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Scan 313
The story of the violin, 1904
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 259. See the scan on archive.org.
1The Lady Violinist
3her sister in the colder North, the golden-tressed maiden, still went about with the bunch of keys hanging from her girdle, in snow-white apron, busy mainly in kitchen and cellar, and only of a Sunday playing the lute and dreamily glancing up at the angel with the fiddle on the bright painted church window. But this changed. Like some flowers which wait for the late summer to wed them, so the maiden of the North found her Amati or her Klingenthal tardily—but she found it. And now? I will not startle you with cold figures (they would be out of place here, methinks), let numbers hide where charm reigns; but go to the next gala concert of our largest music school. Queen's Hall will be crowded, ablaze with light. From where you sit (if you love, as I do, the darker corners in the back), the distant stage, high from among 1000 students, and assisted in the production in church of oratorios, etc. One violinist of fame sprang from this remarkable institution, Regina Strinasacchi or Sacchi (born 1764), for whom Mozart wrote his charming B flat maj. sonata for violin and piano. Of other lady violinists of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries mention has already been made of Maddalena Lombardini-Sirmen, the recipient of Tartini's lessons by correspondence (dated March 6th, 1760); also of Signora Gerbini (born after 1770), a pupil of Pugnani, and Signora Parravacini (born in 1769), pupil of Viotti. But only with the two sisters Teresa and Maria Milanollo, in the forties of the last century, the charm and poetry of violin-playing woman seems to have fully dawned on the world at large. Since then the increase in amateur and professional violinistes has been phenomenal. Madame Norman Neruda (Lady Hallé) set the ball rolling in England, Camilla Urso in America, and around these two stars cluster to-day a very large wreath of fair executants of all nationalities.
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