Books › The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878 › scan 32
Scan 32
The violin: some account of that leading instrument, and its most eminent professors, from its earliest date to the present time;, 1878
6 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Dr. Burney, who does not attempt to settle the point, quotes the passage, to the above effect, from Galilei, and admits his own inability to confute it. Montagne, whose travels brought him to Verona in 1580, has recorded, that there were Violins as well as organs there, to accompany the mass in the great Church. Corelli's Violin, an instrument specially Italian, which afterwards passed into the possession of Giardini, was made in 1578, and its case was decorated by the master-hand of Annibale Caracci, probably several years after the instrument was finished; as Caracci at that date had numbered but eight of his own years.
3Towards the end of the 16th century, the Violin is found indicated in some Italian scores, thus:—piccoli Violini alla Francese; which circumstance has been sometimes alleged as rendering it probable, that the reduction of the old viol or viola to the present dimensions of the Violin took place in France, rather than in Italy: but the fact does not seem to offer a sufficient basis for the conjecture, when it is considered that no instruments of French construction, corresponding with the Violin in its present form, and of as early a date as those which can be produced of Italian make, are known to exist. It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that these piccoli Violini, or little Violins, were not identical with the Violin proper;—although Mr. Hogarth* (from whose respectable authority I am rather loth to differ) quotes the phrase as one tending to the support of the French claim. The term in question, which occurs, particularly, in Monteverde's Opera of Orfeo, printed at Venice in 1615, seems to me to imply merely some French modification of the already invented Italian model—a modi-
5* "Memoirs of the Musical Drama."
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