Chapter III: 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.

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.