Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 96
Scan 96
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.
1VIOLINS IN GERMANY
3recognition of the Cremonas and gave a faulty direction to the violin pattern throughout England, France, and Germany.
5The arguments in favour of Stainer having visited Cremona in his early life rest a good deal on romance—the story of his having been a pupil of the great Nicolo, whose daughter he is said to have refused to marry, is unreliable. Whether he went home or stayed at home and married the village belle whom he appears first to have compromised, and who bore him seven daughters and one son after marriage and one daughter before, it matters very little to us.
7Poems and novels have been written about this unhappy child of genius, but, as far as I can gather, the only reliable facts seem to be these, and they have been quite recently unearthed and sifted by Herr Ruf, who died at Hall in 1877:—
9Jacob Steiner or Stainer was undoubtedly born at Absam, a village not far from Hall. The townlet lay on the high-road between the Tyrol and Italy, and doubtless nothing that went on in the northern cities of Lombardy was long in finding its way to Hall, for mules and pedlars constantly carried all sorts of merchandise—viols, and violins, and lutes amongst other things—to and fro. The great argument against Steiner ever having received early instruction at Cremona seems to be that he affected the tubby raised bellies and deep side-grooves of the old German viols; but it must be remembered that if as a boy he came under Nicolo Amati's influence, it was at a time when Nicolo him-
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