Scan 41
Georg Gemünder's Progress In Violin Making 1881, 1881
6 lines. Read by computer on 19 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1my professional travels, I have had only six violoncellos to repair, and two Cremonese tenors, and one of Steiner's, which belonged to the late chapelmaster, Herr Stamitz. Of new violins after the Cremonese model, I have made but a few for the chapel at Weimar, and six, together with a tenor and a violoncello, for the Chapel Royal at Copenhagen. I was prevented making more, through the following circumstance: the late Duchess Amelia of Weimar having introduced the guitar into Weimar, in 1788, I was immediately obliged to make copies of this instrument for several of the nobility; and these soon becoming known in Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin, so great a demand arose for them, that, for the space of sixteen years, I had more orders than I could execute.
3I must here take the opportunity to observe that, originally, the guitar had only five strings. The late Herr Naumann, chapelmaster at Dresden, ordered the first guitar with the sixth or low E-string, which I at once made for him. Since that time the instrument has always been made with six strings; for which improvement its admirers have to thank Herr Naumann.
5only mounted with four strings, it having always been the practice in Germany, as we are told by L. Spohr, "to reckon the strings from grave to acute, commencing with C, the lowest string of the violoncello and tenor." (See p. 114 of the translator's edition of Spohr's Violin School, published by Messrs Cocks and Co.) About the year 1840, Herr Hillmer invented a five-stringed instrument which he called Violatin—a sort of compound of the violin and tenor, from having the addition of the low C-string of the latter. It was intended as well for the performance of violin compositions, as for those written for the tenor (and even for the violoncello, only, in this case, an octave higher). But instead of being an invention, it appears rather, from what is stated above, to have been a return to early usage. Leipzig Allgem. Mus. Zeitung for 1840, p. 245.—Tr.
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