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Scan 126
Old Violins And Their Makers, 1883
2 lines. Read by computer on 30 September 2026. Printed page 112. See the scan on archive.org.
1worked for about twenty years in Mittenwald, set out on his travels to perfect himself. Among other towns, he visited Florence and Cremona, and returned to his native place with increased knowledge, or, at least, experience, and came to a decision to make a second Cremona of Mittenwald. Somewhere about the year 1683, he carried out his determination in the following way. He attracted to his workshop a goodly number of the sons of his townsmen, and instructed them in the various branches of violin making, founding in that manner a large industry, which is said to have rescued the place from a gradual decay which had supervened in consequence of the removal, in 1679, of an annual fair, about two hundred years old, from Mittenwald to Botzen, whence it had been formerly taken to Mittenwald, through some complaint of the proud Venetian merchants. This manufactory having been established, is said to have greatly increased, and to be still a very important business, one firm alone employing a large number of hands. I am not in a position to say anything about the industry of to-day, but I have been unable to find any trace whatever of this great manufacture in times past in the various sources of information which have been open to me. At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the present century, this Mittenwald, at the junction of the Achen with the Iser, was a very small town indeed. It is in Bavaria, in the midst of the mountains, but within a stone throw of the frontier of the Tyrol; and one writer, speaking of the utter destitution of art feeling in the place, says that not a soul in Mittenwald could distinguish between a daub and a chef d'œuvre, with the exception of a
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