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Scan 291
The story of the violin, 1904
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 239. See the scan on archive.org.
1Violin Art in France
3Leclair's compositions are counted among the best productions of the pre-Viotti French violin art.
5Passing here as of secondary importance the names of Jacques Aubert (died 1753), Guillemain (1705-70), Jean Joseph Cassanea de Mondonville (1715-73), and Antoine Dauvergne (1711-97), as well as the three Tartini pupils already mentioned—André Noel Pagin (born 1721 in Paris), Pierre Lahoussaye (1735-1818), and Joseph Touchemoulin (1727-1801), we come to the best known of French violinists of the eighteenth century, Pierre Gaviniés. He is usually considered the founder of the earlier (as compared to the post-Viotti) national French school of violin-playing. To the fiddle world at large his importance is centred chiefly in his twenty-four Matinées or Caprices, which to this day have their assured place in the educational diary of the violinist. The composer, it is affirmed, wrote them in his seventy-third year, and played them himself. In that case his dexterity must indeed have been quite extraordinary, as they are technical stumbling-blocks for the left hand of many a younger player to this day.
7Gaviniés was born May 11th, 1728, at Bordeaux. Nothing is known of his youth. He may have been his own teacher, and later profited from and formed his style on hearing Italian masters; at all events, at the age of thirteen he appeared at a concert spirituel in Paris, and aroused general interest. Later he undertook the direction of these concerts, and on the founding of the Paris Conservatoire de Musique in 1794
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