Old Violins by H. R. Haweis

Of course, by this time, "every schoolboy," to use Macaulay's famous phrase, knows that most things -- including, alas! violins -- can be made in Germany faster and cheaper than anywhere else; and if we trust to German writers like Dr Schebek, we might almost believe that viols, not to say the violin, originated in Germany.

I am quite willing to leave the viol origin an open question. If, on the one hand, Albert Dürer and his father-in-law both made violins and dated back to 1500, Benvenuto Cellini tells us that long before 1500 his father made the finest Italian viols at Florence; and an ingenious writer has now unearthed a print by Maso Fineguerra, the father of engraving about 1460, in which Thalia is represented playing on a small violin pochette or kit -- which, by the way, has rather upset the idea that the kit was a reduced violin, but seems to show, on the contrary, that the violin followed the kit instead of the kit following the violin, the kit being in reality a small violin. It is thus triumphantly argued by Mr Fleming that even the predecessor of, and every suggestion of, the violin came from Italy; but in his ardour he fails to notice that although an Italian print shows a woman playing on a kit, the kit she plays on might all the same have been "made in Germany."

If I see an English picture with a tomahawk and a boomerang, I do not assume at once that the objects depicted were necessarily "made in England."

But, as far as this book is concerned, such questions are of quite secondary importance. It is sufficient to notice that the first instruments possessing the distinctive features of what we call the viola and the violin, as distinguished from the viol tribe, came from Brescia and Cremona; and that the greatest, if not the earliest, German maker, Jacobus Steiner or Stainer, is commonly reputed to have studied at Venice, or, as some say, learnt his art under Nicolo Amati at Cremona.

As we approach the great figure of Stainer we are in the presence of a man who stands only second in popular estimation to the greatest of the Cremona masters. Indeed, so great a musician and eminent an authority as Sir John Hawkins writes in 1776: "The violins of Cremona are _exceeded_ [_sic_] only by those of Stainer a German whose instruments are remarkable for a full and piercing tone. " The popularity of an English maker, Duke, who followed the German Stainer model, and whose fiddles were all the rage when good Sir John wrote, may have a little blinded his eyes to the Cremona _chefs-d'œuvre_ -- few of which, if any, he had ever seen. But it is no small tribute to the power of the German that for at least a hundred years he retarded the due recognition of the Cremonas and gave a faulty direction to the violin pattern throughout England, France, and Germany.

The arguments in favour of Stainer having visited Cremona in his early life rest a good deal on romance -- the story of his having been a pupil of the great Nicolo, whose daughter he is said to have refused to marry, is unreliable. Whether he went home or stayed at home and married the village belle whom he appears first to have compromised, and who bore him seven daughters and one son after marriage and one daughter before, it matters very little to us.

Poems and novels have been written about this unhappy child of genius, but, as far as I can gather, the only reliable facts seem to be these, and they have been quite recently unearthed and sifted by Herr Ruf, who died at Hall in 1877: --

Jacob Steiner or Stainer was undoubtedly born at Absam, a village not far from Hall. The townlet lay on the high-road between the Tyrol and Italy, and doubtless nothing that went on in the northern cities of Lombardy was long in finding its way to Hall, for mules and pedlars constantly carried all sorts of merchandise -- viols, and violins, and lutes amongst other things -- to and fro. The great argument against Steiner ever having received early instruction at Cremona seems to be that he affected the tubby raised bellies and deep side-grooves of the old German viols; but it must be remembered that if as a boy he came under Nicolo Amati's influence, it was at a time when Nicolo himself approached far more nearly the raised viol form than he did later on when his own model improved. The Steiner pattern is therefore consistent with all these theories: --

Firstly, that Steiner adopted the raised pattern which he found at Cremona, and which was then common throughout the violin-making world; that, returning early to Absam, he adhered to it, and, perhaps from motives of national pride, accentuated it _Germano more_.

Secondly, that he visited Cremona later, when his own model was already formed, and was too proud to alter it.

Thirdly, that German he was, and German he remained, and never went to Cremona at all.

All these questions, upon which much ink and paper have been spent, remain more interesting to the antiquarian than to the collector. Still, an indescribable interest and a deep human pathos seem to cling about the meagre facts of this remarkable man's life.

Stainer's popularity was so enormous that ten times the number of violins he could ever have made have been attributed to him, and his name has been forged quite as often as that of the great Stradivari.

Stainer married in 1645, and was appointed one of the Archducal servants, 1669; he advanced rapidly in favour, became violin-maker to the Emperor's court, and was turning out instruments as fast as he could make them, forming such admirable pupils as Klotz and Albani, when he fell a victim to the _odium theologicum_.