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 14
Scan 14
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
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 8. See the scan on archive.org.
1about equal in number, I am driven to the conclusion that the tenor had an unfair start—in other words, was invented first. I add to this that true four-stringed tenors by Gasparo da Salo exist, though very rare, made with only two corners, which is a more primitive form than any violin by the same maker appears in. For this and some other reasons, I have little doubt the viola preceded the violin by a very few years. What puzzles me more is to time the violon, or, as we childishly call it (after its known descendant), the double-bass. If I was so presumptuous as to trust to my eye alone, I should say it was the first of them all. It is an instrument which does not seem to mix with these four-stringed upstarts, but to belong to a much older family—viz. the viole d’amore, da gamba, &c. In the first place, it has not four strings; secondly, it has not an arched back, but a flat back, with a peculiar shoulder, copied from the viola da gamba; thirdly, the space between the upper and lower corners in the early specimens is ludicrously short. And it is hard to believe that an eye which had observed the graceful proportions of the tenor and violin could be guilty of such a wretched little inner-bought as you find in a double-bass of Brescia. Per contra, it must be admitted, first, that the sound-hole of a Brescian double-bass seems copied from the four-stringed tribe, and not at all from the elder family; secondly, that the violin and tenor are instruments of melody or harmony, but the violon of harmony only. This is dead against its being invented until after the instruments to which it is subsidiary. Man invents only to supply a want. Thus, then, it is. First, the large tenor, played between the knees; then the violin, played under the chin; then (if not the first of them all) the small double-bass: then, years after the violin, the violoncello; then the full-sized double-bass; then, longo intervalloe, the small tenor, played under the chin.
3However, I do not advance these conclusions as infallible. The highest evidence on some of these points must surely lie in manuscript music of the sixteenth century, much of which is preserved in the libraries of Italy; and, if Mr. Hatton or any musician learned in the history of his art will tell me for what stringed instruments the immediate predecessors of Corelli, and Corelli at his commencement, marked their compositions, I shall receive the communication with gratitude and respect. I need hardly say that nothing but the MS. or the editio princeps is evidence in so nice a matter.
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