Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 79
Scan 79
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
14 lines. Read by computer on 28 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1OLD VIOLINS
3£500, and presented to her by the Earl of Dudley and some others. I shall never forget the wonderful effects elicited from it by the great magician Ernst in his palmy days, nor can I understand the statement recently made that its tone is difficult to elicit. I have heard the faintest vanishing whisper of its strings on the Covent Garden stage when, as a boy, I was seated up in the top gallery at one of Benedict's monster season concerts early in the fifties.
5A romantic interest attaches to two Stradivari violins which have come down to us in absolutely perfect condition; one is called the Messie, the other the Pucelle or the Virgin.
7The Messie was secured by Vuillaume after the death of that remarkable man Luigi Tarisio, to whom further on I devote a special section. It bears date 1716.
9Tarisio would never let it be seen till Vuillaume possessed it; it had then never been touched or played upon. He lengthened the neck, but, without inserting his new neck, he fixed it to a block placed outside the ribs. Count Cozio de Salabue had bought it in 1760, but never allowed it to be played upon.
11Tarisio bought it after the Count's death, and at his own death in 1854 it passed to Vuillaume, and was exhibited (No. 91) in the South Kensington Loan Exhibition of 1872, and for the first time unveiled beneath glass to the gaze of admiring thousands.
13When I first saw the Messie I could not believe my eyes. It was covered throughout and uniformly with thick rich red-brown varnish, laid on with a firm brush,
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