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 35
Scan 35
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 29. See the scan on archive.org.
1the violins of Brescia and of Stradiuarius and Guarnerius were the only well-modelled violins, they were really bought by the ear, and the prices were moderate. Now they are in reality bought by the eye, and the price is enormous. The reason is that their tone is good but their appearance inimitable; because the makers chose fine wood and laid on a varnish highly coloured, yet clear as crystal, with this strange property—it becomes far more beautiful by time and usage: it wears softly away, or chips boldly away, in such forms as to make the whole violin picturesque, beautiful, various, and curious.
3To approach the same conclusion by a different road—No. 94 is a violin whose picturesque beauty I have described already; twenty-five years ago Mr. Plowden gave £450 for it. It is now, I suppose, worth £500. Well, knock that violin down and crack it in two places, it will sink that moment to the value of the "violon du diable," and be worth £350. But collect twenty amateurs all ready to buy it, and, instead of cracking it, dip it into a jar of spirits and wash the varnish off. Not one of those customers will give you above £40 for it; nor would it in reality be worth quite so much in the market. Take another example. There is a beautiful and very perfect violin by Stradiuarius, which the Times, in an article on these instruments, calls La Messie. These leading journals have private information on every subject, even grammar. I prefer to call it—after the very intelligent man to whom we owe the sight of it—the Vuillaume Stradiuarius. Well, the Vuillaume Stradiuarius is worth, as times go, £600 at least. Wash off the varnish, it would be worth £35; because, unlike No. 94, it has one little crack. As a further illustration that violins are heard by the eye, let me remind your readers of the high prices at which numberless copies of the old makers were sold in Paris for many years. The inventors of this art undertook to deliver a new violin, that in usage and colour of the worn parts should be exactly like an old and worn violin of some favourite maker. Now, to do this with white wood was impossible; so the wood was baked in the oven or coloured yellow with the smoke of sulphuric acid, or so forth, to give it the colour of age; but these processes kill the wood as a vehicle of sound; and these copies were, and are, the worst musical instruments Europe has created in this century; and, bad as they are at starting, they get worse every year of their untuneful existence; yet, because
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