The Violin

George Dubourg

The Violin / Some Account of That Leading Instrument and Its Most Eminent Professors, from Its Earliest Date to the Present Time; with Hints to Amateurs, Anecdotes, etc

PREFACE TO THE PRESENT EDITION

After a lapse of nearly sixteen years since this little work first appeared in print, I have been called upon to prepare it anew for the press, incorporating with it the additional matter necessary for the extension of the subject to the present time.

My new readers may like to know, at the outset, what is the intended scope of the following pages. This is soon explained. My object has been to present to the cultivators of the Violin, whether students or proficients, such a sketch (however slight) of the rise and progress of that instrument, accompanied with particulars concerning its more prominent professors, and with incidental anecdotes, as might help to enliven their interest in it, and a little to enlarge what may be called their circumstantial acquaintance with it. This humble object has not been altogether, I trust, without its accomplishment; – and here, while commending my renovated manual to the indulgent notice of the now happily increasing community of violin votaries, I would not forget to acknowledge, gratefully, the liberal and generous appreciation with which, when it first ventured forth, it was met by the public press, and introduced into musical society.

G. D.Brighton, August, 1852.

CHAPTER I

ORIGINAL AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN

First seat him somewhere, and derive his race. —

Dryden.

The Fiddle Family, like other tribes that have succeeded in making a noise in the world, has given exercise to the ingenuity of learned theorists and time-seekers, who have laboured to discover for it an origin as remote from our own era, as it is, I fear, from any kind of truth. It has probably been conceived that the Fiddle, associated as he has been, from generation to generation, with jigs, country-dances, fairs, junketings and other rusticities, had descended too low in the scale of society – that he had rendered himself, as Shakspeare for a while did his own genius, “stale and cheap to vulgar company” – and that he required to be reminded of his primitive dignity, and of his very high ancestral derivation – if he had any. This latter point was of course to be first established; but, as your zealous antiquary is a wholesale dealer in time, and is never at a loss for a few centuries to link his conjectures to, the matter was easy enough; indeed, the more doubtful, the better, since doubt is the very life of theory. Accordingly, we have been invited to fall back upon “the ancients,” and to recognize the Epigonion as the dignified and classic prototype of our merry and somewhat lax little friend, the Fiddle. To certain ancient Greek tablets relative to music, which have been somewhere brought to light, Professor Murchard has minutely assigned the date of 709 years before the Christian era; and the following passage, Englished from his translation, is stoutly alleged by the antiquarian advocates of the glories of the violin race: – “But Pherekydes began the contest, and sat himself down before all the people, and played the Epigonion; – for he had improved the same; and he stretched four strings over a small piece of wood, and played on them with a smooth stick. But the strings sounded so, that the people shouted with joy.”

This is plausible enough, but far from conclusive. It is but the outline of a description, and admits of various modes of filling up. If the instrument partook at all of the violin character, it might seem, from the reference which its name bears to the knees, to have been the rude progenitor of either the double-bass or the violoncello, which have both, as is well known, their official post between the knees: but then, the prefix of ἐπί would denote that it was played upon the knees of the artist. “Very well,” says the antiquarian; “it was a fiddle reversed.” “Nay, Dr. Dryasdust, if you yourself overturn what you are about, I have no need to say more.” Au reste, let any body stretch four strings over a small piece of wood, and play on them with a smooth stick, and then take account of what it comes to. No, no; whatever the Epigonion may have been to the Greeks, he is nothing to us: he may have been a respectable individual of the musical genus of his day, when people blew a shell or a reed, and called it music; but we cannot for a moment receive him as the patriarch of the Fiddle Family. As soon should we think of setting up Pherekydes against Paganini.

Dismissing the Epigonion, we come to the Semicon, another pretender of Greek origin. This also, we are farther told, was a kind of violin: but we deny that he was father to the violin kind. The Semicon is said to have been played on with a bow; and yet a learned German (Koch), in the fulness of his determination to have strings enough to his bow, has claimed no less than thirty-five, as the complement of the Semicon. How could any bow pay its devoirs distinctly to thirty-five strings? Here, then, the dilemma is this: either to translate the thing in question into a bow is to traduce the term, or else the strings are an impertinence. Utrum horum mavis, accipe.

If the word plectrum could, by any ingenuity, be established to mean a bow, quotations enough might be accumulated to prove that instruments played with bows had their origin in a very remote period. But the translation of the word into a bow, or such like thing, as we find it in the Dictionaries, arises simply from the want of a known equivalent – a deficiency which makes it necessary to adopt any term that offers even the shadow of a synonym.

It has been stated, on the authority of a passage from Euphorion’s book on the Isthmian Games, that there was an ancient instrument called magadis, which was surrounded by strings; that it was placed upon a pivot, upon which it turned, whilst the performer touched it with the bow (or, at least, the plectrum); and that this instrument afterwards received the name of sambuce.

The hieroglyphics of Peter Valerian, page 628, chap. 4, present the figure of a muse, holding, in her right hand, a kind of bass or contra-violin, the form of which is not very unlike that of our violins or basses.

Philostratus, moreover, who taught at Athens, during the reign of Nero, gives a description of the lyre, which has been thus translated: —

“Orpheus,” he says, “supported the lyre against his left leg, whilst he beat time by striking his foot upon the ground; in his right hand he held the bow, which he drew across the strings, turning his wrist slightly inwards. He touched the strings with the fingers of his left hand, keeping the knuckles perfectly straight.”

From this description (if bow it could be called, which bow was none), it would appear as if the lyre to which Philostratus alludes were, forsooth, the same instrument which the moderns call the contra-violin, or viola di gamba! To settle the matter thus, however, would be indeed to beg the question.

As before observed, the word plectrum is, in the dictionaries, translated by bow; but, even if this were a warranted rendering of the word, it remains to be ascertained not only whether the bows of the ancients were of a form and nature corresponding with ours, but also whether they were used in the modern way. Did the ancients strike their bow upon the strings of the instrument – or did they draw forth the sound by means of friction? These questions are still undecided; but opinions preponderate greatly in favor of the belief that the plectrum was an implement of percussion, and therefore not at all a bow, in our sense.

A recent French writer, Monsieur C. Desmarais, in an ingenious inquiry into the Archology of the Violin, takes us back to the ancient Egyptians, to whom he assigns the primitive violin, under the name of the chélys, and suggests that its form must have resulted from a studious inspection of one of the heavenly constellations!

M. Baillot, in his Introduction to the Méthode de Violon du Conservatoire, speculating on the origin of the instrument, has a passage which, in English, runs thus: —

“It is presumed to have been known from the remotest times. On ancient medals, we behold Apollo represented as playing upon an instrument with three strings, similar to the violin. Whether it be to the God of Harmony that we should attribute the invention of this instrument, or whether it claim some other origin, we cannot deny to it somewhat that is divine.

“The form of the violin bears a considerable affinity to that of the lyre, and thus favors the impression of its being no other than a lyre brought to perfection, so as to unite, with the facilities of modulation, the important advantage of expressing prolonged sounds – an advantage which was not possessed by the lyre.”

This is pretty and fanciful, but far too vague to be at all satisfactory. Apollo might appear to play on an instrument, in which antiquarian ingenuity might discover some latent resemblance to the violin; but where was his bow? M. Baillot has not ventured to assert that he had one – and we may safely conclude that he had not, if we except the bow that was his admitted attribute. As for the affinity to the lyre, it is indeed as faint as the most determined genealogist, studious of an exercise, could wish.

It has been remarked, by some curious observer, that, among the range of statues at the head of the canal at Versailles, an Orpheus is seen (known by the three-headed dog that barks between his legs), to whom the sculptor has given a violin, upon which he appears scraping away with all the furor of a blind itinerant. But is the statue, or its original, an antique? We may rest in safe assurance that it is a modern-antique; as much so, as the ingenious figment of Nero’s fiddling a capriccio to the roaring accompaniment of the flames of Rome!

As for the fidicula of the Romans (or rather, of the Latin Dictionary), it is evidently, as far as it has been made to apply to the fiddle, no legitimate family name. The violin very positively disowns all relationship with it, and leaves it to settle its claims with the guitar.

As far as the mere name goes, however, it is not impossible that a connection may exist, and that the word-hunting Skinner may be right in deriving the Anglo-Saxon word fithele from the older German vedel, and thence from the Latin fidicula, which, it is hardly necessary to state, was any thing but a fiddle, and therefore “had no business” to lend its appellation in the way here noticed.

On the whole, as regards the pretensions alleged on the side of the ancients for the honor of having had the violin in existence among them, it may be safely remarked, that, if nothing like the bow, which is obviously connected most essentially with the expression and character of the violin, can be traced to their days, the violin itself, à fortiori, cannot be said to have belonged to them; and all those questionable shapes which have been speculatively put forward as possible fiddles, must be thrown back again into the field of antiquarian conjecture, to await some other appropriation. The following remarks by Dr. Burney may be taken as a fair summary of all that needs to be observed on this head:

“The ancients seem to have been wholly unacquainted with one of the principal expedients for producing sound from the strings of modern instruments: this is the bow. It has long been a dispute among the learned whether the violin, or any instrument of that kind, as now played with a bow, was known to the ancients. The little figure of Apollo, playing on a kind of violin, with something like a bow, in the Grand Duke’s Tribuna at Florence, which Mr. Addison and others supposed to be antique, has been proved to be modern by the Abbé Winkelmann and Mr. Mings: so that, as this was the only piece of sculpture reputed ancient, in which any thing like a bow could be found, nothing more remains to be discussed relative to that point.” – (Hist. of Music, 4to. vol. i, p. 494.)

The Welch, who are notoriously obstinate genealogists, have not failed to mark the Fiddle for their own, and to assign him an origin, at some very distant date, among their native mountains. In support of this pretension, they bring forward a very ugly and clownish-looking fellow, with the uncouth name of crwth. This creature certainly belongs to them, and is so old as to have sometimes succeeded in being mistaken, in this country, for the father of the violin tribe – a mistake to which the old English terms of crowd for fiddle, and crowder for fiddler, seem to have lent some countenance. A little investigation, however, shows us that it was merely the name, and not the object itself, that we borrowed, for a time, from our Welch neighbours; and that, by a metonymy, more free than complimentary, we fastened the appellation of crowd upon the violin, already current among us by transmission from the continent. The confusion thence arising has occasioned considerable misapprehension: nor has the effect of it been limited to our own island boundaries; for a French writer, M. Fétis, in one of his Letters on the State of Music in England, reports the error, without any apparent consciousness of its being such. Let us quote his passage in English:

“The cruth is a bowed instrument, which is thought to have been the origin of the viola and violin. Its form is that of an oblong square, the lower part of which forms the body of the instrument. It is mounted with four strings, and played on like a violin, but is more difficult in the treatment, because, not being hollowed out at the side, there is no free play for the action of the bow.”

“What!” exclaims the enquiring virtuoso, “is this box of a thing, this piece of base carpentry, this formal oblong square, to be supposed the foundation of that neat form and those graceful inflections which make up the ‘complement externe’ of what men call the violin? Can dulness engender fancy – and can straight lines and right angles have for their lineal descendant the ‘line of beauty?’” The soberest person would answer, this is quite unlikely; the man of taste would deny it to be in the nature of things. No, no; our Cambrian codger may have been a tolerable subject in his way – a good fellow for rough work among the mountains, and instrumental enough in the amusement of capering rusticity – but he must not be allowed, bad musician though we freely admit he may have been, to give himself false airs, and to assume honors to which his form and physiognomy give the lie. Let him be satisfied to be considered “sui generis,” unless he would rashly prefer illustrious illegitimacy, and be styled the base violin.1

If we were disposed, in England proper, to get up a claim for the first local habitation afforded to the violin, we might put together a much better case for the instrument that was familiar to the Anglo-Saxon gleemen, as early as the 10th century, than can be shown in behalf of the candidate just dismissed. We could produce an individual that should display a far better face, and should appear with, at least, no great disgrace to the Fiddle Family, though bearing about him none of the refinements of fashion. It may be as well to exhibit him at once: —

In this representation (borrowed from “Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England”) we discern something which it is possible to call a fiddle, without much violence to our notions “de rerum natura.” There is grotesqueness, but not deformity: there is much of the general character of the true violin, though some of its most particular beauties are wanting. It is true that the sound-holes look as if no notes save circulars were to be permitted to issue through them – that the tail-piece seems forced to do duty for a bridge – that the sides have no indented middle, or waist, to give the aspect of elegance, and accommodate the play of the bow over the two extreme strings – that the finger-board is non-existent – and that the scroll, that crowning charm of the fiddle’s form, is but poorly made amends for by the excrescent oddity substituted at the end of the neck. With all this, however, there is visible warrant for calling it a sort of fiddle. Though even a forty-antiquary power might fail to prove it the origin of the stock, it has claims to be regarded as exhibiting no very remote analogy to the violin; and thus far, therefore, it may defy the competition of the Crwth. Whether it was really born in Saxon England, however, or introduced from Germany, might be a point for nice speculation, were it worth while to agitate the enquiry.

In this representation (borrowed from “Strutt’s Sports and Pastimes of the People of England”) we discern something which it is possible to call a fiddle, without much violence to our notions “de rerum natura.” There is grotesqueness, but not deformity: there is much of the general character of the true violin, though some of its most particular beauties are wanting. It is true that the sound-holes look as if no notes save circulars were to be permitted to issue through them – that the tail-piece seems forced to do duty for a bridge – that the sides have no indented middle, or waist, to give the aspect of elegance, and accommodate the play of the bow over the two extreme strings – that the finger-board is non-existent – and that the scroll, that crowning charm of the fiddle’s form, is but poorly made amends for by the excrescent oddity substituted at the end of the neck. With all this, however, there is visible warrant for calling it a sort of fiddle. Though even a forty-antiquary power might fail to prove it the origin of the stock, it has claims to be regarded as exhibiting no very remote analogy to the violin; and thus far, therefore, it may defy the competition of the Crwth. Whether it was really born in Saxon England, however, or introduced from Germany, might be a point for nice speculation, were it worth while to agitate the enquiry.

Whither, then, are we to turn, after all, for the solution of this problem in musical genealogy? That the violin is of a respectable age, though not so old as what is commonly called antiquity, is a fact apparent to the least laborious of enquirers; and it seems to have been the practice, with those who have had occasion to touch on this point, either to announce the said fact simply, and leave the reader to make the most of it, or to mix up with it, by way of elucidation, some general remark about the absence of light on the matter. “The origin of the violin,” observes one of these authorities, “like that of most of the several musical instruments, is involved in obscurity. As a species of that genus which comprehends the viola, violoncello, and violone, or double-bass, it must be very ancient.” Similarly indefinite are the conclusions of others who have approached the subject; so that it becomes necessary to dispense with such embarrassing aid, and to help oneself to the truth, if it is, peradventure, to be gathered. To me, much meditating on this matter (if I may borrow Lord Brougham’s classic form of speech), there seems reason to fix on Italy as the quarter to which we must look for the “unde derivatur” required. Say, thou soft “Ausonia tellus,” mother of inventions and nurse of the arts, say, soft and sunny Italy, is it not to thee that belongs the too modest merit of having produced and cherished the infancy, even as thou hast confessedly supported and developed the after-growth and advancement, of the interesting musical being whose history, in its more secret passages, we are here exploring? Is it a world (as Sir Toby feelingly asks), is it a world to hide virtues in? Well, if we cannot obtain direct satisfaction, let us pursue the investigation of our point a little more circuitously.

The perfect instrument which we now delight to honor by the name of the violin – the instrument complete in form and qualities – “totum in se teres atque rotundum” – appears to have been the result of a highly interesting series of improvements in the art of producing musical sounds from strings. How long a duration of time was occupied by the elaboration of these improvements respectively, is not readily to be ascertained, nor, perhaps, would the enquiry repay the trouble – but the general order of progression in the improvements themselves, is as clear as it is agreeable to contemplate. The first great advancement consisted in the sounding-board, by means of which invention a tone was produced, through the vibration of the wood, that was incomparably better and fuller than what was previously procured, through the mere vibration of the strings. As the human voice is evolved from the mouth under a concave roof, which serves it as a sounding-board, and gives additional grace and vigour to its inflections, so does the upper shell of the violin add a power of its own to the language of the strings. The next improvement in the instrument, thus extended in capability, was the neck or finger-board, which increased the range and variety of the sounds, by giving to each string the power of producing a series of notes. The bow was the next great step of advancement; and this, like other important inventions, has provoked much learned dispute as to the time and place of its origin, which however we shall not here more particularly revert to, for indeed, “non nostrum tantas componere lites.” With all these additions and appliances, we come not yet to the instrument par excellence, the true violin; for an intermediate and inferior state remains to be gone through. The consideration of that state brings us to the regular construction of the several instruments known by the general name of viol (for we pass by the rebec, as being only a spurious or illegitimate kind of fiddle), that were in the most common use during the 16th, and till about the middle of the 17th, century. These were similar to each other in form, but in size were distinguished into the treble-viol, tenor-viol, and bass-viol. They had six strings, and a finger-board marked with frets, like that of the lute or guitar2. Finally, as the crowning change, the glorious consummation, came the conversion of the viol into the violin, effected by a diminution of size, a reduction of strings, from six to four, and the abolition of those impediments to smoothness, and helps to irritation, the frets. The same reformation attended the other instruments of the viol tribe, which now became, mutato nomine, the viola and the violoncello.

In former days, we had the viol in,’Ere the true instrument had come about:But now we say, since this all ears doth win,The violin hath put the viol out.

Thus, through a considerable tract of indefinite time, and a succession of definite changes, we reach the matured and accomplished instrument, the Violin proper; and then, if we recur to the question, to whom does it belong? the answer becomes less difficult. It is to this instrument, this perfected production, that the Italians may, I think, exultingly point as their own; and, in doing so, they may well afford to be indifferent to all disputes about the title to those earlier apparitions, those crude and half-made-up resemblances to the fiddle, that were but as the abortions which, in human experience, sometimes precede a perfect birth. It is of sufficient notoriety that the earliest instruments of excellence, bearing the name of Violin, as well as the earliest players of eminence, were Italian. The Cremona fiddles of Hieronymus Amati (to go no farther back) were sent into this breathing world about two centuries and a half ago; and Baltazarini, the earliest great player of the genuine Violin on record, is known to have been imported as a curiosity from Italy, by Catherine de Medicis, in 1577. It is tolerably clear, too, that, as a court favourite, the Violin began its career in Italy – its progress, in that capacity, having been, as Burney observes, from Italy to France, and from France to England.