Books › The violin and the art of its construction. A treatise on the Stradivarius violin, 1895 › scan 34
Scan 34
The violin and the art of its construction. A treatise on the Stradivarius violin, 1895
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1To one other point I should like to call the attention of the reader. In repairing old instruments of the time of Stradivarius, I have found that an extraordinary cleanliness and lustre is obtained by rubbing them with fine glass-paper, which is not the case with Tyrolean and German violins of the same period. At a later period this peculiarity was not met with so frequently and from the year 1750 not at all. This fact I primarily attribute to the action of the resin on the wood, being also of opinion that the fine dust of the same gets firmly embedded in the pores of the wood, and in this way, in course of time, a more or less thick coating is formed.
3For one of these practical experiments I took a violin which I had made myself and the tone of which, through years of constant use, was therefore quite familiar to me, and gave it a coating of melted resin on the inside. After this was thoroughly dry and hardened, I polished the interior and remarked the before-mentioned smoothness and brilliancy, the obtaining of which firmly convinced me that I had discovered the truth of the matter. Although, after the glueing-on of the belly, all the former conditions of the violin remained unchanged, yet I was astonished to find what a common-place squeaking tone the instrument had acquired, thus proving to me that with the melted resin I had obtained in the end exactly the opposite effect to that which I had hoped for. I was obliged to rest contented with my failure for a long time, when a lucky chance came to my help. It was this. I received a real Caspar da Salo violoncello to repair, which had never been opened and seemed to have been very little played upon, for on it I found an old bridge which I kept as an ornament and curiosity, and which, on closer examination, I found was varnished.
5When I opened the cello, it was proved without a doubt
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