Old Violins by H. R. Haweis

There is something inexorable about the concensus of posterity.

Individuals may chafe under it, and writers may try to reverse its verdict. You even have crazes for the revival of neglected poets, painters, and musicians, but you will never succeed in pushing from their pedestals the great gods whom posterity has once decided to bow down to.

De Beriot may choose to play on a Maggini, and Paganini may prefer his Joseph, but even Maggini, Nicolo Amati, and Giuseppe Guarnerius, who stand round as it were saluting one another, leave Stradivari apart by himself like a Colossus on a mountain, and yet no one, not the greatest connoisseur, is able to say exactly why. When so many esteem individual violins above some Strads, and when Joseph del Gesù is held to run the magic master very hard, still Strad stands apart upon his mountain for all men to look up to and wonder at. And why? We can only say it is the way with all the greatest; there is something of the mystery of heaven about the incommunicable touch; the true aureole forms about no head to order, and the lonely seats are kept for the mighty.

Antonio Stradivari or Stradiuarius was born in 1644, and died, in his ninety-third year, in 1737. We get the date of his death from the register, and the date of his birth is fixed by a violin label (1736) in his own handwriting, in which he states that he was ninety-three years old when he made the instrument.

Stradiuarius married at the age of twenty-three a woman of twenty-seven, who had been a widow for three years, whose maiden name was Ferraboschi, and he adopted her one little girl. By her he had six children, some of whom died before him. His second wife, whom he married several years later, bore him five children, two of whom died before him -- so that in all Stradivari had eleven children. None of them seemed to have inherited their father's genius; only Omobono and Francesco Stradivari made even decent fiddles, and so far maintained the great name as to succeed at first in selling their wares at their father's prices. The buyers probably hoped that at least the wood might have been selected by Stradivari _père_, and much of it probably was; and if there was the chance of getting a spare rib or back or belly with a touch of the master upon it, it was surely worth a little speculation.

Antonio Stradivari and Andrea Guarneri, as stated before, were young _garzoni_ or apprentices together in the workshop of the great Nicolo Amati -- sat on the same work bench, used the same tools, and doubtless discussed the same problems.

In and out of that shop ran, no doubt, the boy Giuseppe Guarneri to see his uncle Andrea. He must have always found Stradivari there; and when, later on, Giuseppe imbibed a taste for fiddle-making, and became himself the great Del Gesù, it is hard, I insist upon it, to believe that what must have been a lifelong acquaintance with the mighty Stradivari should have had no influence whatever in forming his ideas and methods.

There is no mention of the youthful Stradivari having accompanied Andrea Guarneri to the wedding of his master, Nicolo Amati; Andrea was doubtless the older pupil, and Antonio Stradivari was taken on later.

"If thou wouldst teach, learn; if thou wouldst create, first copy. " It is generally held that for some years, roughly between 1660-70, Stradiuarius simply made up, blocked out, drew, glued, mixed varnish, and worked generally, but without signing his own name to any fiddles. He was _learning_; but in 1660 he begins to sign his name, not from pride, but because his master made him do so. From before that date to about 1670, which brings us to within fourteen years of Nicolo Amati's death, he made what are sometimes called Amati Strads.

At this time Antonio followed closely the violins of the early Nicolo rather than the grand Amati pattern, but he appears to have followed his master's developments continuously, slowly, but surely.

There exists a Stradivari violin with a label Nicholai Amati (anno 1667), and about that date (when he married) Antonio seems to have left his master's workshop, but still continued closely to copy Nicolo, and many violins of his between 1660 and 1670 pass as Amatis, whilst others are called Amati Strads, and some are apparently joint productions.

When Stradiuarius married (about 1667) and left Nicolo Amati, he set up round the corner in the same street as the brothers Guarnerii, and almost next door to them, in the square opposite the great Church of S. Domenico. From about this time connoisseurs notice a great improvement in Stradivari's technique; but up to 1672 at least, remaining a close copyist of Amati, he doubtless kept on terms of the closest intimacy with Nicolo, now in his decline, and benefited by the abundance of orders flowing in for Amati violins which the old master was unable to execute.

From 1660 to 1684 was a period of great activity, perhaps haste; even some pot-boiling Stradivari violins may then have been made as the young family increased. Antonio's wood is often plain about this time, and not up to the best taste and selection of his master, but he evidently remained his right-hand man to the end; and when Nicolo died, at the ripe age of eighty-eight, he left all his tools and his plant not to his son Girolamo, then about thirty-five, but to Antonio Stradivari, then just forty years old.

In 1680, four years before the death of Nicolo, Antonio had so far prospered as to be able to buy his house (which I visited in 1880), at 1 Piazza Roma, for about £800. Desiderio Arisi, a Cremonese, has left an interesting MS. in which he speaks of "his intimate friend Antonio Stradivari. " The MS. is dated 1720, or seventeen years before the death of Stradivari.