Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 95
Scan 95
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.
1OLD VIOLINS
3violin came from Italy; but in his ardour he fails to notice that although an Italian print shows a woman playing on a kit, the kit she plays on might all the same have been "made in Germany."
5If I see an English picture with a tomahawk and a boomerang, I do not assume at once that the objects depicted were necessarily "made in England."
7But, as far as this book is concerned, such questions are of quite secondary importance. It is sufficient to notice that the first instruments possessing the distinctive features of what we call the viola and the violin, as distinguished from the viol tribe, came from Brescia and Cremona; and that the greatest, if not the earliest, German maker, Jacobus Steiner or Stainer, is commonly reputed to have studied at Venice, or, as some say, learnt his art under Nicolo Amati at Cremona.
9As we approach the great figure of Stainer we are in the presence of a man who stands only second in popular estimation to the greatest of the Cremona masters. Indeed, so great a musician and eminent an authority as Sir John Hawkins writes in 1776: "The violins of Cremona are exceeded (sic) only by those of Stainer, a German whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone." The popularity of an English maker, Duke, who followed the German Stainer model, and whose fiddles were all the rage when good Sir John wrote, may have a little blinded his eyes to the Cremona chefs-d'oeuvre—few of which, if any, he had ever seen. But it is no small tribute to the power of the German that for at least a hundred years he retarded the due
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