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Scan 198
Musical instruments, 1908
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1concerts in England during the year 1776. Joachim Tielke of Hamburg, the manufacturer of a specimen in the Museum, was an instrument maker whose lutes were much esteemed on account of their fine tone, and their elegant ornamentation. He made them of ebony inlaid with ivory, mother-of-pearl, silver, and gold.
3Joseph Haydn wrote sixty-three compositions for the viola di bardone by order of Prince Esterhazy, who was himself a performer on this instrument, and who admired it greatly. Its tone is soft and very expressive, but rather tremulous; owing to this quality, probably, it was also called viola di fagotto. It never became very popular, since its rather complicated construction offered too many difficulties in its treatment. In Germany it was generally called Baryton.
5The viola d'amore (Fig. 57) was often strung entirely with wire. It appears to have been a novelty to Evelyn, for he records in his Diary of November 20th, 1679, "I dined with Mr. Slingsby, Master of the Mint, with my wife, invited to hear music, which was exquisitely performed by four of the most renowned masters: Du Prue, a Frenchman, on the lute; Signor Bartholomeo, an Italian, on the harpsichord; Nicholao, on the violin; but above all, for its sweetness and novelty, the viol d'amore of five wire strings played on with a bow, being but an ordinary violin played on lyre-way by a German." Mattheson ("Das Neu-Eröffnete Orchestre," Hamburg, 713) describes the viola d'amore as being mounted with four wire strings, and with one catgut string for the highest tone.
7He praises its sweetness of sound, but does not mention the sympathetic strings. The transformation of the wire-strung viola d'amore into the so-called psaltery or sultana, which has no sympathetic strings, is indicated in the following statement by Sir John Graham Dalyell ("Musical Memoirs of Scotland," Edinburgh, 1849), "The instrument was first introduced in
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