Books › Ole Bull: a memoir; with Ole Bull's 'Violin notes' and A. B. Crosby's 'Anatomy of the violinist', 1897 › scan 100
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Ole Bull: a memoir; with Ole Bull's 'Violin notes' and A. B. Crosby's 'Anatomy of the violinist', 1897
2 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Mr. Ole B. Bull, the Norwegian violinist, made his first public essay in this country, on Saturday evening, at this theatre [King's Theatre]. A more completely successful performance of the kind we have never attended. He played three pieces — a grand concerto in three movements, allegro, adagio, and rondo; a quartette for one violin; and a grand warlike Polish movement introduced by a recitative and adagio. His varieties of movement seem almost unlimited; and much as Paganini has done, this artist has certainly opened a new field on that instrument. His style is essentially different, and, like that of every truly great master, is of his own formation. Perhaps his most remarkable characteristic is the quiet and unpretending manner in which he produces all his great effects. There was no trick, no violent gesture, nor any approach to the ad captandum school. It seemed so easy, that to those not acquainted with the mechanical difficulties he mastered it was not easy to comprehend that anything extraordinary had been done. In long arpeggio passages and others made up of rapid and minute divisions, his bow scarcely seemed to move on the string; his hand, too, was almost motionless, yet our ear was charmed with a succession of distinct and sparkling notes, which kept the whole audience fixed in mute and almost breathless attention. His command of the instrument, from the top to the bottom of the scale — and he has a scale of his own of three complete octaves on each string — is absolutely perfect; in passing from one extreme of it to the other, however rapidly, he never missed a note. His tone on the fourth string is
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