Books › The violin : how to choose one, 1893 › scan 20
Scan 20
The violin : how to choose one, 1893
8 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 16. See the scan on archive.org.
1their beautiful workmanship, though it was nothing but neat guitar making, set every one raving. What cared they for tone when they got beautiful work and pretty varnish? So that insane period lasted. Stradivarius, that marvellously neat-handed guitar maker, followed, and got rid of the scoop only after forty years' thinking, and the tide began to roll back in the right direction. Joseph Guarnerius followed, and got a little more tone back, and there the struggle ended. Violin makers since that time, with scarcely an exception, have exercised only their hands; they have all forgotten that they have brains, and have meekly dwindled into a flock of sheepish copyists. Who is to begin where Joseph Guarnerius left off, and give to the world the perfect model for all time?
3That model, I feel convinced, lies somewhere between those of Guarnerius, Maggini, and Gasparo da Salo. Violin makers should look a century forward instead of a century backward. The cultivation of music is advancing at a rapid pace, and before long the concert halls which we now boast will be too small for the populace which will crowd to fill them. For threepence, or perhaps for one penny, it will be possible to hear a concert which now costs twice as many shillings—and what will be the result? The halls will be made larger, and at once the Stradivarius model will fail to fill the buildings, and soloists will seek violins of grander proportions and larger tone.
5Look forward, ye violin makers, who would be the Stradivari of the twenty-first century! look forward!
7Having thus almost driven the breath out of the reader, and certainly startled him into thought, I shall now continue the work by asserting that, with violins which are truly great—the kings and emperors of their kind—model has very little to do. Leaving out Amati as too trifling, it may be considered proved that great violins have been produced by Gasparo da Salo, Maggini, Stradivarius, Guarnerius, and even Storioni—that is, violins which could satisfy the most exacting ear and the greatest genius in violin playing; and as these men all worked on different models, it is clear that greatness in a violin does not depend on model, or on varnish, or upon fine workmanship, or finish, but chiefly upon the wood of which it has been made. This is proved by the fact that all the violins of Stradivarius and Guarnerius were not great violins; the difference was not in the workmanship, for the carefully finished ones are often inferior in tone to those carelessly put
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