Scan 337
The violin: its famous makers and their imitators, 1884
4 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. Printed page 261. See the scan on archive.org.
1in Germany and England were, at one time, more numerous than those of the principal Italian makers. In a manuscript note which Jacobus Stainer in Absam prope Oenipontum. 17—
3Sir John Hawkins added to his own copy of his History of Music (1776), he says "The Violins of Cremona are exceeded only by those of Stainer, a German, whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone." To the connoisseur of today such commendation may seem inexplicable, and cause him to believe that Fiddle admirers of past times were incapable of appreciating true beauty of form, and its bearing upon sound, or else that fashion made its influence felt on the Fiddle world as elsewhere. It would be absurd to deny that the greatest German maker of Violins that ever lived was a man of rare abilities, because it is indelibly written on his chief works that he was a thorough artist. Therefore an expression of surprise that Jacob Stainer has been estimated higher than even Stradivari by the Germans and English, must not be understood as a reflection on his abilities, since it refers to the form that he chose to give to his works. To account for the apparent inconsistency in the works of Stainer, and to strike the balance between his exceptional abilities on the one side and his model on the other, is not easy. His form was not a borrowed one; it is as original as that of Stradivari—a fact which makes it more than ever unintelligible that he should
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