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Scan 101
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
8 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3for each of the Electors. The popular legend refers them to his Benedictine monastery, but there is no shadow of proof that he ever was there at all; perhaps, however, if one Markus Stainer who is reputed to have made Peter and Paul was a monk, he may have been a Benedictine monk, and as the obscure Guarneri who did get locked up seems to be responsible by transference for the great Joseph del Gesù's legendary incarceration, so Monk Markus may do duty for J. Stainer's reputed sojourn and residence in a Benedictine monastery. It matters very little when the Elector Stainers were made; most connoisseurs are agreed that the two quite authentic "survivals of the fittest" are miracles of workmanship, beauty, and the perfection of Stainer tone.
5The Stainer tone! What is there about that tone, which for 150 years so fascinated the musical world as to dull the perceptions of so experienced a professor as Sir John Hawkins to the more exquisite timbre of the finest Cremonas? No one but myself is responsible for the following conjecture.
7Perhaps there is less tonal difference between the early Amati and the later Strad than between the early Amati and the full-blown Stainer; and it may have been the sharp, pungent contrast—the type of tone that was quite new, as it were an original creation—which at once arrested and held the ear of that epoch. For, after all, musicians in the seventeenth century were only beginning to be cultivated in the delicate appreciation of tone nuances. The proof of
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