Chapter V: VIOLINS AT CREMONA--continued

There is something inexorable about the concensus of posterity.

Individuals may chafe under it, and writers may try to reverse its verdict. You even have crazes for the revival of neglected poets, painters, and musicians, but you will never succeed in pushing from their pedestals the great gods whom posterity has once decided to bow down to.

De Beriot may choose to play on a Maggini, and Paganini may prefer his Joseph, but even Maggini, Nicolo Amati, and Giuseppe Guarnerius, who stand round as it were saluting one another, leave Stradivari apart by himself like a Colossus on a mountain, and yet no one, not the greatest connoisseur, is able to say exactly why. When so many esteem individual violins above some Strads, and when Joseph del Gesù is held to run the magic master very hard, still Strad stands apart upon his mountain for all men to look up to and wonder at. And why? We can only say it is the way with all the greatest; there is something of the mystery of heaven about the incommunicable touch; the true aureole forms about no head to order, and the lonely seats are kept for the mighty.

Antonio Stradivari or Stradiuarius was born in 1644, and died, in his ninety-third year, in 1737. We get the date of his death from the register, and the date of his birth is fixed by a violin label (1736) in his own handwriting, in which he states that he was ninety-three years old when he made the instrument.

Stradiuarius married at the age of twenty-three a woman of twenty-seven, who had been a widow for three years, whose maiden name was Ferraboschi, and he adopted her one little girl. By her he had six children, some of whom died before him. His second wife, whom he married several years later, bore him five children, two of whom died before him--so that in all Stradivari had eleven children. None of them seemed to have inherited their father’s genius; only Omobono and Francesco Stradivari made even decent fiddles, and so far maintained the great name as to succeed at first in selling their wares at their father’s prices. The buyers probably hoped that at least the wood might have been selected by Stradivari _père_, and much of it probably was; and if there was the chance of getting a spare rib or back or belly with a touch of the master upon it, it was surely worth a little speculation.

Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri, as stated before, were young _garzoni_ or apprentices together in the workshop of the great Nicolo Amati--sat on the same work bench, used the same tools, and doubtless discussed the same problems.

In and out of that shop ran, no doubt, the boy Giuseppe Guarneri to see his uncle Andrea. He must have always found Stradivari there; and when, later on, Giuseppe imbibed a taste for fiddle-making, and became himself the great Del Gesù, it is hard, I insist upon it, to believe that what must have been a lifelong acquaintance with the mighty Stradivari should have had no influence whatever in forming his ideas and methods.

There is no mention of the youthful Stradivari having accompanied Andrea Guarneri to the wedding of his master, Nicolo Amati; Andrea was doubtless the older pupil, and Antonio Stradivari was taken on later.

“If thou wouldst teach, learn; if thou wouldst create, first copy.” It is generally held that for some years, roughly between 1660-70, Stradiuarius simply made up, blocked out, drew, glued, mixed varnish, and worked generally, but without signing his own name to any fiddles. He was _learning_; but in 1660 he begins to sign his name, not from pride, but because his master made him do so. From before that date to about 1670, which brings us to within fourteen years of Nicolo Amati’s death, he made what are sometimes called Amati Strads.

At this time Antonio followed closely the violins of the early Nicolo rather than the grand Amati pattern, but he appears to have followed his master’s developments continuously, slowly, but surely.

There exists a Stradivari violin with a label Nicholai Amati (anno 1667), and about that date (when he married) Antonio seems to have left his master’s workshop, but still continued closely to copy Nicolo, and many violins of his between 1660 and 1670 pass as Amatis, whilst others are called Amati Strads, and some are apparently joint productions.

When Stradiuarius married (about 1667) and left Nicolo Amati, he set up round the corner in the same street as the brothers Guarnerii, and almost next door to them, in the square opposite the great Church of S. Domenico. From about this time connoisseurs notice a great improvement in Stradivari’s technique; but up to 1672 at least, remaining a close copyist of Amati, he doubtless kept on terms of the closest intimacy with Nicolo, now in his decline, and benefited by the abundance of orders flowing in for Amati violins which the old master was unable to execute.

From 1660 to 1684 was a period of great activity, perhaps haste; even some pot-boiling Stradivari violins may then have been made as the young family increased. Antonio’s wood is often plain about this time, and not up to the best taste and selection of his master, but he evidently remained his right-hand man to the end; and when Nicolo died, at the ripe age of eighty-eight, he left all his tools and his plant not to his son Girolamo, then about thirty-five, but to Antonio Stradivari, then just forty years old.

In 1680, four years before the death of Nicolo, Antonio had so far prospered as to be able to buy his house (which I visited in 1880), at 1 Piazza Roma, for about £800. Desiderio Arisi, a Cremonese, has left an interesting MS. in which he speaks of “his intimate friend Antonio Stradivari.” The MS. is dated 1720, or seventeen years before the death of Stradivari.

Arisi alludes to a point of great interest which early excited my attention and curiosity--the many-sidedness of the man. “In Cremona,” writes Arisi, “is also living my intimate friend Antonio Stradivari, an excellent maker of _all kinds of musical instruments_.” Indeed, he could make anything that was in demand, and he did; he could “fancy-purfle” to order, inlay, make fiddles in odd shapes, or with a twist in the curve here or there, or longer or shorter for experiment, or big or small.

The Marquis Carlo dal Negro of Genoa owned a Stradivari harp in 1820. The master was not above making mandolines and lutes to order. Messrs Hill own a perfectly plain Stradivari guitar in fine condition. It is of exquisite close-grained wood. I have often wanted to hear the sound of that guitar. I noticed a Stradivari cithern in the South Kensington Loan Collection with an elaborately carved female head of great beauty. I did not wonder that he who could carve such scrolls could carve a head or anything else.

There are, or were, within the present century, other gems of workmanship, some of which it is to be feared have perished, children’s fiddles, instruments made with small figures, flowers, arabesques. Everything that comes from his hand is finely accurate in drawing. Sometimes his decoration is merely painted in black, sometimes ivory, ebony, or mother-of-pearl is used, but everything Stradivari did was perfectly done; he qualified himself to the _n_th, as mathematicians say, for each branch of his art.

In these days one man draws, another blocks out, another inlays, another finishes. Stradivarius did all, and did all consummately well. His heads and arabesques are worthy of Cellini, his inlaying of the finest Florentine marqueterie; his scrolls and curves are of Pheidian beauty; his varnishing is his own.

On the death of Amati, Stradiuarius and the Guarnerii had the Cremona market to themselves, and whilst the competition was quite wholesome, there is no reason to suppose that their rivalry was other than a friendly one. They had all been brought up together, they had worked as boys together, they had doubtless lent each other tools, touched up each other’s backs and bellies, varnished each other’s ribs, criticised each other’s scrolls from boyhood; and now that the Cremona violin was in the ascendant, and kings and nobles from Spain, France, Germany, Saxony, and even England were anxious for Cremona fiddles, there was a market for them all.

The bitterness of competition is not always due to rival makers, but often to over-production; and such a thing as over-production of fiddles in those days was unknown. Nay, the orders that came in could not be executed fast enough. Music walked faster than the instruments could follow it. When the King of Poland wanted a Strad violin he knew his man, and sent his Capelmeister Voleme to Cremona, with orders to stop there and bring back the twelve violins ordered for the court orchestra. “So,” says Arisi, “Voleme arrived in 1715 on the 10th June, and remained there three months, and when all the instruments were ready he took them with him to Poland.”

But at this time Stradivari was at his zenith. “There is not in the world,” writes Lorenzo Giustiniani, a Venetian nobleman, to the great artificer in 1715, “a more skilled maker of musical instruments than yourself, and as I wish to preserve a record of such an illustrious man and famous artist, I trouble you with this letter to ask whether you feel disposed to make me a violin of the highest quality and finish that you can bestow upon it.”

But we must not anticipate.

After the death of the illustrious Nicolo Amati, this patient pupil, this careful copyist, this accurate and tireless student and experimentalist, begins to assert his strong individuality. His scroll departs from the feminine Amati type, and becomes striking and independent, his sound-holes recline more, his corners are pronounced, his middle bout curves are prolonged, his varnish is almost fancifully varied from rich gold to soft velvety red. His wood is now invariably chosen with the utmost care, and as he made chiefly for the nobility, royalty, and the higher clerical dignitaries, he was not only on his mettle, but he could afford to work just as he chose.

In 1682, Michele Monzi, a rich Venetian banker, sent him an order for a chest of violins, altos and ’cellos, which were to be presented to our King James II. They were so much liked that his Majesty ordered a viol di gamba of Stradiuarius in 1686.

Rode Strad Spanish Tenor Spanish Strad

Christina Strad

CELO]

In 1685, Cardinal Orsini, afterwards Pope Benedict XIII., had ordered a violoncello and two violins of him, besides making him “one of his private attendants,” an honorary title, but equivalent to appointing Stradiuarius instrument-maker to the Cardinal Archbishop. We commend this fact to his Holiness Pope Leo XIII. (1897), who has lately placed the violin on his _index expurgatoritus_ of instruments, as being too frivolous for the solemnities of divine service! Yet Pius IX. was a pretty good fiddler.

In 1687 Stradivari makes his famous set of instruments for the Spanish Court, inlaid with ivory, with a scroll-work running round the sides. One of these rarities--a violin--found its way into the hands of Ole Bull, the famous violinist. It has been since sold in England to Dr Charles Oldham of Brighton. The tenor is, I believe, in existence. When last in the market, it had lost its ivory purfling, which has since been exquisitely replaced by Messrs Hill.

There are extant several very small violins made evidently to order about this period. The fallacy of different sizes for different ages from childhood upwards is one which will always smile to makers and those acute persons who teach the violin and buy their pupils’ instruments, which of course have to be changed as the children grow up, for larger and larger ones. I have always protested against this. A child of eight had much better play the violin like a violoncello (at the age of seven, as I did myself) than be given a small one; but when I was eight I could hold a full-sized violin to my chin--not quite in the correct position, no doubt, but near enough. Thus from the very first, when at six or seven years of age, I played the violin like the violoncello, I never had to _unlearn my intervals_ in stopping the strings. _The brain learns intervals._ An habitual tenor player never plays the violin quite in tune, and _vice versâ_; and so every time a larger violin is placed in the pupil’s hands, the brain is bothered with the narrower stopping learned in the preceding period. Still, no one can regret the exquisite cabinet, almost toy specimens, made by the Amati and Guarnerii as well as by Strad. Artistically they are gems; musically, fallacies. I have never got anybody to agree with me about not using dwarf fiddles. Joachim, I believe, contended that for a child to use a large fiddle stiffens his muscles. I don’t believe it; it certainly did not stiffen mine. I believe I am also in a minority in my partiality for old bridges. Neither theory is, in fact, “good for trade.”

In 1690 Stradivari executed a celebrated order for the Prince of Tuscany, through the Marquis Bartholomeo Aribati. Of these _chefs-d’œuvre_ the Marquis writes: “I assure you the Prince has accepted your instruments with more pleasure than I could expect. The players in the orchestra are unanimous in expressing appreciation. They declare your instruments to be quite perfect; they all say they never heard a violoncello with such a tone as yours. My having brought to the knowledge of such a person as his Highness your great skill will doubtless procure you many orders from his exalted house”--and then follow more orders for two tenors. On this occasion, we learn, from the relics of Stradivari in the possession of the Marquis della Valle, that the great violin-maker characteristically enough made the most beautiful cases for the royal instruments, decorating them profusely with armorial bearings and symbols appropriate to each instrument.

Rode Strad Spanish Tenor Spanish Strad
]

The order was given in 1684, but the instruments were not handed in till 1690. The Grand Duke, it seems, came back for more, as there was found amongst his instruments a violin of the grand pattern bearing the later date, 1716.

I cannot forbear to call attention to the exquisite chromo-lithographs of the Tuscan violin, and the lucid description and history of this last-named famous masterpiece, in Messrs Hill’s handsome monograph. He declares it to be in the very finest preservation still, with an unbroken and authentic record, and to possess all the noblest qualities of the incomparable master. It is on the very verge of his great period, bearing the date 1690, and was bought by Mr David Ker in 1794. The Tuscan viola and violoncello are still in the Institute at Florence, and I advise all lovers of Cremona who get the chance to go and inspect them.

The only other point of great general interest before the year 1700, when Stradivarius enters on his golden period, is the deliberate manufacture of a certain number of violins on a pattern distinct from the Amati, and from any patterns adopted by himself before 1686-1694, or after 1700. These instruments are known as long Strads, and they seem to be a sort of constructional or experimental link between the smaller Amati pattern and the grand Strad pattern of 1700-37--a model evidently suggested by the grand Nicolo, but not adopted by the cautious Strad till some years after Nicolo’s death.

From 1694 to 1700 Stradivari not only went out of his way to make long Strads, which not only looked longer because they were narrower and pinched in, but actually were longer--_i.e._ 14-inch, as compared to the 1690 13-inch Strad. In other respects also he walked through his own traditions. Having mastered all violin lore, he was evidently at last trying a series of daring experiments to settle in his own mind once and for ever certain problems of tone.

We have known painters trifle with colour in the same way. Gainsborough would paint his blue boy, and Whistler symphonies in green, mauve, or anything else unexpected, and Turner would recreate the light that never was on sea or land; but in reality it was no trifling, but study in arrangement of colour. So you can have study in construction, empirical ventures, and a testing of tone problems, whether in sound or colour.

As Stradivari mused and carved, and glued and varnished, year after year, his meditations might run thus: “Flatten the belly--thicker here or there according to wood, density of fibre; air column restrained by narrow width, as in the long pattern, but same cubic inches of air allowed for in length or height of ribs, only differently defined by different shapes of instruments. Enlarge width, thin planks, but try different thicknesses; see how different densities of wood go together. Try old seasoned wood for back, newer for belly, or _vice versâ_; if wood hard, thin it; if soft, thicken it; try effect of higher ribs on flat curves; lower the ribs on more bulgy curves and grooved sides. What did Nicolo aim at with his grand pattern? Adopt his width and size, and flatten his belly. Try and save his sweetness (did the grooves give that?) with the flatter back and belly, which gives louder tone, adopting the mathematical curve of nature, suggested by the vibration of a string; certainly that gives power. Is a joined back, or a back in one piece, best or indifferent? That would depend on wood attainable. How would it be to patch bits of precious wood if inter-congenial? That generally succeeds. A good secret that, but an open one--wanted always the patcher!”

This idea of patching was certainly one of the most inspired thoughts that ever occurred to him. He seems to have kept wood of the finest acoustic properties for his best orders. He had favourite planks; we can trace one of these by a stain that runs through the grain, and the wood crops up again and again in some of his best fiddles.

The plank must have been known to his pupils, for the remains of it were worked up after his death.

“Now for the sound-bar,” ponders Stradivari; “thick or thin, according to the density or elasticity of the back and belly. And its position? A little transverse, of course--slightly diagonal to be in the line of vibration. Study effect on power of different strings by placing it a fraction of an inch one way or another; place it slightly aslant for experiment. And the varnish?” But that will call for a few separate paragraphs by-and-by.

I have tried to indicate the kind of observation and meditation, demanding unlimited time, patience, and love, which Stradivari devoted for the better part of a century to his art, and without which those Cremona _chefs-d’œuvre_, the Dolphin, the Messie, Tuscan, Betts, and Pucelle Strads, could never have come forth.

I have alluded to Strad’s taking late to the large Amati pattern for violins, inclining for some time to the small size. I do not know that any one has yet noticed that in violoncellos Strad reversed this order of work, making his early violoncellos large, and diminishing their size. As he reached his golden period he probably felt that the demands made by virtuosity and tone-power were quite alike consistent with a larger type of violin and a smaller and more manageable size of violoncello.

The violinist is well aware of the value of Strad’s golden period, which will cost him gold; for, after about 1700, a fine Strad will be worth to him from £1000 and upwards, according to its condition.

The long apprenticeship was at last over, and in 1700 the master had reached the ripe age of fifty-six, an age at which so many have achieved their greatest work. He was at the acme of his power, experience, and fame; no one could teach him anything now, and apparently he had nothing to learn. He could at last wield his tools as a Millais or a Tadema wields his brush, a Flaxman his pencil, a Canova his chisel, or as a Mozart or Wagner handles his score. He knew what he wanted, and he could do it, and do it with a spontaneous ease and joy which seems even now to smile to us from the saucy corners of his bouts, the free daring curves of his grand pattern, and the lightly tossed and lifted scrolls.

No one has failed to notice the masterful ease, the emancipation from all mannerism, the cool defiance of precedent and uniformity, and even symmetry, which characterises his great period from 1700 to 1730.

The violins are not all alike. Strad knew that the secret was not merely in the pattern or shape; he could vary his curves, and yet produce masterpieces, because he knew all about the air column, the wood densities, and the proportions and quantities which should be combined for the requisite result, and he could mix them differently like a master colourist. He no more treated every violin as if it had the same constitution than does a physician treat every human body alike; it is not so much nitrogenous or carbonaceous food, and so much liquid, but it is these and other things used in proportion, according to your digestion and temperament, which will produce in that instrument, your body, the harmony of health; and how close is the analogy between the constitution of a violin and that of a human body--how varied is the texture, the tissue, quality, fibre, and density of the component parts of each--I have endeavoured to point out as succinctly as I could.

So, in the grand period, the grand pattern Strads are all made with a trained, almost inspired instinct, according to those laws which govern the tone qualities aimed at; but the fiddles are by no means alike to look at. They have the charm of imaginative variety, combined with the unity of supreme excellence.

To this great period belongs the Dolphin Strad, so called, it is said, from the melting and almost iridescent tints of the varnish. To me, however, the violin almost suggests the life, freedom, and elegant poise of that graceful fish whose name it bears. The beauty and acoustic properties of the Dolphin wood are quite special, and can easily be compared with other violins of the same period, some of which are much plainer to look at, and somewhat different in form, and though very charming, hardly so bell-like in tone.

The last time I had the privilege of touching the Dolphin Strad was at my lecture on violins before the Royal Institution in 1880. I shall never forget its ringing notes and its exquisite sensibility. It seemed anxious to speak before it was spoken to; when touched, it seemed to do all for itself like magic. Instead of the player showing it off, it shows off the player; he begins to feel he has nothing to learn in tone production. It is almost like sitting at those ingeniously contrived pianos that make elaborate music, and you merely have to put your hands on a dummy keyboard, press the keys, and appear to be playing, and then you roll off Chopin and Mendelssohn perfectly, though you can scarce play your scales! Since then Vuillaume’s sound-bar has been replaced with a stronger one by Messrs Hill. It seemed to me quite perfect before, but I suppose one must bow to experts in such matters.

The best opinion limits the number of instruments which Strad made to about two thousand, only eight hundred of which at most are known to be extant. Compared with any other maker except Vuillaume, both as regards output and survival of work, Strad probably bears the palm.

An elaborate description, a careful portraiture of every known Strad, together with its history, as far as recoverable, I must leave for some more gifted and industrious recorder. I believe Messrs Hill are preparing the most complete monograph on Stradivari which has ever yet or is ever likely to appear, and I only wish I could dip into their MS. and steal a few pages. It will certainly, when it appears, be a monumental work, and there is no time to lose, as many of these gems are known to have been destroyed, others dismembered, whilst some are at the bottom of the sea. There are, however, a few more famous specimens, which are of such unique interest that they cannot be passed over even in so general a survey as this.

Mr Croall (1897) of Edinburgh is the happy owner of M. Artôt’s Strad, varnished dark red, quite perfect, and one of the finest known for tone; it is dated 1716. Lady Hallé still plays on Ernst’s violin, bought for £500, and presented to her by the Earl of Dudley and some others. I shall never forget the wonderful effects elicited from it by the great magician Ernst in his palmy days, nor can I understand the statement recently made that its tone is difficult to elicit. I have heard the faintest vanishing whisper of its strings on the Covent Garden stage when, as a boy, I was seated up in the top gallery at one of Benedict’s monster season concerts early in the fifties.

A romantic interest attaches to two Stradivari violins which have come down to us in absolutely perfect condition: one is called the Messie, the other the Pucelle or the Virgin.

The Messie was secured by Vuillaume after the death of that remarkable man Luigi Tarisio, to whom further on I devote a special section. It bears date 1716.

Tarisio would never let it be seen till Vuillaume possessed it; it had then never been touched or played upon. He lengthened the neck, but, without _inserting_ his new neck, he fixed it to a block placed outside the ribs. Count Cozio de Salabue had bought it in 1760, but never allowed it to be played upon.

Tarisio bought it after the Count’s death, and at his own death in 1854 it passed to Vuillaume, and was exhibited (No. 91) in the South Kensington Loan Exhibition of 1872, and for the first time unveiled beneath glass to the gaze of admiring thousands.

When I first saw the Messie I could not believe my eyes. It was covered throughout and uniformly with thick rich red-brown varnish, laid on with a firm brush, level and lavish. It seemed to have left the workshop only the day before; the anointed glitter of the fresh varnish was upon it, it looked hardly dry. It is of the grand pattern, but not heavy and massive like some of the great Del Gesù’s, but beautiful as a Pheidian carving, full of a certain special grace and elegance. One “∫” is a shade lower than the other--a practice _so common_ with Strad, especially in his later period, that it must have been intentional, his artistic eye not tolerating even the suggestion of mechanical uniformity. The Greeks worked similarly, no two sides of their Corinthian capitals ever quite matching.

The “Messiah” back is in two pieces, the corners are absolutely unrubbed, and completely covered with varnish--of no other specimen can this be said. The head is light and graceful, “the scroll,” as I have elsewhere observed, thrown off like a ribbon lightly curled about the finger, and drawn in, one side of the scroll cut a little lower than the other; the lines of the scroll are picked out with thick black paint; only faint traces of this remain in other violin heads. The black outline was artistically conceived, as it called full attention to the scroll curve, always so characteristic a part of violin physiognomy.

As the Messiah recently bought by Mr Crawford of Edinburgh for £2000 has now been played upon, it seems a pity that the world should not sometimes be allowed to hear its voice; and I venture to say that a well-advertised concert, in which two of our finest violinists should be invited to play on the Messiah and the Pucelle--_i.e._, each player upon each instrument once, thus giving four solos, so that the audience might hear the same violins under different fingers--would be an epoch in the musical world. The announcement would doubtless pack St James’s or any other London hall.

The Pucelle or Virgin is the last Stradivari violin I have space to notice. The “Virgin” is so called because its interior organism had, up to the time when it came into M. Vuillaume’s hands, not been interfered with--_i.e._, the inside bass bar had never been touched. All the old violins have had these bars strengthened, and their necks lengthened, to meet the strain of the modern high-pitch tension of the strings on the belly, and the lengthened finger-board which the development of advanced virtuosity demands.

These readjustments the Pucelle owes to Vuillaume. She is in fine preservation otherwise, although her varnish is a good deal rubbed in places. Her contour, so fanciful are even good judges, is by some considered more graceful than that of the Messiah, but less graceful by others. To me there seems to be little to choose between them; each is a distinct conception.

The Virgin’s varnish is of a rich soft brown and yellow tone, rather contrasting with the Messiah’s bright red. The head is stronger and less graceful than that of some Strads (the Dolphin’s, for instance); the Virgin’s back is in two parts, the belly is a little higher than that of the Messiah. The only vestige of repair about her is where the chin has rubbed into the purfling, which has accordingly been renewed. The corners are somewhat fancifully cut, running straight out in the top bouts, and hanging away in the lower bouts; there is a rather marked indentation of the curve beneath them.

The Virgin is labelled 1709, and she reached Paris in 1840 (of course it is a Tarisio violin); it has been owned by Mons. le Roy, a banker, and passed to his heir, Mons. Glanday. She is now the property of a member of the same family, and is very jealously guarded by her owner.

In vain does imagination seek to recover the image of the great maker as he lived and moved and had his being through ninety-three years of shower and shine. Undisturbed by petty sieges and local disturbances and changes of administration, sought for and admired impartially by the friends and the foes of his country, he wrought out calmly his own matchless ideal.

Violins have no politics, and the great republic of Art dominates the ages, and comprehends whilst it survives the rise and fall of dynasties and empires.

I sometimes seem to see the grand old man standing at the door of his modest but comfortable house--a tall, thin, perhaps rather gaunt figure, most likely not a man of many words, carrying on for ever mental processes connected with his subtle handicraft, seldom seen without a chisel in his hand.

Behold him just risen from his stool, or come round to superintend or criticise a carelessly cut scroll of Bergonzi, his best pupil; and before he goes up into that almost sacred attic, open to the air, at the top of the house, where hang the varnished fiddles and anointed strips a-drying, he mutters a rebuke or rectifies a curve.

The old man comes to the door, and stands for a moment looking down the street. He wears his woollen nightcap and his inevitable leather apron; he salutes the neighbours as they pass, but they do not stop to speak to him, they know he has no leisure for that. Only later, at the café-cabaret, it may be, he will chat with Joseph Guarnerius, and exhort him to more refinement; or tell his sons they will never uphold the reputation of the firm if they do not work harder; and as it is known that the master detests interruptions at home, in those moments of rare leisure when he emerges with the regularity of clockwork to sip his _vino_ or _sirop_ or coffee, Capelmeister A. or Padre B. or Monsignor C. may surprise him for a chat, and inquire timidly when the violoncello or quartet of violins ordered are likely to be ready, and get for reply something too enigmatic or oracular to be of any service; so patrons or patrons’ emissaries had to sit down at Cremona and wait on the master’s convenience for the masterpieces that could be got nowhere else.

His prices seem to have been altogether moderate, but we must remember that the value of money was far greater in those days, a sovereign going then nearly as far as five go now.

He sold his violins for £10 (= £40); the original price of his violoncellos and violas does not seem to be known.

Although he had a large family, he must have made, if not inherited, money, for there seems to have been a proverb current at Cremona, “As rich as Stradivari.”

Some years ago, fresh from my visit to the house of Stradivari, then still standing in the Piazza Roma, Cremona, I gave a full description of the great maker’s _entourage_, which I need not here repeat; but a single paragraph may serve better than anything that I can now write, at the distance of over a decade, to place the reader in the atmosphere in which Antonio Stradivari worked for more than half a century.

I stood in the open loft at the top of his house where still in the old beams stuck the rusty old nails upon which he hung up his violins. And I saw out upon the north the wide blue sky, just mellowing to rich purple, and flecked here and there with orange streaks prophetic of sunset. Whenever Stradiuarius looked up from his work, if he looked north his eye fell on the old towers of S. Marcellino and S. Antonio, if he looked west the Cathedral with its tall campanile rose dark against the sky, and what a sky! full of clear sun in the morning, full of pure heat all day, and bathed with ineffable tints in the cool of the evening when the light lay low upon vinery and hanging garden, or spangled with ruddy gold the eaves--the roofs and frescoed walls of the houses.

Here, up in the high air, with the sun his helper, the light his minister, the blessed soft airs his journeymen, what time the work-a-day noise of the city rose and the sound of matins and vespers was in his ears, through the long warm days worked Antonio Stradivari.

Before the time came for the busy hand to fail, Antonio ceased to sign all the violins that he made; but, with an old man’s natural pride, he continued to sign a few down to the year of his death, registering the number of his years in each case, and it is from one of the latest of these, dated 1736, that we know his age.

He sank quietly to rest, evidently worn out naturally and nobly, if not with his eye quite undimmed and his natural strength unabated, certainly still full of marvellous vigour, unpalsied senses, and undulled perception.

When the Chapel of the Rosary in the Church of S. Domenico, opposite to which he had lived all his life, was pulled down, his funeral tablet was rescued, and it is now in the Town Hall at Cremona; but where are his ashes? Are they in the present family vault of the Stradivaris, in the Campo Santo of Cremona, or in the parish of S. Matthew? I was unable to ascertain. The tablet bears the following simple inscription:--“Sepolcro di Antonio Stradivari E svoi Eredi, Anno 1729.”

Many of his family had preceded him to the grave, both of his wives and six of his eleven children, his last wife dying only nine months before him, a significant and painful event in a life so regular and uneventful, and one which may not unnaturally have hastened his own end. None of the family seem to have been buried in the S. Domenico vault, but in one belonging to Signor Francesco Vitani, in the parish of S. Matthew; so it may be Antonio lies there.

The Church of S. Domenico was pulled down several years ago; the house of Stradiuarius was destroyed only recently. The Piazza S. Domenico is now the Piazza Roma, and when an average Cremonese is asked about Stradivari, he thinks of the fashionable _avocat_ of that name, who appears to spend his time chiefly at Milan, and may possibly resent the notion that a man in good society should ever have had ancestors connected with fiddle-making. _Sic transit._

The achievements in violin-making up to the first quarter of the eighteenth century are clearly summed up in the names of Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe (del Gesù) Guarneri.

It would be an interesting and thorny question to debate whether any variations of importance or additions in excellence have since been noticeable, and of course we naturally look to the best Cremonese makers, who followed these giants of tone-power and sweetness.

The name of Carlo Bergonzi at once stands out as worthy, if not to be bracketed with that of the two mighty men, at least to receive their mantle and reflect something of their lustre. Carlo Bergonzi was Stradivari’s favourite pupil; he lived next door, and afterwards occupied Stradivari’s own house with his son.

He finished many of his master’s late violins, and issued some others after his death collected from the débris of the great man’s workshop; and Stradivari left him all his tools and plant.

He worked at Cremona between 1720-47 or 50, and followed at first Stradivari’s example; for as Antonio made his early fiddles on the pattern of Nicolo Amati, so did Bergonzi closely copy the grand Strad pattern. But later on, and before the death of the old man, Bergonzi conceived the ambition of attempting to weld the power of Giuseppe Guarnerius with the round, bright, bell-like sweetness of the Stradivari. To what extent he succeeded must be left to the judgment and decision of connoisseurs, but the grand quality for which his violins are increasingly appreciated is, no doubt, their powerful sonority; that he clearly saw must be the indispensable quality for all violins of the future.

The old tinkling days were over; the feeble, scraping, and muffled viol tone was a thing of the past. The instrument had finally emerged from the cloister, was no longer to be a mere adjunct to the voice in dim sacristies and cathedral choirs; its sphere henceforth was to be out in the wide, wide world, its triumphs were to be won in the concert room, the opera house, and the grand musical arenas of solo virtuosity.

And so, undoubtedly, what Bergonzi aimed at was body of tone and _carrying power_, and he won it. This dominant idea has modified even his pattern. He looks bold and loud. Yet is the pattern not Guarneri, but Stradivari modified. Notice the larger breadth of the top curve, a certain bold angularity about the bouts, and a freer development of the lower part of the violin as well; the sound-holes set lower and nearer to the purfling, and the flat model which Stradivari discovered to be favourable to loudness. The scroll is also characteristic--flatter in some places than that of his master, but made to look bold and full of self-assertion by reason of the strongly-defined and prominent curl of the ear, which stands out and at once challenges attention.

The whole build is massive. The Bergonzi will outlast the Strad; it will be the survival, if not of the fittest, of the strongest. The very varnish is laid on with a lavish hand, to allow for wear and tear; it is even clotted in places, and is said in some specimens to have cracked and become scurfy. It is of a red Cremona brown, velvety, and quite the right sort.

Until within the last few years Bergonzi has not received his dues; the scarcity of his instruments may in part account for this; but in France, and especially in England, he is now fully recognised and much sought after. There are, however, only about sixty authentic instruments of his known. His working life was but about twenty-five years. Two notable Bergonzi violins are those in the possession of Miss Eissler and Signor Simonetti. There is a famous Bergonzi double-bass of singularly fine quality now in possession of Mr I. Sears of Boston. In Count Cozio de Salabue’s collection there were two very fine Bergonzi violins, dated 1731 and 1733.

There were five other Bergonzis--a son and grandsons; they all made fiddles, but they were of no account, and were far surpassed by some other makers who themselves belong to the decline period of the Cremona school.

Although I have called Bergonzi Stradivari’s best pupil, it would be very unfair to ignore the merit of Lorenzo Guadagnini (1695-1740), the only one of that name who poses as a pupil of Stradivari. He was born at Piacenza, but lived at Cremona till about 1740. In about 1795 he removed to Milan after leaving his master at Cremona, but returned to die in his native town. His make is bold, his model flat, his varnish not so rich as his master’s, his head original, but without the grace of Antonio.

His son, Giovanni Battista, born at Piacenza, 1711-1786, made violins which are almost more highly esteemed than his father’s. He imitated Stradivari perhaps more closely than his father, but Count Cozio de Salabue, who thought very highly of him and bought several instruments from him, is careful to mention that Giovanni Battista Guadagnini prided himself upon being no mere copyist. In fact, the Guadagnini in the hands of Mr Willy Hess is quite equal to the best of Lorenzo’s work. He was always changing his place of residence, and wandered from Piacenza to Milan, and at last to Turin, where he died. His own explanation was that the envy of rivals made each town too hot for him, but his neighbours said that his frequent migrations were due to his own hot temper. There were seven Guadagninis who made violins between 1695 and 1881, but of these the first two, father and son, alone need be taken account of.

It has been the fashion to separate the Italian makers into schools according to the place at which they happened to live--the Milanese, the Venetian, the Neapolitan, the Bolognese, etc.; but it is much more important to notice the influences under which the chief makers worked than to identify them with special towns.

A Cremonese who works at Venice but carries the Cremonese traditions with him, is still a Cremonese, and belongs to the Cremona school.

Thus, the “mighty Montagnana,” as the novelist Charles Reade called him, made Cremona violins and violoncellos at Venice. He worked between 1700-40 as a pupil of Stradivari, and survived his master only three years. But he came to him when the Cremona art was already perfected, and studied the finest models, assisting in all probability at the very manufacture of the most wonderful instruments in the world. With such a training, on his arrival at Venice he easily took the lead and kept it, and to this day his instruments, especially his matchless violoncellos--alas! too few in number--are little if at all inferior to the best of Antonio.

Montagnana’s outline is by no means a servile copy, of Stradivari. It is flattened at top and bottom, and seems to the eye less graceful; but in his selection of wood, his glorious varnish, the relative thickness of his slabs, and in the cunning knowledge of those fibre densities in back and belly which are likely to sound well together, he is second to none.

Montagnana no doubt embodies and transplants to Venice the Cremona secrets. As I noticed in the case of Bergonzi, Montagnana, owing to the paucity of his instruments as well as to the splendour of his contemporaries, Strad and Giuseppe Guarneri, has not until lately received the honour which is due to him. He suffers, too, from having often been labelled Guarnerius or Bergonzi, makers who had the vogue of the day. These frauds are now being unmasked, and the few great successors of the Cremona giants, Bergonzi, Montagnana, Guadagnini, and Balestrieri (very fine in Guadagnini’s style, flat, big build, powerful tone), and Storioni, have at last a chance of taking their proper places and fetching their prices.

When we come to Lorenzo Storioni (1769-99) we come to the last maker of importance who can with any show of plausibility be called even a second or third rate master of Cremona. Storioni’s model was Joseph Guarnerius, but he copied him more in his rough work than in his great qualities. In his varnish we notice the singular change which came over the Cremona varnish after about 1760. Up till then all the Cremona violins have the Cremona varnish; after that time it simply disappears. Why is it? This interesting problem I shall have to consider in my chapter on Cremona varnish.

Storioni’s instruments are not much esteemed in England as yet, but are thought a good deal more of in Italy.

I may here fitly mention the Gagliano family, who are associated with the Neapolitan school, but really derive their importance from Cremona. Alessandro Gagliano, the first of the name, was distinguished for his very fine red varnish, 1695-1730. A violin remarkable for its tone is the Gennaro Gagliano that has been used by Mr Otto Peiniger for solo purposes during many years.

Alessandro Gagliano was actually in early life a _bonâ fide_ pupil of Stradivari. Finding himself, no doubt, unmercifully overshadowed by the prestige of the immortal workshops in the square of S. Domenico at Cremona, and being a person of native enterprise, Alessandro Gagliano migrated to the South, carrying with him the Cremona craft, and founded the so-called Neapolitan school. His model was, of course, the approved flat one of the golden age, 1700-37, but his scroll is small and rather mean, the ∫ ∫ are set low down, and the work is sometimes lacking in finish. It is in the varnish of Alessandro Gagliano that we see some connection with Stradivari, his varnish very often being fine in colour and of the right texture.

Attempts have been made to classify the various towns in which Italian violins were made during the Cremona period into schools, which is about as profitable an occupation as the attempts to divide the work of individual makers into distinct periods--one period runs into another, and one school runs into another.

Roughly speaking, you find but two influences--the Cremona, _i.e._, the Nicolo, the great Giuseppe and greater Antonio influence with its flat form, gentle curves, and red and yellow varnish; and the German, _i.e._, the Stainer model, of which I shall presently speak, with its elongated form, arched belly, deep side-grooves, and brown-yellow varnish.

Some fine Venetian and Milanese makers like Montagnana and Serafino inclined to Stainer, whilst the Roman and Neapolitan adhered more to the Cremona type; but Stainer himself learnt at Cremona, and all the best men like Tecchler (Rome) and Gagliano (Naples) who went South copied either Stradivari or Giuseppe Guarnerius. The Milanese school, on account of the great importance of the capital, naturally attracted good makers like Grancino, Testore (pupil of Grancino), and Pietro Giovanni Mantegazza (1687-1720).

Venice, Florence, and Bologna can also boast of a few respectable names, but I prefer, for the sake of completeness, to treat them later more in catalogue style, for the guidance of the student, and not to mix them up with the great central figures which have formed the subject, and I hope absorbed the attention, of the reader of this section.