Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 63
Scan 63
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
10 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1CHAPTER V
3VIOLINS AT CREMONA—Continued
5There is something inexorable about the consensus of posterity.
7Individuals may chafe under it, and writers may try to reverse its verdict. You even have crazes for the revival of neglected poets, painters, and musicians, but you will never succeed in pushing from their pedestals the great gods whom posterity has once decided to bow down to.
9De Beriot may choose to play on a Maggini, and Paganini may prefer his Joseph, but even Maggini, Nicolo Amati, and Giuseppe Guarnerius, who stand round as it were saluting one another, leave Stradivari apart by himself like a Colossus on a mountain, and yet no one, not the greatest connoisseur, is able to say exactly why. When so many esteem individual violins above some Strads, and when Joseph del Gesù is held to run the magic master very hard, still Strad stands apart upon his mountain for all men to look up to and wonder at. And why? We can only say it is the way with all the greatest; there is something of the mystery of heaven about the incommunicable touch; the true aureole forms about no head to order, and the lonely seats are kept for the mighty.
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