Books › Cremona violins. Four letters descriptive of those exhibited in 1873 at the South Kensington museum. Also giving the data for producing the true varnishes used by the great Cremona makers. [Reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette.], 1873 › scan 13
Scan 13
Cremona violins. Four letters descriptive of those exhibited in 1873 at the South Kensington museum. Also giving the data for producing the true varnishes used by the great Cremona makers. [Reprinted from the Pall Mall Gazette.], 1873
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 7. See the scan on archive.org.
1heart of man. It can be prostituted to the performance of difficulties, and often is; but that is not its fault. Genius can make your very heart dance with it, or your eyes to fill; and Niel Gow was no romancer, but only a deeper critic than his fellows, when, being asked what was the true test of a player, he replied, "A mon is a player when he can gar himsel greet wi his feddle."
3Asking forgiveness for this preamble, I proceed to enquire what country invented these four-stringed and four-cornered instruments?
5I understand that France and Germany have of late raised some pretensions. Connoisseurship and etymology are both against them. Etymology suffices. The French terms are all derived from the Italian, and that disposes of France. I will go into German pretensions critically, if any one will show me as old and specific a German word as viola and violino, and the music composed for those German instruments. "Fiddle" is of vast antiquity; but pearshaped, till Italy invented the four corners, on which sound as well as beauty depends.
7The Order of Invention.—Etymology decides with unerring voice that the violoncello was invented after the violono or double-bass, and connoisseurship proves by two distinct methods that it was invented after the violin. 1st, the critical method: it is called after the violon, yet is made on the plan of the violin, with arched back and long inner bought. 2nd, the historical method: a violoncello made by the inventors of the violin is incomparably rare, and this instrument is disproportionately rare even up to the year 1610. Violino being a derivative of viola would seem to indicate that the violin followed the tenor; but this taken alone is dangerous; for viola is not only a specific term for the tenor, but a generic name that was in Italy a hundred years before a tenor with four strings was made. To go then to connoisseurship—I find that I have fallen in with as many tenors as violins by Gasparo da Salo, who worked from about 1555 to 1600, and not quite so many by Gio Paolo Maggini, who began a few years later. The violin being the king of all these instruments, I think there would not be so many tenors made as violins, when once the violin had been invented. Moreover, between the above dates came Corelli, a composer and violinist. He would naturally create a crop of violins. Finding the tenors and violins of Gasparo da Salo
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