt. Two settled at Brussels, three at Paris, but all the others lived and died at Mirecourt.

William Ebsworth Hill was careful to send his sons to this celebrated school of violin art, and we may be sure that they did not come away until they had possessed themselves of everything that Mirecourt had to teach the violin maker or the connoisseur.

M. Thibouville Lamy of Mirecourt, who has trade branches in Paris and London, manufactures a violin at about 3s. 10d. cost price, selling at about 4s. 6d.; but Markneukirchen probably leads in cheapness and quantity, if not quality, turning out quite playable fiddles for the modest figure of £1 to £2, 10s.

The best Mirecourt fiddles will fetch from £6 to £10.

The Grand and Bemardel prices range from £16 to £20.

The ever-increasing demands for “trade fiddles” of all kinds, as distinguished from the solo violins reserved for the use of virtuosi, has called forth an abundance of fair makers beyond the limits of Mirecourt, Mittenwald, and Markneukirchen.

In England it is enough to mention such names as Hill & Sons; Duncan of Glasgow; the Chanots, London and Manchester; the late Furber, London; in Paris, Bernardel, Silvestre, Germain, Audinot, and Chardon; in Vienna, Zach, Bittner, Lembök, Voigt, Guttermann, Rampfler; in Munich, Sprenger; in Frankfort-on-Maine, Lenk; in Breslau, Liebich; in Brussels, Darche; in Lille, Hel; in Milan, Marchetti; in Turin, Bros. Guadagnini; in Cremona, Ceruti; and for further general information the reader may consult the tolerably exhaustive catalogue index of makers at the end of this volume, for the bulk of which I am indebted to the studious and admirable labours of Miss Stainer. Her booklet is entitled “Violin Makers,” and it forms one of the music primers of an educational series issued by Novello & Co.

MITTENWALD.

In old days Mittenwald, quaintest of Bavarian towns, with its frescoed houses and its picturesque river-side, for it is on the banks of the dear Isar, overshadowed by the Wetterstein and Kurwändel mountains, was a town of considerable importance from very early days as the halting-place for the Romans on their way to the Danube.

It long retained its peculiar caravanserai character, which resulted in the establishment of the handy mart or Mittenwald fair, for which in more recent times the place was chiefly famous. After the removal of the fair to Bozen, the importance of Mittenwald began to decline; trade and commerce suddenly seemed to have made unto themselves wings, until one Matthias Klotz, who in his boyhood is said to have been apprenticed to no less a person than the great Nicolas Amati, settled at Mittenwald, and wrote up outside his house: “Matthias Klotz, Geigen Macher, im jahr 1684.” The prime hazel and maple, to be found in the Wetterstein hills, is of splendid quality, and the woods, then close up to the town, were full of old trees.

Thither, before the days of Matthias, was wont to come a dreamy, ill-regulated sort of person, who excited the curiosity, and perhaps ridicule, of the villagers by tapping their trees with a hammer and then putting his ear close to the wood to hear the sound.

They thought he was mad, and he did go mad from worry and want, but the sanest thing he ever did was to tap those trees and listen to the sound.

His name was Jacob Stainer.

Matthias Klotz was only nineteen when he came to Mittenwald, but by this time the Mittenwalders, who had heard how the eccentric tramp with the hammer had gone back to Absam and made the place famous by his fiddles, were prepared to receive the young workman with favour and hospitality, for they hoped he might do something of the kind for Mittenwald.

They were not mistaken. One year before Klotz arrived at Mittenwald, Stainer had died incoherent and insane at Absam, and now that the greatest of German makers was dead, Mittenwald was soon destined to become noted in its turn for its fiddles.

It is generally affirmed that Klotz was a pupil of Stainer. Certainly his relations with Nicolas Amati are not very well defined. The probabilities are that he was a pupil of both--in the sense of being familiar with their work. The fact that his violins are sometimes mistaken for Stainer, points to the strong Absam influence which was upon him--it could hardly be otherwise--whilst the tendency noticeable in the fiddles of his son Sebastian, who certainly did visit Cremona, to bring down the model flatter than was fashionable at this time, indicates that the firm at all events reflected the later Amati model of Nicolas, who died the very year Klotz came to Mittenwald.

Had Matthias or Sebastian Klotz attended to the methods either of Stainer or Amati more carefully, they would have observed that wood cut in spring with the sap in it was not calculated to last like the drier autumn timber. Whether from haste or ignorance, the Klotz wood, especially that used by Matthias and Sebastian, is sometimes found to be worm-eaten, but Sebastian’s fiddles are much esteemed. His brothers, George and Egidius, and his nephew, Joseph, son of Egidius, all made fiddles of the same type--varnish running from yellow to brown, and laid on rather more lavishly than was the habit of Matthias, founder of the firm.

The Mittenwald industry, although now less prolific than that of Markneukirchen, preceded it in point of time, and undoubtedly it was through Bavarian Mittenwald that the Cremona influence reached Saxony.

Master Reiter, whose teacher was Johan Vauchel of Wurzburg, is now the most prominent Mittenwald maker, and Herr Neuner, who was a pupil of Vuillaume, directs the school and factory. The school instructs about twenty boys, and is under Government.

Out of eighteen hundred Mittenwalders, three hundred are fiddle-makers.

The place provides from fifteen to twenty thousand instruments per annum, including zithers and guitars. I will not say that Herr Reiter, who is an artist versed in the old secrets and the old enthusiasms, is personally responsible for the “trade fiddles” that annually pour from the Mittenwald workshops. He himself has made comparatively few fiddles, but he supervises them all, and remarked to a visitor the other day, “I, Master Reiter, never let one go out of my hands that has not been thoroughly tested, and I have sent out into the world, to Russia, to America, Athens, and where not, some two hundred violins and twenty-five ’cellos, besides having repaired some four hundred others.”

MARKNEUKIRCHEN.

Quiet resting-places, secluded valleys of the Tyrol, mountains of Saxony!--Mittenwald, Markneukirchen, Mirecourt; sleepy Italian towns!--Brescia, Cremona, once provincial villages like Mirecourt, far from the stir of mighty cities!--such retreats seem to have been ever favourable to the development of violin manufacture. Something, too, of simple and almost _naïve_ religious sentiment has entered into the production of the earlier violins, most of which were, after all, chiefly intended for the sanctuary, Catholic or Protestant.

The arts and craftsbook of the Worshipful Guild of Violin-makers of Markneukirchen, 1677 to 1772, has lately been unearthed and translated by the many-sided and indefatigable Heron Allen, and it throws a kind of sudden flashlight upon the origin of an industrial centre which has since become one of the most famous emporiums of violins “made in Germany.”

Here we read how a mere handful of masters and workmen went out from kith and kin into a wilderness--some would say a paradise--for the sake of worshipping God in their own way--that is to say, the new reformed Lutheran way. They settled, to the number of sixty-six, about the year 1627, at the retired and mountainous village of Markneukirchen. The old book which records their uneventful annals begins characteristically enough with, “In the name of the Holy Trinity, Amen”; and then follow the names of twelve families, the principals being Reicher, Hans George, Polles, Gaspar, Schönfeldes, and Gaspar Hopf; and from this modest nucleus, emigrants, chiefly from Graslitz, grew the famous Guild, which by-and-by was responsible for scattering abroad violins innumerable, labelled with every known name, and of quality good, bad, and indifferent; for it is a notable peculiarity of the Markneukirchen makers that, whilst they were compelled by the rules of the Guild to produce diploma instruments and others of recognised quality, the cost of production has got down as low as about four shillings, and a very playable instrument, labelled Stradivari, is actually sold for a sum not much above that astonishing cost price.

Many of these workers were all-round men, and did not confine themselves to fiddle-making. Thus, Carl Frederick Jacob was carpenter, locksmith, and general instrument maker; one Andrea Gher, 1587, was a schoolmaster; whilst Gasper Reichel was a barber. Gottfried Pitz was admitted to the Guild on easy terms, because he had served his country as a cavalry soldier.

The master-workers were mostly people of some substance. They had to pay a tax of one florin on being admitted to mastership; but sons of a master were admitted on a reduced fee of five florins.

Most of the masters were expected to have a decent house, with a room large enough to entertain the Guild with their wives at a banquet on their installation. As this cost some money--there were various ways of lightening the burden when the candidate happened to be a desirable addition to the Guild--he was allowed to pay in instalments, or part was remitted by favour. A popular means of effecting economy was to _propose_ to marry the daughter of a master; that at least staved off payment. The apprentices often got in cheap that way.

Hans Adam Narlitzer, who “intended” to marry a master’s daughter, was admitted on reduced terms, on the understanding that, if the match did not come off, he was to pay up in full.

One Kretchman also “intended” to marry the youngest daughter of Hans Martin Schönfeldes; also Johann Christian Envel, in 1761, had “half a mind” to marry the youngest daughter of Reichel, and was admitted for ten thalers; but in case he could not make up his mind to marry the girl, _or any other master’s daughter_, he would have to pay thirty-one thalers. In no case is it _recorded_ that any of these gentlemen failed to marry as per contract; the masters’ daughters probably took very good care of that, or would have sufficient influence to suppress the fact of their rejection.

With the spread of the Reformed opinions, there at first arose a certain demand for violins in the new churches; but the rigid Lutherans soon smelled the odour of abuse and reversion to Romanism, and discouraged any approach to ornate services, or an over-supply of instrumental accompaniment. A decree that the violins used in Church should be reduced in numbers naturally spread consternation throughout the little country town; but the growing demand for stringed instruments of good quality for secular bands soon counteracted the effect of sectarian bigotry and clerical parsimony; and when one Joseph Haydn, bandmaster to Prince Esterhazy in Vienna, practically founded the modern orchestra with its symphony, and created the modern oratorio and quartet, the demand for violins and basses led to a prodigious development of the Markneukirchen industry; and as the masters not only had ready access to the best Cremonese models, but were surrounded by some of the finest maple timber in the world, felled in forests full of seasoned trees hundreds of years old, the fame of the Markneukirchen makers soon spread throughout Europe.

At Mittenwald a similar community flourished, and the crop of German instruments made, and still made, by these enterprising artificers have flooded all the orchestras of the world, providing them with samples of every maker, from Gaspar and Maggini to Stradivari, the Guarneri, Bergonzi, and Guadagnini. The Mittenwald makers owed their inspiration chiefly to Egidius Klotz, pupil of the great Stainer. They were as famous for their fine hazel-fir timber as the Markneukircheners were for their maple; it was also through the Mittenwalders that the Cremona methods filtered readily into the more northern region--Markneukirchen, Prague, Nuremburg, Wurzburg, and Franken.

The increased demand for instruments resulted necessarily in a tendency to deterioration, which did not escape the attention of the Guild, and rigid rules were drawn up, called “Beneficent Mandates for the Suppression of Abuses.”

Every master had to prove himself equal to producing one masterpiece as a sample of his skill, though it was freely admitted that a cheap demand involved a cheap type of instrument, which could not be expected to rival the diploma standard of tone and finish.

The quaint record of the Markneukirchen arts and craftsbook ends with the year 1772, and with the words “_Deo Gloria_.” Since that date the names of Reichel, Schuster, and Paulus have all been _en evidence_ at various European Exhibitions as medallists and exhibitors of distinction; but, after a great fire in 1840, a good many families left the town, and thus the old centre became like a flower that had overblown itself, and began to obey the inevitable law by which a mature centre distributes itself gradually, losing as it were its own central wealth in its circumference, as the seeds of the dandelion get blown abroad over all lands.