Books › Antonio Stradivari, 1900 › scan 87
Scan 87
Antonio Stradivari, 1900
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1all makers and repairers of experience—that with a violin if very "thickly timbered," the tone is less easy of emission, or actually weak. On the other hand, if too thin the emission is comparatively easy, but lacks intensity and is termed "hollow." Under these circumstances we should expect to find a variation in the thicknesses of different violins of Stradivari, which is in accordance with fact.
3Some connoisseurs have been in their enthusiasm too hasty in their reference of general principles from a few particular instances and their researches—as time thereafter showed—did not bear the fruit so anxiously looked forward to.
5An instance comes to mind of two well known dealers, one British, the other foreign, meeting together one day and opening some half-a-dozen Strads, that appeared up to that moment to have had their interiors undisturbed, or perhaps it might be said untampered with. What a meeting! and what a parting! let us hope that each table, upper or lower, that had so long been working in harmony, eventually became again properly mated and gave no cause for lawyers to "put their fingers in the pie." The results of the examination is related thus:—"In no two of the instruments were thicknesses alike; some had thick places and thin places; some were thicker on one side than the other; all were thicker in the centre of the upper table and all had these as three to five for the back."
7Another is that of a well known continental repairer in his day, relating how he had repaired a very large number of real Strads and found the upper tables to be of the same thickness, two and a half m's. all over, but that the backs varied in thickness. Some discrepancies here seemingly. To add to this, a correspondent says the Strads he has measured "have certainly not been thickest in the centre of the upper table."
9My own observations as to thicknesses I am afraid will not afford much comfort to those who have been
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.