Books › The heart of music : the story of the violin, 1906 › scan 214
Scan 214
The heart of music : the story of the violin, 1906
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1untalented Geronimo was a rarely fortunate youth, had he but known it, for he not only had Nicolo Amati for father and master, but he had for fellow-students Andrea Guarneri and Antonio Stradivari!
3The entrance of an old Italian family into trade, which in those days was held in scarcely higher esteem than that of a common mechanic or artisan, has a peculiar interest. That Andrea should have first had the courage to apprentice himself to a man whom his world considered an ordinary craftsman, a man almost certainly of inferior birth, however superior his attainments, marks a curious leap upward in the dignity of the art of music. The violin was at last becoming something beautiful, rare, valued, cherished; men had begun to study its sweetness and lovely possibilities; it was no longer an instrument of gay, cheap destinies, but a thing of art to which the house of Amati could give up its generations in all dignity.
5Among the more illustrious of the names which we find among Nicolo Amati's apprentices and pupils is that of Mathias Albani the second, son of the Albani of Botzen who studied with Jacob Stainer. The young Albani was a very fine maker and learned his great master's methods so well that many persons have declared his instruments
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