The baroque violin by Andrew Manze

Is it not strange that sheeps’ guts should hale souls out of men’s bodies?

William Shakespeare, Much ado about nothing, III, 3

Can the Bard have been referring to anything other than the violin? During his lifetime the instrument had evolved from various mediaeval and renaissance rebecs and fiddles and arrived at the form it has now retained with very few changes for the last four hundred years. It is still considered ‘one of the most perfect instruments acoustically’ (The New Grove) and is arguably the most beautiful looking. In financial terms alone, examples from the great makers regularly fetch prices at auction reserved for only the rare works of art.

Frontispiece of Leopold Mozart’s ‘Violinschule’ (1756)

Shakespeare has, as only he could, captured the very essence of the violin’s inimitable magic in those few words: not just its beautiful simplicity — four strings of spun gut stretched over a resonating ‘body’ of wood and made to vibrate by the hairs from a horse’s tail; not just its design, as distinctive and pleasing to the eye as it is to the ear, as satisfying to the aesthete as to the physicist, with its combination of graceful curves and ‘bee-sting’ corners, its f-shaped sound holes and coy scroll; not just its chameleon-like ability to be equally at home in the church and chamber, opera house and tavern, state banquet and barn dance. These things alone would be enough to set the violin apart from all other instruments. Its importance and universal popularity however are owed to its ability to move listeners with wordless utterances from the most public of profundities to the sweetest nothings using strings as sonorous as vocal chords and a bow as deft as a tongue.

The techniques used in the violin’s construction were (and some still are) shrouded in secrecy, passed from father to son or a master to apprentice. North Italy was the birthplace of these secrets. Brescia took the lead in producing the first highly prized instruments with makers such as da Salo and the Maggini family, but by 1600 this violinistic hegemony had been ceded to nearby Cremona where the Amati family worked. It was in their workshops that many of the finest Italian luthiers learned their trade as well as the Tyrolean maker Jacob Stainer (?1617–1683) and of course the greatest of them all, Antonio Stradivari (1644–1737). While all makers brought (and are still bringing) their own ideas and styles to the violin, the work of Amati, Stainer and Stradivari elevated the instrument to such a state of perfection that they can be seen as the violin’s (if not western music’s) sine qua non.

The violin family illustrated in Praetorius’ Syntagma Musicum of 1618. 1 + 2 pochettes, 3 renaissance violin, 4 treble violin, 5 tenor violin, 6 bass violin.

Although the instrument’s birth date is impossible to discover, its coming of age as a solo instrument for ‘serious’ music making in church or at court does have a precise date: 1610. In this year Giovanni Paolo Cima published the first violin sonata, the first of thousands, and Monterverdi featured the violin as a virtuosic instrument in his Vespers. It was also the year that Galileo pointed his newfangled telescope at the moon and Jupiter and single-handedly overturned mankind’s view of his own place in the cosmos: no longer was he at the centre of the universe. The violin has been comforting him ever since.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century a changing world took the violin out of its regular haunts of churches, salons and taverns, and placed it in ever larger concert halls to entertain vaster audiences, accompanied by louder pianos or bigger orchestras. To cope with this, several radical changes were made to increase the violin’s carrying power, a process which could be seen as a loss of innocence. The body was reinforced making the instrument heavier; the angle of ‘neck’ to ‘body’ was altered to increase the string tension in a visually unappealing and anatomically unlikely way, and various pieces of metal and plastic scaffolding were added to enable the player to extract every last ounce of power from the over-stressed wood. The ultimate concession to the modern age was made as recently as the 1930s and ’40s when gut strings were replaced by metal. Gone was the renaissance ideal of the violin as a microcosm of man.

Violin by Jacob Stainer

For this reason the members of The Academy of Ancient Music, when playing seventeenth and eighteenth century repertoire, prefer to use instruments in the condition in which they would have been at the time the music was composed and first performed, before that loss of innocence.

It must be said though that innocence and violin playing rarely went together in the early days. It is no coincidence that the word ‘fiddle’ has had two distinct meanings since the seventeenth century. One anecdote of the time describes how a young London nobleman was so ashamed of playing such a lowly instrument that he hid his violin under his greatcoat when going to and from his lessons and thus it was smashed to pieces when he was trampled by a dancing bear which had broken loose. And the satirist Jonathan Swift depicts Gulliver during his last Travel enjoying ‘perfect tranquility of mind: no Wives, Politicians or Shop-keepers; no Lords, Judges or Fiddlers!’

The violin was often described as the devil’s instrument, perhaps because of the intricacy of the techniques used in playing it, or maybe because of its alchemical powers over the soul. The Italian virtuoso Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) transcribed a sonata he claimed to have heard in a dream played by the devil standing at the foot of his bed. And such was the technical wizardry of Nicolo Paganini (1782–1840) that he was widely believed to have made a Faustian pact with Old Nick and for this was refused burial in consecrated ground.

There was an angelic side to violin playing as well. ‘Angelo del violino’ became a mark in Italy of unofficial laureateship, rather like a composer being dubbed a ‘new orpheus’. Archangelo Corelli (1653–1713) received both these accolades and his concertos and sonatas were the world’s first best-sellers in terms of the numbers of editions and copies which were printed. His immaculate compositions were especially popular in England, fresh from its period of Puritan domination during the Commonwealth. One musicologist of the time referred to Corelli’s music as ‘the bread of life’: praise verging on blasphemy is perhaps the highest praise.

Just as Italian makers dominated the violin for its first three hundred years of life, so Italian players took the lead in developing its techniques and range of expression. The first virtuosos form clear stepping-stones, often from master to pupil, some names more familiar than others: from Fontana to Marini, Uccellini, Corelli, Vivaldi, Veracini, Locatelli, Tartini, Viotti and Paganini. There were non-Italian virtuosos of course, notably Schmelzer and Biber in Austria, Walther, Westhoff and Pisendel in Germany, and Rebel, Leclair, Kreutzer and Baillot in France. More importantly, few leading musicians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not play the violin to some extent. Handel did, Bach is known to have had a ‘clear and penetrating tone’ and often directed orchestras from the violin, and Telemann confessed in his autobiography that before a public performance on the instrument he would lock himself away for a few days with his sleeves rolled up, violin in one hand and a bottle in the other.

‘In sum, in the hand of a skilful player, the violin represents the sweetness of the lute, the suavity of the viol, the majesty of the harp, the force of the trumpet, the vivacity of the fife, the sadness of the flute’ (Giovanni Battista Doni, 1640). To discover how the violin can best ‘hale souls out of men’s bodies’ has been a grail to makers, composers and players for four hundred years. The quest will never end — to the eternal delight of their listeners.

Andrew Manze, 23 September 1997