Books › The Story of the Violin, 1914 › scan 123
Scan 123
The Story of the Violin, 1914
6 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1CHAPTER XVI.
3THE AMATIS.
5By what dice-throw of the muses—if one dare couple those immortals with man's low symbol of mere accident—that little, unimportant town of Cremona Lombardy, Cremona, was chosen to become the centre of fiddle-making, who can tell? Probably it had no more to recommend it three hundred years ago than it has now—viz., that it lay in the fertile and protected valley of the Po, where trade and commerce had flourished for centuries among an industrious and sober people, and where you may see the snow-clad mountains from afar, like eternal portals, closing off this blessed land from northern blasts, and withal pointing the way to heaven—and, perhaps, good fiddle-wood. But why not Bologna, that ancient seat of learning, or Brescia, known to fame, or Venice, Florence, Milan, Rome? Did the lost art of fiddle-making impose its own peculiar conditions? Was the slow, drowsy, uneventful, hum-drum air of this small commercial and provincial town the most conducive atmosphere for creating forms—nay, habitations for shapeless fleeting tone-ideals? Could fiddle-making only truly thrive where poetry and painting might have
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