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Here we are! The final chapter in the life of Pietro Guarneri of Mantua, a distinguished violin maker, and his experiences during a turbulent period in history. Pietro's mother-in-law joins their household in 1700. Pietro's style of violin making has evolved substantially, reflecting the broader and bolder designs of his instruments.
However, family tensions arise as his brother Giuseppe fails to pay Pietro his share of their father's inheritance, eventually resolving the dispute after several years. Meanwhile, historical events significantly impact Pietro’s life. The death of the King of Spain in 1700 sparks the War of Spanish Succession, embroiling Mantua in conflict as the French and Austrians vie for control over northern Italian territories.
This period sees devastating consequences for Pietro's family, including the death of his daughter Eleonora and the chronic instability caused by shifting political powers. Despite these challenges, Pietro continues his craft, even as the Austrians eventually claim Mantua what will happen to our violin maker Pietro Guarneri?
Personal tragedies persist with the death of more children, but Pietro forges on, making exquisite instruments until his death in 1720.
Mantua is transforming how will the art of the violin makers survive this upheaval?
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Welcome back to the complex and eventful life of Pietro Guarneri of Mantua. This episode explores Pietro's struggle of managing six children alone, the influence of Jacob Steiner on his instruments, and the familial conflicts over inheritance. We look at Pietro's work for the court of Mantua, including his decorated instruments with the fleur de lis patterns, why did he do this? Find out all! The episode also touches on the personal hardships Pietro faced, such as the death of his wife Caterina and subsequent remarriage to Lucia Birani. Financial challenges, especially related to dowries and house payments, are prominent, alongside Pietro's continuous dedication to his craft and the musical court despite political instability. Andrea Guarneri's death left a few curved balls for his sons to sort out, let see how the brothers (Pietro of Mantua and Giuseppe Filius Andrea) manage.
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In this episode of The Violin Chronicles, the life of Pietro Guarneri, Andrea Guarneri's eldest son, continues as he and his wife Caterina move to Mantua, a culturally rich yet politically tumultuous city. This episode opens a window onto Pietro's daily life, his tasks for the imprudent Duke Ferdinando Carlo, and the socio-political environment of 17th-century Mantua. This episode also explores the impact of European power struggles, particularly the War of the Spanish Succession, on the Guarneri family and Mantuan society. Pietro's craftsmanship, family dynamics, and interactions with the declining ducal court stand at the forefront, offering a rich historical tapestry in which our violin maker despite tough times was making a go of it.
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Never get your Pietro Guarneri's mixed up again! Pietro Guarneri of Mantua was Andrea Guarneri's eldest son, both a talented maker and musician, so why did he leave his home town to go work for a narcissistic socialite down the road? Find out as we take a look at this often forgotten Guarneri at the opulent and downright turbulent court of the Gonzaga's.
Pietro Guarneri of Mantua, a fascinating yet often overlooked figure in violin making history. This episode covers Pietro's colourful life, beginning with his birth in Cremona in 1655, his early years working alongside his father Andrea Guarneri, and his move to Mantua. Pietro's journey is marked by personal tragedies, including the loss of his first child, and professional aspirations driven by his exceptional talent both as a craftsman and a musician. The episode also delves into the political complexities of Mantua, its court life, and the intrigues surrounding its rulers. Pietro's move to Mantua to work under the Gonzaga court, his successful establishment as both a musician and an instrument maker, and the legacy he left behind form the crux of this engaging historical account.
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Continue listening to the life of Andrea Guarneri, student of Nicolo Amati and father of 2 very important violin makers.
To listen to this episode I invite you to sign up to Patreon, you can do this at Patreon/thevioinchronicles.com
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Andrea Guarneri was the first in the line of Guarneri violin makers and he is the link with the Amati family, having been apprenticed to Nicolo Amati, but as you will see this family will soon break away from the Amati tradition and start creating their own unique style.
the Guarneri family of violin makers. Take a look with me at Andrea's early life amidst war, famine, and the plague, and his apprenticeship under the esteemed Niccolo Amati, who had lost many family members to the plague.
Andrea becomes a trusted apprentice and eventually moves out of the Amati household to get married to Anna Maria Orcelli. How will Andrea evolve in his work and business success working just around the corner from the great Nicolo Amati?
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In this second episode on Giovanni Battista Rogeri we look at his family and children. Living in Brescia also meant that Rogeri was in the heart of an Opera loving people close to Venice and an exciting time musically and instrumentally.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband, Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect. But here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to part two of The Life of Giovanni Battista Rogeri. In the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we looked at Rogeri's early life. His apprenticeship with the master Niccolo Amati himself in Cremona. He's moved to Brescia seeking out greener pastures. And now he is in Brescia where we will see his style really come into its own and take a look at this thing Opera, that was really changing the musical landscape for musicians and instrument makers alike.
So stay with me as we take a dive into the life and career of Giovanni Battista Ruggieri. Not Ruggeri, Rogeri. Before we move on, I would like to say that I am an independent podcaster and really appreciate the support people have been showing in helping this show happen. If you would like to be one of those people helping me make more content for you to enjoy, consider going to patreon.com forward slash the violin chronicles, where you can have access to extra episode and help make things happen.
We now find ourselves in the home of Laura and Giovanni Rugeri. The year after this young couple married in 1665, they had their first child called Pietro Giacomo and would go on to have at least six more children. Two years after Pietro's birth, they had another son called Gio Paolo. These two sons would be the only surviving boys of the Rogeri's five sons and would go on to become violin makers as well. In these early years, there is not much we know about Giovanni Battista Rogeri's work, but five years on, into the 1670s, we see an active workshop Giovanni definitely had his own style. When working for Niccolò Amati, his hand can be seen in that cremonese workshop as his instruments differed to those of Niccolò. His bolder style even influenced the young Girolamo II Amati in the development of his own characteristic instruments.
Now, if you can cast your minds back to the first few episodes of the Violin Chronicles, where we spoke about the city of Brescia, we looked at its close connection with Venice. And now that Venice is embracing this exciting new art form called opera, it's no surprise that Brescia is not far behind. And the year before Rogeri married, in 1664, Brescia opened its very own commercial opera house. And this first theatre was called the Teatro degli Erranti. Cremona would never embrace opera to the extent that the Venetian state did. And here we find Giovanni Battista Rogeri setting up his workshop in the midst of this exciting time for the city of Brescia. Here I talk to Stephen Mould about how opera was so different to anything people had ever seen how it was pulling on human emotion and the impact music would have had on people at this time in this part of Italy.
Linda Lespets
And, and also I've, the, with the history of opera, we're sort of going from this Renaissance style. And we sort of move through to the Baroque, which is more, so we're going from the, you know, the Pythagorean theory of music was sort of God's omnipotence and to music being this source of bringing out human emotion. It's sort of the, the idea of music and the sort of thinking behind music was changing during this time of opera developing as well. Yeah. And can we see that in the operas?
Stephen Mould
Look, what you're talking about is absolutely valid. I tend to think of all of those kinds of ideas, they were sort of in the air.
Linda Lespets
Yeah. In the same way that Yeah, because I feel like opera really was, it's all about drama. It is. And human emotion. Like love and jealousy and revenge.
Stephen Mould
Yes. And so the interesting thing is how those things are expressed on the stage, how those things are played out. Again, I come to this idea of the stratas of society in that, let's say, people from the lower classes or peasants or whatever, who had oral traditions of passing on poems or stories and things, and have this very immediate form of street theatre where people, they're actually looking into people's eyes and gazing to get a connection with their audience.
Now, If you look at the way people behaved in the aristocratic circles, they didn't do that too. You might've had an arranged marriage to somebody and never actually been alone in a room with them or looked them in the eyes that it's all, it's all done according to certain social conventions. So although these Pythagorean ideas and everything else were present, I feel that that was a bit more of a background thing. And that, that was. material that was really available to the more aristocratic classes who had time to sit and read and Think about these things. Think about things. I feel particularly in Venice that this emergent middle class was much more much more volatile. It was a time of extraordinary change, but what were interesting was the interactions between the classes. And what I would say then is, if you think of Mozart's the three Don Giovanni, Così Fan Tutte, and the Marriage of Figaro, these are also about different classes of people. And you see all the music, So, for example, in the, in the Marriage of Figaro, you've got Figaro and Susanna who are the servant class and the kind of music that Mozart uses for that are peasant dances, other musical forms that come from their class. When the Count and Countess are talking or singing, they have a different realm of music. In Don Giovanni, you've got The scenario of the Don, who is an aristocrat, and his servant Leporello, who's from the servant class. And I mean, the opera opens with Leporello going, I'm sick of being a servant, I want to be the master. So there's this class conflict, and at a certain point in the second act, they actually disguise one another as, so Leporello disguises himself as Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni disguises himself as Leporello, so there's this weird sort of change. And it then occurs in the music as well. So it's this idea of having different musics from different places. So, to map out all these stations. And the music really was part of the storytelling. Absolutely. And, and the, so the, the, see, we don't, we, we don't sit in a Mozart opera and go, Oh, there's a gavotte. That's this class or that, but they, they didn't even have to have that conversation with themselves. They just knew it. And, and I mean, to bring it back to history, when Louis and Mary Antoinette had to escape from Versailles because of the, all the, it was the revolt coming from Paris. They went out the servant's door of Versailles disguised as their servants. So you see all of this switching around. So I see that as probably the. Dominant thing, which animated opera. This sort of connection with people and their, their class.
Linda Lespets
Right. Yeah. And, and in, with the violin makers, it was a little bit, there's a bit of that story as well, where you've, the violin maker was an artisan, but had to, was making for the aristocracy, but also dealing with, you know it was very, there was sort of a bridge between classes as well, that were working with tradespeople and yeah, the music in general, we seemed to have this like bridge of
Stephen Mould
Yeah. Sort of eng globed a lot of classes. It, it was a way I mean if, if you think of when, when you said that, I think of Hayden for example, who was basically a servant all his life and Mozart who was determined not to be, and only in Vienna.He, could he really do that.
Linda Lespets
But now in Brescia, Rogeri was making instruments using fine wood for his wealthy clients. And for those with a more modest budget, he would use plainer pieces. And to save time, simply draw on the purfling on the backs, for example, of some of his instruments by scratching in the lines with a tracer and filling the grooves in with black. I talked to Florian Leonard about G.B. Rogeri instruments that have historically been confused with Maggini’s and the characteristics of Rogeri instruments that distinguish them from other makers.
Florian Leonhard
Before dendrochronology was established, the Maggini’s were going around and they were actually GB Rogeri’s.
Linda Lespets
Right, yeah, we did a we did a condition report on a Giovanni Paolo Maggini and It had an old certificate and then we did the dendocrinology and so I had to change the title to attributed to.
Florian Leonhard
Yeah. And it might've been, you know, I mean, I have seen about three, three Rogeris that used to be G. P. Maggini’s Okay. Yeah. Very nicely made. But you can see that the construction behind it doesn't have that more loose idea of creating that shape, but it was a constructed shape. Of course it had the linings, it had the corner blocks in the right way, it had but another feature I found always that was a dead giveaway is the volute. So the scroll, Rogeri had a very strong character of, of how he constructed the scroll in an Amati style. So obviously it was influenced by Amati, but it is his own idea. And you can see right away when he makes his own style, not, not, not a Maggini style, that he has quite a flat cutting out of the, of the back of the scroll and also the front of the scroll.
So that's very flat, incredibly flat. And the similar thing is also from the side. So it comes from, it arrives from the peg box and then runs up into the first turning. And that hardly goes into depth. And he manages to still have the chamfer relatively sharp without having a round cut. He has a very flat cut into the volute. And then he arrives in the eye in the almost Amati school way. And he does, when he cuts the, the Maggini scroll, it just looks as if he just had a different model, but it's the same attitude. It's incredible to see that. So he could not hide that. And I don't think he tried to fake anyway. He just built that model, but it was totally him.
It's like the Maggini copy by Vuillaume I mean, it does totally not look like Maggini, so it looks like a Vuillaume so the Vuillaume couldn't hide his character behind it. Even though Vuillaume’s intention was more to be quite real, he did for his time, do quite nice copies, but of course the copy wasn't intellectually analysed as detailed as somebody would think.
Linda Lespets
The labels Rogeri printed to insert into his instruments are peculiar in that they are printed in red ink. Okay, so not all of his labels are in red ink, but quite a few are. We don't really know why, but what we do know is that red ink was the most popular colour after black. And in legal and notarial documents, red ink was used. It was used for important headings and quotes. Think of red letter Bibles, for example. Fun fact, accountants would enter in black ink, positive figures on business financial records and the negative figures in red, hence to be in the red or the black. That aside, it could have just been that it was an aesthetic choice or a mistake by the printer. Although he had worked in the Amati workshop in his formative years, and one of their signature moves was an almost imperceptible dot in the centre back of instruments, thought to be from a compass in the measurement process in making the instrument, Giovanni Battista Rogeri did not have this on his instruments. We have today many fine violins and cellos by Giovanni Battista Rogeri, but there is, and this is interesting for Brescia, not many violas coming out of his workshop. And this was not because he had a personal problem with viola players, but simply a question of compositional style. Things had changed by the end of the 17th century and the fashion was for trio sonatas that consisted of two treble instruments, such as two violins and a bass, and often a keyboard instrument playing the continuo parts. That confusingly makes four people playing the trio. But in any case, the viola was no longer needed, for now, and this could explain the fact that there is a dip in viola making after 1700 in both Cremona and Brescia. Never fear, the violas do come back in, the later Baroque and Classical periods, but our violin maker will no longer be with us.
Giovanni Battista Rogeri's business in Brescia is a success and he will live with his family in San Giorgio for the next 20 years. His children will grow up and the boys, Pietro Giacomo and Gio Paolo, will eventually be apprenticed with their father. Rogeri, as we have mentioned earlier, had an influence on Girolamo II Amati's style, But Niccolò Amati definitely had a huge influence on Rogeri and his style. He modelled many of his instruments on Niccolò Amati's grand pattern. And although we see this strong influence, Rogeri cannot help but have his own particular style, a type of Cremonese/Brescian fusion. It is sweepingly bold and finely executed, drawing on Cremonese and Brescian influences. He uses local maple for his instruments, backs, ribs, and scrolls. Some of his instruments are remarkably like Niccolo Amati's, and the next could be a Maggini copy with short corners, double purfling around the contours of the instrument, and decorative motifs on the back. Depending on the client's demand, he could do it all, one day Cremonese and Brescia the next, and yet with his own distinct style that you can see, in the sweep of the sound holes of his instruments, that is quite distinctive.
I asked Florian Leonhard what he thought about the influence Brescian makers such as Maggini and Rogeri could have had on Stradivari in his phases of experimentation.
Florian Leonhard
Antonio Stradivari went through a period of making longer violins. These are called his long pattern instrument, and his arching became fuller and evolved. He would keep experimenting until he culminated in his golden period. But could the Brescian school and G.B. Rogeri have played a part in this thought process at that time? Brescia was plodding along with their style on their own. and creating something that, yeah, they just were confident because the musicians wanted to have those instruments.
They were busy, They got rich from it, You know, nobody was poor making those instruments and they, which we can see in the archives today. So you can, you can see that they were successful. They had constantly musicians from all over the country because the musicians were the ones driving what was in demand, you know, in parallel, in the parallel universe, Cremona supplied some other chords with their instruments, and they were successful within that and that system worked very well, but I don't see much cross pollination there going on between those cities. So Cremona will have noticed that Musicians like sometimes to have this kind of Maggini like instruments, and Rogeri was already making such instruments as well. Maybe visible for Cremonese, violin makers, because they, the musicians would travel, because Brescia and Cremona is not that far apart.
But Obviously, the link wasn't so established culturally, as you can tell from the violin making history. So, but Stradivari who totally deserves his name as the genius of our profession, he was constantly, from day one, from the earliest instruments, when we analyse him, you can see from the earliest instruments, his strong character and drive to find out how to make it better. So I think from day one, he tried to see how can I improve this thing. And by 1690, he arrived by saying, let's radically change the design of the arching, because, because the musicians talking about the sonority and warmth and depth of Maggini instruments. And so he, he felt that's lacking.
Let's try to find this out. And then he saw something and he said, let’s try it. And he did it. And it created some effect and he continued this. And so he did it for, for just under a decade, building those long pattern instruments, because long machines were longer and they were fuller arched. And you see that in, in Stradivari's design. But Stradivari still was bound by the very strong, incredible principles that the Amati’s have created in Cremona. So he had the discipline to build it beautifully, with long, slender corners, with a choice of wood that looks magnificent. And it's very, It's aristocratic in the way. So the Amati model by Stradivari doesn't look like Amati you know, so it's, it's a much more graceful in design, in my view.
He combined in the, in the golden period, the two things, so his arching became fuller, which is the major change in study varius designs. For the sound.
Linda Lespets
Yeah, there's less of that there's the scooped, like, towards the edges, It's less, although, Yes, I mean, the Amati brothers, I don't, yeah. The brothers Amati were already quite full.
Florian Leonhard
Yeah. Yes. There's a, yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's hard to tell. Since you mentioned the Amati brothers, the Amati brothers were more advanced in the arching from our modern perspective of, of ideal arching than Niccolo, because Niccolo exaggerated that deep, long, wide, wide channel, and therefore has nearly a slightly pinched arching, which you see in some Ruggieris as well.
Linda Lespets
In the 1670s, Rogeri, now in his 30s, his workshop is a busy place. Business is good, and he has a young family with many children. As was the case with many other families, infant death was sadly a common thing, and three of his boys were killed. The two sons that did make it to adulthood were Pietro Giacomo and Gio Paolo.
As they grew up, they would help their father more and more in the workshop. And in the year 1688, when Giovanni was in his late 40s, the family would move house. Perhaps his father in law had died and the house they had been living in for the last 20 years had to be sold. But now Ruggieri, his wife and their five children, the two boys and three daughters, moved into a rented house nearby to the Cortell del Polini.
Giovanni Battista Ruggieri's workshop was busy. He was making instruments in his own bold style, based on the techniques he had learnt as an apprentice from his master Niccolò Amati. His work definitely showed the style of the great Cremonese maker, in the shape of the scroll and the outline of his violins. But the sound holes, they were his own thing. Their shape showed his unique stamp on the instrument, and as he was now settled in to life in Brescia, he also embraced some of the local models such as Maggini. Although he wouldn't construct the instrument as Maggini had done, he would copy the model The double purfling, the short corners with open sea bouts, and that distinctive Brescian scroll.
But the making process was indeed Cremonese. This is what he had learnt, and it had worked for him. He used an inside mould with blocks and side linings for those instruments that had to be made quickly. He would sometimes not even do the purfling on the back. It would be drawn on. Time is money, hey? For his instruments, Rogeri had a good stock of fine spruce and beautifully figured maple.
Like Rugeri, Rogeri also made smaller cellos. It is the late 1660s and overwound gut strings are starting to appear. This means that bass instruments could be made smaller. They didn't need room for gigantic gut strings on the lower strings. Composers in Bologna, Naples and Rome also started to write music with the cello in mind.
And it is around now we find cellos by Rogeri. He is using his own model and it is small and powerful. We can imagine that some of Rogeri's instruments would have been played by the local musicians in orchestras, religious processions and the opera house that was in full swing in downtown Brescia. The players in this city would have needed Rogeri and other instrument makers to maintain their instruments and repair them if any mishap occurred, and occur they would in these lively orchestras at the time.
This was the world of the theatre at its best. Now, Venice at this time was the first place to create a commercial opera house. And what this meant was that it was a business. So you pay for your ticket, you went, and this meant that there was a mixture of classes crossing over in the theatre. Move to France and the other royal courts of the time, opera was a court entertainment and a very different experience.
Stephen Mould
So in the 17th century, a woman who came from a family without money and so forth and wanted to remain independent in society and life to some extent and to, and to do well. They had three Possibilities. Become a courtesan, a high class prostitute. This is assuming they didn't want to become a street walker or an opera singer. Those three professions were seen as being intertwined. And just they, they were the social climbing options.
Linda Lespets
Right. And was it like was there as much drama off the stage as on the stage?
Stephen Mould
Oh, I'm sure. In these like milieus, in this like, yeah. You mean amongst all the operas?
Linda Lespets
Yeah, amongst them, yeah.
Stephen Mould
Well, Don Giovanni was premiered in Prague and the, I think it was the Donna Elvira, her name was Saporito. So she's an Italian singer. Saporito means a tasty dish. And she was evidently so promiscuous during the whole production period of Don Giovanni that she was nearly expelled from the city. And so in the score of Don Giovanni in the last act you know, they're having dinner and Don Giovanni refers to Saporito, a tasty dish. There are all these in jokes. You can imagine all of what went on behind the scenes.
Linda Lespets
So in, in Italy, yeah. So I'm imagining the violin makers In Cremona, their, their clients are maybe in the church or in you know, entertainment, opera And amateurs amongst the Yes, the, yeah, they're great clients, yeah even for us. And so, yeah, so in Italy you've got that happening and you could suppose that it would be the same thing happening in Paris. But what was happening in Paris at this time?
Stephen Mould
Well, I think the centre of the world at that time was Versailles, and that's where the king tended to hang out. So this is, this is a really interesting one because it shows how opera tends to reinvent itself according to circumstances. So Lully was born in, he was born somewhere in Italy. I think he did come from Florence. And he was a really, really, really good dancer. And he turned up, I'm not quite sure how, in, in France and was introduced to the king, who was also a very good dancer. And Lully effectively used his position with the King of Influence to create French opera. And it's just, it's a bit like making a minestrone, I have to say. What was popular then, obviously, ballet. Dance. That was the main art form, the most popular. So the, you know, all the ballet operas that have got extensive amounts of ballet in them that he realized that that ingredient was going to be a big ingredient in the soup. It was more than a bay leaf. Then there was the, the spoken drama, which there was a great tradition of. And so he created the specific French style of recitative, which is rather different to the Italian. The Italian. And secco recitative is just in the rhythm of the words. What you see on the paper is not what you do.
It's very conversational in that. Whereas the French the way the French actors delivered their lines was very, very declamatory. Even into the 19th century, when you hear actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, there's, there's recordings of her speaking and it's, it, it almost sounds comical. So French recitative is much more in time and it's got this sense of declaimed rather than spontaneous speech. The other thing that Lully did was he invented the French overture. He just thought, well, we'll need a style of overture and he kind of like dotted rhythms and so forth. Yeah. which paradoxically are called scotch snaps. So he created a product. Then it becomes interesting. All of the other operas were about, they in a way had the life of pop, pop songs that there would be a few performances would be over. And then everybody just wanted the next opera. Nobody said, Oh, you remember that really good opera we heard five years ago. Let's revive that. No idea of revival, no idea of anything that it was all just the next, the next, the next. Now I have a funny feeling that Louis didn't. I'm not sure that he had the best musical ear. He certainly wasn't in, didn't have an inquiring ear, and I rather suspect that he saw opera as being a kind of cool thing that he could go and a bit like watching a sitcom on the television at night, but he happened to have a little opera house in his, his palace, but he could talk during it and, you know, do what he wanted to do while, while the opera was going. That wasn't so unusual in those days.
So It so happens that in Lully's time, this was the beginnings of the so called opera repertoire. There was a repertoire of operas that Lully wrote, and you can see here a work like Thésée. It was first performed in 1675. Last performed in 1779, and it was in the repertoire for 104 years. Now this only happened in the rarefied world of Versailles. That these, these operas, so it was, it was like, you know, having a certain number of television channels. Probably Louis would say, Oh, let's have Prosperine. You know, remember that one? And so they then did it and then clocked up a few more years. It was in being performed for 78 years. So instead of constant. So in that sense, Lully was also kind of a good strategist and businessman. I imagine he wanted to be out there dancing, not sitting at his desk writing operas all the time. So he had this little. You know, library of operas, if you will, or repertoire of operas. So this idea of sort of leads into the institutionalized opera house and the idea of an opera repertoire of pieces that you vibe. Right. And so in Italy, was it more just one after the other? Yes, it was much more haphazard as it still is in Italy. And now we're like. We're really stuck in the Versailles, we're doing the Versailles method.
And so he, he, you know, he was, he seemed to me to have been a terrific strategist, businessman, very good at dealing with kings of that hand. He only really made one mistake, which was putting his baton through his foot and dying of gangrene. And he, they were going to amputate the foot because he wouldn't be able to dance.
Linda Lespets
I mean, that's how important it was. It's like, if I can't dance, I'm going to die.
He was a very. So it kind of makes sense that Louis had to sort of recycle the operas.
Stephen Mould
Recycling's a great word.
Linda Lespets
Because, I mean, he had a lot more on his plate. There was, Louis XIV, he just loved to dance. So there was so much dancing. And I imagine that's why ballet was more a thing in France, whereas Italy was, it was all about opera. But Louis was like, oh, yeah. Like he really wanted more ballet as well. So Lully had to do the ballets The the opera as well. He's like look, I don't have time to come up with new operas We're just gonna do these again But then in doing that like each time you redo an opera people will always compare it to another one the one before And they'd have to refine it.
Stephen Mould
I suppose and so you'd So again, coming back to what you were saying about the changes in thought between the Renaissance and the Baroque and so forth, it was probably more about, I mean, if you think of an opera as being like a variety show, and I'm, I'm being a little silly in saying it, but it was, whatever were the customs of that period. Place, the call for opera, and it was, it was always answering a demand was for something that fulfilled the needs of a court or a ruler in terms of providing a suitable entertainment and I kind of, I guess the advantage of opera was that it was one, a one stop entertainment, that you got a bit of music, you got, you got a bit of recited TV kind of spoken drama, you got a fun overture, people got up and danced in, in the, in the ballet bits. So in a, in a sense it was a kind of something for everyone. So the primary function of opera, as far as I can see, is that it has always answered a social need and in doing that it's sometimes been a social, delivered a social critique as well.
Linda Lespets
And so in, in Venice, when it was like, you were saying it's all the mixture of classes in France, that was not the case, was it? Because it was in Versailles?
Stphen Mould
No, this was, this was much more. So, so all of the themes of the of the Lully operas are, I believe, classical. Yeah. Because they're catered for the, noble class. Yes. And, and so this is like, you know, if you go into the Louvre today and see all those big historical paintings of ancient times, it's like the current Monarch is in this sort of very European thinking that there's this line of this lineage and that these great ancient battles that were fought that's what Napoleon thought he was fighting in in the 19th century he had that he was this Roman Emperor yeah he had that that mental sense of that was his that was his world you know he'd read about it and everything and Probably lived it a little bit too much in his head, if you know what I mean. So, all of those things, and then this distant classical world that was somehow they were able to recreate it. It wasn't lost, it was something that they could re find in their everyday life. If only they shut that down. the rest of the world out. And we all know where that ended up. But that's, so this is, these types of pieces are a kind of escapism. Maybe even you know, something like a 17th or 18th century painting come to life with music with it, of this sort of Arcadian sort of aspirations and, and this, this idea that civilization began with the Greeks, which I mean, today we know that that is utter rubbish. But people have clung on to it as a nice idea for a very, very, very long time. So your experience, say you were a French nobleman and you'd seen an opera in Versailles and then you go to Venice, it would be a totally different experience. Completely different. And there was a lot of travel amongst the aristocracy. Yes, so it was constantly being reinvented. With the public opera, you've got maybe not the absolute, you know, penniless lowest of lowest classes, but you've got a mixture of classes, so I would say a whole lot of people in a room for an opera performance, the smell, the amount of noise, the whole thing would be probably Yeah. I mean, I prefer It probably was like a The lighting, I mean there was no electricity right? So it was all candles and It was very, it was very dim lighting compared to Until it caught fire. Until it caught fire, yes.
You know, in music history, if you're an instrumentalist, you say that the most natural and beautiful instrument is the violin. I happen to work in the world of opera, so it's the human voice. And there is probably, in the philosophies, More this idea that the instruments imitate the human voice, which is the God given or natural voice so the violin's beautiful because it sounds like the human voice. So this rise of public opera, I'm sure, I mean, don't know so many examples from the, let's say, the 16th or the 17th, sorry, the 17th or the early 18th century, but you did get to a point where there would be arias that had a solo violin obbligato.
There are some in Mozart.
Linda Lespets
Ah, yeah. And oh I have written here, was opera political?
Stephen Mould
Always. Yes. So that, yeah, so not only was it this amazing spectacle, but it was like it was political as well. Which made it even more, that's an extra level of drama. And look, when everything was going well that was okay, but then it was constantly subject to censorship. Censorship. Verdi could not write an opera without having the libretto past the censors. He wanted La Traviata, which was written in 1851 or 1853, I can't remember which, but the Victor Hugo novella was written at that time. So it was an opera about a courtesan at that time. Verdi was fascinated by it because he was never married to his final, or did they get married? But she was his mistress for years and years and years and years and years and had kind of been an opera singer slash courtesan. So he was fascinated by the subject, since it wasn't having any of that, it had to be set back in the 17th century. Which makes it a lot safer. There was a whole thing with the marriage of Figaro about not having dancing in it. Because, was it Charles II? I always get these people confused, but in Vienna, somebody had died. Maybe Charles I died, I can't remember, but the court, or the king was kind of in mourning, so he said there's to be no dancing on the stage. But also, the marriage of Figaro with all the thing about the, the classes that, that Figaro and Susanna are smarter than the count and the Countess. And the count, having to beg for the Countess’s forgiveness and all this stuff. The play of Behe was setting off. It was like it did not start the French Revolution, but it, it was one of those things that was in the air. It was revolutionary in its ideas, in, its in its ideas, and that was more than just putting on an opera. That was, that was, playing with the politics at the time in a slightly dangerous way. Yeah.
Linda Lespets
With his two sons helping him in the workshop, Giovanni Battista Rogeri is making instruments to order with Pietro and Gio Paolo. This is seen in the workmanship of the instruments. The sons style was slightly different, but this did not stop the father and son from making instruments together. Elements of several people on the one instrument are evident. Giovanni would work with his two sons who over the years grew up. Gio-Paolo in 1667 is thought to have died sometime in his 30s. There is no death certificate for him but at some point he died. Instruments from him just stop. Now, Giovanni's older brother, Pietro Giacomo, married, but over the years it became evident that they would have no children. Pietro worked with his father on orders, taking more and more responsibility in the workshop as his father aged. For now, he would finish the outline of the instrument with his distinctive long hooked corners that were quite different to his father's work. But his father, Giovanni, always insisted on cutting the sound holes. Later, as time went on and his father stopped spending so much time in the workshop, we can see instruments with the same Pietro outline and his own, not his father's, hand in cutting the sound holes. Into the instruments they would glue their label that gave the name of Rogeri, not Rugeri. Even then, people would confuse them. After his name, he added that he was a student of Niccolo Amati, and in the city of Brescia. This is all in Latin, and there's the date. Something his Brescian predecessors did not do.
So now we know just when he made his instruments. Sometime around the late 1690s, when Rogeri was in his mid to late 50s, it looks as though he took on a young apprentice called Gaetano Pasta. Giovanni knew Gaetano's father Bartolomeo Pasta from his days in Cremona when he was working in the Amati workshop in the early 1660s. When Giovanni Rogeri had arrived as a young man, Bartolomeo Pasta was only two years older than him, was finishing up his apprenticeship and about to move to Milan. There was less competition there as Cremona was now bursting at the seams with luthiers. But over the years, being in trade, Giovanni Rogeri and Bartolomeo Pasta may have stayed in contact. His workshop in Milan was going well and he had three sons who had followed their father in the trade. Perhaps three brothers in the one workshop was a bit too much testosterone, especially with sharp tools at hand and delicate instruments to smash. In any case, Gaetano Pasta was in his late teens and out of there. He left for Brescia to work for Rogeri and the strong influence of Rogeri can be seen in his work. His labels are written Milanese, Alevio del Amati di Cremona. But this may have been because it sounded better to be from Cremona and the Amati workshop. Giovanni Rogeri sons were at least 10 years older than Gaetano Pasta, and by this time, a new set of hands in the workshop were welcome. Pasta's move to Brescia may have been to be apprenticed in another workshop, see the world and learn from his dad's friend, who had just happened to have the most successful shop in Brescia at the time, but very soon he met the lovely Caterina Pavarino, or perhaps it was her lovely dowry, being the widow of a late colleague, Stefano Lassigne, who was a violin maker. So at the age of 22, Gaetano Pasta was married to a local girl. Probably inherited a bunch of useful stuff from his wife's first husband, and so, he stays. As time goes on, Pietro Giacomo Rogeri will take over the workshop from his father, making more and more instruments, continuing in his father's style, but exaggerating it with extended trumpeting corners to the instruments and not quite matching the elegance of his father. Giovanni Battista Rogeri would die in 1710 at the age of 68. Over in Cremona, Stradivari was well into his golden period of making. And then 14 years after Giovanni's death, his son Pietro Giacomo would die, bringing an end to the Rogeri workshop in Brescia.
And this brings us to an end of the series on Rogeri and Rugeri. I hope now you can tell the difference between these two makers. They both worked in one of the most exciting and industrious times of instrument making in this part of the world and have drawn influencers and influenced other great makers of this age.
A big thank you to my guests. Stephen Mould and Florian Leonhard for joining me in this episode. And if you have enjoyed these episodes, please tell a friend about it or write a review on the app you have listened to. This does in fact help. And this piece of music you're listening to right now is a live recording of Boccherini by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
Finally, thank you for listening. And I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles.
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Giovanni Battista Rogeri has often been confused with other makers such as the Rugeri family, because of his name, and Giovanni Paolo Maggini, because of his working style. Trained in the famous workshop of Nicolo Amati in Cremona, Rogeri set out to make a name for himself in Brescia creating a Cremonese Brescian fusion. Learn all about this often mistaken maker in this first episode on the life of Giovanni Battista Rogeri.
This is the story of Giovanni Battista Rogeri the Cremonese trained violin maker who made it big in Brescia and has since been confused with other makers throughout history. Florian Leonhard talks about the influences Rogeri pulled on and exactly why his instruments have for so long been attributed to Giovanni Paolo Maggini.
Transcript
Far, far away in a place called Silene, in what is now modern day Libya, there was a town that was plagued by an evil venom spewing dragon, who skulked in the nearby lake, wreaking havoc on the local population. To prevent this dragon from inflicting its wrath upon the people of Silene, the leaders of the town offered the beast two sheep every day in an attempt to ward off its reptilian mood swings.
But when this was not enough, they started feeding the scaly creature a sheep and a man. Finally, they would offer the children and the youths of the town to the insatiable beast, the unlucky victims being chosen by lottery. As you can imagine, this was not a long term sustainable option. But then, one day, the dreaded lot fell to the king's daughter. The king was devastated and offered all his gold and silver, if only they would spare his beloved daughter. The people refused, and so the next morning at dawn, the princess approached the dragon's lair by the lake, dressed as a bride to be sacrificed to the hungry animal. It just so happened that a knight who went by the name of St George was passing by at that very moment and happened upon the lovely princess out for a morning stroll. Or so he thought. But when it was explained to him by the girl that she was in fact about to become someone else's breakfast and could he please move on and mind his own business he was outraged on her behalf and refused to leave her side. Either she was slightly unhinged and shouldn't be swanning about lakes so early in the morning all by herself, or at least with only a sheep for protection, or she was in grave danger and definitely needed saving. No sooner had Saint George and the princess had this conversation than they were interrupted by a terrifying roar as the dragon burst forth from the water, heading straight towards the girl. Being the nimble little thing she was, the princess dodged the sharp claws. As she was zigzagging away from danger, George stopped to make the sign of the cross and charged the gigantic lizard, thrusting Ascalon, that was the name of his sword, yep he named it, into the four legged menace and severely wounded the beast. George called to the princess to throw him her girdle, That's a belt type thing, and put it around the dragon's neck. From then on, wherever the young lady walked, the dragon followed like a meek beast. Back to the city of Silene went George, the princess, and the dragon, where the animal proceeded to terrify the people.
George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to becoming Christian. George is sounding a little bit pushy, I know. But the people readily agreed and 15, 000 men were baptized, including the king. St. George killed the dragon, slicing off its head with his trusty sword, Ascalon, and it was carried out of the city on four ox carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. George on the site where the dragon was slain and a spring flowed from its altar with water that it is said would cure all diseases.
This is the story of Saint George and the Princess. It is a classic story of good versus evil, and of disease healing miracles that would have spoken to the inhabitants of 17th century Brescia. The scene depicting Saint George and the Princess is painted in stunning artwork by Antonio Cicognata and was mounted on the wall of the Church of San Giorgio. Giovanni Battista Rogeri gazed up at this painting as family and friends, mainly of his bride Laura Testini, crowded into the church of San Giorgio for his wedding. Giovanni was 22 and his soon to be wife, 21, as they spoke their vows in the new city he called home. He hoped to make his career in this town making instruments for the art loving Brescians, evidence of which could be seen in the wonderful artworks in such places as this small church. Rogeri would live for the next 20 years in the parish of San Giorgio. The very same George astride an impressive white stallion in shining armour, his head surrounded by a golden halo. He is spearing the dragon whilst the princess calmly watches on clad in jewels with long red flowing robes in the latest fashion. In the background is the city of Brescia itself, reminding the viewer to remember that here in their city they too must fight evil and pray for healing from disease ever present in the lives of the 17th century Brescians.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius. Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery, that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome to this first episode on the life of Giovanni Battista Rogeri. After having spent the last few episodes looking at the life of the Ruggeri family, we will now dive into the life of that guy who almost has the same name, but whose work and contribution to violin making, you will see, is very different. And we will also look at just why, for so many years, his work has been attributed erroneously to another Brescian maker.
The year was 1642, and over the Atlantic, New York was called New Amsterdam. The Dutch and the English were having scuffles over who got what. Was it New England? New Netherlands? In England, things were definitely heating up, and in 1642, a civil war was in the process of breaking out. On one side there were the parliamentarians, including Oliver Cromwell, and on the other side were the Royalists, who were the supporters of King Charles I. This war would rage on for the next 20 years, and not that anyone in England at this time really cared, but the same year that this war broke out, a baby called Giovanni Battista Rogeri was born in Bologna, perhaps, and for the next 20 years he grew up in this city ruled by the Popes of Italy. He too would witness firsthand wars that swept through his hometown. He would avoid dying of the dreaded plague, sidestep any suspicion by the Catholic church in this enthusiastic time of counter reformation by being decidedly non Protestant. And from an early age, he would have been bathed in the works of the Renaissance and now entering churches being constructed in the Baroque style.
Bologna was a city flourishing in the arts, music and culture, with one of the oldest universities in the country. But for the young Giovanni Battista Rogeri, to learn the trade of lutai, or violin maker, the place he needed to be was, in fact, 155. 9 km northwest of where he was right now. And if he took the A1, well, today it's called the A1, and it's an ancient Roman road so I'm assuming it's the same one, he could walk it in a few days. Destination Cremona, and more precisely, the workshop of Niccolo Amati. An instrument maker of such renown, it is said that his grandfather, Andrea Amati, made some of the first violins and had royal orders from the French king himself. To be the apprentice of such a man was a grand thing indeed.
So we are in the mid 1600s and people are embracing the Baroque aesthetic along with supercharged architecture and paintings full of movement, colour and expression. There is fashion, and how the wealthy clients who would buy instruments in Cremona dressed was also influenced by this movement.
Emily Brayshaw.
You've got these ideas of exaggeration of forms and you can exaggerate the human body with, you know, things like high heels and wigs and ribbons and laces. And you've got a little bit of gender bending happening, men wearing makeup and styles in the courts. You know, you've got dress and accessories challenging the concept of what's natural, how art can compete with that and even triumph over the natural perhaps. You've got gloves trimmed with lace as well. Again, we've got a lot of lace coming through so cravats beauty spot as well coming through. You've got the powder face, the, the wig. Yeah. The makeup, the high heels. Okay. That's now. I actually found a lovely source, an Italian tailor from Bergamo during the Baroque era. The Italians like really had incredibly little tailors and tailoring techniques. And during this sort of Baroque era. He grumbles that since the French came to Italy not to cut but to ruin cloth in order to make fashionable clothes, it's neither possible to do our work well nor are our good rules respected anymore. We have completely lost the right to practice our craft. Nowadays though who disgracefully ruin our art and practice it worse than us are considered the most valuable and fashionable tailors.
So we've got like this real sort of shift. You know, from Italian tailoring to sort of French and English tailoring as well.
And they're not happy about it.
No, they are not happy about it. And this idea that I was talking about before, we've got a lovely quote from an Italian fashion commentator sort of around the mid 17th century. His name's Lam Pugnani, and he mentions the two main fashions. meaning French and Spanish, the two powers that were ruling the Italian peninsula and gradually building their global colonial empires. And he says, “the two main fashions that we have just recorded when we mentioned Spanish and French fashion, enable me to notice strangeness, if not a madness residing in Italian brains, that without any reason to fall in love so greatly Or better, naturalize themselves with one of these two nations and forget that they are Italian. I often hear of ladies who come from France, where the beauty spot is in use not only for women, but also for men, especially young ones, so much so that their faces often appear with a strange fiction darkened and disturbed, not by beauty spots, but rather by big and ridiculous ones, or so it seems somebody who is not used to watching similar mode art”.
So, you know, we've got people commentating and grumbling about these influences of Spain and France on Italian fashion and what it means to be Italian. When we sort of think about working people, like there's this trope in movie costuming of like peasant brown, you know, and sort of ordinary, you know, people, perhaps ordinary workers, you know, they weren't necessarily dressed. In brown, there are so many different shades of blue. You know, you get these really lovely palettes of like blues, and shades of blue, and yellows, and burgundies, and reds, as well as of course browns, and creams, and these sorts of palettes. So yeah, they're quite lovely.
And I'm imagining even if you didn't have a lot of money, there's, I know there's a lot of flowers and roots and barks that you can, you can dye yourself. Yeah, definitely. And people did, people did. I can imagine if I was living back there and we, you know, we're like, Oh, I just, I want this blue skirt. And you'd go out and you'd get the blue skirt. The flowers you needed and yeah, definitely. And people would, or, you know, you can sort of, you know, like beetroot dyes and things like that. I mean, and it would fade, but then you can just like, you know, quickly dye it again. Yeah, or you do all sorts of things, you know, and really sort of inject colour and, people were also, you know, people were clean. To, you know, people did the best they could keep themselves clean, keep their homes clean. You know, we were talking about boiling linens to keep things fresh and get rid of things like fleas and lice. And people also used fur a lot in fashion. And you'd often like, you know, of course you'd get the wealthy people using the high end furs, but sometimes people would, you know, use cat fur in Holland, for example, people would trim their fur. Their garments and lined their garments with cat fur. Why not? Because, you know, that's sort of what they could afford. It was there. Yeah, people also would wear numerous layers of clothing as well because the heating wasn't always so great. Yeah. You know, at certain times of the year as well. So the more layers you had, the better. The more, the more warm and snug you could be. As do we in Sydney. Indeed. Indeed. Canadians complain of the biting cold here. I know. And it's like, dude, you've got to lay about us. It's a humid cold. It's awful. It's horrible. It just goes through everything. Anyway. It's awful. Yeah.
So at the age of 19, Giovanni Battista Rogeri finds himself living in the lively and somewhat crowded household of Niccolo Amati. The master is in his early 60s and Giovanni Battista Rogeri also finds himself in the workshop alongside Niccolo Amati's son Girolamo II Amati, who is about 13 or 14 at this time. Cremona is a busy place, a city bursting with artisans and merchants.
The Amati Workshop is definitely the place to be to learn the craft, but it soon becomes clear as Giovanni Battista Rogeri looks around himself in the streets that, thanks to Nicolo Amati, Cremona does indeed have many violin makers, and although he has had a good few years in the Amati Workshop, Learning and taking the young Girolamo II Amati the second under his wing more and more as his father is occupied with other matters. He feels that his best chances of making a go of it would be better if he moved on and left Cremona and her violin makers. There was Girolamo II Amati who would take over his father's business. There were the Guarneri's around the corner. There was that very ambitious Antonio Stradivari who was definitely going to make a name for himself. And then there were the Rugeri family, Francesco Rugeri and Vincenzo Rugeri whose name was so familiar to his, people were often asking if they were related. No, it was time to move on, and he knew the place he was headed.
Emily Brayshaw.
So, you've also got, like, a lot of artisans moving to Brescia as well, following the Venetian ban on foreign Fustian sold in the territory. So Fustian is, like, a blend of various things. Stiff cotton that's used in padding. So if you sort of think of, for example someone like Henry VIII, right? I can't guarantee that his shoulder pads back in the Renaissance were from Venetian Fustian, but they are sort of topped up and lined with this really stiff Fustian to give like these really big sort of, Broad shoulders. That's how stiff this is. So, Venice is banning foreign fustians, which means that Cremona can't be sold in these retail outlets.
So, Ah, so, and was that sort of That's fabric, but did that mirror the economy that Brescia was doing better than Cremona at this point? Do you, do you think? Because of that?
Well, people go where the work is. Yeah. Cause it's interesting because you've got Francesco Ruggeri, this family that lives in Cremona. Yeah. And then you have about 12 to 20 years later, you have another maker, Giovanni Battista Rogeri. Yeah. He is apprenticed to Niccolo Amati. So he learns in Cremona. And then he's in this city full of violin makers, maybe, and there's this economic downturn, and so it was probably a very wise decision. He's like, look, I'm going to Brescia, and he goes to Brescia. He would have definitely been part of this movement of skilled workers and artisans to Brescia at that time, sort of what happening as well. So, you know, there's all sorts of heavy tolls on movements of goods and things like that. And essentially it collapses. And they were, and they were heavily taxed as well. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
It was the fabulous city of Brescia. He had heard stories of the city's wealth, art, music and culture, famous for its musicians and instrument makers. But the plague of 1630 had wiped out almost all the Luthiers and if ever there was a good time and place to set up his workshop, it was then and there. So bidding farewell to the young Girolamo Amati, the older Nicolò Amati and his household, where he had been living for the past few years. The young artisan set out to make a mark in Brescia, a city waiting for a new maker, and this time with the Cremonese touch.
Almost halfway between the old cathedral and the castle of Brescia, you will find the small yet lovely Romanesque church of San Giorgio. Amidst paintings and frescoes of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints, there stands a solemn yet nervous young couple, both in their early twenties. Beneath the domed ceiling of the church, the seven angels of the Apocalypse gaze down upon them, a constant reminder that life is fragile, and that plague, famine and war are ever present reminders of their mortality. But today is a happy one. The young Giovanni Battista Rogeri is marrying Laura Testini. And so it was that Giovanni Battista Rogeri moved to Brescia into the artisanal district and finds himself with a young wife, Laura Testini. She is the daughter of a successful leather worker and the couple most probably lived with Laura's family. Her father owned a house with eight rooms and two workshops. This would have been the perfect setup for the young Giovanni to start his own workshop and get down to business making instruments for the people of Brescia. He could show off his skills acquired in Cremona, and that is just what he did. Since the death of Maggini, there had not been any major instrument making workshops in Brescia.
Florian Leonhard
Here I talk to Florian Leonhard about Giovanni Battista Rogeri's move to Brescia and his style that would soon be influenced by not only his Cremonese training, but the Brescian makers such as Giovanni Paolo Maggini
I mean, I would say in 1732. The Brescian violin making or violin making was dead for a bit, so until the arrival of Giovanni Battista Rogeri, who came with a completely harmonised idea, into town and then adopted features of Giovanni Paolo Maggini and Gasparo da Salo. I cannot say who, probably some Giovanni Paolo Maggini violins that would have been more in numbers available to him, have influenced his design of creating an arching. It's interesting that he instantly picked up on that arching because Giovanni Battista Rogeri always much fuller arched. The arching rises much earlier from the purfling up. Right. So he came from the Cremonese tradition, but he adopted the, like, the Brescian arching idea. He, he came from Niccolo Amati and has learned all the finesse of construction, fine making, discipline, and also series production. He had an inside mould, and he had the linings, and he had the, all the blocks, including top and bottom block. And he nailed in the neck, so he did a complete package of Cremonese violin making and brought that into Brescia, but blended it in certain stylistics and sometimes even in copies with the Brescian style.
For a long time, we have had Before dendrochronology was established, the Giovanni Paolo Magginis were going around and they were actually Giovanni Battista Rogeris.
Brescia at this time was still a centre flourishing in the arts and despite the devastation of the plague almost 30 years ago, it was an important city in Lombardy and was in the process of undergoing much urban development and expansion. When Giovanni Rogeri arrived in the city, There were efforts to improve infrastructure, including the construction of public buildings, fortifications and roads. The rich religious life of the city was evident, and continued to be a centre of religious devotion at this time, with the construction and renovation of churches in the new Baroque style. The elaborate and ornate designs were not only reserved for churches, but any new important building projects underway in the city at this time. If you had yourself the palace in the Mula, you were definitely renovating in the Baroque style. And part of this style would also be to have a collection of lovely instruments to lend to musicians who would come and play in your fancy new pad. Strolling down the colourful streets lined with buildings covered in painted motifs, people were also making a statement in their choice of clothing.
Another thing that the very wealthy women were wearing are these shoes called Chopines, which are like two foot tall. And so you've got like this really exaggerated proportions as well. Very tall. I mean. Very tall, very wide. So taking up a lot of space.
I'm trying to think of the door, the doorways that would have to accommodate you.
Yes.
How do you fit through the door?
So a lot of the time women would have to stoop. You would need to be escorted by either servants. And then you'd just stand around. I did find some discussions of fashion in the time as well. Commentators saying, well, you know, what do we do in northern France? We either, in northern Italy, sorry, we either dress like the French, we dress like the Spanish, why aren't we dressing like Italians? And kind of these ideas of linking national identity through the expression of dress in fashion. So, we're having this
But did you want to, was it fashionable to be to look like the French court or the, to look like the Spanish court.
Well, yeah, it was, it was fashionable. And this is part of what people are commenting about as well. It's like, why are we bowing to France? Why are we bowing to Italy? Sorry. Why are we bowing to Spain? Why don't we have our own national Italian identity? And we do see like little variations in dress regionally as well. You know, people don't always. Dress exactly how the aristocracy are dressing. You'll have your own little twists, you'll have your own little trimmings, you'll have your own little ways and styles. And there are theories in dress about trickle down, you know, like people are trying to emulate the aristocracy, but they're not always. Trying to do that. Well, yeah, it's not practical if you're living, you know, if you're and you financially you can't either like some of these Outfits that we're talking about, you know with one of these hugh like the Garde in Fanta worn by Marie Theresa that outfit alone would have cost in today's money like more than a million dollars You can't copy these styles of dress, right? So what you've got to do is, you know, make adjustments. And also like a lot of women, like you, these huge fashion spectacles worn at court. They're not practical for working women either. So we see adaptations of them. So women might have a pared down silhouette and wear like a bum roll underneath their skirts and petticoats and over the top of the stays.
And that sort of gives you a little nod to these wider silhouettes, but you can still move, you can still get your work done, you can still, you know, do things like that. So that's sort of what's happening there.
Okay, so now we find a young Giovanni Battista Rogeri. He has married a local girl and set up his workshop. Business will be good for this maker, and no doubt thanks to the latest musical craze to sweep the country. I'm talking about opera. In the last episodes on Francesco Ruggeri, I spoke to Stephen Mould, the composer. at the Sydney Conservatorium about the beginnings of opera and the furore in which it swept across Europe. And if you will remember back to the episodes on Gasparo Da Salo at the beginning of the Violin Chronicles, we spoke about how Brescia was part of the Venetian state. This is still the case now with Giovanni Battista Rogeri and this means that the close relationship with Venice is a good thing for his business. Venice equals opera and opera means orchestras and where orchestras are you have musicians and musicians have to have an instrument really, don't they?
Here is Stephen Mould explaining the thing that is opera and why it was so important to the music industry at the time and instrument makers such as our very own Giovanni Battista Rogeri.
Venice as a place was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Everything was there, and it was a very, it was a very modern type of city, a trading city, and it had a huge emerging, or more than emerging, middle class. People from the middle class like entertainment of all sorts, and in Venice they were particularly interested in rather salacious entertainments, which opera absolutely became. So the great thing of this period was the rise of the castrato. Which they, which, I mean, it was, the idea of it is perverse and it was, and they loved it. And it was to see this, this person that was neither man nor, you know, was in a way sexless on the stage singing and, and often singing far more far more virtuosically than a lot of women, that there was this, there was this strange figure. And that was endlessly fascinating. They were the pop stars of their time. And so people would go to the opera just to hear Farinelli or whoever it was to sing really the way. So this is the rise of public opera.
As opposed to the other version.
Well, Orfeo, for example, took place in the court at Mantua, probably in the, in the room of a, of a palace or a castle, which wouldn't have been that big, but would have been sort of specially set up for those performances. If I can give you an idea of how. Opera might have risen as it were, or been birthed in Venice.
Let's say you've got a feast day, you know, a celebratory weekend or few days. You're in the piazza outside San Marco. It's full of people and they're buying things, they're selling things, they're drinking, they're eating, they're having a good time. And all of a sudden this troupe of strolling players comes into the piazza and they start to put on a show, which is probably a kind of comedia dell'arte spoken drama. But the thing is that often those types of traveling players can also sing a bit and somebody can usually play a lute or some instrument. So they start improvising. Probably folk songs. Yeah. And including that you, so you've kind of already there got a little play happening outside with music. It's sort of like a group of buskers in Martin place. It could be very hot. I mean, I've got a picture somewhere of this. They put a kind of canvas awning with four people at either corner, holding up the canvas awning so that there was some sort of shade for the players. Yeah. That's not what you get in a kid's playground these days. You've almost got the sense. Of the space of a stage, if you then knock on the door of one of the palazzi in, in Venice and say to, to the, the local brew of the, of the aristocracy, look, I don't suppose we could borrow one of your rooms, you know, in your, in your lovely palazzo to, to put on a, a, a show. Yeah, sure. And maybe charged, maybe didn't, you know, and, and so they, the, the very first, it was the San Cassiano, I think it was the theatre, the theatre, this, this room in a, in a palace became a theatre. People went in an impresario would often commission somebody to write the libretto, might write it himself. Commissioner, composer, and they put up some kind of a stage, public came in paid, so it's paying to come and see opera. Look, it's, it's not so different to what had been going on in England in the Globe Theatre. And also the, the similar thing to Shakespeare's time, it was this sort of mixing up of the classes, so everything was kind of mixed together. And that's, that's why you get different musical genres mixed together. For example, an early something like Papaya by Monteverdi, we've just done it, and from what, from what I can gather from the vocal lines, some of the comic roles were probably these street players, who just had a limited vocal range, but could do character roles very well, play old women, play old men, play whatever, you know, caricature type roles. Other people were Probably trained singers. Some of them were probably out of Monteverdi's chorus in San Marco, and on the, on when they weren't singing in church, they were over playing in the opera, living this kind of double life. And That’s how opera started to take off. Yeah, so like you were saying, there are different levels.
So you had these classical Greek themes, which would be more like, you're an educated person going, yes, yes, I'm seeing this classical Greek play, but then you're someone who'd never heard of Greek music. The classics. They were there for the, you know, the lively entertainment and the sweet performers.
Yes. So the, the, the Commedia dell'arte had, had all these traditional folk tales. Then you've got all of the, all of the ancient myths and, and, and so forth. Papaya was particularly notable because it was the first opera that was a historical opera. So it wasn't based on any ancient myths or anything.
It was based on the life of Nero and Papaya. And so they were real life a few hundred years before, but they were real. It was a real historical situation that was being enacted on the stage. And it was a craze. That's the thing to remember is. You know, these days people have to get dressed up and they have to figure out how they get inside the opera house and they're not sure whether to clap or not and all of this sort of stuff and there's all these conventions surrounding it. That wasn't what it was about. It was the fact that the public were absolutely thirsty for this kind of entertainment. Yeah. And I was seeing the first, so the first opera house was made in in about 1637, I think it was. And then by the end of Monteverdi's lifetime, they said there were 19 opera houses in Venice. It was, like you were saying, a craze that just really took off. They had a few extra ones because they kept burning down. That's why one of them, the one that, that is, still exists today is called La Fenice. It keeps burning down as well, but rising from the ashes. Oh, wow. Like the, yeah, with the lighting and stuff, I imagine it's So, yeah, because they had candles and they had, you know, Yeah, it must have been a huge fire hazard. Huge fire hazard, and all the set pieces were made out of wood or fabric and all of that. Opera houses burning down is another big theme. Oh yeah, it's a whole thing in itself, yeah. So then you've got These opera troupes, which are maybe a little, something a little bit above these commedia dell'arte strolling players.
So, you've got Italy at that time. Venice was something else. Venice wasn't really like the rest of Italy. You've got this country which is largely agrarian, and you've got this country where people are wanting to travel in order to have experiences or to trade to, to make money and so forth. And so, first of all if an opera was successful, it might be taken down to Rome or to Naples for people to hear it. You would get these operas happening, happening in different versions. And then of course, there was this idea that you could travel further through Europe. And I, I think I have on occasion, laughingly. a couple of years ago said that it was like the, the latest pandemic, you know, it was, but it was this craze that caught on and everybody wanted to experience.
Yeah. So you didn't, you didn't have to live in Venice to see the opera. They, they moved around. It was, it was touring. Probably more than we think. That, that, that whole period, like a lot of these operas were basically unknown for about 400 years. It's only, the last century or so that people have been gradually trying to unearth under which circumstances the pieces were performed. And we're still learning a lot, but the sense is that there was this sort of network of performers and performance that occurred.
And one of the things that Monteverdi did, which was, which was different as well, is that before you would have maybe one or two musicians accompanying, and he came and he went, I'm taking them all.
And he created sort of, sort of the first kind of orchestras, like lots of different instruments. They were the prototypes of, of orchestras. And Look, the bad news for your, the violin side of your project, there was certainly violins in it. It was basically a string contingent. That was the main part of the orchestra. There may have been a couple of trumpets, may have been a couple of oboe like instruments. I would have thought that for Venice, they would have had much more exotic instruments. But the, the, the fact is at this time with the public opera, what became very popular were all of the stage elements. And so you have operas that have got storms or floods or fires. They simulated fires. A huge amount of effort went into painting these very elaborate sets and using, I mean, earlier Leonardo da Vinci had been experimenting with a lot of how you create the effect of a storm or an earthquake or a fire or a flood. There was a whole group of experts who did this kind of stuff.
For the people at the time, it probably looked like, you know, going to the, the, the first big movie, you know, when movies first came out in the 20s, when the talkies came out and seeing all of these effects and creating the effects. When we look at those films today, we often think, well, that's been updated, you know, it's out of date, but they found them very, very, very compelling.
What I'm saying is the money tended to go on the look of the thing on the stage and the orchestra, the sound of the orchestras from what we can gather was a little more monochrome. Of course, the other element of the orchestra is the continuo section. So you've got the so called orchestra, which plays during the aria like parts of the opera, the set musical numbers. And you've got the continuo, which is largely for the rest of the team. And you would have had a theorbo, you would have had maybe a cello, a couple of keyboard instruments, lute. It basically, it was a very flexible, what’s available kind of.
Yeah, so there was they would use violines, which was the ancestor of the double bass. So a three stringed one and violins as well. And that, and what else I find interesting is with the music, they would just, they would give them for these bass instruments, just the chords and they would improvise sort of on those. Chords. So every time it was a little bit different, they were following a Yes. Improvisation. Yeah. So it was kind of original. You could go back again and again.
It wasn't exactly the same. And look, that is the problem with historical recreation. And that is that if you go on IMSLP, you can actually download the earliest manuscript that we have of Papaya. And what you've got is less than chords, you've got a baseline. Just a simple bass line, a little bit of figuration to indicate some of the chords, and you've got a vocal line. That's all we have. We don't actually know, we can surmise a whole lot of things, but we don't actually know anything else about how it was performed.
I imagine all the bass instruments were given that bass line, and like, Do what you want with that.
So yeah, it would, and it would have really varied depending on musicians. Probably different players every night, depending on, you know, look, if you go into 19th century orchestras, highly unreliable, huge incidents of drunkenness and, you know, different people coming and going because they had other gigs to do. Like this is 19th century Italian theatres at a point where, you know, It should have been, in any other country, it would have, Germany had much better organized you know, orchestral resources and the whole thing. So it had that kind of Italian spontaneity and improvised, the whole idea of opera was this thing that came out of improvisation. Singers also, especially the ones that did comic roles, would probably improvise texts, make them a bit saucier than the original if they wanted for a particular performance. All these things were, were open.
And this brings us to an end of this first episode on Giovanni Battista Rogeri. We have seen the young life of this maker setting out to make his fortune in a neighbouring city, alive with culture and its close connections to Venice and the world of opera.
I would like to thank my lovely guests Emily Brayshaw, Stephen Mould and Florian Leonhardt for joining me today.
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Francesco Rugeri had 4 sons, lets take a look at who they were and their contribution to Cremona in its golden period.
In this episode we concludes the story of Francesco Ruggeri, a lesser-known but fascinating violin maker from Cremona, Italy. Discover his life, his move to different parishes, and the roles his children played in carrying on his legacy.
This episode looks at the history of Cremona as a bustling city for artisans, the family dynamics and movements of the Ruggeri family, and their contributions to violin making, especially in producing smaller cellos. Discover Vincenzo Ruggeri, Francesco's well-known son, his marriage, and his life in Cremona. Then again there is the mysterious death of Francesco's youngest son, Carlo....
Join me as I talk to guests Duane Rosengard, Jason Price, and Emily Brayshaw on topics like the influence of military fashion on civilian dress, the characteristics of Ruggeri instruments, and the historical contexts of the Ruggeri family's work.
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In this episode we will be looking at Francesco’s most productive period of making instruments with a busy workshop and 4 sons helping him out. Jason Price from Tarisio fine violins and bows talks to us about Rugeris distinctive making style and his prolific production at this time in his life but things do not run as smoothly as Rugeri would like as he finds himself in hot water with court cases and grumpy children.
Thankyou to the Australian Chamber Orchestra for permission to play their music.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture.
So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin. This show is sponsored by Tarisio Fine Instruments and Bows. And right now, I would like to talk about a formidable database you can access today, if you wish, called the COSIO Archive.
For people who listen to this podcast, something that you might be thinking when you're listening to me telling the stories of violin makers is you would really love to see pictures of the instruments that they make. And for that, you have the perfect resource. Here is Jason Price, Director of Tarisio, to tell you about it.
Jason Price
Yes, the Cosio Archive. We now own it, maintain it, and are continually adding to it. Over a hundred thousand instruments in the database, over four thousand makers, which we are following and tracking, two hundred thousand auction prices. It's really quite cool. If I pull up the stats for, you know, a maker like Ruggeri, I get 336 instruments by Francesco Ruggieri.
It's a unique resource and we hope it's really useful.
Linda Lespets
And so what I love is that often in some databases, you just get one, photo per maker, but in the Cosio archive, for example, for Ruggeri, you're able to look at the maker's whole career in photos and you see influences from other makers. You can see the dates where his sons are working for him and you can see examples of that work and the style.
They're similar. For example, you can look up Vincenzo Ruggeri and see how his style is similar to his father. Yeah. Yeah. There's a violin in your archive, uh, 1680 called the Milanolo, which is really beautiful. Yeah. Which is a small violin. So that would be an example of his work when he's working with his sons in when the workshop was very successful.
And then there's a violin from 1650, which was his earlier work. I think maybe my favorite name for an instrument is the Admiral Buckle. Admiral Buckle. That's wonderful. His life and his, it kind of reads like something out of a Jane Austen, book. Wonderful. And then, uh, there's a 1673 cello, which is really beautiful, and the, the quality of the photo is amazing.
You can zoom right in and see the texture of the varnish. You can see the purfling. You can tell that the purfling's been tinted. Yep. There are examples of from 1692, so his later work, and 1695, right to the, the end of his making career, which is extraordinary.
Jason Price
Yeah, good. I'm really, really happy that you find it useful.
Linda Lespets
To have access to all these photos, what's the process to subscribe?
Jason Price
The annual subscription is $100 And allows you unlimited access to as many makers and as many instruments as you want to look at.
Linda Lespets
Yeah. And I find the auction results quite helpful as well as a violin maker, because we're often having to research different prices and you have to look at a lot of different resources to get an idea of a market value of an instrument. And so that's just one of our, Tools that we use in that process. Yes. And so you have your auctions, the photos, the auction results, and there's also the Cartegio. We get the emails every, every week.
Jason Price
Good. The Cartegio, I love the Cartegio project. It's, it's something I really, I really enjoy. We try to make it long form discussions on things that are interesting, interesting corners of our world.
And we invite some of the, uh, some really distinguished people who write for it and have frankly, very, uh, I think, inspiring and fascinating things to say. You don't have to be a subscriber to the archive to have access to the Cartegio articles. You can sign up for them and that is absolutely free. So there you have it.
Linda Lespets
If you would like to subscribe to the Cosio archive, read a Cartegio article, or browse the auction catalog, go to tarisio.com. Now back to the show.
Welcome back to the Life and Times of Francesco Ruggeri. As we have seen in the last episodes, Ruggeri is living in an exciting time for musicians. There are advances in string technology, and Francesco's smaller model of cellos are selling like hotcakes.
Over in Venice, opera is taking off and it's just the best thing ever to go and see the latest arias. Ruggeri's boys are growing up now and can start helping out with all the orders. Or are they sick of hanging around outside the walls of Cremona, where more interesting things are happening in town?
Starting from the late 1660s, the Ruggeri family is referenced in church and civil records with the nickname of Il Père or Detto Il Père. He also puts it on his labels. No one really knows how he got this nickname or what it means. Perhaps it was to distinguish him from other Ruggeris in the area. In their parish of San Bernardo alone, there were five other Ruggeri families and two of them were Francesco's brothers.
Duane Rosengard
My name is Duane Rosengard. And I'm a double bass player in the Philadelphia Orchestra. One interesting document, I think we found, actually, I think it's actually in that parish church of San Bernardo, is A document of 1669 that pertains to a brother and nephew of Francesco Ruggeri. So it may or may not have anything to do with violins, but this document calls Francesco's brother Ruggeri detto il per, which means called the pair, P E R, right?
And that document is from August of 1669 and that, up till now is the earliest written record of this, call it a nickname, call it a suffix, whatever you prefer. But that suffix or moniker or nickname was used to identify Francesco Ruggeri and his siblings. and their descendants. Why is that important?
Nobody, even if they spent a lifetime, could count how many Ruggieri families lived in and around Cremona. I wouldn't say it's as common as, not nearly as common as Smith or Jones, but it maybe is almost as common as a name like Brown or Green. You know what I'm saying? It was, The amount of, um, material, just when I think back to the 1990s, that Carlo Chiesa and I sifted through, both in churches and in the legal records of notaries.
There's many Ruggeri's, and some could read, and some could write, and some were illiterate. And sometimes they spelled it with R. Two Gs, one other times with one G, sometimes with one G and an I before the ERI. And, you know, it could drive you mad.
Linda Lesepets
At this time, another maker with a very similar name of Rogeri was apprenticed in the Amati workshop for a few years. He was in his late teens, but soon over the next five years, he would move to Brescia. Get married and start a workshop in that city of his own. In the 1680s, Francesco's eldest son, Giovanni Battista, was a witness at a wedding, and the priest writes his name as G. B. Per, with Per replacing his last name, Ruggeri, so that was the nickname that they put on the labels, remember?
So we can see that the family was well known by this name. It could also have been, to stop confusion, with Rogeri over in Brescia, but we will probably never know. The fact is that this name, Il Per, is on his labels and records from now on. Before the Great Plague 30 years ago, Cremona was a city of about 30 to 40, 000 people.
Now, in the 1660s, its population is just 10, 000, and yet the violin makers, or lutei, were doing well. The reputation of a Cremona violin meant that four industrious workshops were trading in town. And as the years passed, Francesco's children grew up and the boys started helping their father in the workshop, making it a hive of activity. And the Ruggieri workshop, under the guidance of Francesco Rugeri, was distinguishable with its own style and way of making instruments.
Jason Price.
I was just going to say stylistically, that there really are some, uh, you know, you look at them from 10 feet away and there's some obvious similarities.
They're both an Amati model but when you start looking up close, you see some things that are different. The head of a Ruggieri is really distinctive, a tiny eye, very, very small chamfer, the body of a Ruggieri. Um, tends to be a little bit more pinched in arching. The sound holes tend to be a little bit more sinewy and wiry.
Um, they don't, they don't tend to have the classical poise that an Amati does. And then they're missing some things like obviously the central pin, which is all the Amati makers, uh, and disciples had. Ruggeri, Ruggeri's do not have those. So they are, they're similar from 10 feet away, but quite distinct once you get up close.
Linda Lespets
When you say, they made a lot of instruments, is that, violins, cellos? What, are there a lot of? It's certainly not violas. That's for sure. And that's a, that's a separate topic all on its own, but. You know, why weren't people making real Unfortunately for you.
In 1677, Giovanni Battista Ruggeri, the eldest of the Ruggeri boys, married and moved out of home into another parish of Cremona with his wife briefly, but soon they would move back and continue to work with his father. Giovanni Battista was good friends with Niccolò Amati's son, Girolamo II, Who was only four years older than him. And when Giovanni and his young wife had a child of their own, they asked him to be godfather. During this time in the 1670s and 80s, the Ruggeri workshop was at its most productive. Francesco had his four sons working with him, making many instruments. In 1685, a year after Niccolò Amati died, the 56 year old Francesco Ruggeri found himself involved in a court case.
Rugeri was sort of got himself. He got himself sort of mixed up in a situation, with a fake label in his instrument,
Jason Price.
That's right. So this was, um, in Modena. So a musician appealed to the Duke of Modena for relief or for some sort of, uh, you know, injunction against the person who had sold him a violin that was supposed to be an Amati because it had an Amati label, but turns out it had a Ruggeri label underneath that.
Yeah, underneath. It's crazy, huh? It's crazy. I mean, these old tricks, they never, uh, they've been there from the very beginning. Yeah. And the cool thing about this is it happened, like, just a couple years after Niccolò Amati had died that this was, that this came out, I think. I think it was, he died in 84.
And I think it was like in the 80s that that this happened. And, you know, the price difference between an Rugeri is what was at stake. I think that he asked for some sort of, um, either compensation or, or relief or something because, you know, the idea was an Amati is worth five times what a Rugeri is worth.
I don't remember the actual numbers, but it's some, it's a ratio like that. I think, I think it was, um, Pistoles, but in different, uh, accounts, they give different currencies. So, but then I, I was looking up to see how much a Pistole was worth and in one account, one Pistole could buy you a cow.
Oh, wow. Right. And an Amati violin could buy like four cows, which sounds expensive to me. Which is, that's amazing. It really tells you everything, doesn't it? Yeah. That one, Amati was commercially that much more valuable and two, there was enough demand for Amati that people were either making counterfeits or selling counterfeits one way or another.
Yeah, and he got in trouble for it and I'm like, it couldn't have been him. He would have like ripped, he would have taken out the label or like not put, even put his label in and like, you wouldn't stick a label on top of your own label. I mean, if you're going to be fraudulent, you do it properly.
Jason Price
I think that there are some examples in the 20th century where we're happy to put in whatever label you want them to put in there.
Linda Lespets
So, um, so you, for example, you're an expert. Yes. Absolutely. That's the, yeah. Um, so say, hypothetically speaking, someone comes to you, um, and they give you, they give you a violin.
And I say, look, I bought this. It's a, it’s a Vuillaume. And you can see from across the room that it's not a Vuillaume. What happens today in this setting, uh, in that situation?
Jason Price
In that situation, you, um, you make sure they're seated. Uh, so that they're, uh, you know, not wobbly. Um, and then you, you try to see what they want you to tell them. And if most of the time they're coming to you because they want you to corroborate something they already know. And for me, I think you have to be super direct in these. Matters. You have to tell people what it is, but how you get there certainly requires some finesse that you don't want to, uh, you don't want to offend someone.
You don't want to make them feel like they've made a bad purchase. You don't want to, you know, make them faint and fall over, but nine times out of 10, when they come to you with something that isn't something, this isn't going to be news that you're giving them. Yeah. You have to be gentle with these things, but super direct and super truthful.
Linda Lespets
There's this example I have of a story that, um, the, the vice chancellor of Sydney uni told me the first time I met him. And so, uh, so the story was that, well, it's a true story. This happened to him the first year he was, uh, the vice chancellor of Sydney uni, uh, an old, an elderly lady died, and she, she In her will, the university received two paintings and one of them was a Picasso and the other one was a Miro.
So the Picasso, he said, first of all, they, they got someone to look at them and they said, well, yeah, this is a Picasso. These are Picasso. Um, you know, it's this and the university just, they, they couldn't pay the insurance to keep them for even a few months. So they, there were experts from two big auction houses in London. You could imagine who they were and they, they did like a Vuillaume, they, they jumped on the first plane. They came out to Sydney. They looked and it was a, his blue period. It was incredible. They sort of had this big. Kind of battle for who was going to sell it. Um, it was taken back to England. It was, it made the cover of the, of the auction catalogue.
It sold for a record price. It was huge record price. So the university is like fantastic, uh, like universities in Australia, they need sort of a lot of private funding. So heaps of millions, millions of dollars. Uh, the second painting was a Miro. They're like, cool, we got the, the Picasso, we've got millions, and they said, well, actually, no, the Miro, we have to take that to Paris, because you have to have the right expert to, to be sold, it has to have the right expertise.
So they're like, sure, sure, take it to Paris, but they said, but we have to tell you that if it's a fake, it's going to be destroyed. And so this is how it happens.
Jason Price
This is, I mean, this is absolutely, it's a, um, it's a movement in especially the contemporary art world. The Warhol Commission won't even look at something until you, uh, give them permission to destroy it if it's a counterfeit.
Linda Lespets
So either you get the certificate to say what it is, or you've agreed for its destruction. And they were like, well, if this is, this is okay. It’s, we’ve got the Picasso was real, right? Like the Miro, they send the Miro and it was a fake. And so it was destroyed. Uh, but their argument is, well, how, how can we know that someone isn't going to take this painting and sell it, uh, as a fraudulent thing?
And I was just wondering what would, what would the violin world look like today? If that's what happened.
Jason Price
That's a very good question. Very good question. What do you think about it? I mean, how would you, how would you see that?
Linda Lespets
I think we don't often say, well, I don't know if it's some, if it was sold as that and it was very, and I know there has been cases where things have accidentally been sold as something and they haven't seen a little iron mark in it saying it's something else and that's put the violin maker into a lot of trouble. Uh, but I can, I mean, at the same time I can understand the art. The, laws surrounding it because they're like, this is copyright. This is infringement of copyright. You can't do this to a song. Um, you're selling this as someone else's work. They did that painting. And normally copyright is, I think it's 70 years after the death of the person, but then some people own the copyright.
I mean, like we, nobody owns the copyright to the Strad model. So, yeah, I don't know, I was just a bit shocked by it. I was like, Oh, we're sort of, sort of in the same world. I find it fascinating and shocking at the same time.
Jason Price
I think if you applied that to the violin business, there would be some things that would, um, well, it would miss all the subtleties of, you know, Völler copies from the late, uh, 19th century, um, Vuillaume copies, uh, of a Guarneri that, um, You know, that had a Guarneri label in it when they left his workshop.
But these are, these are not, they're not forgeries. They're not counterfeits. They're things that are made as, well, they're traded now with full knowledge of what they are. And it sort of would be a sad erasure of history if you had to do that, wouldn't it? Yeah.
Linda Lespets
And I don't know, and there's always a part of you that might be saying, you know, maybe with the paintings, like maybe it was a real,
Here's what happened. There was a virtuoso court violinist and composer working for the Duke of Modena. That's about 100 kilometres, or 62 miles, from Cremona. His name was Tommaso Antonio Vitale, and being a well-known musician and composer, he thought he would buy himself a violin worthy of his station, and that could only mean an Amati would do.
They weren't cheap, but he had important things to play on this instrument, so he managed to find himself one of these famous Amati violins. Presumably he didn't go to the workshop himself, but acquired it in some other fashion. A travelling salesman or another violinist dealer, perhaps? So anyway, he gets his violin and pays nine pistoli for it.
Now in one source I found you could buy a cow for one pistoli, which gives you an idea of the value of an Amati at the time. So whether it was nine cows or a herd of goats, we don't quite know. It was expensive in any case, and everything was going just fine until he saw the label inside his instrument peeling at the corner, and as the Niccolo Amati label was slowly peeled away, it exposed a Francesco Ruggeri Detto Il Per label. Shock horror! He had been scammed. This was bad news for Tommaso, who had just forked over a considerable amount of money for this instrument to find out that it was Okay, a violin from Cremona but a Ruggeri instrument. A Ruggeri instrument was only worth a third of that of an Amati. Vitali, finding himself in a pickle, petitioned the Duke, his employer, to see if he could help get his money back, in this case a fraud. This story tells us a few things. 1. Niccolo Amati's violins were considered the cream of the crop, even during his lifetime, or in this case, shortly after. Rugeri's instruments were considerably less expensive, but also well made enough to be passed off as an Amati to the unsuspecting. 3. You can't always trust what is on the label. And 4. That unscrupulous people wanting to make a quick buck have been around since the dawn of time.
Jason Price.
Have you heard of an author called Malcolm Gladwell? Yes, absolutely. And he wrote a really, uh, a book I love is called Blink. I don't know if you've read that. And he talks about, um, Blink, yep.
Linda Lespets
Yeah, I feel like he talks about a thing called the adaptive unconscious. Which is, it's everything that happens in a few seconds when you first see something that you can't explain. He often talks about people, uh, he takes an example of art experts having, they can't explain it. It's a feeling that they have when they see an instrument, uh, not an instrument, when they see a painting. And do you, do you have the feeling when you see an instrument?
Jason Price
I think that sort of uncategorizable, um, experience of seeing something is, uh, is incredibly important. The instinct you have when you see something is incredibly important, but it's also equally important to corroborate that and to challenge that. That when you see something, when someone flashes a violin in front of you and you just, you know, Say, oh yeah, it's a Vuillaume. That's great. It's great that you have that instinct. It's great that you've seen, you know, 700 Vuillaume that you can recognize the 701st. But the better expert is the The one that then unpacks that and says, hang on a second, let me just sit with this a little bit and make sure that all the parts check out and that it corroborates that, that I'm not, I'm not doing it out of posturing. I'm doing it out of actual, um, intellectual rigor of looking at the instrument, not just my instinct. And then it's also important to challenge that, to say, you know what, hang on a second. I saw the, um, Six months ago that didn't have this thing here. And why does this have that? Those two things are super important. You have to have the instinct, but you also have to challenge it.
Linda Lespets
Yeah. And that, that adaptive unconscious, it's kind of like, it's, it's a lifetime experience. Cause he'll talk about people, uh, reading, reading people as well. And it's because you've spent your life. doing it. It's not, it just doesn't, you're not sort of born with it, or I mean, maybe someone is, but normally it's, it's thousands of connections being made from, from seeing thousands of instruments and which I think AI could never really, AI can maybe categorize things and help with elimination, but they could never synthesize completely the, the entirety of The object, because for, he gives this example, um, in the, I think it's the Getty museum.
They were, they wanted to buy a statue and it was 10 million. And they did, I'm not sure if it was Getty, it was a big museum in America. Um, and they, they did all this scientific testing on it for the materials, where it came from, the, they did every scientific test you could do, but then when they put it in front of an art expert. They, they just said, I hope you haven't bought this. I have a really bad feeling. And they couldn't, they couldn't say why. And they, they couldn't go back to the museum and say, well, this guy felt a feeling. In the end, it was a fake, but every, it was so well done, uh, that it, it ticked all the scientific boxes. And that's, and that would be your, your human, Using their sort of little supercomputer, um, synthesizing it all together.
Jason Price
No, you're absolutely right. It's that human judgment is irreplaceable and you certainly don't replace that with scientific evaluation for sure. Yeah, yeah. And it's, and it's something that's hard to quantify or explain because people say to you, how do you know? Like, how can you tell it's this? Uh, I, I, for me, I think it actually is almost more athletic than anything else. I think it's just because you've done the work that you've seen the previous, uh, 400 examples of that maker and you've actually studied them. You've, uh, made binders or you've made folders and you've, uh, compared one to another.
You know, the early period, you know, the late period, you know, the problematic ones. You know, the ones that, um, are accepted by some people, but not by others. That's, that's just doing the work. It's, that's like a, an athletic experience, not like voodoo. Part of our business, not our, not violin business, but in general, but the arts business that I find a little bit dangerous is the sort of, um, you know, posing as expert. Uh, I am as I am expert because I beat my chest and say that I am. That doesn't work. You know, experts aren't fancy suits. Um, experts are people who can, you know, proclaim something, um, as a work of magic. They're doing it because they've studied it.
Linda Lespets
And it's hard to measure that. Um, depth of knowledge. So the next time you buy yourself a Niccolo Amati, be sure to go to a trusted source, and this is where an expert can help you. And as in the art world, there are different experts who have expert knowledge on specific makers. So there you have it. At the end of this episode, we leave Francesco Rugeri in a pickle with his instruments and his workshop is in full swing with his sons, the Ruggeri brothers.
I'm sure they were well known about town, strapping lads that they would have been. And next week we will see the shenanigans the boys get up to and some big moves for the workshop. And that will be the final episode on Ruggeri before we move into the wonderful life and career of Giovanni Battista Rogeri.
Thank you to my fantastic guests, Dr. Emily Brayshaw and Jason Price. And Dwayne Rosengard. And to end, here is some viola music for Jason. Well, viola and cello, actually. This is Liisa Pallandi and Timo- Veikko Valve from the Australian Chamber Orchestra playing the Sonata Representiva. You will hear how the composer is playing with the capabilities of the instruments, imitating bird songs. It's quite lovely. It was composed around 1669. So, so it's around about now in Francesco's life. To support the podcast, you can leave a rating and review on your listening app, and I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles.
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Join me as we continue to look at the life of this innovative violin maker who was literally living outside the box. His workshop has been successfully set up, he has a young family and work is pouring in. Francesco now has to take on apprentices but who could they be? Keep listening to find out.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mirecourt. As well as being a luthier I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with and in particular the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect. But here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture.
So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, feminine war, but also of love. Artistic genius. Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
This week's show is sponsored by Tarizio Fine Instruments and Bows, and I just happen to have bumped into Mr.Jason Price.
Hello, I'm Jason Price. I'm the founder and director of Tarizio, Tarizio was started 25 years ago in New York City, and now we have offices in London and also Berlin. We do auctions, we do private sales, and we also are the maintainers and curators of this thing called the Cozio Archive.
I just wanted to say from personal experience as a violin maker, over the years we've bought instruments from different auction houses and you guys have been very straightforward to work with and
I'm happy to hear that.
And I'm not going to say that everything is perfect for everyone, but us personally,
of course, of course, of course,
We have never had a problem with you guys.
And we're happy to hear it.
So it's just been a pleasure working with you.
You know, we work really hard to make sure that our attributions are correct, that our condition reports are 100 percent accurate, and that what we're selling is reliable.
Say I'm a musician and I'm looking for an instrument and I come to you, how does that process work?
Well, Our brick and mortar offices are in New York, London, and Berlin, and we put together three auctions a year in each of those locations, so that's nine auctions total, and we invite the public in for a full month before each auction. And we encourage you to bring your friend, your teacher, your standmate, your grandmother, anybody who can help you make a good decision, and we want you to spend as long as you can getting to know these instruments.
For people who listen to this podcast, something that you might be thinking when you're, when you're listening to me telling the stories of violin makers is you would really love to see pictures of the instruments that they make. And for that, you have the perfect resource.
The Cosio Archive. We now own it, maintain it, and are continually adding to it. It's an incredible amount of instruments. Over 100, 000 instruments in the database. Over 4, 000 makers, which we are following and tracking. 200, 000 auction prices. An incredible number of photographs. It's really quite cool to have access to all these photos.
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So there you have it. If you would like to subscribe to the Cosio Archive, read a Cartegio article or browse the auction catalogue, go to Tarizio.com. And now back to the show.
Welcome back to this series on Francesco Ruggeri. We find ourselves in Cremona, a city in Northern Italy on the Lombard plains. Yet this relatively small centre had a far reaching reputation for the production of fine instruments in many European cities. Over in England, the country just could not keep a monarch on the throne for very long, and this had been going on for quite a while. Whereas France, another superpower, had a lot of stability with their sun king, Louis XIV. Lully was in full force and ballet and opera and ballet operas were all the thing at Versailles.
Well, now it's all about the cello and it's this little guy's time to shine. Rugeri's workshop may have been on the outskirts of Cremona, but it was an industrious hub of activity with instrument after instrument being produced. He was beginning to get a reputation for his fine sounding cellos that he made to a smaller and more manageable size. Their rich sound meant orders kept coming in. His workshop would have been attached to his house where you could find Ippolita and their ever growing brood of children. Francesco's boys were too young to help out in the workshop, so it seems logical, with the quantity of instruments emerging from the Ruggeri workshop, that there were apprentices, or other hands helping him out.
Although Antonio Stradivarius's apprenticeship has often been assumed to have been in the hands of the Amatis. Even though there's no actual proof of this, here we find Antonio Stradivari in his mid teens, and from a biographical point of view, he is the right age to be apprenticed to Ruggeri, given also that some researchers think his work resembles more that of Ruggeri in his early work, stylistically and technically, than Amati's. So there is always a possibility that this young maker was working with Francesco Rugeri in the shop churning out instruments. W. E. Hill and Sons concede that they, quote, “failed to find the hand of Stradivari in any of Niccolò Amati's work, although the unmistakable hands of Andrea Guarneri and Francesco Ruggeri are evident”, end quote.
In the previous episodes, I spoke to Dan Larson about the evolution of gut strings, and now we are at a point where, as Dan will explain, the wound gut string will enable makers such as Francesco Ruggeri to make different sized instruments and how that was possible through new string technologies.
Dan Larson.
What we had was the invention of the concept of changing the mass of the string. Because, as I mentioned before several times, up to that point, there was only one type of material that they had, gut. And if you wanted to lower string, you had to just add more gut. But if you had the technology to combine materials, then you could start putting heavier materials together with the gut and have a thinner string, which meant that you could start to control the weight of the string, as well as control the size of the instrument and the size of, you know, the pitch that you were using and so forth. And I think that the important thing about this concept of the gimped string, whatever it was, the important thing is that it gave instrument makers the ability to control the weight of the string and that opened up a whole new world of, of instrument design for them. It meant that they weren't restricted by the, the fundamental laws that Mersenne talked about. About length and pitch and, and tension and so forth. That they could change the length. And they could make it shorter, for instance, and just make a heavier string. They could make it a little bit longer and use a lighter string. And I think that opened up a tremendous amount of, of possibilities.
So people think that Strad was sort of copied him, his smaller instrument model, his B model cello they think is based off of Francesco Ruggeri's, who was doing this 50 years before. So we often say Stradivari made this, the modern standard cello, but Francesco Ruggeri was doing this. At this time, when the strings were making it possible to make a smaller instrument, and would it also have made, at this point, violins more, more sort of powerful as well, with that, those strings?
Dan Larson.
Not necessarily. I've heard a lot of instruments with all gut strings that are pretty powerful, especially if they're all gut strings is strong and equal tension. They can be, they can be quite powerful indeed. So, no, I don't think that would necessarily mean it would have any more energy in it than it, than it would with a plain gut string.
Yeah, so before was it that they had to also you get a lot of very wide, cellos before? And that would, was that sort of dictated by the strings as well?
It could be. It could be. I know I certainly prefer wide instruments myself because I have a tendency to use primarily gut strings. And I find with gut strings that having that width gives a more fundamental tone then it tends to reduce the upper partials of the note and the tone and sort of reinforces the fundamental of the of the note. So, you know, it could be, but that's just total anecdotal thinking on my part because that's what I like.
As time goes on for the Rugeris in the 1660s, the couple has two more sons, Vincenzo then Carlo. And here is where things will start to get confusing, because it is now that the young Giovanni Battista Rogeri, who will eventually move to Brescia, starts his apprenticeship with Niccolo Amati in town, around the years 1661 to 1663. Matters are not helped by the fact that Francesco's eldest son, who is about 10 years younger than Giovanni Battista Rogeri, is also called Giovanni Battista, which makes him Giovanni Battista Rugeri.
Here is Duane Rosengard, who we spoke to in the previous episode.
In that interval from 1653 to 1666, Francesca Rugeri's four sons are born, and you can probably pretty easily imagine that once they were of a certain age to help, and it could have been 12, it could have been 11, could have been 13, depending on their personalities and physique, they got involved in father's business and they lived out there in the country and had room to roam and, not at all like life in a medieval city. As it were. It's really, that's the first, the first chapter of the book. As I see it, a Francesco is his obscure origins in the province, his connection to Amati, and then starting his own family and having so many children.
Yeah, and his children would have been the same ages as close to Niccolo Amati and Andrea Guarneri's?
Yes, that's a very excellent point, right? The children of Francesco are roughly the same age, even almost the same age spread as Andrea Guarneri's two sons, or three sons. One, Andrea Guarneri had one son who was a priest and two who were violin makers, and of those, Pietro Guarneri, the older son, seems to have been as occupied with music at playing instruments as he was making them. So yeah, they were all in that, let's call it two generations after the Black Death, let's call it.
Life, music, art, and architecture around them is changing. We are firmly in the Baroque period at this point, having left the Renaissance. The way music is played and composed has a direct impact on the violin makers of Cremona, and one of the moving factors for this movement that the Ruggieri's find themselves in comes from the Reformation. If you haven't already, go back and listen to Episode 5 of The Violin Chronicles, where I talk about what the Reformation was and the profound impact it had on the city of Cremona, and the way music was composed. Well, after the Reformation, there was the Counter Reformation, and that was the Catholic Church's response to Protestantism. While the Protestant churches decided to remove statues and artworks that risked looking like something resembling idol worship, to end up with very simply decorated buildings, almost even austere in some places, the Catholic Church's response was to go literally Baroque.
Now, the movement we call Baroque, as I mentioned, emerged from the Reformation and started in Rome with the Catholic Church encouraging this style to really contrast to the simplicity of Protestant architecture, art and music. Baroque anything is pretty full on, but some characteristics to help recognize the style in art, for example, are the use of deep colors, movement, lots of flowing fabric, intense emotions, and contrast. Think of Caravaggio's portraits for contrast and emotion with the clairobscur, and Peter Paul Rubens for movement and flowy fabric. There's a lot of drama, asymmetry, and the use of primary colors and allegory. This meant that there was often a story being told in the image, that would often involve windswept clothing consisting of meters of fabric flowing around them.It was intense.
Take Judas Slaying Holophane by Artemisia Gentileschi. There's emotion, almost spotlight lighting. There's fabric galore and a story to be told. Buildings were characterized by exuberant detail and grandeur. There's a crowded, dense sense of ornamentation. There was always room to stuff in sculptures of baskets, of fruit, of flowers, trophies and weapons into an already loaded structure. The more the merrier. And you couldn't get any further from the Protestant ideal of simplicity. But that was exactly the point.
The Baroque period went from about 1600 to 1750 and our violin maker Francesco Rugeri lived from 1629 or 28 to 1698. That places him slap bang in the middle of the Baroque.
Emily Brayshaw.
I was just thinking, so we've come from the Renaissance where it's this like explosion of colors and textures and, you know, stripes and things, and we're coming into the Baroque era. Is it still very colorful?
Oh, absolutely. And yeah, it absolutely is. For men and women.
Often I have this idea that it's all blacks and greys and browns and regions.
No, no, no. So the thing with blacks of course is you still do have a lot of black and that's coming out of Holland a lot of the time and because it's quite a protestant thing to be wearing black with these Dutch merchant classes. So with the Reformation maybe like just wearing colors you were like I'm definitely not Protestant. You know, with the Spanish Inquisition, maybe you could, it was a bit like hairy there for a bit. You didn't, you really didn't want to be Protestant in Cremona. You were being,
yeah. Okay. So maybe with your clothing, you could say, well, the thing is though, like not all blacks are created equal. And the thing about this Dutch merchant classes is as well, like for a long time black. is associated with wealth. A really good quality black dye is actually very expensive to make, one that's stable and fast, and so not all black clothes are created equal. And so you can still express, you know, like luxury and wealth through black and black materials. And you can also you know, express that, you know, this lack of Protestant sobriety, you can also express, you know, decadence and extravagance through black, not all black textiles are created equal, so you can do that. Yeah, definitely. So we're still seeing these colors. What's happening though, is particularly in the Baroque era, we're moving into an era where. It's more about the primacy of the textile. And so particularly in the UK, you’re seeing more of these one color silks, and it's about the quality of the silk and the cut of the silk, and it's being trimmed like with things like laces. And also in the Baroque too, by, you know, the 1660s, you have the rise of really incredible lace trimmings. And you've also got ribbons, like, because ribbons are incredibly expensive to make, because you've got to set it all up to make these incredibly thin strips of luxury silk textiles. And so if you can, the more ribbons, you know, the richer you are.
Right, so ribbons are a big thing, and of course you can have ribbons in all sorts of different colours, and this is also a nice trimming that kind of can filter down, you know, so perhaps you've got a poorer woman who can afford one beautiful ribbon in her hair, versus again, you know, these Baroque courtly leaders who have, just have ribbons for days. Like they have ribbons, like the men will have ribbons on the bottoms of all their breeches and adorning their coats and, you know, just all over the shop, like it's a ribbon city.
In little women, they're always going, Oh, I'm going to, going to go and buy some ribbons. And they're always off to buy, they're always off to the shop to buy some ribbons.
Yeah, and the great thing about ribbons too is that, and I mean that's part of why little women are talking about it as well, but it's a really cheap well not cheap, but it's a really simple way that you can change up your outfit really quickly.
So this is what people were wearing at this time, when the young Ruggeri was running his workshop with his burgeoning family. Okay, so he wasn't wearing the chains and ribbons and fancy pants. And let's face it, high heels are just not practical in the workshop. Believe me, I tried. But he was definitely making instruments for some of these people and would have come across these fashions in downtown Cremona.
You know, they'll wear chains around their necks. These are men, you know, also men really have extravagant shoes as well. So you've got the rise of the Louis heel, the court in France, for example, you know, in the time of Louis XIV, you've got the red. What we've got though, which is really interesting in Cremona. So something that pops up is this sort of style of men's court called the Juste corps, which comes from France. And it's a really long outer coat, really, really long, with huge pockets.
Because today, the Juste corps is a singlet.
Which doesn't That's hilarious!
Because they're like, why isn't your baby wearing a little juste corps. Yeah, so it's called a juste corps, just to call it, and it's a long men's over jacket, and this sort of like evolves over the Baroque period, and you'll get like the huge cuffs, which are you know, often embellished. It'll be in a very, very fine wool or velvet, depending what you're doing with it. On either side, we'll have incredibly expensive buttons and embroidery. And something that pops up in this period too is, as you probably know, is the pochette or the kit. Yes. Which comes from the, so these juste corps have huge pockets and we see the dance masters wearing them and with the kit that they can carry in their pocket. Yeah. Of the just decor. And this is where this is coming from. And we know, for example, that I think Amati made different styles of kits for the higher quality ones. And what we're seeing is what's really interesting is these dance masters have to dress in the most expensive clothing that they can possibly afford because their clients are nobility. Right? Or they're aspirational wealthy people who are looking to learn how to dance or get their daughters to learn how to dance so that they can marry well. And so you've sort of got like the dancing master dressing the very best he can to kind of try to fit in, even though these classes like they need his services, but they will still mock him because he's a type of dancer.
Yeah, he's another one of those people. I feel like with the instrument makers that are between worlds, they're, they're catering to the very wealthy their working class themselves, but they're kind of on the, on the upper end of these skilled artisans. Yeah. Like the skilled tailors.
This was the age of the pochette, or kit violin, that you could put in the pocket of your French juste de corps jacket, if you were a dance master. The word pochette means pocket, and these kit instruments, as they were called, were in fact tiny violins. They were not proportionally small, they often had a full length neck and scroll on what looks like a tiny little shrunken body of a violin and their purpose was to play music as you practice dancing. A teacher didn't have an orchestra at his disposal at all times. And so he would pull this little thing out to play a tune for his students. There are some really stunning instruments made like this, and they would often come in little boxes or tubes to transport easily. There are pochettes made by Stradivari and Amati, amongst others.
In Venice and parts of Italy and it moves to France, you've got like the lace makers who are making these incredibly labour intensive, beautiful, handmade laces that become part of a garment that just takes off boom in 1660, known as the cravat, which revolutionizes menswear. Okay.
So that was during Ruggieri's lifetime as well. He lived through a really all this stuff was happening. So, from the 1640s to the 1660s, the violin sort of exploded. It became really popular. That's when it became so popular. And before then, it was sort of the viola, and then it sort of, and then, and then the violin starts to take over now. And in the second half of the 1600s, we get over spun strings. So we have wire wrapped around the gut, which means that big bass instruments could be made smaller, more manageable before they so you can play them without them going all you, you didn't need a giant gut string. You could make a thinner gut string. So Ruggeri, he, he made these smaller cellos. They were 10 centimetres smaller than what people were making at the time. And this was like, this was huge for violin makings. He was living in sort of this, this age of, of great change, you know, you've got the cravat.
Yeah. The, cello is, appearing. You've got the violin is taking off. It was, I, it was, yeah, it was exciting they'd gone through this lull with the plague and now they were sort of, you know, revving up to. Trying to boost it up again. And again, you sort of see that in like Cremona trying to rebuild itself, you know, prop itself back up with these making raw silks, textiles, the flaxes, the linens, things like that. A lot of foodstuffs, even agricultural foodstuffs.
So what did this mean for music? Because that is what is going to influence Francesco Rugeri more than flowy robes in paintings and baskets of fruit on facades. Music, as with art and architecture, was creating a heightened sense of emotion. It was heavily instrumental. Composers were starting to use the keyboard and the violin more and more. And the Catholic Church encouraging composers to write music to appeal to the masses. Emotion evoking music. It was, it was to be dynamic and contrasting. Composers used counterpoint, or that that meant the layering of several melodies on top of each other, to create a supercharged piece of music. Into this mix, we see the rise of opera and the development of new genres such as the concerto and the sonata.
I'm Stephen Mould and I'm an associate professor at the Conservatory of Music in Sydney. And I teach mainly in the areas of opera studies and conducting. Yeah, sure. Basically during that century from about 1600. Okay. Where we were, if you'd been alive then, you wouldn't have woken up one morning and said, Oh, opera's been born in any way, shape, or form. Opera like works have existed, well, since the ancient Greeks. Or even in the 16th century, there were lots of works, which if you listen to them today, you'd say, well, that's basically an opera. What happened at around 1600 was a group of noblemen got together and decided that they wanted to revive the ancient Greek notion of opera. So it's quite a self conscious thing. They were all poets. An important aspect of opera is the Gesamtkunstwerk. That's what we call it today, which is this idea, which already comes from the Greeks that, that opera is a collection of different things, text, music, decor, drama, and that all of these, all of these particular areas come together in some mysterious harmony, To create a wonderful operatic work. It's the ultimate art form. Ultimate art form. It's a kind of alchemical sort of, it's an idea. The idea of opera got, if you like, kickstarted around 1600, because these noblemen got together and decided that they were going to revive this form. Now, being poets, they wrote poems. What for the time was, was wonderful poetry. And then they had it set to music. Now already you've got a problem because you've got the poet with their wonderful text. And then you've got maybe a composer who is trying to write the next great tune. And so there's this, this question that runs through the whole history of opera. What comes first, the words or the music, or in fact, what dominates the words or the music? It's pretty clear you can't have, it requires a librettist to write the opera and then a composer to set the text. So the person writing the music wasn't necessarily the person writing the story. Absolutely not. There's always been these two different, the poet plus the, the musician. So you know, today, if we talk about any opera, if I say the marriage of Figaro, you'll probably say Mozart. Yeah. If I say Il Trovatore, you'll say Verdi. Yeah What about the poor old librettist? What's happened there? And, and so the way we talk about opera is extraordinary because a lot of modern opera goers couldn't tell you. Who had written some of their favourite operas. Who had written the text for some of their favourite operas.
Yeah, that's extraordinary. We do just think of the composer and the whole idea of opera was that it was this mixture of dance music, poetry. And what I found interesting is the, the, the mise en scène, the, the, the decor. You don't really think of the person doing the decorations, but for them, it was just as important.
Absolutely. So it is this idea. I mean, today in modern terms, we'd call it an ecosystem that all of these very, very, very different areas find this magical balance. So Wagner created this word, Gesamtkunstwerk. He didn't create it, he kind of brought it back into the language, which means total work of art. Wagner was one of the great plagiarizers or borrowers of all time, depending on what era you live in. So he didn't invent that much, but he appropriated a lot of things to create something original. So he put this term out there basically as his own invention, which it wasn't. So, this group of literati who wrote the Libretti, their idea was that the word was the primary thing. They wanted the person who set the opera to set it with very, very, very plain, syllabic settings so that the words were always clear. Audible. The words were almost always foremost in the audience's mind.
The splendour of the Baroque age. It epitomizes grandeur and elegance. The music is mirroring other baroque works, such as art and architecture in Paris at the court of Louis xiv. Jean Baptiste Lully was in full swing. In Italy, Vivaldi and Corelli were soon to come onto the scene. Corelli was a master of the trio sonata, and that had two violins and a continuo. This was a very popular musical format. May account for the dip in popularity of the viola at this point and the rise of the violin and increased demand for the cello at this time, as the trio sonata would have two violins and a bass, which, which would remove the viola part. Courtly dances were the basis of many Baroque pieces. These came from Renaissance dances from Germany, France, and Italy. The Baroque composers took these dances and developed them into instrumental pieces without the dance. There's the Allemande, or the jig, the Sarabande, and the Carante. The harpsichord became the backbone to most ensembles, and it formed the continuo with the cello. Flutes, oboes, trumpets without valves, and timpani were developing, and became established instruments into orchestras. And as the quality of instruments improved, composers continued exploring the capabilities of the orchestra, being able to use contrast, soft and loud sounds, and that would fit right into the Baroque aesthetic.
You can hear some of these very early operas for around 1600. They're boring by modern standards. Some of them have had historical recreations in under certain settings, but they would never, ever survive a commercial season in a modern opera house. They, they're all, they're very nicely written, but they are like poetry with a bit of music. Yeah. Things. This is very blunt tool, but sometimes the blunt tool is useful. Tunes and divas. If you don't have both of those and, and they're not even part of the Gazant Kunstverband, but that's what keeps opera alive. The thing about Monteverdi was he was a great composer. He wrote. Fabulous music. So when, when certain intensity was happening in the drama, he knew how to turn up the, the harmonies and, and mirror what was going on stage with, with the right harmonic palette. And he also wrote great tunes. He was what I would call a man of the theatre. And we also have to contend with the fact that he was also the Maestro della Musica of San Marco in, in Venice. So this whole idea of secular and, and sacred is an interesting mix as well. There's a fascinating. scene in, in Orfeo, who we always manage playing on it. Imagine playing on his lyre, where Orfeo is literally trying to sing himself or perform himself across the river Styx to get to the underworld to find Euridice. Monteverdi takes a couple of violins to do all these flourishes and runs. And then there's also a harp involved. So it's this idea of using musical virtuosity that that Orfeo is not just, not just a musician, but one.
So Cremona's very own Monteverdi is getting into opera and giving the violin star parts in his operas. These companies coming out of Venice would tour around the country, and perhaps our violin maker Francesco Rugeri even saw one around this time. He would definitely have been in contact with musicians working in the theatre, and in the ever-increasing orchestras now being put together. And as time goes on, we will see in the up and coming episodes, how Francesco's workshop will flourish and grow with his sons coming on board. And with all this manpower, the production of incredible instruments is to come.
I would like to thank my guests, Stephen Mould. Dr. Emily Brayshaw, Dan Larson, and Duane Rosengard.
Thank you also to the Australian Chamber Orchestra for permission to use their recordings of Timo Vekkio Valve playing the cello. And if you've liked this show and would like to hear bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/theviolinchronicles, or another way to support the podcast is to rate and review it on the application on which you're listening.
So stay tuned and I hope you will join me next time for another episode of the Violin Chronicles.
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Part II
Kathleen Parlow was one of the most outstanding violinists at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1912, she was signed by the Columbia Record Company in New York, and her first records for the U.S. label were brought out alongside those of the legendary Eugene Ysaÿe.
Listen to her fascinating story and how she took the world by storm. From her devastating looks to the intrigue her priceless instrument created. You will hear rare recordings of this prodigious player as we retell her life and try to understand why such an incredible talent has been so forgotten today.
Brought to you by Biddulph recordings
Transcript
Welcome to the Historical String Recordings podcast, a show that gives you a chance to hear rare and early recordings of great masters and their stories. My name is Linda Lespets and my co host is Eric Wan.
This is part two of the story of the remarkably talented violinist Kathleen Parlow. In part one, we met a prodigious talent. She was the first foreigner to study in the Russian Conservatorium in St. Petersburg with the famous teacher Auer, and her most ardent admirer had given her an extraordinary gift of a Guarneri del Gesù violin. But just how far can talent, hard work, and good looks get this young woman in the beginning of the 20th century? Keep listening to find out.
So now it's 1909 and Kathleen has her career taking off. She has her teacher with connections, she has her violins, and the concert that she did in the National Theatre, the one where Einar saw her for the first time, the one with Johan Halvorsen conducting, well Kathleen and Johan hit it off. And now, a year later Johan Halvorsen has finished his violin concerto, and he's been working so long and hard on it, like it's his baby and, he actually dedicates this concerto to Kathleen Parlow, and asks her to premiere it with the Berlin Philharmonic at the Modenspa outside The Hague in the Netherlands in the summer of 1909.
Then Johan Halversen writes this concerto, which is sort of athletic and sort of gymnastic to play. And he finishes it and dedicates it to her to Kathleen Parlow. And she plays this very tricky piece which kind of shows his faith in her virtuosic talents. Well, one of her first recordings was the Moto Perpetuo by Paganini and Auer says it's one of the most difficult pieces in terms of bowing technique ever written, he says in one of his books. The reason why is one has to keep a very controlled bow, crossing strings all over the place, and play it very rapidly. Now Kathleen Parlow's recording of the Paganini Moto Perpetuo, which was made in her first recording session for HMV, is really astounding. It's the fastest version ever made. I think it's even faster than the Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin. Clean as a whistle, but she also phrases it so beautifully. So she doesn't just play it technically very fast. She really shapes, you know, it's all regular sixteenth notes or semiquavers, and yet she shapes the line beautifully and really gives a direction. So when you hear this, you realize she's more than just a virtuoso performer. She's somebody with real musicianship. She's an astounding player.
And this concerto, it's quite interesting. It's, it's tricky and it's a piece that really shows off a virtuoso. So it's, it’s quite a good one for Kathleen. And at the same time, he gives it a Norwegian twist. It's cleverly composed and a virtuoso such as Kathleen was perfect for playing this piece. There are references to Norwegian folk music. In the last movement, we can hear pieces that were traditionally played on the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle. So it's a violin that has sympathetic strings that run under the fingerboard, and it gives it quite like a like a haunting sound, a very kind of Scandinavian sound. So there are bits in this concerto that are from traditional music played on that violin. Then there's, there's this fun bit which makes a reference to a traditional Norwegian dance called the Halling Dance. And the Halling Dance is danced, it's danced by men at weddings or parties, and there's really no other way to describe it than breakdancing and it's like the ancestor of breakdancing. So what happens is the men, they show off their prowess to the ladies by doing this really cool sort of these acrobatics and the music for this hailing dance itself is quite tricky and you have to play it with like a rhythm to get the crowd moving and to give the dancer like the impetus to do his tricks and the men, they wear these like traditional costumes of like high waisted breeches and red waistcoats with long puffy sleeves and this little black hat. It's a bit like Mr. Darcy meets Run DMC. You've got this man in this traditional dress doing this breakdancing, basically. And then they do they do backflips. They do that thing where you hold your foot and you jump through it with your other foot. They do like the caterpillar move. Even like spitting around on their heads. And what happens is they'll be, they'll be dancing to this music often played with, you know, the epinette and they'll be spinning around and then intermittently after spinning around, they'll do, you know, the backflip and the headspin or the, the caterpillar. And it's, I don't know how they do it. It's, they must be very dizzy. Anyway, it's incredible. And then sort of the climax of the dance is that there's a woman also, you know, dressed traditionally, and she's got this pole, this long pole. And on the end of the pole is a hat. And the idea is you have to kick the hat off, but the pole is three meters high. So she's standing on like a ladder with the pole. And so the dancer, he'll do this kind of flying kick in the air. Either you can, you kick it off or you miss it. So in Johan Halvorsen’s concerto at the end, there's this high harmonic and that you either have to hit on the G string. And like in the dance, you know, you're hitting that hat off. And so you're always there. You're always wondering if the soloist can pull it off. Can they, can they hit that high harmonic? And it's, it's the same sort of the equivalent of the spinning high kick from the dance. So, and if you were Norwegian, You would get this, I think, from the, from the music and you'd hear it. You hear that you do hear it in the music.
So Kathleen Parlow, she plays this Halversen concerto and she plays it three times that year, and when she plays the piece in the National Theatre in September, there's sort of, there are mixed reviews with the critics saying that the piece was too unconventional. It's a little bit different and here's where Halvorsen, he like, he kicks up a stink a bit. This, because this concerto is like his baby and he's really protective and he's like, you know, he's quite fragile. He's, he's worked so much on this thing and people are just saying, you know, nasty things. They don't understand the work that went into it. Yeah, you write a concerto. So people, they flocked to hear Kathleen play Johan Halversen's concerto at the theatre. And it was full to bursting on several nights in a row. And if you consider on the same night in Oslo in another hall, Fritz Kreisler was playing and here you have Kathleen Parlow and people are just like cramming in to see her and Halvorsen's concerto. She was a huge name in her time. Only after a few performances and the negative critiques, Johan Halvorsen, he cancelled all the future performances of the work and, and when he retired, he burnt the manuscripts and asked for all the copies to be destroyed as well, it really, he was really hurt. Well, it was to be lost forever, except So a hundred years later, a copy of the concerto was serendipitously found in the University of Toronto's Faculty of Music, when one of the employees was looking through, not music, but personal documents of Kathleen's and it had been filed in there by mistake. And because it was with her personal files, it hadn't really, like her letters and things, it had been overlooked. So they found it and they resurrected it and they've re performed this concerto that had been lost for a hundred years. And that's another role as a musician. You're also not managing, but you also have to deal with composers that could have quite be quite touchy and everything like a musician has to have, have on their plate.
Well, I think being a musician, not only do you have to have an incredible skill level, you have to have an engaging personality. You have to be able to transmit a personality through the music itself. And you have to have incredible social grace to navigate charming not only your audience, but charming the people who create the concerts, the sponsors, the people who bankroll them. I think it's an incredibly difficult task. Because the skill level playing the violin is so difficult. That in itself would take up most people's energy. But on top of that, also have to be ingratiating and charming. I think it's an incredibly difficult life. Yeah, must be exhausting. And she does get exhausted. She'll have Breakdowns through, like her first one is when she's about 22. She has like almost like a nervous breakdown. And so it's kind of, she runs hot for a long time and then crashes. And it might be like, you're saying like all these different things they have to, all the balls that they have in the air that they're juggling to keep it going. Kathleen Parlow, she's still in her teens. She's still a teenager. She has incredible success. She's performing in Germany and the Netherlands. And later that same year, she returns to Canada where she makes an extensive tour. She makes her debut in New York and Philadelphia. I mean, she's just like, she's just all over. I mean, America's a big place and she's just all over the place. And then in 1909, at the age of 19, she gets a recording contract with the gramophone company known as his master's voice. And that's the one with the dog listening into a recording trumpet. And she was offered a 10 percent artist's royalty figure.
So is that good? Getting 10 percent royalties?
Yes. A 10 percent royalty at that time. is really quite unheard of. I believe the gramophone company gave that to their superstars. Louisa Tetrazzini, for example, was the great coloratura soprano of the day, and she received 10 percent of the sales royalty. So for Kathleen Parlow to be receiving that percentage really attests to her status.
Yeah. And like you were saying before, it was, it's like amazing that we've forgotten about her.
Oh, it's kind of astounding. She was an absolute star.
The concert halls and one newspaper wrote an article and I quote one of the articles, the young woman could not mistake the furor she created. She was, so she was described as the greatest woman violinist in the world and the girl of the golden bow and Of course the obsession with her willowy figure and pale complexion and feminine wilds continues Which is sort of I mean even the case today I suppose will people will go into describing a woman and what she's wearing what she looks like a bit more than a guy, this thing that's just pervaded and then there was Einar Bjornsson, always there in the background. The communications between them, himself and Kathleen, was sort of constant. He was always visiting and in her diary she was, you know, just abbreviating his name because it was so his feelings for the young woman were extreme and the money he borrowed from his father, he would never be able to repay. So he was sort of indebted his whole life because of this.
It must have been a little bit awkward explaining to his wife as well where the money has gone. Yeah, it's a big chunk of her dowry. I mean, even if he did tell her, maybe, you know, I don't know, maybe he didn't tell her. Maybe she, it was possible for him to do that. I'm not sure how the laws in Norway work. If, you know, sometimes in some countries, once you marry, your, your money becomes your husband's.
Basically, after the successful gramophone company recordings, she was really launched her career. She travelled all over. She travelled to, back to the United States, even though she's from Canada. She was regarded as a British artist, primarily because Canada was part of Britain, but then she made her success in the United States. And she was a very big success, so much so that the Columbia Record Company decided to offer her a recording contract. Now, there were two main companies in the United States. One of them was the Victor talking machine, which is essentially, that later became RCA Victor when it was bought by the Radio Corporation of America. But it originally started as the Victor talking machine. They had many, many big artists. They had people like Fritz Kreisler and Mischa Elman, and they also engaged a female violinist by the name of Maude Powell, who was an American born violinist. And so the Columbia Record Company decided that they should have their own roster of great instrumentalists, particularly violinists.
And so they signed up Eugene Ysaie, the great Belgian violinist, but at the same time they also signed up And I think, in a sense, that was to somehow put themselves in competition with the Victor Company. These two major record companies in the United States. So you had the Victor Company with Mischa Elman and Fritz Kreisler and their female star, Maude Powell. And then you have Columbia answering back with Eugenie Ysaie and their female star, Kathleen Parlow.
Yeah. So you have like we were saying, like all the relationships that you have to keep juggling as a musician. And I think what Kathleen Parlow had on top of that was this. This complicated relationship with Einar, her, her patron, who was, who it was, it's all a bit ambiguous what was going on there, but she also had that in the equation.
So it's not surprising that she had multiple breakdowns like she would just go for it and then, and crash. And she plays, I think Kreisler's tambourine chinois. And was that because there was sort of this, like this kind of fascination with the Orient at that time in the, in like the 1910s, 1920s?
Well, the origin of tambourine chinois, apparently according to Kreisler, but Kreisler always spun tall tales. He said that he was in a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco when the idea, the musical ideas of tambourine chinois came to, to being. So, but Kreisler always. You know, invented stories all the time. I mean, the thing is, it's a very playful, it's a very you know, fun piece of music. It's very bustling. So, hence, that's why probably Fritz Kreisler is associated with a busy Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, because it's very, very bustling in its character. But the middle section of Tamborine Chinois It's Act Viennese, so it's funny, because the middle section, when you hear it, it doesn't sound like anything to do with the Orient, or if anything, it sounds like the cafe, coffeehouses of Vienna.
Yeah, it'd probably be cancelled anyway today. Well, if they heard that story, it certainly would.
Then, she actually only does her first tour in America when she's 20. Kathleen, she continues with her endless touring and concert. Her money management was never great, although, you know, she's still, she's still earning quite a lot of money, and her mother and herself had, they had enough to live on, but never enough to be completely hassle free. And not that she wanted it, it seemed like she was sort of addicted to this life of the stage, and she once said when she was older that she thought maybe she had to get a job teaching, but she just couldn't do it. She played more than 375 concerts between 1908 and 1915 and, and you can believe it to get an idea.
So she's 19 year old's touring schedule. Here are the countries she played in in 1909. And you have to remember the concerts are nonstop every night, almost in different cities, but here are just, here are just some of the countries she travelled to in this year, in 1909. Germany, England, Poland, Netherlands, then she goes back to England, Ireland, Germany, England, the Netherlands, Norway, Wales, England again, Ireland again, England, Scotland, Poland. Man, I gave it, it was just, you know, huge. And in her diaries we can see that she’s, like, she's just a young woman, like, about town when she's in London, she takes trips to the theatre, and she talks about going to see Madame Butterfly, and she goes shopping, and she goes to tea with people she has like, appointments at the dressmaker for fittings for new dresses, and, and all of this is in between lessons, and rehearsals, and concerts. And her diary is just jam, she has these day books and they're just jam packed. Then Auer when he comes to London, her diary, it's like she has lessons with him. And you can see she's sort of excited, she's like hours arriving and then she'll see him and then she'll often have lunch with him and lessons and sometimes the lessons are at eight o'clock at night or, or 10am on a Saturday or at the middle of the night on a Monday. And she'll skip from him to rehearsals with her pianist from Carlton Keith. And she's lots of tea. She's going to tea a lot with a lot of different people. She's still only 19 here. So her popularity, it's like, it's far reaching and she's not just playing like classical music. She'll also play just popular pieces of the day. There's Kreisler's Tambourine Chinoise. And then she'll play, there's some of the recordings. They're these Irish, little Irish. Songs. So it was to appeal to the general public as well, her repertoires and her recordings. And then in 1910, she turns 20 and she has her first tour in North America. And then in 1911, the New York Herald declares her as one of the phenomena of the musical world on par with Mischa Elman. That must have been frustrating because for years she's in the same class as him and she knows him. And everyone just keeps comparing her to, she's like, Oh, she's almost as good as this guy.
But no, here they're saying she is as good as this guy. I could just, must've been a little bit frustrating. Then she makes an appearance with the Toronto Symphony in 1911 and she'll go back there many times. And in the next year, in 1912, she moved with her mother, who's still her mentor and manager and chaperone, to England, where they, they rent a house just out of Cambridge, you know, in the peaceful countryside away from the big cities. And in between her touring from here, she went, she goes to China, to the U. S., to Korea and Japan. And in Japan, she records with Nipponophone Company. She recorded quite just in a not much in a short space of time. She could have, she could have recorded more afterwards, because yeah, but she doesn't.
Then the news of the tragic sinking of the Titanic in April had Kathleen jumping on a streamliner herself to play a benefit concert in New York for the survivors of the disaster. And I've seen that booklet, and that you open the booklet, and there's like, life insurance. And then there's actually ads for another streamliner, and you're like, too soon, too soon, people don't want this. And then she plays, so on that same trip, she plays at the Met Opera. She plays Tchaikovsky's Serenade, Melancholique. And in New York, she signed up by Columbia Record, by the Columbia Record Company. And her first records for the US label are brought out alongside those of Eugene Ysaye. So she's alongside these, they all, they must've all known each other.
She was a contemporary and she just kind of slips off the radar. And as with all the recordings of the great violinists of the day, most of Paolow’s recordings on American Columbia were of popular songs and that, that would attract the general public. But the fact that most of these recordings were accompanied by an orchestra and not just piano highlights her status as a star.
So they had the, they got together an orchestra for her, so she's worthy of an orchestra. Still in 1912, Kathleen, she's 22 now and she's been traveling so much, she's, now it's happening, it's hitting her, she's exhausted and she has a kind of breakdown it'd probably be like a burnout and, which, it's amazing she's lasted this long, since, you know, age 5, 6, up to 22.
So she's both mentally and physically exhausted and her mother, acting as her agent, realizes that she needs to reduce some of her tours. She retreats to Meldreth, that's that house just outside of Cambridge that they have, that they've been renting. It's quite close to London, that little cottage that they have. They have easy access to London by train. And not only could they go easily to London, but traveling, traveling businessmen! From Norway! Could come to them! Easily. She continues with the concerts, one at Queen's Hall in London. So she has her little burnout, but then she's back again. Plays Schubert's Moment Musical around this time.
After they've rented this home for four years, they end up buying it. So she does have enough money to buy a house, so she is you know, not frittering away all her money. So this gives her some sort of stability. And it, even though it's a, it's still a very unusual existence for a young lady of the day.
So she's breaking a lot of stereotypes and this could end up being exhausting after a while. So it was nice for her to have a calm place to kick up her heels or fling off her corset. But no, she didn't, but willowy frame, she doesn't look like she's got a corset. I don't think you can play. Can you? Could you play that much? You know, you can't breathe. But, but, aren't there like old photos of, of lady violinists in corsets? I don't know how they do it. Like, you can't. Well, you had to do everything else in the corset. But you get kind of hot and sweaty and you're under the lights and it must have been exhausting. At least she was like lucky to have that pre Raphaelite fashion where she could be wearing, you know, the flowing sort of we're heading into the, the sort of the looser clothes in this era. But I think some people are still hanging on to corsets, but it's like the end of corsets and you're getting more loose clothing thankfully for her.
And according to letters Kathleen wrote to friends her and her mother, and they fell in love with the village life in Mildreth. Kathleen was able to relax and lead a normal life in between tours. And then in 1915, you have World War I hits, and her tours are less frequent. Her, her patron Einar, must have been having some lively fun. Dinner conversations with his family on opposing sides. So you've got, you know, with his, you know, fascist party, enthusiastic brother and his ex-prime minister brother in law and his theatre operating lefty brother and his Jewish wife and his Left wing satirical journalist sister, and her German husband, and then, and then his patriot father.
So Einar probably just wanted to run away to willowy Kathleen, and her stunning violin. But she remains in England for much of the war, and she does a few concerts locally. And her diary is quite blank until about 1916. And she uses, like, so she uses this time to relax. So ironically, she needed a war. To have a rest. That was the only thing slowing her down. She could, because she couldn't travel and tour. Now she's 26, but I feel like she's just, she’s lived so much already. It's incredible. So Meldreth was the happy place where she enjoyed their lovely garden and their croquet lawn and Miss Chamberlain from the Gables next door would come and play croquet and she could escape to another world, almost.
She'll go through periods of having these sort of breakdowns. I think she just pushes, there are some people like that. They'll push themselves; they just keep pushing themselves until they collapse. And I feel like she was one of, she looks like she didn't really pace herself. She just went, just hurtling into it. She just catapults herself into life and concerts and playing. In 1916, she returned to the US. She toured Norway and the Netherlands. For playing she was said to possess a sweet legato sound that made her seem to be playing with a nine foot and was admired for her effortless playing, hence her nickname, the girl with the nine foot bow.
So yeah, so she must have had this really kind of, it's hard to tell, you want to be there in the concert hall to hear her. I feel like the recordings don't do her justice.
A lot of Experiencing music and these pieces is actually going to a concert and it's the same today listening on a you know, at home, it's not the same as being in a concert hall and having that energy of the musician and the energy of the orchestra and the and the audience, it's very different dynamic. She recorded a few small pieces for Columbia records. And then that was, that was it. And we have no more recordings of her. And between 1917 and 1919, she wasn't able to tour outside England due to the war that was going on. And for the last 12 years, Einar Bjornsson had. He'd been this presence in her life, but now in the summer of 1920, he visited her one last time in London before sailing home for good.
So that. So it finishes at this time, so he was, he was married, he had children, he was also broke. Buying a horrendously expensive violin and giving it to a girl can do that to you. And Kathleen writes, Kathleen writes in her diary simply, E. B. Sailing home. Einar had to return to his family as soon as possible because he couldn't afford to divorce his wife. Elspeth Langdon, she was, she wasn't going to let him off that easily. And if he left, he would have had to repay the, the dowry, I imagine. Thank you. Thank you very much. As I said, there are just no letters of her correspondence. There's correspondence between her and everyone else, but not with them. So that still remains. But you can sort of see by circumstance what was kind of going on. And after the Great War, Kathleen Parlow, she resumed her career in full force. She gave several world tours traveling to the Middle East, to India, to China, to Korea and Japan. And she toured the States, Canada, Indonesia and the Philippines in that year and she played concerts in 56 different cities.
It was just non stop and in, and when I say 56 different cities, that's not 56, you know, concerts. That's like multiple concerts in each. City, night after night. And then in 1926, Kathleen and her mother, they leave England and they move to San Francisco. She takes a year off due to her mental health. So again, she's like, she's overdone it. The stress and basically, you know, a nervous breakdown and she's now in her mid thirties. But after having this year off, she's back onto it. She's back touring again. It's like this addiction, like you were saying, this is what, it's kind of like her, what makes her run. It's what, You know, keeps her going. But at this point she begins to slow down slightly and she starts teaching a bit. Starts teaching more and in 1929 she tours Mexico and she travels without her mother for the first time. Because her mother, Minnie, she would have been getting quite old and then Kathleen she's 39 now. So despite playing many concerts and receiving very high praise financially, she's barely kind of breaking even and she later told an interviewer that when things were very hard she and her mother had talked about her getting a job to ensure their security for the future but she just couldn't do it. And then, but then she did end up teaching at Mills College, Oakland, California. For from 1929 to 1936, but then her world tours continued and this is like, this is how she thrived, even though she would, you know, she'd crash and burn and from the exhaustion and, but then, you know, then she would go back.
She realized she had to teach to earn some money. And then she returned to Canada in 1941, where she remained until she remains there until she dies in 1963. She's offered a job at the Toronto College of Music and she begins making appearances with orchestras. She has a pianist, she has the, she creates the Parlow String Quartet, which was active for 15 years.
Even though this time was difficult financially for her, she would, she would never give up her violin. You know, she was struggling, just scraping by, but she, she would never give up her violin and so, I mean, it was a tricky situation. It was, it was a gift. Yeah. I mean, could you imagine? Like, she must've realized what Einar went through to give this to her and she can't, you know, she can't just be like, I'm going to sell it. So there's this sort of, it's like she's holding on to a bit of him really, like, by keeping it, if she, she gives that up. So she taught at the University of Toronto and on her wall was a large portrait of her teacher, Leopold Auer, whom she would always refer to as Papa Auer.
Now that she'd given up her career as a soloist, but she still remains very active in chamber music, concerto appearance. October of 1959, she was made head of the string department at the London College of Music in West Ontario, Canada. She never marries, and she dies in Oakville, Ontario, in 1963 at the age of 72.
She kept her Guarneri del Gesu until her dying day, and the instrument was sold with her estate. The Kathleen Parlow scholarship was set up with the proceeds from the sale of her violin and the money from her estate. So Kathleen Parlow was a somewhat extraordinary woman, ahead of her times in many ways, and her relationship with Einar, must have been pretty intense. And it was, there was obviously strong feelings there. And even though it's a very grey area, we don't know her love life contrasts with her, her brilliant career and her phenomenal touring and the, the energy that she had to do, it was. Exceptional she just does these brief recordings and then she does no more. And maybe, maybe that's why we've forgotten her.
Have the other, did the others go on to keep recording?
Well, they did. They certainly did. I think I'm surprised that Kathleen Parlow didn’t make more recordings. I really am. And I don't know what that's about. I can only speculate, but I think she also kind of retreated from concertizing, didn't she, in her twenties? So, I mean, you know, she did play as far afield as the, you know, she went to China, she went to Japan. She even made recordings for the Niponophone Company in the early twenties. So she was obviously still a great celebrity. But it's sort of puzzling how somebody who had all their ducks in place to make a superstar career.
You know, she had talent, she had beauty, she had interest. You know, from the public, so support from her teacher, all those elements would guarantee a superstar career. But it's so mysterious that she kind of fell off the radar. So much so that her name is completely forgotten today. Yeah, it's one of the big mysteries, but it's really quite remarkable that she was such a terrific violinist, even at the end. It wasn't that she lost her nerve or lost her playing ability. She obviously had it. So there are definitely other factors. that made her withdraw from public concertizing. And just her touring schedule is just exhausting. Like just the traveling.
Yeah, it's crazy. I mean, I mean, this is truly an example of burnout. Yeah. But, but then she would, she would have the crisis and then she'd be back on, she'd be back touring. Well, you know, she was pretty resilient. But I think just the sheer number of years, I think, must have taken its toll. I think she loved being in England, in Cambridgeshire.
I think those were some really happy years for her, to have a home and in a beautiful setting. But it really, it's a very complicated life and a life that really, one would want to try to understand in a deeper way. Yeah, and it seems a little nothing was ever very simple. Yeah, and she never, she never marries, she never has a family.
It's Yes. Her life is really And you'd imagine she'd have suitors, you know, send them off because, you know, she was a talented, beautiful woman. So she's got Misha Elman. He could, like, if you were a man, you could easily get married and then your wife would have children. But at that time, if you married, like, she had to choose between getting married and her career. You couldn't work if, like and it often, like, you weren't allowed to work.
Absolutely. Terrible. No, it's true. So she had this like, this threat, and that's all she could do. That was her life playing. And then if she married, that would be taken away from her. So she had to decide between, you know, a career and this.
It's kind of, it's a bit sad, but yeah, it's a huge choice that she made and she was married to life. Yeah. The sacrifice. One way or the other. Well, I think it's wonderful that she is being remembered through this Buddulph recordings release. And it's the first time there's ever been a recording completely devoted to her. So I'm really glad that. will be able to somehow restore her memory, just a little bit even.
Well, thank you for listening to this podcast. And I hope you enjoyed this story about the incredible Kathleen Parlow. If you liked the podcast, please rate it and review it wherever you listen to it. And I would really encourage you to keep listening to Kathleen Parlow's work. What you heard today were just excerpts from her songs.
So if you would like to listen to. The whole piece, Biddulph Recordings have released two CDs that you can listen to on Apple Music, Spotify or any other major streaming service. You can also buy the double CD of her recordings if you prefer the uncompressed version. Goodbye.
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Kathleen Parlow was one of the most outstanding violinists at the beginning of the 20th century.
In 1912, she was signed by the Columbia Record Company in New York, and her first records for the U.S. label were brought out alongside those of the legendary Eugene Ysaÿe.
Listen to her fascinating story and how she took the world by storm. From her devastating looks to the intrigue her priceless instrument created. You will hear rare recordings of this prodigious player as we retell her life and try to understand why such an incredible talent has been so forgotten today.
Brought to you by Biddulph recordings
TRANSCRIPT
Kathleen Parlow Part 1
Welcome to this very first episode of the Historical Strings Recording Podcast. A show that gives you a chance to hear rare and early recordings of great masters and their stories. Hello, my name is Linda Lespets. I'm a violin maker and restorer in Sydney, Australia, and I'm also the host of another podcast called ‘The Violin Chronicles’, a show about the lives of historically important violin makers and their instruments.
But today we have a different podcast and telling this incredible story with me is my co-host Eric Wen.
Hello, my name is Eric Wen, and I'm the producer at Biddulph Recordings, which is a label that focuses upon reissuing historic recordings, particularly those by famous string players of the past. I also teach at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where I've been for the past 24 years.
In this first episode, we will be looking at an incredibly talented violinist called Kathleen Parlow, who, in her time, took Europe and the world by storm, giving even Fritz Kreisler a run for his money in the popularity department.
She was described in the media as being ‘One of the phenomena of the musical world’ on par with Mischa Elman, or the ‘greatest lady violinist in the world’, and ‘the girl with the golden bow’. She was treated with superstar status wherever she went, which begs the question as to why she is so little known today?
Well, join us to discover her incredible story, the events of her career and her violin. A violin which would eventually financially ruin one man and divide his family. We will take a closer look at high hat kicking breakdancers, militant fascists, scandalous theatre directors, impossible love, a score ripping composer, and all this revolving around one of the world's most expensive violins and the incredible means one man went to get it into his hot little hands and then give it away.
This is the story of Kathleen Parlow.
And all of the pieces you will be hearing in this podcast are of Kathleen Parlow playing her violin.
Kathleen Parlow was born into a modest family in Calgary on the Canadian prairies in 1890. Her mother, Minnie, was a violinist. So, at a young age at four, she gave her daughter a violin and started teaching her. When she was six years old, the family, Kathleen, Minnie, and her father, Charlie, they moved to San Francisco where her talent was immediately recognized. And well, this is probably because of the, the mom. And she was having lessons with her cousin called Conrad Coward in San Francisco. Very soon, still aged six, she gave her first recital in San Francisco.
So is six, is six a reasonable age for a child to give a recital? What do you think? It's extremely young. In fact, that is truly prodigious. I mean, people don't even begin the violin till six and that's an early beginning of an instrument. Most people start around seven or eight, but to begin much earlier and to even be playing a concert at the age of six. That's really quite phenomenal.
So with her burgeoning talent, she now started having lessons with Henry Holmes, who was a pupil of Louis Spohr, the well-known German composer and violinist. And he's a conductor and who he's the man who apparently invented the chin rest. So where would we be without the chin rest, really? He's attributed with inventing it.
Well, Spohr was a fine violinist, German violinist. He was also a quite prominent composer. He was quite a conservative composer. So, I believe he wasn't that fond of the music of Beethoven. In other words, there were people like Spohr, Von Weber, and they represented a much more conservative branch of the sort of German composition. of the German composers. And basically, they looked upon Beethoven as such a wild revolutionary in his music, so daring that I think they were almost a little offended by it. So Spohr, if you could say, is primarily a kind of conservative, very well-schooled, excellent composer. He wrote many, many violin concertos, the most famous of which is No. 8 in A minor, which is written in the form of an operatic scene. Full of violin solo recitatives and arias for the violin.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that's interesting. So they were, there was like very shocked by Beethoven. They were, apparently. Was he a contemporary of Beethoven? Because I, because sometimes you go back pretty quickly, don't you? Like the teacher of the teacher of and all of a sudden you're in like the
Well, Spohr was born 14, he's 14 years younger than Beethoven.
Oh, okay. So, he was born in 1784, but he lived a lot longer. He lived over 20 years longer than Beethoven.
Oh, wow. And that's fascinating. So, Henry Holmes, Kathleen Parlow's teacher, was taught by this guy who would have known Beethoven?
Yes, absolutely.
And objected to Beethoven. Was shocked by his music.
Well, I mean, I think sort of the, you might say the more mature Beethoven or the more daring Beethoven. But I think, you know, I'm sure maybe some of Beethoven's early works were much more acceptable. They were more normative, so to speak.
Oh, okay. So Kathleen's in San Francisco and her parents’ marriage is breaking down. Her father, Charlie, moves back to Calgary where he dies of tuberculosis the year after. But Kathleen, she rockets on and is becoming more and more well known. Her new teacher sees real talent in the girl, and this teacher, Henry Holmes, he has contacts to make things happen. And he helps arrange a tour for her and playing engagements in England. So for this to happen, Kathleen's mum, she's, she's I'm getting stage mum vibes.
Yes.
Because she's still very, still very young.
Oh, yeah. I mean, I can't believe she wasn't playing with dolls.
And this would have been a conversation between Minnie, Kathleen's mum, and the teacher. It probably wouldn't have been a conversation with her as a child.
No, probably not.
You don't really choose much when you're six, seven.
No, that's true.
So the problem they have is that they have no money. So, so what do you do, Eric? You have no money, you have a prodigy.
You exploit the prodigy by having them play and make an income for you, which is something that happens unfortunately to many, many talented musicians coming from, you might say, less well-off families. They end up becoming the breadwinner. All their focus gets put upon these, these kids. And so not only do they have the added burden of playing and making sure they keep up They're playing well, but they also have the burden of making sure that they play well enough to make an income so that their families can survive. I mean, that's a very familiar story, and it's a story that has more failures than winners, I'm afraid, because you do hear about the winners. You do hear about the Misha Elmans or the Yasha. Well, Heifetz is a little different because he had a more middle-class family, but you do hear of Oskar Shumsky, for example, who I know I knew personally, he says, don't believe that these violence that you hear about having normal childhood behind every great violence, there's always a mama or a papa. And I think he himself endured that kind of pressure, the pressure to somehow become. The breadwinner, or let's say the some, the pressure to become a great violinist, primarily because he would serve as the breadwinner for the family. Well, if you think about it, you could say that. Violin playing in the early 20th century was very dominated by Russians, particularly Russian Jews. And one of the reasons for that was that in Russia, all the Jews were confined to an area known as the Pale of Settlement. In other words, a designated area that they could live in, but they could not leave that particular area. And basically, some very gifted young students could get into university or could go into a conservatory, and one of the big examples was Misha Elman, and Misha Elman, you might say left the Pale of Settlement to go study with Leopold Auer in St Petersburg. And they had to get all sorts of permission to do that. Well, the success of Misha Elman, the global success, the international success, I think resonated so well. with the people in the ghetto that they sort of saw, wow, this is one of our boys and look what he's done. He's now playing for the crowned heads of Europe. So I think for them, they felt this was a way out. And if you think about it, the film, Fiddler on the Roof, which is a famous musical and it was adapted as a famous film. And basically, that film, just the very title, talks about the Fiddler on the Roof. And the setting is in the Pale of Settlement, the Jewish ghetto in Russia. They're often subjected to random attacks by the Cossacks and all sorts of difficulties. But here, despite all that, you know they manage to survive. And of course the image of the Fiddler on the Roof. The violinist is exemplified, you might say, by Misha Elman, who literally grew up in the Russian ghetto.
Yeah, and Misha Elman, he'll, he'll become, he He'll become important in our story, yeah.
The money. This is not a problem. There is a wealthy admirer called Harriet Pullman, Carolan, in San Francisco. And she pays for Kathleen and her mother to take the trip to England. And in 1904, at the age of 14, Kathleen plays for King Edward VII at Buckingham Palace. And then in the next year in 1905, she and her mother, they come back to England. This tour marks the beginning of a life that she would lead for years to come of performing and playing. And so by the time she was 15, she was touring and playing with the London Symphony. And it was in a concert at the Wigmore Hall in London that she really shoots to fame. So is the Wigmore Hall, is that, is that still today an important place to play?
Oh, extremely so. It's funny because the Wigmore Hall was originally called the Bechstein Hall, and obviously during the wars, it became a much more the name was more neutralized to become less dramatic, and it became named after the street it's on, which is Wigmore Street. It was always a very important venue, but around the sort of 60s In the 70s it had declined a bit in its status because the South Bank had been built and so the Wigmore Hall was a little bit relegated to a sort of a little second class status. But in the past 20 years or so the Wigmore Hall has catapulted to fame again and it's today one of the most distinguished halls. In London.
All right. Okay. And this is, this is pre war. So it's, it would have been called?
Bechstein.
Okay. So it would have been called the Bechstein Hall when she played?
Probably. Oh yeah, definitely. So the Bechstein Hall was, I think first opened in 1901 and it was built by the piano manufacturers, the German manufacturers Bechstein, hence the name. And after the First World War, I believe it was changed to a more neutral sounding, less Germanic name, and it adopted the name of the street that it's currently on, which is Wigmore Street. Incidentally, the first concert at Wigmore Hall was actually performed, was a violin and piano recital, performed by Eugene Ysaye and Federico Busoni.
And then one night in London, Kathleen and her mother went to another concert of another child prodigy called Mischa Elman. And he was, so he's the fiddler on the roof guy, and he was almost exactly the same age as Kathleen. He was just a few months there's just a few months difference between them. And she, she hears him playing this concert and she's, she's just blown away. Blown away, and after the concert, she and her mother decide that Kathleen, she just has to go and have lessons from the same teacher as this, as this, as Mischa. So the only thing, only little thing about Mischa Elman's teacher is that he is in Russia. And as far as anyone knows, no foreigners study in the St. Petersburg Conservatorium, but that is about to change. Definitely no ladies. So, Kathleen and her mother had arrived in England with 300 raised by their church in San Francisco and this was, it just wasn't enough to get them to Russia and to the conservatorium where the famed Leopold Auer was a professor, but get there they would because Kathleen's mum, Minnie, still had a few tricks up her sleeve. She went and petitioned the Canadian High Commissioner. So she must have been, I feel like Minnie, she must have been very persuasive. Like there was nothing was getting in between, you know, her daughter and this career.
Forceful, a task to be reckoned with, certainly.
Yeah. She's like we'll get to England, we have no money. Not a problem. We're gonna, we're gonna get this teacher. He's in Russia. Not a problem. No foreigners. It, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't seem to be a problem for her, no girls. Not a problem. No foreigner has ever studied in this St. Petersburg conservatorium. Not daunted. They're off. They go. So to pay the cost travel, Minnie managed to get a loan from Lord Strathconia, the Canadian high commissioner. And from there, mother and daughter travelled to Russia. And in October of 1906, Kathleen becomes the first foreigner to attend the St. Petersburg Conservatorium. And in her class are 45 Students and she's the only girl. And we have to remember this is pre-revolutionary Russia. So there's still the Tsar Nicholas the second at this point. Yeah. She's mixing in, in that set. So it's an interesting place to be as a musician. Cause you're frequenting the sort of the upper classes but you can come from, from nothing and arrive there. Her professor was the famed teacher, Leopold Auer, who had a knack of discovering talent.
Leopold Auer was actually a Hungarian violinist, and he was trained in Vienna, and he also studied with Joachim. And what happened was Russia has always had a sort of love for the violin, and they employed many people to teach at the conservatory, because they really embraced Western culture. They had A number of important French violinists come, but their big, you might say, catch was to get Vieuxtemps, Henri Vieuxtemps, to teach for a number of years at, in St. Petersburg. And after Henry Vieuxtemps, they actually got Henry Wieniawski to teach at the conservatory. And when Wieniawski decided to go back to Europe, they employed Leopold Auer to take his place at St Petersburg.
Right. So he's up there with the big names.
Well, they were a little bit let down. I mean, that's what they were, I think, a little bit disappointed to replace Wieniawski with Leopold Auer because Wieniawski was such a major violinist. So he had initially a little rough time, but he was adored by Tchaikovsky and Tchaikovsky loved Auer's playing, dedicated a number of works for him, including the famous serenade melancholic, and wrote a lot number of ballet scores, which Leopold Auer played the solos for. But of course, they had a big rift when Tchaikovsky wrote his violin concerto for Auer, because Auer said it was unplayable. And that really hurt Tchaikovsky's feelings. And it laid dormant for several years before another Russian violinist. Brodsky took it up, learned it, and. Premiered it in Europe first, and only after its success in Europe did he bring it back to Russia, where it became a big success, and Auer felt very bad about that, and in fact, just before Tchaikovsky died, a few months before Tchaikovsky died, story has it that Auer went to Tchaikovsky and apologized to Tchaikovsky for his initial mistrust of the concerto. In fact, by that time, Auer himself had actually performed the concerto, championed it, and taught it to many of his students.
Yeah, and we'll see in this story how sensitive composers are, and how easy it is to hurt their feelings and really create. Like a lot of emotional turmoil. That's coming up. So Auer, like he might not have been their first choice for replacing, but he did have a knack of finding star pupils. That is something that we see, that I see in the conservatorium. Every now and then you have a teacher who's very talented at finding talent.
Absolutely. And I know in Australia you have one very distinguished teacher who I think now has been poached by the Menuhin School in, in England.
Yes. And we're not going to talk about that.
Yes, we won't. Because it's Must be a sore point. But we do see, we do see him every now and then when he comes back. So along with Elman and Efren Zimbalist, Parlow becomes one of Auer's star pupils and Auer was so taken with her playing that he often called her Elman in a skirt, which I think is supposed to be a compliment. And in Auer's biography, he writes, he says, “It was during this year that my first London pupil came to me, Kathleen Parlow, who has since become one of the first, if not the first, of women violinists”. And that, he says that in his biography, My Long Life in Music. So, Every year, Auer had a summer school in Kristiana, which is Oslo today. And Parlow spent her summers there and became a great favourite in Norway, which leads us to the next and perhaps one of the most marking events in her career and life.
At 17, having spent a year at the conservatory in Russia, Kathleen begins to put on public performances she gives solo performances in both St. Petersburg and Helsinki. So these are two places she knows quite well by now. And these concerts were, they were very important as Kathleen's mother really had no money to support them. And so, with but you know, Minnie doesn't bother her, she just ploughs on. And so with the money from these concerts this would have to tide her over. From letters that I've read, they were living in like this small apartment and then another friend writes, you know this other person, they've been saying you live in a tiny little place, but I'm not going to spread that rumor. And, and so it was a, it was a thing on the radar that they didn't have much money and they were scraping by and they were like frequenting people of much more wealthier than they were, so they were sort of on the fringes of society, but with her talent that was sort of pushing, people wanted to know her.
So she makes her professional debut in Berlin and then began, she begins a tour of Germany and the Netherlands and Norway. And in Norway, she performs for the King Hakon and Queen Maud. Of whom she'll become a favorite. And, and her touring schedule was phenomenal. It was just like nonstop. So, yeah. For a 17-year-old that's, you know, she's going all over the world. And you were saying that Auer knew . Do Tchaikovsky do you think Auer, was he was giving her these pieces that did, that influenced him? Yes. I mean, Tchaikovsky wrote a number of violin, solo violin works before the concerto, the most famous of which is, of course, the Waltz Scherzo and the Serenade Melancholique. One is a fast, virtuoso piece, the other is a slow, soulful piece. And I know that Auer was the dedicatee of certainly the Serenade Melancholique, which she did play.
So, so Auer's giving her stuff from, you know, his friend Tchaikovsky to play. Now she's 17 and she's touring to support herself and her mother and she has an amazing teacher who probably understands her circumstances all too well because Auer growing up also found himself in her position, supporting his father in his youth with his playing. So she's studying in St. Petersburg, which is an incredible feat in itself. So she must have had quite a strong character and her mother, Minnie, also appears to be very ambitious for her daughter. We're talking about her mother being ambitious, but for Kathleen to, you know, she's her daughter, she, she must've had quite a strong wheel as well.
Yes. Well, she certainly did. I wish we knew more about her because maybe she was very subservient, you know, we have no idea. Maybe she didn't have, I mean, it's a speculation, of course.
Yeah. We do have like hundreds of letters from Kathleen and there's a lot between her and Auer, and there's a real sort of paternal, he really sort of cared for her like a daughter almost and she looked up to him like a father and he was always very correct about it, you know, he would always write the letter to her. To Minnie, her mother the correspondents, it was, and it was always very, everything was very above board, but a very, they were very close.
Kathleen later says that after expenses, her Berlin debut netted her exactly 10 pounds. She didn't know it at the time, but this was an indication of what her future would be like, and she would be sort of financially in a precarious state most of her life, and she would so her routine was she studies with Auer every summer in order to prepare, like they were preparing her repertoire for the next season of touring.
So now she has a tour in 1908, so she's still 17, almost 18. It's in Norway, and to understand just a little bit of the political climate in the country, We can see that Norway, only three years earlier, had become independent of Sweden and had basically become its own country. So there's this this great sense of nationalism and pride in being Norwegian. And they have a newly minted king, King Hakon, who she's played for, and his queen, who was, He was in fact a Danish prince. And then when Norway, the Norwegian parliament asked him if he would like to become the king of Norway when they had their independence. And he said, why not? As part of this great sense of nationalism Norwegian musicians, composers, writers, and poets, they were celebrated and became superstars.
And, oh gosh, yes,
We can sort of understand. Poets have sort of dropped off the list, but back then poets, they were a big deal. So you add to this a young, fresh faced, talented Canadian girl who knows and understands their country. She arrives in Oslo to play in the National Theatre, where Norway's very own Johan Halvorsen who's conductor and composer and violinist, he's conducting the country's largest professional orchestra. And that night for Kathleen's concert, she plays Brahms and some of Halvorsen's compositions and the two, Kathleen Parloe and Halvorsen, they would go on to become quite good friends and Halvorsen regarded her very highly in saying, he said that her playing was superior almost to all the other famous soloists who made guest appearances in the city. So, I mean, a lot of people went through Oslo, so that was, you know, high praise. And Kathleen quickly Becomes a admirer of his and she would become a driving factor in him finishing his violin concerto that he'd been dithering over for a very long time. And this is Kathleen playing one of Halvorsen's compositions.
It's not his concerto, it's Mosaic No. 4.
So back to the theatre. And it was a magical night with the romantic music of Brahms to make you fall in love. And everyone did, just some more than others. And to finish off, there's music from their very own Johan Halvorsen to celebrate you know, a Norwegian talent. So Kathleen plays her heart out and when the concert ended, the crowd goes wild and the 17 year old soaks up the thunderous applause. She's holding on tight to her violin as she bows to adoring fans. Tonight she is the darling of Oslo. In the uproarious crowd stands a man unable to take his eyes off this young woman. Her playing has moved him and her talent is unbelievable. This man makes a decision that will change both their lives forever.
So, Einar Bjornsson had fallen head over heels for the 17 year old Canadian there and then. She would turn 18 in a few months. And in that moment, he decided to give her the most beautiful gift she would ever receive. So, who is Einar Bjornsson? So what we were saying, poets, poets are less of a, you know, a hot shot today, but Einar was the son of a very, very famous poet. A Norwegian businessman and son of one of the most prominent public figures of the day, Bjørnstan Bjørnsson. He was a poet, a dramatist, a novelist, a journalist, an editor, a public speaker, and a theatre director. Five years earlier, in 1903, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and one of his poems, called ‘Yes, We Love This Land’, was put to music and is the Norwegian national anthem up to this day. So, you could say he was kind of famous in these parts, and his personality alone would have easily filled. A concert hall, that one in Oslo. Einar's father here, we're talking about Einar's father, he's the poet. Einar himself doesn't appear to have written any poetry. And this, so this situation could have been just fine the whole infatuation, love at first sight thing, except for a few things that put a spanner in the works.
To begin with, Einar Björnsson is somewhat older than the youthful Kathleen he's 26 years older. Then her, in fact, and for a 17 year old, that is a big age gap. So he's 45, but that aside, there is a problem that he's also married and has two children. His daughter is actually almost the same age as Kathleen she's 16, but he doesn't really seem to see that. All he can see is this violinist and her talent. And he's been just, he's besotted and he's going to make a grand gesture. So obviously, one way to support the arts is to, what patrons do is they will buy, a lovely instrument and lend it to someone. So that's your normal affair. Obviously, one way to show his devotion to her is to find her a better violin. Hers is absolutely not good enough for someone of her talent. And he has to find her something amazing because she is amazing. He's determined to give her the most wonderful gift she has ever received. So he goes out and he's a businessman. And so he goes to his businessman contacts. And Kathleen would have spoken to her entourage. I imagine, and I now finally finds a violin worthy of Kathleen's virtuosity, and it happens to be one of the most expensive violins on the market in 1908, and it's a 1735 Giuseppe Guarneri Del Gesu violin.
It had previously belonged to great violinists such as Giovanni Battista Viotti and Pierre Baillot. So just to clarify in the violin making world Antonio Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù are the two top makers. If you're comparing two instruments, if one was owned by no one not anyone that you know. And then another one was owned by Viotti and Pierre Baillot . The one that's owned by Viotti and Pierre Baillot is probably going to be worth more. Yeah. So Viotti, he was just huge. He had a lot of instruments. I think he did a little bit of teaching and dealing on the side, Viotti. Like with the number of instruments named after him, or he just went through a lot of instruments. So she buys this violin, and it's not all smooth sailing to get the violin. Because she, there's this, there's a big correspondence between her and Auer, and we see that actually there's this letter where it says from Auer saying, I saw Hamming very cross. He says that the violin is compromised if he takes it back. So at one point, I think she may have changed her mind about this violin, but Hamming the dealer was not okay with this. All the I'm just trying to read his writing, it's not that easy. All the papers brought the news That Kathleen bought it so the newspapers have already, so the, you've got Hamming, that's annoyed, the papers have already said they've bought this violin and he could not, it says he could not sell it soon and repeat the sale, waiting till he finds something equal to the Guarneri.
He showed me a Strad, indeed wonderful, asking 60, 000 livres, which must be pounds, right? A nice fellow, isn't he? And now, goodbye, write to me. Love, Auer. They do end up getting the violin. They, they don't get the 60, 000 Strad that Hamming Gets all upset about and offers, which I think he might have been exaggerating the price just to make him calm down about and to keep the del Gesu.
Then Einar gives this to Kathleen. So this is a very kind of strange situation because normally you don't, you don't actually give, the patrons don't actually give their instrument to the
No, absolutely. That's a remarkable gift. Just in terms of, I mean, the gesture is very magnanimous, but in terms of financial, there's just a financial cost or value of the gift is quite enormous.
And so really after only knowing her for a month, Einar transfers this money into her account and she travels, Kathleen travels to Germany to the Hamming workshop and purchases her del Gesu violin for two thousand pounds and in today's money according to an inflation calculator, that is three hundred thousand pounds. Almost four hundred thousand US dollars. More than half a million Australian dollars, which at the time was a lot for a violin as well. So we're not I mean, I, today you'd be kind of happy to buy a Del Gesu for half a million, but then it was, it'd be a bargain. So, it's interesting this, like, he buys this, this young violinist this very expensive present and it's a, and it's a grey area and it's fraught with debate ethically, really. And I feel like today musicians find themselves sometimes in this position where they're sort of indebted to the, to a benefactor. It's almost feudal. I I feel cause at the same time you're very happy that they're lending it to you, but got to keep an eye on if it's a healthy relationship to. To get the money he had to get, you know, half a million pounds pretty quickly. If you remember, Ina's father was a very famous poet who'd won a Nobel Prize in literature and part of the prize is that you win a large sum of money. And so, what does Einar do? He goes and asks Dad. So he asks, he borrows, he borrows most of the money actually. Goodness knows how he convinced him, but you know, he's a businessman. And also for the remaining, he's married, remember, and he's married to, actually, to an heiress, and he takes a bunch of her, her dowry money and transfers this to essentially a teenager he met a month ago. The purchase of this incredibly expensive violin attracted, it attracted the attention of the press internationally, but journalists It's never really questioned the fact that this, this gift was given to a young woman by a, by an established family man. So everyone was just like, Oh, isn't it amazing? Because normally in this circumstance, people don't often give the instrument. You buy it as an investment and you'll lend it to someone. I think I've heard of like very few, very few cases of things being gifted, but actually normally your standard practice is to, to lend it to people. And most people playing on strads, that's, that's what it is, someone's lent it to them.
How would you feel about someone giving a 300, 000 instrument to your daughter, who's a teenager?
Well, I'd be, I mean, I'd just hate the sort of obligation that would involve, because On one hand, it is a very wonderful gift if it is a gift, but you almost expect that there is some expectation in return, don't you?
Yeah. It's like he's bought her almost.
Kind of.
So, Einar, as, as I mentioned, he's, he's from a well known Norwegian family. They're very patriotic. His father's writings really established a sense of pride and meaning to what it was to be Norwegian. And he was. Like his father was this beloved figure in the country and he was quite frankly a hard act to follow. But his children gave it a good shot. You have Einar was one of five children. His father Bjornstein Bjornsson was the poet and public figure. He worked in a theatre. His mother was an actress when he'd met her. Which is a little bit risque also for the time. So they're a bit more of sort of an acting bohemian theatre family. His older brother Bjorn Bjornsson, just to be complicated here, his brother's called Bjorn Bjornsson. And not to be confused with Bjornstein Bjornsson, his father. So he was a stage actor and a theatre director. Like his dad. He was a playwright and he was the first theatre director of the National Theatre. And that was the big theatre in Oslo where Kathleen played. He was also quite busy in his personal life, because his first wife was Jenny Bjornsson. I mean, another Bjornsson. Boarding house owner. So he married her for four years. So this is Einars older brother. He married her for four years, then he divorced her, then he married an opera singer.
Called Gina Oselio for 16 years, but then he, they, they got divorced, and then he married in 1909 Aileen Bendix, who was actually Jewish, and that's an important point, that she was Jewish, because at this time, things are kind of soon things will start heating up in Europe. And then he was, then there was Einar's younger brother called Erling Bjørnson, and he was a farmer and a politician for the Norwegian Far Right Party. So he was extreme right. Bit of a fascist. The other brother. So he was elected to the parliament of Norway and he was very active during World War II. So his two brothers have very, like, polarized opinions. Einar himself, he was a passive member of the far right party, but during the war years at that time that was the only party that people were allowed to be part of, so you can't, it's hard to tell his political leanings from that. Then he has a younger sister. Bergliot Bjornson, and she was a singer and a mezzo soprano, and she was married to a left wing politician Sigurd Ibsen, who was, he was the son of a playwright, and he becomes the Norwegian Prime Minister, so he plays a central role in Norway getting its independence. He met Einar's sister because he's a big patriot. Einar's father is a big patriot and that's how they were kind of family friends. It's not bad, you know, having your husband as the prime minister. Then he has another little sister called Dagny Bjornson and she was 19 when she marries a German publisher called Albert Langdon and so they're sort of like leftish as well. So Einar, he marries the sister of Albert Langdon. So they have this joint brother sister wedding. On the same day, the Bjornson brothers sisters marry the Langdon brothers sisters. But, the important thing to know is that the Langdons are very, very wealthy. They're orphans and they, they've inherited a lot of money. And so, but then Dagny, she ends up leaving her husband. Goes to Paris and works at another newspaper. And this is all in the, you know, the early 1900s. So she had this amazing life and then and then she marries another man, a French literate called Georges Sartreau well he comes also from a very wealthy family. Then you have Einar, who's a businessman, and he marries Elizabeth and they have two children, and his life is like not that remarkable. I think the most exciting thing he does is fall in love with Kathleen, I suppose, and sort of runs after her and her violin. From Kathleen's diaries, we can see the day after this concert in Oslo on the 10th of January, it's written 10th January, Mr Bjornson, 11;30am She meets with him the day after skiing and tobogganing with the Bjornsons. She has a concert the next day, but the day after that it's dinner with the Bjornsons, then another concert. And then she plays for the King. Then she goes to dinner with the Bjornsons. So this is just an excerpt from her diary for those weeks. And the next day, it's just Mr. Bjornson. That's just her meeting him not with the family. And maybe this is where he says, you know, I'll get you a violin. Maybe that was that meeting. And then on the 28th of February, she's in Germany and, and he's there. Einar is there. He goes to see her. Then on the 6th of March, she's in Amsterdam and in her diaries, you know, Mr Bjornson, he's there. He's kind of like, I don't know if this is creepy. He's following her around and then, and it's around about this time that he buys the violin for her. So she finishes her tour and she goes back to England and a month later in her diary, who rocks up? I know, he's there. In England, and she's still only 17 there. It's like he's kind of shadowing her a bit. Yes, it's that next level patronage.
And then there's the, the aesthetic at the time, the, the pre-Raphaelite willowy type woman, which she fits perfectly into. And Kathleen, if you, if you see Kathleen, it's kind of like. John William Waterhouse, his paintings. There's women in these long flowy robes with flowers in their hair and long willowy postures and, they're often like, you know, they're flopping about on something like a chair or there's this one holding this pot of basil. And there's that famous painting, The Lady of Shalott, where you've got this woman float, is she, is she dead? She's floating in the water with her hair and, and all this fabric and flowers and. In a promotional article, there was this quote from a review in the Evening Sun.
“Kathleen Parlow, tall, straight, slim, and swaying as the white birch sapling of her native Canada, but a spring vision, but a spring vision all in pink from her French heels to her fiddle chin rest and crowned with parted chestnut hair of a deeper auburn than any Stradivarius violin made an astonishing impression of masterful ease”.
I don't know if men were described like this, but they loved her. She's like a white birch.
Well she's very slender, she had beautiful long hair she was very thin, very fragile, and I think she sort of exemplified this pre Raphaelite beauty basically and that was so enchanting to have someone who was almost from another world playing the violin divinely. I think she must have cut an incredibly attractive image for the day. Absolutely. Yeah. And then she would have been like playing these like incredible romantic pieces.
It would be juxtaposed with her playing. Yeah. And yeah. Yes. So she was this real William Waterhouse figure with her violin. So she's lithe and willowy, and she has her touring schedule, which was phenomenal. She, so she tours England, Finland, Belgium, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Norway. Just to name a few. It just kind of stopped after that. It was just never ending. And you have to remember it's the beginning of the 20th century, and traveling, it's not like it is today. It was much more. Uncomfortable. I mean, it's incredible. You see one day she's in one country, the next day in another country. So this must have been quite fatiguing. And she's just playing night after night. Her mother, Minnie, she's her, she's, they're quite close. She's, and often like with these, with prodigies, often their parents. They're best friends, like they're the only constant in their life. So in the summers, she returns to Oslo every year for the summer school hour that's helping her for the next concerts. She spends quite a lot of time with Halverson, going to lunches and teas and rehearsals with him. You can see this in her diaries. But is this, is this kind of the life of a musician as well? Like you have to, you have to go to a lot of teas and lunches with people to please patrons and so on.
Yes, I think you do because musicians don't normally have much money and so to ingratiate themselves to patrons and sponsors they really had to coax them into help
Yeah, because she's living this life sort of beyond her means, going to the theater, going to concerts and things, and sort of a balancing act.
Back in Norway, and a week after she turns 18, there's an entry in her diary, play for Mr. Bjornson, and the next month her entries, they change slightly, and she'll now just call him E. B. For Einar Bjornson and the entries will say things like E. B. arriving and then often like a week later It's E. B. leaving and in her diaries, it's intermittently always though he'll be there for a week wherever she is often in England or and every few months He'll just pop up, you know in London in Germany in the Netherlands And he just always happens to be happens to be there and what's interesting is she has these hundreds of letters archived Of her writing to friends, to family, to her pianist. And it's really interesting that there's zero letters to Einar. There's no correspondence between them, which I think is maybe on purpose, they may be, they have to have been removed because she just writes letters to everyone, but we don't have these, any letters from them, so it just leaves things up to speculation.
This brings us to the end of part one in the story of Kathleen Parlow. I would encourage you to keep listening to the music of Kathleen. To do this, Biddulph Recordings have released two CDs that you can listen to on Apple Music, Spotify, or any other major streaming service. You can also buy the double CD of her recordings if you prefer the uncompressed version.
I hope you have enjoyed her story so far, but stick around for part two to find out what will happen with her career, the violin, the man who gave it to her, and the mystery behind a missing concerto that Kathleen would, in part, help solve after her death. Goodbye for now.
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Come and discover in this episode why your cello is the size it is!
We continue looking at the life of Francesco Rugeri and how his career intersected with other well known masters such as Guarneri and Stradivari.
The advent of wound strings will also play a part in piecing together the puzzle of how Francesco Rugeri was able to make smaller cellos 50 years before Stradivari even tried.
Transcript
Okay, so I'm here with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker. Hello and , this little segment is we're gonna give you a, the secret how to remember the difference between Francesco Rugeri and Giovanni Baptista Rogeri
Antoine Lespets
can you talk about your memo technique? I fun for remembering the difference between Rogeri and Rugeri
Yeah. I say memo technique, technique? or just a memo technique?
Oh, I thought, no, it's a memo technique because it's for memory, right? It's to remember. So memo technique.
Yeah. All right. So my memo technique to remember the difference between Rugeri and Rogeri. It's a very simple one. Um, I just think Rugeri with the U is rude because he stays in Cremona.
So he's, that's his, um, Rugeri is in Cremona and Rogeri, goes rogue with a O to, so he goes to Brescia, he leaves Cremona and he goes to Breescia. So Rogeri in Bresecia because he goes rogue and Rugeri in Cremona because, because he's, he's so rude. He never wants to leave Cremona. Yes.
Yeah. So it's not necessarily true, but the whole idea of a memo technique is just to remember.
Yeah. Don't worry if you're in Cremona, I've got nothing against you and you don't have to write there. And you can stay in Cremona like all you like. You might not be rude. Yeah. You don't have to. It's just a technique to remember. Rugeri or Rogeri. Thank you Antoine. You're welcome. Rogeri in Brescia, Rugeri in Cremona.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles. A podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting, violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Lutherie in Mirecourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often, when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture.
So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius, Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome to this episode on the life of Francesco Ruggeri. In previous episodes, we have looked at various families living in Cremona, in particular, the Amati family and their incredible craftsmanship, innovation, and influence on all things violin.
So many of the great makers were influenced by this family, and Ruggeri included. In this show, we will be looking at the life of this maker, Francesco Ruggeri, where he learnt to make instruments, how he fits into the story, and I will talk about something quite innovative Francesco did that today almost everyone will give the credit to Antonio Stradivari for.
Francesco returned to his workshop in San Bernardo after his wedding, and over the years, with his wife, they would have a large family. The very next year, 1653, their first son, Giovanni Battista, was born. The couple would go on to have at least six more children. In these same years, Nicola Amati, newly married, would also have children, and the two families would have known each other well, along with the Guarneri kids and the Gennaro children, all living in the same neighbourhood.
Niccolo Amati was even the godfather to one of Francesco's son, Giacinto. But in the following years after the weddings of Francesco Ruggeri and Andrea Guarneri, the Amati household has no record of any apprentices living with them, and yet the workshop was producing many instruments. Could Niccolo have had other makers such as Ruggeri and Guarneri working for him still during these years, even though they were no longer living with him?
E. Hill and Sons note. And I quote, “The unmistakable handiwork of Francesco Ruggeri can be found in certain of Niccolo Amati's works”. End quote. Francesco Ruggeri, working in his place in San Bernardo, could have been working for Niccolo, but also was building up his own clientele. His instruments definitely went at a cheaper rate to those of the Amatis, and his workmanship was less precise than that of his competitor. But he was able to run a successful business and he found himself experimenting with models and in particular bass instruments. And here is where Ruggeri was doing something a little bit different.Jason Price. That's probably his most lasting contribution is, uh, are the really excellent cellos that he made, which are of modern usable size.
Linda Lespets
Yes. Because often when people talk about the modern cello, they'll say it's Stradivari. They'll say, oh, he's, he's B model, but, um, but actually he was inspired by Ruggieri.
Jason Price
You're totally right. You're totally right. I mean, it was all, I'm sure it was all happening sort of organically and without exact, you know, influence and stuff. But, uh, You know, monster basettos that people are making and they work and so he made a lot of them that yeah, Ruggieri figured it out sooner. And a lot of this, you know, has to do, had to do with, um, obviously what clients wanted, that there's a reason why he was making them small because people wanted them. But it also has to do with string technology. And, you know, this is the end of the 17th century is when people first started wrapping strings in metal, the lower strings, and that, that lets you have a, an instrument which is functional at a much smaller body size, and I'm sure that's one of the factors that was going on here that, that led to his making smaller cellos. You could have that lowest string not be, you know, the width of a pencil. Because, and not super floppy, because you could reinforce it with metal.
Linda Lespets
Now you see, musicians playing on a bass instrument often had to manoeuvre around large bulky basses with wide gut strings. The instrument's response was, Often slow, and so it was difficult to play fast paced compositions and were mostly relegated to simpler bass parts. But in the last few years, a new technology had changed things. Large gut strings were beginning to be wound with metals which gave them more tension, and this meant that the instrument did not have to be so long and wide. to accommodate the strings that would play the same note. This new string technology is really pivotal in the story of the cello and one of the reasons for its success as an instrument and Ruggeri's renown, and perhaps even his motivation in making this instrument.
I asked Dan Larson from Gamut Strings about the history of strings and why they are so important in determining the size and playability of an instrument.
My name is Dan Larson and I run a business called Gamut Music Incorporated. And I'm a trained violin maker. I also make Baroque guitars and lutes of the Baroque and the Renaissance variety, and I have a workshop in Duluth, Minnesota that makes musical strings, or gut strings, for musical instruments.
The 17th century actually is a very exciting time for many, many things. There was a burgeoning market for everything at that time. There was a lot of technology being brought to the world in many ways, and there was a lot of people beginning to experiment with things. And that was back in the day when a guy could get an idea, and he could make something, he could invent something, and he could, uh, recognize a new, law of nature, and that's just what educated people did back in those days in the 17th century.
Up until the mid 17th century, when you had strings, You had only one choice of string material, and that was gut. There was, sheep gut was used, there was beef gut that was used, there were some other, allegedly, some different animals that were used for gut. But primarily it was sheep gut, and secondarily it was beef gut. Those were the two primary materials that were used. Largely because that was the material that was available. People at that time ate a lot of sheep. And not so many cattle, but they had a certain number of cattle that they had with slaughter for various reasons. So, the only choice that they had for strings was gut. String making in itself was a whole industry and in 1656, just a few years after Ruggeri married, Paris had its first guild of Boyadieu. That's the French word for gut string makers. Their workshops were near the slaughterhouse in the Faubourg Saint Martin.
Dan Larson.
What were the main, uh, places that strings came from?
Were, there sort of string making centres or did people make strings everywhere? Would musicians make their own strings?
No, they wouldn't. It was too complicated a system and the material was very carefully controlled by the people that made strings. Strings tended to be made in centres. And they were geographical areas were, were primarily designated as certain areas where strings were made. And, and it was usually in large population areas where a lot of animals were killed because the, the animals would be the source of the material to make the strings. So, he ended up with a lot of string making in Paris, for instance, uh, Lyon. There was an enormous and tremendous development of string making in Markneukirchen in Germany, in the Saxon region there. And they, had an international industry where they would gather gut from all over the eastern Europe and bring it into the city to be processed into gut. The gut string making was an international business. It was an international concern. The transporting of the material was very specialized, so it wouldn't, uh, it wouldn't go bad in transit. And preserving it was a very specific thing that had, they had to develop different ways of carrying it to preserve it, so it wouldn't go bad.
And how, sorry, how did they do, how did they do it? How did they carry it without it going off? Uh, they made these special boxes. And, uh, they were just big thick boxes that would protect the, the strings from not, not only the cull, but from animals because the, the little critters like to get into it. I think the biggest, the biggest threat to transporting gut was the, was the critters that would want to get into it. A lot more than the cold and thing, but it was usually, they were usually transmitted dry. Right. Okay. So they were transported dry. So they would, in the source where they were taken, the gut would have been dried out and then put in these containers and the containers were, I don't know if they were just particularly heavy or they were reinforced with metal or something, but they would, they would be very heavy.
Okay. uh, specifically made to resist the influence of the, of the animals that wanted to get in and eat the gut. Right, right. There's also different traditions. The German tradition is very different than the, the Italian tradition, which is very different than the French tradition. And the French and the, and the Italians tended to use more fresh gut, where they would take the, the gut from the animal and turn it into a string pretty much immediately. The Germans had this process of drying the gut so they could transport the gut over great distances, and then they could also make the gut into strings at their leisure, which was, uh, just suited them better. Right. It was, uh, an international industry. It was a very sophisticated industry, as it continues to be even today. And it varied from one country to another. Every, each country had their own particular ways of going about it and, and therefore the result of the different strings had, uh, different reputations. You know, the, strings from Italy had a reputation. for really good top strings, and the French had a really good reputation for lower strings, and the Germans had a really good reputation for inexpensive strings, and you know, just everybody had their own little niche that they worked into the market.
If you were a string maker, where did that put you in, uh, was that a sort of a sort of a lower class thing or were you a proud craftsman? Do you know what their position in society would have been?
Oh, the, the string makers were the richest men in town. They were quite prosperous in Markneukirchen and literally the richest people in town were the people that owned the string making factories.
Emily Brayshaw
It's really interesting that you talk about this idea of the wire wrapped around the gut to make strings because that has long been, by this time, a technique that is used Um, in textile production, in that you would have like a thread and literally wind gold or silver wire around it. And that's how you get gold and silver embroidery thread.
And um, depending on the thickness of that, you can get like Super fine for embroidery or you, and, and weaving, or you can perhaps get thicker for fringing and things like that. Part of me wonders, and maybe somebody out there will have the answer, whether, you know, these textile techniques influenced this technique of string making.
Was that everywhere that we're using this around? Everywhere. Everywhere.
Yeah. Yeah. So you had this mixing of technologies and Cremona is a city, you know, bursting with textiles. Yeah, it could well be. I mean, it, there's so much overlap and, you know, we remember, remember as well, like it's a small place. It's by the end of the plague, it's 17, 000 people. Everybody has to know everybody else. You know, everybody knows everybody else. Mm right. That's kind of how these places work. So you do get these kind of pots of ideas too, you know, that that are happening. And I think this is really sort of a fascinating thing,
Dan Larsen
So the only choice that they had for strings was gut. That works well if you have an instrument that has only one string. It works really, really well. When you have an instrument that has more than one string, you have to start playing around with the design of the string, because you have strings that have to have different pitches. So, you have to figure out how to get the different pitches. And more importantly, you have to figure out what size the instrument needs to be to get the pitches of the playing gut strings to work as efficiently as possible. And they developed some science around that. There were various people that were instrumental.
Mersenne, for instance, developed a series of laws about gut strings and how it should work and how the strings should be calculated so they would have this the same amount of tension based on a given length. You could have a six stringed instrument and all the strings would have the same amount of tension, but they would be at the different pitches that they were supposed to be. So he developed a whole A whole system of laws and rules, uh, to govern those things. Uh, Galileo's father was very much into figuring out strings, and in fact, Galileo's, one of his first experiences in science was to help his dad make strings. tests the strings. He had this sort of setup where they would hang a hook on a string and then hang a weight on it and then change the lengths and they would figure out what the pitch of the string would be given different weights on it and different masses and different, uh, tensions and so forth. So there was a lot of that going on. They were trying to figure out how strings worked and how they could bring the design into it. That works all right. It works fine. But it does mean that you end up with some, with some very thick strings on the bottom, because the instrument has to be, it has to be scaled such that you can get the first string up to the pitch that you want the first string to be. So it's really the first string of the instrument that dictates the size of the instrument, and that's why we get You know, that's why the violin is the size of a violin, isn't it, the size of a cello is the size of a cello is, and so on and so forth.
It is also around this time that the first references to The gut strings were generally wrapped in silver, but also in copper and brass. Thanks to these strings, makers such as Rugeri could make smaller cellos for musicians, and that was just what he did. Not only could you buy yourself a more manoeuvrable instrument, but composers, especially such places as Bologna and Naples, had composers writing music for the cello.
Jason Price.
I made a, a nickel harper once, which is like a Swedish violin. Cool. Often people will put cello strings on them. And that's when you see that it's not ideal. Like really the, uh, Savarez, you could say, I want this length and I want this note for this length and they make the perfect string and it sounded so much better.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. It is funny to think of what this. You know, string industry looked like in the, in the 17th century. I mean, obviously you didn't just go on Amazon and get some strings delivered to your house. You know, you probably, I'm sure it was butchers out the front door and then fishing line and violin strings out the back.
Yeah. It's kind of funny. And in your, an article you wrote that's in the, I was, I'm going to say Cossio Archive, but that's not right. It's the Tarizio. You were talking about, uh, composers in the second half of the 1600s. There were people actually writing specifically for cello. Yeah. That's really when the cello became, uh, considered as a solo instrument at the end of that 17th century and early 18th century. And that's when you see Gabrielli start writing for these really, like, complicated, uh, lines for solo cello, and then obviously Boccherini did it. 30, 40 years later. And, um, yeah, that's obviously the makers had to, had to step up their game and make instruments that could handle that for sure. Yeah. It's like, I feel like it's a chicken or the egg.
I'm like, Oh, they're writing for solo cello. And yes. And is that because then they did, they make smaller violin cellos or they discovered that they have these smaller good sound like cellos that were responsive. Cause they have to be. Quite responsive to write more virtuously music for. Yeah, absolutely. A chicken and egg, but like a four part chicken and egg with like musician, composer, instruments, string. Um, I imagine there were a lot of factors that were sort of, yeah, all coming together and, and, uh, it didn't all happen at once, but that's, that's the period in which. In which cellos became smaller because musicians wanted them to be smaller.
Dan Larsen.
The instrument has to be, it has to be scaled such that you can get the first string up to the pitch that you want the first string to be. So it's really the first string of the instrument that dictates the size of the instrument. You know, that's why the violin is the size of the violin, as in the size of the cello is, and so on and so forth. And then when you have the, when you have established the string length based on the pitch of the top string, then you have to figure out what the other strings are going to be, because theoretically you should change the length of those, like on a harpsichord. You can use, you could use the same diameter of string, the same type of string, just make it longer, and you would get the different pitches, and it would It would sound good and it would work well, but on a fixed length instrument like a violin or a cello, you can't do that. You can't have multiple lengths of strings. So they had to develop a system that became known as foreshortening. So they would change the mass of the string. Which would allow them to put, make the string shorter, and maintain the tension that the instrument needed to be, the string needed to have on it to sound properly. Because they had only one material, the only thing they could do was to add more gut and make the strings thicker. to add mass to the string for the lower strings to get the tension that they required on it. And that, that works fine. They, there were different types of strings that they developed with, with different twisting technologies that would, uh, the string would be flexible enough to, to play at those relatively low tensions at the, the thicknesses that they were, that they needed and so forth. But, the end result wasn't 100 percent satisfactory for them.
Sorry, are you saying that, um, so for Andrea Amati, for example, when he made his violin, which is sort of what we go on today, he, he had to already have had the strings were already like developed and he made it, he had to make it so that it could accommodate those strings.
Exactly. Yeah. Ah, so the strings come before the violin. Oh, the strings come before the violin, yeah. The strings come before everything. Do you think he would have, um, used, they would have used, say, lute strings? Would they have been the best strings then? Like, if you were a maker in the 16th century, what would you have taken?
I think the string makers at the time were making strings for everything. The violin was a very popular instrument. Okay. And there were string makers that made strings specifically for the violin, and I think that most of the string shops probably made strings for lutes and strings for violins. Some, some of the string gauges would double over and be useful on, on, on both, but not so many because the violin had tended to have a lot more tension than the lute does.
Yeah. And would he have gone and said, I'm making an instrument this size, can you make me a string to fit it? And the string makers would have gone, okay, yeah, all right.
Sure, sure. And they would have had standard sizes that they were using. Okay. You know, he would just say, I need, I need, uh, you know, five violin E strings and six A strings and two D strings and, and 18 G strings.
And that's, they would have said, okay, but that's what we'll get for you. So anyway, the, concept of the fact that there was only one string material is really important in understanding the development of the instruments and the size, especially the sizing of the instruments. Uh, that's, really important to understand that they were limited by this material. And on the other hand, they were sort of fortunate enough to have only one material. It made things a little simpler in many ways. You know, there weren't that many options for sizing. If they were sticking to that one principle of the, well, in the lute world, when they talked about tuning an instrument, they would say, tune the top string to the point where just before it breaks, which is always a fun thing to know. If it breaks, okay, you went a little bit too far. You shouldn't have gone that far. It's like trying to prove a negative. You can't always do that so easily. The violin strings tended to be bigger and heavier anyway, so they probably didn't have so much of a problem with that. But in the 17th century, in the mid 1600s, something happened, and we don't know exactly where. I suspect it happened in France. There was a popular book written by John Playford. It came out in 1664 with the addition that has this article that specifies a new type of string that was available for violins. It says specifically that it has silver wire and the wire was twisted or gimped onto silk or gut to make this string and this string was specifically used for the violin G string. And of course, this string is, has marvellous properties and is the most wonderful string ever invented by man and so forth, as, as most salesmen would say. And, uh. The best string in the world. In a good unregulated market, you know.
I love how, um, a lot of some string brands will like have these claims for it being the best, you know, the best E string in the world. Oh, sure. That one's actually made in Australia. I have the packet. I have the best E string in the world. Yes. From about, it's about 100 years old.
Yeah, they're, they're, well, I guess if you stop and think about it, if you, if you're not going to make something the best in the world, why do you even bother?
What's the point?
You never, no one ever says, this is the best. Third, but maybe, maybe fourth, the third or fourth best thing in the world. You know, it never happens that way. There was this new type of string that came available that was advertised in 1664. So that indicates to me that this technology had been developing for quite some time before that. Nothing ever comes out. Nobody ever invents something and then advertises it the next day. That's just not the way things work. So probably by the 1630s or 1640s there was this experimentation of combining the wire With and with the string material.
This brings us to the end of this second episode of Francesco Rugeri, a man who lived with the times embracing new technologies and innovating his instrument. Cello players everywhere can be a little bit thankful to him and his influence on other makers in perfecting this instrument. That incredible cello playing you've heard throughout the episode is by Timo Viekko Valve from the Australian Chamber Orchestra, playing on his wonderful Amati Brothers cello made in 1616.
If you would like to hear the fascinating sound Story of his cello and the man who made it. You can go back and listen to episodes nine and 10 about the Ammar Brothers and this cello in particular, but the story of Ruggeri is not over for now. I'll say goodbye and I hope you will join me for the next episode of the Violin Chronicles.
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Francesco Rugeri; this Cremonese violin maker often mistaken for Giovanni Battista Rogeri, another Cremonese trained violin maker living at the same time, made many fine instruments and is especially well known for his cellos and his innovation of the instrument. Join me as I delve into the life of violin makers in Cremona after the Amati's and before the Guarneri families, this is the age of the Rugeris'.
This is the story of Giovanni Battista Rogeri the Cremonese trained violin maker who made it big in Brescia and has since been confused with other makers throughout history. Florian Leonhard talks about the influences Rogeri pulled on and exactly why his instruments have for so long been attributed to Giovanni Paolo Maggini.
Transcript
Far, far away in a place called Silene, in what is now modern-day Libya, there was a town that was plagued by an evil venom spewing dragon, who skulked in the nearby lake, wreaking havoc on the local population. To prevent this dragon from inflicting its wrath upon the people of Silene, the leaders of the town offered the beast two sheep every day in an attempt to ward off its reptilian mood swings.
But when this was not enough, they started feeding the scaly creature a sheep and a man. Finally, they would offer the children and the youths of the town to the insatiable beast, the unlucky victims being chosen by lottery. As you can imagine, this was not a long term sustainable option. But then, one day, the dreaded lot fell to the king's daughter. The king was devastated and offered all his gold and silver, if only they would spare his beloved daughter. The people refused, and so the next morning at dawn, the princess approached the dragon's lair by the lake, dressed as a bride to be sacrificed to the hungry animal. It just so happened that a knight who went by the name of St George was passing by at that very moment and happened upon the lovely princess out for a morning stroll. Or so he thought. But when it was explained to him by the girl that she was in fact about to become someone else's breakfast and could he please move on and mind his own business he was outraged on her behalf and refused to leave her side. Either she was slightly unhinged and shouldn't be swanning about lakes so early in the morning all by herself, or at least with only a sheep for protection, or she was in grave danger and definitely needed saving. No sooner had Saint George and the princess had this conversation than they were interrupted by a terrifying roar as the dragon burst forth from the water, heading straight towards the girl. Being the nimble little thing she was, the princess dodged the sharp claws. As she was zigzagging away from danger, George stopped to make the sign of the cross and charged the gigantic lizard, thrusting Ascalon, that was the name of his sword, yep he named it, into the four legged menace and severely wounded the beast. George called to the princess to throw him her girdle, That's a belt type thing, and put it around the dragon's neck. From then on, wherever the young lady walked, the dragon followed like a meek beast. Back to the city of Silene went George, the princess, and the dragon, where the animal proceeded to terrify the people.
George offered to kill the dragon if they consented to becoming Christian. George is sounding a little bit pushy, I know. But the people readily agreed and 15, 000 men were baptized, including the king. St. George killed the dragon, slicing off its head with his trusty sword, Ascalon, and it was carried out of the city on four ox carts. The king built a church to the Blessed Virgin Mary and St. George on the site where the dragon was slain and a spring flowed from its altar with water that it is said would cure all diseases.
This is the story of Saint George and the Princess. It is a classic story of good versus evil, and of disease healing miracles that would have spoken to the inhabitants of 17th century Brescia. The scene depicting Saint George and the Princess is painted in stunning artwork by Antonio Cicognata and was mounted on the wall of the Church of San Giorgio. Giovanni Battista Rogeri gazed up at this painting as family and friends, mainly of his bride Laura Testini, crowded into the church of San Giorgio for his wedding. Giovanni was 22 and his soon to be wife, 21, as they spoke their vows in the new city he called home. He hoped to make his career in this town making instruments for the art loving Brescians, evidence of which could be seen in the wonderful artworks in such places as this small church. Rogeri would live for the next 20 years in the parish of San Giorgio. The very same George astride an impressive white stallion in shining armour, his head surrounded by a golden halo. He is spearing the dragon whilst the princess calmly watches on clad in jewels with long red flowing robes in the latest fashion. In the background is the city of Brescia itself, reminding the viewer to remember that here in their city they too must fight evil and pray for healing from disease ever present in the lives of the 17th century Brescians.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius. Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery, that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome to this first episode on the life of Giovanni Battista Rogeri. After having spent the last few episodes looking at the life of the Ruggeri family, we will now dive into the life of that guy who almost has the same name, but whose work and contribution to violin making, you will see, is very different. And we will also look at just why, for so many years, his work has been attributed erroneously to another Brescian maker.
The year was 1642, and over the Atlantic, New York was called New Amsterdam. The Dutch and the English were having scuffles over who got what. Was it New England? New Netherlands? In England, things were definitely heating up, and in 1642, a civil war was in the process of breaking out. On one side there were the parliamentarians, including Oliver Cromwell, and on the other side were the Royalists, who were the supporters of King Charles I. This war would rage on for the next 20 years, and not that anyone in England at this time really cared, but the same year that this war broke out, a baby called Giovanni Battista Rogeri was born in Bologna, perhaps, and for the next 20 years he grew up in this city ruled by the Popes of Italy. He too would witness firsthand wars that swept through his hometown. He would avoid dying of the dreaded plague, sidestep any suspicion by the Catholic church in this enthusiastic time of counter reformation by being decidedly non Protestant. And from an early age, he would have been bathed in the works of the Renaissance and now entering churches being constructed in the Baroque style.
Bologna was a city flourishing in the arts, music and culture, with one of the oldest universities in the country. But for the young Giovanni Battista Rogeri, to learn the trade of lutai, or violin maker, the place he needed to be was, in fact, 155. 9 km northwest of where he was right now. And if he took the A1, well, today it's called the A1, and it's an ancient Roman road so I'm assuming it's the same one, he could walk it in a few days. Destination Cremona, and more precisely, the workshop of Niccolo Amati. An instrument maker of such renown, it is said that his grandfather, Andrea Amati, made some of the first violins and had royal orders from the French king himself. To be the apprentice of such a man was a grand thing indeed.
So we are in the mid 1600s and people are embracing the Baroque aesthetic along with supercharged architecture and paintings full of movement, colour and expression. There is fashion, and how the wealthy clients who would buy instruments in Cremona dressed was also influenced by this movement.
Emily Brayshaw.
You've got these ideas of exaggeration of forms and you can exaggerate the human body with, you know, things like high heels and wigs and ribbons and laces. And you've got a little bit of gender bending happening, men wearing makeup and styles in the courts. You know, you've got dress and accessories challenging the concept of what's natural, how art can compete with that and even triumph over the natural perhaps. You've got gloves trimmed with lace as well. Again, we've got a lot of lace coming through so cravats beauty spot as well coming through. You've got the powder face, the, the wig. Yeah. The makeup, the high heels. Okay. That's now. I actually found a lovely source, an Italian tailor from Bergamo during the Baroque era. The Italians like really had incredibly little tailors and tailoring techniques. And during this sort of Baroque era. He grumbles that since the French came to Italy not to cut but to ruin cloth in order to make fashionable clothes, it's neither possible to do our work well nor are our good rules respected anymore. We have completely lost the right to practice our craft. Nowadays though who disgracefully ruin our art and practice it worse than us are considered the most valuable and fashionable tailors.
So we've got like this real sort of shift. You know, from Italian tailoring to sort of French and English tailoring as well.
And they're not happy about it.
No, they are not happy about it. And this idea that I was talking about before, we've got a lovely quote from an Italian fashion commentator sort of around the mid 17th century. His name's Lam Pugnani, and he mentions the two main fashions. meaning French and Spanish, the two powers that were ruling the Italian peninsula and gradually building their global colonial empires. And he says, “the two main fashions that we have just recorded when we mentioned Spanish and French fashion, enable me to notice strangeness, if not a madness residing in Italian brains, that without any reason to fall in love so greatly Or better, naturalize themselves with one of these two nations and forget that they are Italian. I often hear of ladies who come from France, where the beauty spot is in use not only for women, but also for men, especially young ones, so much so that their faces often appear with a strange fiction darkened and disturbed, not by beauty spots, but rather by big and ridiculous ones, or so it seems somebody who is not used to watching similar mode art”.
So, you know, we've got people commentating and grumbling about these influences of Spain and France on Italian fashion and what it means to be Italian. When we sort of think about working people, like there's this trope in movie costuming of like peasant brown, you know, and sort of ordinary, you know, people, perhaps ordinary workers, you know, they weren't necessarily dressed. In brown, there are so many different shades of blue. You know, you get these really lovely palettes of like blues, and shades of blue, and yellows, and burgundies, and reds, as well as of course browns, and creams, and these sorts of palettes. So yeah, they're quite lovely.
And I'm imagining even if you didn't have a lot of money, there's, I know there's a lot of flowers and roots and barks that you can, you can dye yourself. Yeah, definitely. And people did, people did. I can imagine if I was living back there and we, you know, we're like, Oh, I just, I want this blue skirt. And you'd go out and you'd get the blue skirt. The flowers you needed and yeah, definitely. And people would, or, you know, you can sort of, you know, like beetroot dyes and things like that. I mean, and it would fade, but then you can just like, you know, quickly dye it again. Yeah, or you do all sorts of things, you know, and really sort of inject colour and, people were also, you know, people were clean. To, you know, people did the best they could keep themselves clean, keep their homes clean. You know, we were talking about boiling linens to keep things fresh and get rid of things like fleas and lice. And people also used fur a lot in fashion. And you'd often like, you know, of course you'd get the wealthy people using the high end furs, but sometimes people would, you know, use cat fur in Holland, for example, people would trim their fur. Their garments and lined their garments with cat fur. Why not? Because, you know, that's sort of what they could afford. It was there. Yeah, people also would wear numerous layers of clothing as well because the heating wasn't always so great. Yeah. You know, at certain times of the year as well. So the more layers you had, the better. The more, the more warm and snug you could be. As do we in Sydney. Indeed. Indeed. Canadians complain of the biting cold here. I know. And it's like, dude, you've got to lay about us. It's a humid cold. It's awful. It's horrible. It just goes through everything. Anyway. It's awful. Yeah.
So at the age of 19, Giovanni Battista Rogeri finds himself living in the lively and somewhat crowded household of Niccolo Amati. The master is in his early 60s and Giovanni Battista Rogeri also finds himself in the workshop alongside Niccolo Amati's son Girolamo II Amati, who is about 13 or 14 at this time. Cremona is a busy place, a city bursting with artisans and merchants.
The Amati Workshop is definitely the place to be to learn the craft, but it soon becomes clear as Giovanni Battista Rogeri looks around himself in the streets that, thanks to Nicolo Amati, Cremona does indeed have many violin makers, and although he has had a good few years in the Amati Workshop, Learning and taking the young Girolamo II Amati the second under his wing more and more as his father is occupied with other matters. He feels that his best chances of making a go of it would be better if he moved on and left Cremona and her violin makers. There was Girolamo II Amati who would take over his father's business. There were the Guarneri's around the corner. There was that very ambitious Antonio Stradivari who was definitely going to make a name for himself. And then there were the Rugeri family, Francesco Rugeri and Vincenzo Rugeri whose name was so familiar to his, people were often asking if they were related. No, it was time to move on, and he knew the place he was headed.
Emily Brayshaw.
So, you've also got, like, a lot of artisans moving to Brescia as well, following the Venetian ban on foreign Fustian sold in the territory. So Fustian is, like, a blend of various things. Stiff cotton that's used in padding. So if you sort of think of, for example someone like Henry VIII, right? I can't guarantee that his shoulder pads back in the Renaissance were from Venetian Fustian, but they are sort of topped up and lined with this really stiff Fustian to give like these really big sort of, Broad shoulders. That's how stiff this is. So, Venice is banning foreign fustians, which means that Cremona can't be sold in these retail outlets.
So, Ah, so, and was that sort of That's fabric, but did that mirror the economy that Brescia was doing better than Cremona at this point? Do you, do you think? Because of that?
Well, people go where the work is. Yeah. Cause it's interesting because you've got Francesco Ruggeri, this family that lives in Cremona. Yeah. And then you have about 12 to 20 years later, you have another maker, Giovanni Battista Rogeri. Yeah. He is apprenticed to Niccolo Amati. So he learns in Cremona. And then he's in this city full of violin makers, maybe, and there's this economic downturn, and so it was probably a very wise decision. He's like, look, I'm going to Brescia, and he goes to Brescia. He would have definitely been part of this movement of skilled workers and artisans to Brescia at that time, sort of what happening as well. So, you know, there's all sorts of heavy tolls on movements of goods and things like that. And essentially it collapses. And they were, and they were heavily taxed as well. Yeah, definitely. Definitely.
It was the fabulous city of Brescia. He had heard stories of the city's wealth, art, music and culture, famous for its musicians and instrument makers. But the plague of 1630 had wiped out almost all the Luthiers and if ever there was a good time and place to set up his workshop, it was then and there. So bidding farewell to the young Girolamo Amati, the older Nicolò Amati and his household, where he had been living for the past few years. The young artisan set out to make a mark in Brescia, a city waiting for a new maker, and this time with the Cremonese touch.
Almost halfway between the old cathedral and the castle of Brescia, you will find the small yet lovely Romanesque church of San Giorgio. Amidst paintings and frescoes of Christ, the Virgin and the Saints, there stands a solemn yet nervous young couple, both in their early twenties. Beneath the domed ceiling of the church, the seven angels of the Apocalypse gaze down upon them, a constant reminder that life is fragile, and that plague, famine and war are ever present reminders of their mortality. But today is a happy one. The young Giovanni Battista Rogeri is marrying Laura Testini. And so it was that Giovanni Battista Rogeri moved to Brescia into the artisanal district and finds himself with a young wife, Laura Testini. She is the daughter of a successful leather worker and the couple most probably lived with Laura's family. Her father owned a house with eight rooms and two workshops. This would have been the perfect setup for the young Giovanni to start his own workshop and get down to business making instruments for the people of Brescia. He could show off his skills acquired in Cremona, and that is just what he did. Since the death of Maggini, there had not been any major instrument making workshops in Brescia.
Florian Leonhard
Here I talk to Florian Leonhard about Giovanni Battista Rogeri's move to Brescia and his style that would soon be influenced by not only his Cremonese training, but the Brescian makers such as Giovanni Paolo Maggini
I mean, I would say in 1732. The Brescian violin making or violin making was dead for a bit, so until the arrival of Giovanni Battista Rogeri, who came with a completely harmonised idea, into town and then adopted features of Giovanni Paolo Maggini and Gasparo da Salo. I cannot say who, probably some Giovanni Paolo Maggini violins that would have been more in numbers available to him, have influenced his design of creating an arching. It's interesting that he instantly picked up on that arching because Giovanni Battista Rogeri always much fuller arched. The arching rises much earlier from the purfling up. Right. So he came from the Cremonese tradition, but he adopted the, like, the Brescian arching idea. He, he came from Niccolo Amati and has learned all the finesse of construction, fine making, discipline, and also series production. He had an inside mould, and he had the linings, and he had the, all the blocks, including top and bottom block. And he nailed in the neck, so he did a complete package of Cremonese violin making and brought that into Brescia, but blended it in certain stylistics and sometimes even in copies with the Brescian style.
For a long time, we have had Before dendrochronology was established, the Giovanni Paolo Magginis were going around and they were actually Giovanni Battista Rogeris.
Brescia at this time was still a centre flourishing in the arts and despite the devastation of the plague almost 30 years ago, it was an important city in Lombardy and was in the process of undergoing much urban development and expansion. When Giovanni Rogeri arrived in the city, There were efforts to improve infrastructure, including the construction of public buildings, fortifications and roads. The rich religious life of the city was evident, and continued to be a centre of religious devotion at this time, with the construction and renovation of churches in the new Baroque style. The elaborate and ornate designs were not only reserved for churches, but any new important building projects underway in the city at this time. If you had yourself the palace in the Mula, you were definitely renovating in the Baroque style. And part of this style would also be to have a collection of lovely instruments to lend to musicians who would come and play in your fancy new pad. Strolling down the colourful streets lined with buildings covered in painted motifs, people were also making a statement in their choice of clothing.
Another thing that the very wealthy women were wearing are these shoes called Chopines, which are like two foot tall. And so you've got like this really exaggerated proportions as well. Very tall. I mean. Very tall, very wide. So taking up a lot of space.
I'm trying to think of the door, the doorways that would have to accommodate you.
Yes.
How do you fit through the door?
So a lot of the time women would have to stoop. You would need to be escorted by either servants. And then you'd just stand around. I did find some discussions of fashion in the time as well. Commentators saying, well, you know, what do we do in northern France? We either, in northern Italy, sorry, we either dress like the French, we dress like the Spanish, why aren't we dressing like Italians? And kind of these ideas of linking national identity through the expression of dress in fashion. So, we're having this
But did you want to, was it fashionable to be to look like the French court or the, to look like the Spanish court.
Well, yeah, it was, it was fashionable. And this is part of what people are commenting about as well. It's like, why are we bowing to France? Why are we bowing to Italy? Sorry. Why are we bowing to Spain? Why don't we have our own national Italian identity? And we do see like little variations in dress regionally as well. You know, people don't always. Dress exactly how the aristocracy are dressing. You'll have your own little twists, you'll have your own little trimmings, you'll have your own little ways and styles. And there are theories in dress about trickle down, you know, like people are trying to emulate the aristocracy, but they're not always. Trying to do that. Well, yeah, it's not practical if you're living, you know, if you're and you financially you can't either like some of these Outfits that we're talking about, you know with one of these hugh like the Garde in Fanta worn by Marie Theresa that outfit alone would have cost in today's money like more than a million dollars You can't copy these styles of dress, right? So what you've got to do is, you know, make adjustments. And also like a lot of women, like you, these huge fashion spectacles worn at court. They're not practical for working women either. So we see adaptations of them. So women might have a pared down silhouette and wear like a bum roll underneath their skirts and petticoats and over the top of the stays.
And that sort of gives you a little nod to these wider silhouettes, but you can still move, you can still get your work done, you can still, you know, do things like that. So that's sort of what's happening there.
Okay, so now we find a young Giovanni Battista Rogeri. He has married a local girl and set up his workshop. Business will be good for this maker, and no doubt thanks to the latest musical craze to sweep the country. I'm talking about opera. In the last episodes on Francesco Ruggeri, I spoke to Stephen Mould, the composer. at the Sydney Conservatorium about the beginnings of opera and the furore in which it swept across Europe. And if you will remember back to the episodes on Gasparo Da Salo at the beginning of the Violin Chronicles, we spoke about how Brescia was part of the Venetian state. This is still the case now with Giovanni Battista Rogeri and this means that the close relationship with Venice is a good thing for his business. Venice equals opera and opera means orchestras and where orchestras are you have musicians and musicians have to have an instrument really, don't they?
Here is Stephen Mould explaining the thing that is opera and why it was so important to the music industry at the time and instrument makers such as our very own Giovanni Battista Rogeri.
Venice as a place was a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk. Everything was there, and it was a very, it was a very modern type of city, a trading city, and it had a huge emerging, or more than emerging, middle class. People from the middle class like entertainment of all sorts, and in Venice they were particularly interested in rather salacious entertainments, which opera absolutely became. So the great thing of this period was the rise of the castrato. Which they, which, I mean, it was, the idea of it is perverse and it was, and they loved it. And it was to see this, this person that was neither man nor, you know, was in a way sexless on the stage singing and, and often singing far more far more virtuosically than a lot of women, that there was this, there was this strange figure. And that was endlessly fascinating. They were the pop stars of their time. And so people would go to the opera just to hear Farinelli or whoever it was to sing really the way. So this is the rise of public opera.
As opposed to the other version.
Well, Orfeo, for example, took place in the court at Mantua, probably in the, in the room of a, of a palace or a castle, which wouldn't have been that big, but would have been sort of specially set up for those performances. If I can give you an idea of how. Opera might have risen as it were, or been birthed in Venice.
Let's say you've got a feast day, you know, a celebratory weekend or few days. You're in the piazza outside San Marco. It's full of people and they're buying things, they're selling things, they're drinking, they're eating, they're having a good time. And all of a sudden this troupe of strolling players comes into the piazza and they start to put on a show, which is probably a kind of comedia dell'arte spoken drama. But the thing is that often those types of traveling players can also sing a bit and somebody can usually play a lute or some instrument. So they start improvising. Probably folk songs. Yeah. And including that you, so you've kind of already there got a little play happening outside with music. It's sort of like a group of buskers in Martin place. It could be very hot. I mean, I've got a picture somewhere of this. They put a kind of canvas awning with four people at either corner, holding up the canvas awning so that there was some sort of shade for the players. Yeah. That's not what you get in a kid's playground these days. You've almost got the sense. Of the space of a stage, if you then knock on the door of one of the palazzi in, in Venice and say to, to the, the local brew of the, of the aristocracy, look, I don't suppose we could borrow one of your rooms, you know, in your, in your lovely palazzo to, to put on a, a, a show. Yeah, sure. And maybe charged, maybe didn't, you know, and, and so they, the, the very first, it was the San Cassiano, I think it was the theatre, the theatre, this, this room in a, in a palace became a theatre. People went in an impresario would often commission somebody to write the libretto, might write it himself. Commissioner, composer, and they put up some kind of a stage, public came in paid, so it's paying to come and see opera. Look, it's, it's not so different to what had been going on in England in the Globe Theatre. And also the, the similar thing to Shakespeare's time, it was this sort of mixing up of the classes, so everything was kind of mixed together. And that's, that's why you get different musical genres mixed together. For example, an early something like Papaya by Monteverdi, we've just done it, and from what, from what I can gather from the vocal lines, some of the comic roles were probably these street players, who just had a limited vocal range, but could do character roles very well, play old women, play old men, play whatever, you know, caricature type roles. Other people were Probably trained singers. Some of them were probably out of Monteverdi's chorus in San Marco, and on the, on when they weren't singing in church, they were over playing in the opera, living this kind of double life. And That’s how opera started to take off. Yeah, so like you were saying, there are different levels.
So you had these classical Greek themes, which would be more like, you're an educated person going, yes, yes, I'm seeing this classical Greek play, but then you're someone who'd never heard of Greek music. The classics. They were there for the, you know, the lively entertainment and the sweet performers.
Yes. So the, the, the Commedia dell'arte had, had all these traditional folk tales. Then you've got all of the, all of the ancient myths and, and, and so forth. Papaya was particularly notable because it was the first opera that was a historical opera. So it wasn't based on any ancient myths or anything.
It was based on the life of Nero and Papaya. And so they were real life a few hundred years before, but they were real. It was a real historical situation that was being enacted on the stage. And it was a craze. That's the thing to remember is. You know, these days people have to get dressed up and they have to figure out how they get inside the opera house and they're not sure whether to clap or not and all of this sort of stuff and there's all these conventions surrounding it. That wasn't what it was about. It was the fact that the public were absolutely thirsty for this kind of entertainment. Yeah. And I was seeing the first, so the first opera house was made in in about 1637, I think it was. And then by the end of Monteverdi's lifetime, they said there were 19 opera houses in Venice. It was, like you were saying, a craze that just really took off. They had a few extra ones because they kept burning down. That's why one of them, the one that, that is, still exists today is called La Fenice. It keeps burning down as well, but rising from the ashes. Oh, wow. Like the, yeah, with the lighting and stuff, I imagine it's So, yeah, because they had candles and they had, you know, Yeah, it must have been a huge fire hazard. Huge fire hazard, and all the set pieces were made out of wood or fabric and all of that. Opera houses burning down is another big theme. Oh yeah, it's a whole thing in itself, yeah. So then you've got These opera troupes, which are maybe a little, something a little bit above these commedia dell'arte strolling players.
So, you've got Italy at that time. Venice was something else. Venice wasn't really like the rest of Italy. You've got this country which is largely agrarian, and you've got this country where people are wanting to travel in order to have experiences or to trade to, to make money and so forth. And so, first of all if an opera was successful, it might be taken down to Rome or to Naples for people to hear it. You would get these operas happening, happening in different versions. And then of course, there was this idea that you could travel further through Europe. And I, I think I have on occasion, laughingly. a couple of years ago said that it was like the, the latest pandemic, you know, it was, but it was this craze that caught on and everybody wanted to experience.
Yeah. So you didn't, you didn't have to live in Venice to see the opera. They, they moved around. It was, it was touring. Probably more than we think. That, that, that whole period, like a lot of these operas were basically unknown for about 400 years. It's only, the last century or so that people have been gradually trying to unearth under which circumstances the pieces were performed. And we're still learning a lot, but the sense is that there was this sort of network of performers and performance that occurred.
And one of the things that Monteverdi did, which was, which was different as well, is that before you would have maybe one or two musicians accompanying, and he came and he went, I'm taking them all.
And he created sort of, sort of the first kind of orchestras, like lots of different instruments. They were the prototypes of, of orchestras. And Look, the bad news for your, the violin side of your project, there was certainly violins in it. It was basically a string contingent. That was the main part of the orchestra. There may have been a couple of trumpets, may have been a couple of oboe like instruments. I would have thought that for Venice, they would have had much more exotic instruments. But the, the, the fact is at this time with the public opera, what became very popular were all of the stage elements. And so you have operas that have got storms or floods or fires. They simulated fires. A huge amount of effort went into painting these very elaborate sets and using, I mean, earlier Leonardo da Vinci had been experimenting with a lot of how you create the effect of a storm or an earthquake or a fire or a flood. There was a whole group of experts who did this kind of stuff.
For the people at the time, it probably looked like, you know, going to the, the, the first big movie, you know, when movies first came out in the 20s, when the talkies came out and seeing all of these effects and creating the effects. When we look at those films today, we often think, well, that's been updated, you know, it's out of date, but they found them very, very, very compelling.
What I'm saying is the money tended to go on the look of the thing on the stage and the orchestra, the sound of the orchestras from what we can gather was a little more monochrome. Of course, the other element of the orchestra is the continuo section. So you've got the so called orchestra, which plays during the aria like parts of the opera, the set musical numbers. And you've got the continuo, which is largely for the rest of the team. And you would have had a theorbo, you would have had maybe a cello, a couple of keyboard instruments, lute. It basically, it was a very flexible, what’s available kind of.
Yeah, so there was they would use violines, which was the ancestor of the double bass. So a three stringed one and violins as well. And that, and what else I find interesting is with the music, they would just, they would give them for these bass instruments, just the chords and they would improvise sort of on those. Chords. So every time it was a little bit different, they were following a Yes. Improvisation. Yeah. So it was kind of original. You could go back again and again.
It wasn't exactly the same. And look, that is the problem with historical recreation. And that is that if you go on IMSLP, you can actually download the earliest manuscript that we have of Poppea. And what you've got is less than chords, you've got a baseline. Just a simple bass line, a little bit of figuration to indicate some of the chords, and you've got a vocal line. That's all we have. We don't actually know, we can surmise a whole lot of things, but we don't actually know anything else about how it was performed.
I imagine all the bass instruments were given that bass line, and like, Do what you want with that.
So yeah, it would, and it would have really varied depending on musicians. Probably different players every night, depending on, you know, look, if you go into 19th century orchestras, highly unreliable, huge incidents of drunkenness and, you know, different people coming and going because they had other gigs to do. Like this is 19th century Italian theatres at a point where, you know, It should have been, in any other country, it would have, Germany had much better organized you know, orchestral resources and the whole thing. So it had that kind of Italian spontaneity and improvised, the whole idea of opera was this thing that came out of improvisation. Singers also, especially the ones that did comic roles, would probably improvise texts, make them a bit saucier than the original if they wanted for a particular performance. All these things were, were open.
And this brings us to an end of this first episode on Giovanni Battista Rogeri. We have seen the young life of this maker setting out to make his fortune in a neighbouring city, alive with culture and its close connections to Venice and the world of opera.
I would like to thank my lovely guests Emily Brayshaw, Stephen Mould and Florian Leonhardt for joining me today.
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Want to hear about the worlds most expensive ballet performance, murderous royals and Cremonese violins? Well listen on to see what happened to Andrea Amati's instruments once they arrived in the French court.
To have access to this episode sign into Patreon, just go to Patreon/theviolinchronicles.com to listen.
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Girolamo II Amati was the last of the Amati family of violin makers in Cremona. He worked along side Antonio Stradivari and the Guarneri family in an intense moment of violin making and musical discovery at the time. Listen to how he fits into the story of the violin and turns out to be more that what he is (or not) remembered for.
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with. And in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome to the Amati workshop where over the last 150 years generations of instrument makers have lived and worked and the fourth generation is about to start his apprenticeship with his father who is perhaps the most famous of the family due to his beautiful craftsmanship and innovation of design. I'm talking about Niccolo Amati. In 1660, a young 11 year old Girolamo, Nicolo's son, Amati is taken into the workshop. Up until now, he would have been going to the local parish school, learning to read and write. At home, he would be doing odd jobs in the workshop, helping out his father. But now he was going to start working with him and the other apprentices and workers in the shop for real.
Who would not have been proud to work in the famous Amati workshop that attracted the attention of nobles, royals, and also some of the other local boys in town. Especially one who was five years older than Giolamo Amati, named Antonio Stradivari. Nicolo Amatis son would be spending his days with his father and his assistants. At the moment, his father's employees included Bartolomeo Pasta and Giovanni Battista Rogeri. Around the corner lived and worked close family friends, the Guarneri's. Already they had five children and it looked like more were on the way. Girolamo II, as he is known, would have spent a lot of time with his father's senior assistant, Giovanni Battista Rogeri, whose style was bolder than Nicolo's and his influence can be seen in the work of Girolamo Amati II, who would become the last violin maker of the Amati family.
As far as business went, the demands for violins were still strong from home and abroad. Whilst Nicolo Amati’s career was in full swing. North of Italy, a Dutch scientist had just invented the first pendulum clock, and this would forever have an impact on music, as it would lead to equal temperament. Simplified, that really just means that everyone agreed on the speed of the music being played, more or less. Music was being written about and innovations were being adapted to help musicians and the musical environment. There was the printing press that was making it possible for music to travel, opening up exciting new horizons for musicians. And in the eye of this musical storm, slowly but surely, our violin makers, cutting, scraping, plaining and gouging away, were making instruments for this new market. Music was on the road to becoming standardized. Equal temperament and a printed score. You could play a piece of music in London, Paris or Florence and it would be more or less the same, hopefully. While Italy and France were often at odds, the dance and music loving King Louis XIV could only have helped the industry of instrument making with his famed 24 violins in his royal court.
Benjamin Hebert, expert and dealer in Oxford.
1661 is when Lully comes to the French court, and he creates the Petit Band, where he gathers around for the first time since the Valois dynasty, Italian musicians playing, playing French music informed by the new Italian ways of thinking, and there is one of these French court Amatis, where we can absolutely say that the new front, the restoration, is right on the nail for Lully taking these things out of the cupboard and saying, hey, we've already got some great instruments to do this with. By which time, you know, the smoke has cleared. It's history that these have got Valois connections, and it's not as offensive as it would have been to the Huguenot king and his court of people who'd been, you know, routinely assassinated and murdered and genocidal maniac by, uh, Catherine de Medici's henchmen.
Yeah, I was, I was reading that about three million people died in the wars of religion. And I sort of did the equivalence for today for the French population, and that would be like today, nine million people dying in France. Like it's,
it's huge. It's pretty, it's pretty huge. Um, sorry, the corners. talking about that it softened. It's because like they were in a line and you didn't want to get poked by the violin next to you.
Is that it?
I did a project years ago where some people in France produced 24 violins and they didn't do any bows. And what we ended up with was a bow, which is about a foot long. Maybe, you know. Maybe 14 inches or so. Really diddy bow. And actually what we decided, we then subsequently found that Pochette, so French dancing master's fiddles in the Victorian Albert Museum, there's one in a beautiful red leather case with its bow which we actually took as a kind of prototype for everything and then it suddenly hit us, the reason why a Pochette is the size that it is so that it's the same size as the bow. And the bow is the same bow that you'd play on a proper violin if you're doing dance stuff. And the way that you've got to imagine it is that everybody in France in the court has got these incredibly tight costumes. The rudest thing that I could do to you if we're French is, instead of sticking two fingers up at you or whatever, is to actually raise my elbow sharply in your direction. Because it means, it means eff you so much that I'm actually willing to rip my, my costume in order to, in order to show my anger towards you. So that's how the courtiers dress, the musicians dress the same way. It's like, like, in like those Shakespeare things where they rip their shirts off, like, Like that.
Pretty much, yeah, exactly. So, I mean, you know, all stuff is so expensive, but you're absolutely corseted into these things. If you, if you think about, you know, kind of having your elbows down against your rib cage and trying to play a violin that way. on both, on both sides. And then here's the thing. If you, if you let your, your wrists go upwards so that your thumb sits nicely on the hair, then actually get this very staccatoish playing position where you've got short notes, you've got a lot of tension. Rather like playing a viola da gamba, in the way that the bow is twisted onto the string. And it just, each note is explosive and short. And you look at this early French stuff, and it's often got a drum, and you've got the same staccato that the drum is able to give you. Just, you know, short, tight notes. And so everything came together. And then the icing on the cake was the very few images that we saw, had people so close together that you couldn't stick your, you just couldn't stick your elbow in somebody else's face because, because there's not the room to do it. So it all, it all sort of magically came together that, you know, there's a really specific idea. And even an idea to, to the point that, you know, We know that the French had a unique sound and that, you know, this was something which was highly revered. But we also know, I mean, the Talbot manuscript in England in the 1690s, 1710s, it actually gives two measurements for a dance bow and a dance flute. Sonata bow. And, you know, I can bet you that Lully and his mates, after an exhausting night doing, doing, uh, you know, French court music, probably just loosened off their blouses, went down to the pub, picked up their sonata bows, and really let rip the way that they wanted to, because this was the difference.
But this is what I think emerges out of You know, right out of that start.
Emily Brayshaw, fashion historian.
Yeah, so the, the, the King's 24 violins, they would have, um, livery. They had that paid for them. Yes. Um, I don't, maybe they had wigs. Yeah, they would have. They would have definitely had wigs, um, their shoes, everything. So what's interesting with livery too is that, um, in a lot of these eras, It was, uh, super expensive, so if you could afford to dress all your servants in livery, you would often do it in these luxury fabrics. But what, uh, we, we have examples that, uh, extend in museums. What would happen though is they would deliberately cut them and make them. Um, so by cut, I mean like pattern and construction and stuff to be outside what was fashionable. And that meant that the servants, uh, Couldn't wear them on their days off. So you had to wear your livery because, you know, otherwise you'd be there in the tavern or whatever. And it's like, oh, you're going out in your work clothes.
Yeah. It was like a uniform.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So, you know, you're paying for these specific garments as well. Closer to home, opera was taking off like a frog in a sock. Forget the French and their ballet, the Italians had opera and all the trimmings that came with it. And so, work was plentiful. Girolamo was happily working away in the knowledge that one day this prestigious workshop would be his. Cremona had by this time been under Habsburg Spanish occupation for three generations. Foreign taxes were high and the town's once prosperous and internationally renowned textile industry was in decline. Nicolo Amati continued to be the sought after maestro and workshop assistants came and went. Some spoke the Cremonese dialect, others Paduan, and a few even came from Germanic countries. Antonio Stradivari and Giovanni Battista Rogeri were never recorded as apprentices in the census, living in the Amati household, but if they were locals, they would not have needed to be lodged with the master. They may have learnt under Nicolo in the Amati workshop, and that would be a logical explanation for their making style. In all, Nicolo Amati had about 18 apprentices over a 40 year period and mostly from other instrument making cities such as Padua, Bologna, Milan, and Venice. Those who could would return to their homes and continue making in the Amati style, transforming it into a standard or school of making.
Girolamo Amati II assisted his aging father until about 1670, when Nicolo Amati was in his mid seventies Leaving his son to continue working without him, but still using the Nicolo Amati label. He would do this over the next 14 years until his father's death. in 1684. Niccolo Amati's instruments around this time are most likely the work of Girolamo Amati II, but to know for sure, you would need an expert.
When Nicolo Amati was 79 years old, he was still a wealthy man. His daughter Teresa married and he provided her with a 5, 000 lira dowry. To compare with his colleague Andrea Guarneri, when his daughter married, he was only able to give a 1, 300 lira for her dowry. So there. In 1677, Girolamo II was now 28 years old. He married the 14 year old Angela Caritoni, and in the following years, they would have two daughters and a son. Some historians think she could have been older, which would make it a little less creepy. But in any case, Girolamo's story is a bit of a sad one. When Nicolo Amati died in 1684 at the age of 87, things started falling apart. Instruments with Girolamo Amati II label after his father's death are rare. The following year. His wife, Angela, died, and then two years later, his three year old son, also called Nicolo Amati, tragically passes away. His wife and son are buried close by, in the monastery of Corpus Christi, where his eldest daughter will soon begin her novitiate. He seems to have lost his enthusiasm for work. His family were dying, the market for violins was not great, well, not for him anyway. Antonio Stradivari, who had bought a house just around the corner from theirs a few years before his father died, looked like he was doing just fine. And then there were the Guarneri's, also taking whatever business that was left over, leaving him with practically nothing.
Carlo Chiesa, expert and violin maker in Milan.
We know that, uh, Girolamo Amati II was a very good maker, I like as a maker, but, uh, He had, uh, you know
rivalry.
Yeah, rivalry. He had some people working next door to him in the same, the same block, not just the same neighbourhood, but in the same block. And their names were Giuseppe Guarneri and Antonio Stradivari. I’m not sure I would be happy to have Antonio Stradivari working close to me. And that was the situation.
Before that, the Amatis were the only workshop in Cremona. So their economic success was, of course. Also from the fact that they were the only workshop in the year 1690, if you were to take a walk in the parish of San Fustino down one particular street, you would pass the well known Amati house and workshop. Keep going, and you would be at the casa Guarneri a little further on Lived and Antonio Stradivari, who was still working in the Amati style, but really starting to make a name for himself, all open for business. What a street.
In a relatively small city, that is a lot of competition. And Girolamo Amati II just seemed to sink. He quickly spiralled into debt. He had a brilliant plan with one of his brothers to try and sell some of the family's property and goods to pay off said debt. But another brother, Dom Nicolo Amati, obviously appalled that they were running the family business into the ground and then trying to save the sinking ship by selling off the family silver was incensed enough to take them to court and commence bankruptcy proceedings against them. Girolamo and his brother even owed money to one of the Stradivari boys. The family's fortunes had definitely turned.
Benjamin Hebbert.
So I think the story there is, it's almost a story more of Stradivari. And I've, I found a wonderful quote by a guy called Edward Chamberlain in 1683, which is just the year before Nicola Amati dies. And he says, uh, that Cremona violins have not been fetching the prices that they did previously. And it's not a very big quote, but it's like, you know, unfortunately, you know, we've been claiming that Cremonese violins have never, never lost value since they were made. And in 1683, there's an Englishman who's complaining that he can't get the price for them. There's a guy a few years later in about 17 Around 1710, William Corbett, who travels to Cremona, does a deal with Stradivari, brings a load of instruments for the London market, and has to return them all because no one's prepared to pay the prices. And I think there's a lot of economic stuff that's going on. You know, you've got the problem that your biggest competition is your own second hand residual market.
By 1684, when Nicolò Amati dies, there's a heck of a lot of second hand instruments on the market. And you've got to kind of ask why, why bother make another violin at that point. And so Girolamo Amati kind of limps through, but I think limps through because, I mean, I'm sure that the Amatis ran a guild in every sense of the word, because anything that you do, in Italy at that time, is run by a guild. So although there's no formality about any guilds existing, let's be clear about that. You know, here's the head honcho, and he's able to sort of control what everybody else does. And there's this, there's this guy called Stradivari, who is precocious. He makes these decorated instruments, even when, when Nicolo Amati is alive, which are taking the decorative aspect of an instrument to a far greater level. And I think he's probably able to do that because maybe Girolamo Amati II isn't very interested. Niccolo Amati, knows he's getting old and it's like, look, you know, the market's done. It's over. If you think you can make a difference, make a difference. You know, well done you. You know, you see Rooker's harpsichords with been and done by the 1660s. Bolognese lutes were been and done by the 1580s. You know, it keeps on going, you know, things have a cycle. And I think Stradivari is already there to say, I'm going to beat the cycle.
Yeah. So, okay. So you had that lull in the market before. Exactly. And then Stradivari kind of. He's already sort of going, well, I think he's seeing the lull in the market, he's seeing an opportunity for himself, and he's creating things which are more decorative than anything else before because he thinks that there is a market, he can pick up new buyers, he can put himself at that, you know, at the front position of the Cremonese market, and he can largely do that because Girolamo Amati II isn't interested, it doesn't really matter what Nicolo Amati says because Nicolo's already very old. When he passes, Stradivari will be able to do his thing. Maybe things don't whittle off as badly as we think they do, because actually, Girolamo Amati II has the biggest, you know, he's got the biggest access to the second hand market. So, quite what he does. I feel, you know, I tend to feel that my colleagues who research this are very, very reluctant to speculate about what the second hand market might be, and we just think of people purely as craftsmen. But instruments from the 1630s wouldn't exist till now unless someone in the 1680s was taking care of them, let alone at any other time. And to me that, you know, that's got to be a very clear part of, part of, uh, the history. And that gives him a new market. So Girolamo Amati disappears off into the wilderness and then, you know, we don't know what he did. He probably had a super successful career. Violin dealer, but you know, that's not sexy or romantic. And then he, once he's sort of sold too many of them or whatever, he comes back and starts being a maker again, as far as I see it.
Aged nearly 50, Girolamo Amati II, drowning in debt, left Cremona. The year was 1700, and Stradivari was about to enter his golden period of production. It would be another 20 years before Girolamo Amati II returned to Cremona. His motives for leaving were probably varied, and no one knows for sure why he left town. What we do know is that he appears to have left his family, the workshop and the network of instrument makers who undoubtedly benefited from knowing his father, one of the most important teachers in the history of violin making. Where he went was Piacenza, around 40km west of Cremona, a small town near Parma where The local count commissioned various instruments from him between 1700 and 1715. During Girolamo's absence, the city saw many changes, which included Antonio Stradivari's workshop becoming the most dominant and financially successful force in Cremona. In 1707, the Habsburg Spanish occupation lost its power to the Austrian Empire, so Austrian soldiers soon occupied the town. Again. Over the last 150 years, the city's population had halved from 40, 000 to 20, 000 people. In 1705 and the next year in 1706, the Poe flooded multiple times and the crops were ruined. There was disease and armies were back in town. Things were pretty miserable. Girolamo Amati does eventually make his way back to Cremona around 1717. The family home was now in the hands of one of Nicolo Amati’s daughters, Then was handed down to Girolamo's second daughter. Notice that the Amati ladies are not trusting the Amati men with the house.
Emily Brayshaw.
Yeah. And then there's, this is this kind of handover, Nicolo Amati ends up having another son called Girolamo Amati II, who is the last in the Amati dynasty. And it's sort of, his life is a little bit sad and it's a bit of a, he fizzles out really with Girolamo. But at the same time, you have this, you have Andrea Amati and Uh, Antonio Stradivari is five years older than Girolamo Amati. They're sort of the same, they're the same generation and they probably went to the same school because these children did go to a local school to learn to read and write. They would have known each other really. So you have this, it's sort of across that you can see the curve of the Amatis going down and then you have this other curve of all this, this group of Cremonese makers taking off, sort of thanks to Nicolo Amati, you've got The Guarneri family, the Ruggeri family, uh, Stradivari, uh, and it's sort of an explosion of instrument making in Cremona at this time.
Yeah, okay. And that is in, so Strad was, wasn't he 1644, I think? To 1737. Sorry, he would be 40, 50, 60, in like the 1660s, 1670s. You could imagine that's where he was, um, you know, a young man about town. Yeah. And he'd be wearing You know, he'd be wearing the same thing that Girolamo Amati would be wearing. Yeah, definitely.
So. Um, so it's the fashion from the second half of the 15th century of tradesmen. Was it, and that would have been quite different to nobles as well. Well, again, again, they did follow the same cut. And they did follow the same silhouette as the nobility. But without the spangles. They didn't, well, they just didn't have as much bling, you know, like, um, and they didn't have all the money, all the time to be able to spend. So, you know, their dress is a little bit more sober, a little bit more professional. Um, you know, we've talked about black, for example. But they, so, but they want, when they would go to the opera as well, they would be this kind of class that's kind of in between ish. Nicolo's mother was actually, um, his father's second wife and she was from sort of the lower gentry. Her, she was called, um, Laura Medici Lazzarini. And so. She's thought to be a distant cousin of the banking Medici's and she was the niece of a prominent nobleman. So you have, I find that interesting. You have this, the social position of the Amati family was such that it was possible for him to marry into. Sort of these wealthier families. Yeah, there's another strata. Yeah, look, and certainly, you know, we do sort of have, um, different classes as well. It's not just the super wealthy and the super poor, you know, we've got increasing merchant classes and, um, maker classes and master craftsmen and again sort of with dress, you know, they are going to be dressing very well. They'll, they'll, have servants themselves and they'll be dressing better than the servants again and they'll certainly be keeping an eye on the latest fashions and trends and because they are moving in these worlds with the super wealthy. By the token to the super wealthy don't expect that these people will be as well dressed as they are either. As long as you're dressing well, you're not expected to be like dripping with pearls like the queen or some of these mind bogglingly wealthy royal dukes and these sorts of people. Yeah, but and I'm thinking maybe in, um, in society they would overlap. So, so maybe there was also this, uh, like a way of speaking and a way, the way of, um, interacting they would.
They're in this sort of middle area where they're dealing with. Yeah, I feel like there is. You certainly have to show difference. That goes without saying, I think though that technical discussions, like people like, um, you know, the Duke Gonzaga, for example, he's, he's a cultured man, right? These are really cultured people and they want to be talking and having these discussions about art and music. And so there will be seeking out the experts to converse with, to have these discussions as well as. Running state, making diplomatic connections. Girolamo Amati II. He comes home an old man and at the age of 70 in 1719 and makes his last surviving violin. In the years following, the city of Cremona is once again affected by yet another war involving the French.
In 1733, 12, 000 French troops were garrisoned in Cremona who had a population of 30, 000. This weighed hugely on local resources and sent prices soaring. The city looked fondly back at the relative law and order provided by the Spanish compared with this new French army. Cremona's economy plodded on nevertheless. Music was still highly regarded into the mix of dance teachers, instrument makers, textile merchants, junk dealers, moneylenders, printers, booksellers, and jewelers, fur merchants, and of course, shoemakers. The French did eventually leave town, and a few years after this, Girolamo Amati II died in relative poverty in February of 1740 at the age of 90, nonetheless.
We don't know of any instruments from this later period. It is thought that he was suffering from mental illness and with no male heirs to carry on the trade, the story of the Amatis ends. Although this is the end of one violin making family, great though they were, this is in fact only the beginning of another exciting chapter in the violin. While Girolamo Amati lay dying, a golden period is about to burst forth in Cremona, and the end of the Amati story is really the beginning of one of Cremona's most industrious and golden periods of violin making ever in its history. It's the story of Stradivari, of Guarneri. When we talk about great Cremonese masters, it starts now. This is the period people are talking about, and the story will get a whole lot more complex because there are a lot of people to keep up with. Are you ready? Well, I hope you are because now we're going to be looking at many, many masters, and I hope you'll stay with me for the next episodes of the Violin Chronicles.
I'd like to say a big thank you to my guests, Dr. Emily Brayshaw, Benjamin Hebbert, and Carlo Chiesa. And if you have liked the show, please rate and review it on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. That would really help out with the making of the podcast so I can continue to bring you more episodes. Be sure also to head over to Patreon forward slash The Violin Chronicles. If you would like to support the podcast and become a Patreon, there are extra episodes, and I would particularly like to point out a new series called My Encyclopedia of Luthiers. That little podcast I do with my husband, Antoine. In it, we summarize each maker in under an hour and describe all the little details to look out for so you can recognize that particular maker's work.
And maybe you can become an expert yourself one day. I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles. Goodbye for now.
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For a quick revision of your makers with tips and clues to look out for so you too can recognise their work.
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Nicolo finds love, the workshop is full steam ahead and this violin maker has to find creative ways to get family members out of his house so his future bride doesn’t freak out! This is one busy luthier. Follow Nicolo Amati as his family grows and his influence as a violin maker branches throughout Italy and Europe.
In this episode you will also meet a very important family in the story of the violin, the Guarneris, see how their lives overlap with the Amatis as we start to see the beginning of the end of the “house of Amati”
Transcript
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Lutherie, in Mirecourt.
Welcome back to the story of Nicolò Amati, the third in this generation of violin makers. We now find him in his mid 40s. He has survived the bubonic plague in which he lost many of his family members. He lives in the house his grandfather, Andrea Amati, bought and passed on to his sons. And now Nicolo finds himself with an odd crew of orphaned cousins, nephews, nieces, and siblings to look after post pandemic.
The world in which Nicolo lived was changing dramatically. These were the years that Europeans were arriving in the Americas. There were the Spanish and Portuguese in the south. Up north were the English, Dutch, French, and the Swedes. In 1644, when Nicolo Amati was entering his late 40s, the young Antonio Stradivari was born.
Most likely in Cremona and not far from the Amati home. The question, looking at Nicolo Amati this week is, was he just an artisan at the beck and call of musicians and wealthy patrons, looking to have a collection of instruments for musicians coming to their house or court? Socially speaking, where did Nicolo Amati sit in the greater scheme of things?
And why was it that Luthiers from Cremona had this reputation of producing excellent instruments? Why were they better than any other city in that part of Italy at the time? Rome, Naples and Venice were all important cultural centres then, so what made this relatively small city stand out? Well, in the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we saw Nicolo Amati surviving the plague and getting on with his life.
He gives up depending on family members to help him in the workshop and starts to employ apprentices who come and live and work with him, notably two teenagers. Andrea Guarneri and Giacomo Gennaro. He also starts to make his grand pattern violin. It is surprising that by making something a few millimetres bigger and slightly changing the outline and archings of the violin, he really does change the potential of this instrument and lay the groundwork for the very well known violin makers to come after him.
Niccolò Amati's clients were often noble families and the church, much like his father and grandfather had. And he would even sell instruments that were not his, such as a local priest and musician, Don Alessandro Lodi, whose family turned to him when he died to sell his collection. Here we see Nicolò Amati’s instruments fetching a good price, where others were selling their instruments for 5 ducati Nicolò's violins were going for 15 ducati and 22 for a viola. The double bass he sold from the priest's collection that was not his. It could have been a Brescian instrument, was only 13 Ducati. From the high prices Nicolo Amati demanded for his instruments, we can clearly see that he was not a lowly craftsman, but was an educated and literate member of his community, having gone to school before learning his trade with his father. It would have been important for him, in dealing with his noble clientele, to have a certain level of learning and a knowledge of business, mathematics, and accounting, as would many of his artisan colleagues. At this time in Cremona, schools were attended mainly by children of merchants and nobles, but not only. At school, they would learn. In addition to the traditional subjects of Geometry, Arithmetic, and even Astrology, subjects such as Geography, Architecture, Algebra, and Mechanics, both theoretical and applied.
Carlo Chiesa, violin maker, expert, researcher, and author from Milan.
It is also worth noting that the Amatis at that point, they were wealthy enough people. This is very important because It means they, the kids had an education. They were able to go to school, to be trained properly, not just in the workshop. And they were artisans of a high level anyway. So the daughters of Andrea who got married, they usually got married with good doweries with the people who were from the same social status, and that is also worth noting important because they were not. It means that they were not working for low class musicians, but usually their commission went. to noblemen or high-class customers, which they were able to deal with. That is also another of the reasons for the success of cremonese making, because the artisans were able to deal with the high class.
Nicolo Amati was a product of the Cremonese system. He was not only a talented artisan, but also had a level of education that enabled him access to the upper echelons of society. And this appears to have always been where violin makers sit. Never being part of the nobility as they were in trade and part of the merchant class, yet their product interested and sometimes fascinated the noble classes, somehow giving them a form of access or small door into their world being almost acceptable. As for Nicolo's workmanship, he had always shown a spirit of innovation and thought. He was experimenting in different sizes of instrument in an effort to improve his product and this reflects the time and place he lived. It was, don't forget, the renaissance, and as their world was a relatively small place, he would certainly have known fellow artisans in town, such as the very interesting Alessandro Capra and his sons. Cremona was renowned for its engineers, both civil and military, who published books on their work. They were, after all, on a military highway. What better place to have your shop window? Alessandro Capra, architect and plumber, had opened his workshop in town where he would display his inventions and offer his services as either a military or civil engineer. He also carried out teaching activities for apprentices interested in learning science, art, maths and geometry. From his workshop, he would obtain commissions from various parts of Italy for machines and inventions. In his domestic artisans workshop, he displayed his machines and various models. Lining the walls were precious books filled with information on land surveying, perspective, applied geometry, arithmetic, and merchant accounting.
These were handbooks written expressly for craftsmen, artisans, artists, and technicians. They were not for a specific trade but information for people involved in these activities. and were practical guides on how to go about business. The printed works of Capras were like professional development manuals. They were presented as a collection of craft and commercial problems useful for the training of future generations of craftsmen and traders, land and real estate owners. It also advised landowners on how to earn more money and lower income earners on how to manage better their real estate. It was a 17th century version of how to make friends and influence people. Alessandro Capra also mentions the benefits of following military campaigns, scientific skills linked to the solution of problems, fortifications, ballistics, engineering, mechanical and hydraulic, management and organization of people. Cremona was a great place to be for this as it was continually in the midst of military campaigns and would have facilitated this scientific environment.
But back to the Casa Amati. Nicolo had two assistants living with him that I mentioned earlier and they are actually quite important to our story. They made a team in the workshop and Nicolo trusted them not only with the work on it, instruments but also in his business dealings and everyday life. They were legal witnesses on legal documents and even civic occasions such as his wedding. These two assistants were of course Giacomo Genaro and Andrea Guarneri. Andrea Guarneri is the first in the great family of the Guarneri makers of Cremona and here we see his close relationship with his master.
Carlo Chiesa explains.
And, and then did Andrea Guarneri did he go on to, his instruments, were they based on the Nicolo's Grand Patten?
Sometimes and sometimes also on the other side, Andrea was was a good maker, intelligent maker. And he also, and I'm sure he went on working for Amati also after he moved to his own workshop because their workshops were very close to each other in the same block. And there was a back alley in which they both had a door. So that through the back alley, the two workshops were very, very close to each other.
They could pass a violin.
There's a customer here. I have not a violin finished. You've got one. Yeah, I'm finishing that one. Take it. Take this one. Put your label in.
In 1640, Nicolo Amati stops using the brothers Amati label. It is now almost as if he is truly affirming himself, starting a new chapter in his life. By using the brothers Amati label, his father's, he was in no way trying to deceive people who knew very well that his father was dead, but rather that he had built this instrument in his father's style. Even though he had made the instrument, it was in essence an Amati Brothers instrument. After his father's death, he did indeed create a different model, his grand pattern, and started putting in his own label. This design he owned in his own right a name.
In 1642, the year after engaging his assistants, Niccolò employs a maid, Catarina, along with his two apprentices living in the house, there was his sister and niece and also an 18 year old cousin, Marilina Urbana, who comes to live with them as her parents have died in the plague. Two years on, business is good for Nicolo. He is comfortably well off and the decision to take on a second servant to help out was necessary because now there were two more of the Urbana cousins, Marilina’s little brother and sister Benedetto, who is 12 and his little sister Valeria is only four years old. Along with the assistance that makes nine people living in the house. As time went on, Giacomo Gennaro left the Amati workshop to go off on his own, but Andrea stayed and was particularly close to Nicolò. He was his right-hand man, and Nicolò was now almost 50. He had no children, and perhaps Andrea would inherit the workshop one day. Nicolò is looking more and more like a confirmed bachelor, and then, boom, it happens. Nicolò falls in love. In 1645, he meets the lovely Lucrezia and thinks maybe it's not such a bad idea to get married after all. But here is the catch. At this moment, in Nicolò's household, there are no less than 10 people. That's right, 10 people. There is his 66 year old sister and her daughter, Elisabetta and Angela. There are his two assistants, Giacomo and Andrea, who are 21 and 19, much closer in age to Lucrencia than Nicolo himself. Three orphaned cousins in his care, who really are children, they are 12, 6 and 3 years old, and two servants to help look after them all. Lucrencia would be a brave woman indeed to marry this man, but Nicolo had a plan. One week before the wedding, he gifts his niece a small property with a house in the parish of San Nicolo. In doing this, he discreetly removes his niece and his sister, who will have to go and live with her daughter because she can't live alone. And this move makes way for his new bride, Lucrezia. In the spring of 1645, on the 23rd of May, the 48 year old Nicolo married the somewhat younger 26 year old Lucrenzia Pagliari. Andrea Guarneri was the witness, and her uncle the priest who married them. Their first child, Giolamo, was born the next year on the 6th of February. Just under nine months later. No scandal there. And if Guarneri thought that Nicolo was not going to have anyone to inherit the workshop, he was wrong. Because over the next 15 years, Lucrencia would have three more sons and four daughters. That is a child every two years for 15 years. A year after their first child, Lucrencia has a little girl they named Teresa. Now at this point, something quite dramatic happens to the city of Cremona. There was a siege, and it was because of a war called the 30 Years War. It was such a vast and complicated thing. thing that they probably just ended up calling it the 30 years war because it went on for, well, 30 years. It involved most of the major European powers and during this war Cremona, which was located in the Lombard region of Italy, was a strategic city and was occupied by the Spanish army, as we know. In 1648, the French army, under the command of Maréchal Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, laid siege to the city in order to expel the Spanish. The siege lasted for several weeks and resulted in its eventual capture by the French army. Sadly, Nicolo and Lucanza's first child, Girolamo, died at the age of three, just after the siege in September, so this really was a bad year for them. But the next year, on a freezing February morning in 1649, their third child was born, and they named him, wait for it, Girolamo, like the first son. Their little girl Teresa also died around this time, and a year after the second Girolamo was born, the Amatis have another little girl, whom they name Teresa. Around the time Niccolò married Lucrezia, he made a cello that would end up in the collection of the Grand Prince Ferdinand de Medici, son of Cosimo III. From this we see that the calibre of his instruments are such that nobles would desire them in their collections. This instrument is described in an inventory of 1700, along with 100 other instruments for his private use and that of his chamber musicians. In this list are a number of instruments made by Niccolò and also by the Amati brothers. He must have truly appreciated their instruments and regarded them as items of value. They have come down to us today because they have Throughout their existence, being thought of as such and being looked after carefully. After Niccolo and Lucrenzia's first child was born, Andrea Guarneri, who had been living with them for years, moved out. Maybe noticing that he was the third wheel here. But a few years later, just after Girolamo died, The second was born. Andrea Guarneri was obviously having some problems with his housing situation and moved back in with the Amatis. Ciao! I can imagine Nicolo's wife maybe hinting to her husband to find Andrea a wife. 1650 is also a time when Nicolò starts to use his grand pattern violin more and more. His instruments now show all the classic characteristics of his work, the use of the grand pattern model, his golden yellow varnish, and his archings, which are less scooped than the Amati brothers models.
Andrea Guarneri was one of Niccolò's favourites and thought maybe it was time he got married as well. Nicolò happened to know that one of their clients, the talented musician Giovanni Pietro Orcelli, had a young orphaned cousin from a well to do family. She would be perfect for Andrea. Anna Maria Orcelli had grown up just around the corner from the Amati household. She had lost her family, most probably in the recent plague, and so, in 1652, the 29 year old Andrea Guarneri married Anna Maria. They stayed living with the Amatis for a few more months. But by this time, Ana Maria was pregnant, and they were in the process of moving into a house she had inherited just a few doors down from Nicolo Amati and his family. Anna Maria, as part of her dowry, had a house that was so close to the Amatis that their back entrances were almost next to each other. The relatives living there were proving difficult to move on. Finally, the Relos moved out and Andrea and his pregnant wife could move in. Here, Andrea was able to set up his own business with his new family living upstairs, starting a new chapter in his life.
The number of instrument makers in Cremona was on the rise. Niccolo's instruments from this period are only getting better acoustically and it was the instruments Nicolo made in this era that Antonio Stradivari would go on to copy in what we call his Amatis period. In 1653. The workshop is a busy place and many instruments are being produced. Nicolo, who is 57 at this point, has at least four apprentices working for him and living in the family home. In this busy household lived 12 people, and in the summer, Lucrenzia and Niccolo have their fifth child, Giovanni Battista. Sadly, the Amati's youngest child, Giovanni Battista, would die in infancy when he was two years old. Now living with them were their two children, Servants. Apprentices. There were also three boys who would work for the shop and lived with them. They were called the Malagamba brothers. Giuseppe was 20, his younger brother Giovanni Battista, 17, and Giacomo, the youngest, only 10 years old. They most likely made accessories for Nicolo and will work with him for years to come. In 1655, things were looking up in the Casa Amati. In July, Lucrenzia has a daughter, they name her Anna Maria, and Giovanni Battista, one of the Malagamba brothers, who make accessories for Nicolo Amati, marries a local girl, Apollina. The young couple are both 18 years old and they continue to live with Niccolo and Lucrenzia.
Fun fact about the Amati workshop at this point is that there is an apprentice. In the shop at this time, he will go on to have an interesting career after leaving Cremona. His name was Bartolomeo Cristofiori and he would invent the pianoforte when he was working for the Medici family in Florence.
In 1657, Nicolò Amati has his Seventh child. It is a boy, so they call him Girolamo. This youngest child of the his would have been born into a lively, close knit community. The parish they lived in was a small one where everyone knew their neighbors and their business. The Guarneris are just around the corner and four houses down the road live the Ferraboschi family, including their daughter. who would, in a few years time, marry Antonio Stradivari. And across the road are the Capras, whose nephew would be Francesca's first husband, before Antonio. In 1661, the Amatis last child, a daughter, was born, when Nicolo was almost 65. Her name was Euphrosia Scholastica. His many children shared a busy household with extended family members, cousins, aunts and uncles, workshop staff and servants. At one point there were 11 people living in the home.
Nicolo's wonderfully crafted instruments were in high demand and some would consider them to be some of the most elegant violins ever made. In the workshop, they had apprentices and two or three servants, or hired hands, who would be making accessories such as pegs, fingerboards, bridges, bassbars, and even scrolls. Going to mass on a Sunday, or the town market, the Amati children would have bumped into any number of aunts, uncles, cousins, or neighbours. Around the family lived their friends, enemies, godparents, in laws, landlords, tenants, witnesses at weddings, and legal documents. So from the 1660s, Nicolò's instruments create a standard for the Cremonese makers to aspire to. They are tonally powerful and, from a craftsmanship point of view, masterpieces.
But even before this period, Nicolò Amati had changed his instruments to adapt to the musical demands of the day. The Baroque period in which he lived was producing composers and music that demanded more sound volume from its instruments. This movement was particularly strong in Rome, where compositions needed instruments able to compete with whole choirs to be heard. Monteverdi didn't just double up the violins, giving them the same notes as the singers. The violins were now being written specific musical parts for themselves. To shine and to shine. You had to be heard and to be heard, you had to be more powerful. It is also from the 1660s that over spun gut strength started to be made and used by musicians increasing the tension and power of instruments. Nicolo Amati made two sized violins, big ones, and small ones. The larger ones measure between 354 to 358 millimetres. That is regarded as a standard today, and the smaller ones back length are 352mm, which makes them on the smaller side, but that's not the end of the world.
The smaller ones were often, if you dare, referred to as ladies violins, but really not because women were 5mm smaller than men, apparently, but they were referring to the rooms in which they were to be heard. So a smaller violin would be played indoors. It didn't need to be so powerful and Heaven forbid a lady would play outside, preposterous. And this reminds me, and I know I'm getting off track here, but women's clothing at the time didn't have integrated pockets in them because they thought, when I say they, this is presumably men, they thought that women would fill the above mentioned practical storage spaces with charms and poisons to befuddle the menfolk. And to be fair, that was my first thought when discovering pockets in my clothing, so I'll give them that.
In 1680, the Amati home is still a busy place to be. The children have grown up, and Girolamo, whom we call Girolamo II, not to be confused with his grandfather, Girolamo Amati, who was one of the Amati brothers. Gerolamo II is married and living in the family home with his wife, Angela, and their first child, Vittoria. At the moment, she is pregnant with their second child, and most of Nicolo's apprentices over the years were not from Cremona and have moved home. Some of them have set up workshops in town and some like the Malagamba Brothers have moved just a few doors down the street. And then on April the 12th, 1684, the 88-year-old Nicola Amati died. He would've been greatly missed by his family, friends, and the many pupils he had taught over the years. His legacy was vast, and he definitely changed the landscape of violin making in Cremona, leaving it a city of instrument makers. If it had not been for his willingness to take on apprentices outside his family, the history of violin making and the city of Cremona would have looked vastly different. The week after Nicolo's death, Girolamo II Amati baptized his son Nicolo, and a few months later, Anna Maria, that's one of Nicolo's daughters, and Girolamo's sister, who was already married it seems, finally moved out to live with her husband in the house next door. Who knows what was going on there. Anyway, although Niccolo is probably the most well known of the Amatis, it would have to be his son Girolamo II, the least recognized, and yet as we will see, his work and life is indeed significant in the story of the violin.
But what happened to Girolamo
and why was he the last of the illustrious Amati family? This, we will see in the next episode of the Violin Chronicles. And if you have liked the show, please rate and review it on Apple podcasts or Spotify. That would really help out with the making of the podcast so I can continue to bring you more episodes.
Be sure also to head over to Patreon forward slash the Violin Chronicles. If you would like to support the podcast and become a Patreon, there are extra episodes, and I would particularly like to point out a new series called My Encyclopedia of Luthiers. That little podcast I do with my husband, Antoine.
In it, we summarize each maker in under an hour and describe all the little details to look out for. So you can recognize that particular maker's work. And maybe you can become an expert yourself one day. I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles. Goodbye for now.
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Welcome to another episode of “The Violin Chronicles” podcast that delves into the lives and legacies of the world's most renowned artisans and craftsmen. In today's episode, we journey back in time to explore the extraordinary craftsmanship of Nicolo Amati, a name synonymous with the art of violin making.
In this Episode we look at a major turning point in this history of Cremonese violin making that you simply cannot miss.
After the great plague of 1630 Nicolo is picking up the pieces of his life and moving on. Tracing the footsteps of this master luthier we will uncover the secrets behind Nicolo Amati's enduring legacy, a legacy marked by precision, passion, and innovation. From his early years in Cremona, Italy, to the workshop where he meticulously crafted some of the most exquisite violins in history.
We'll also explore his influence on subsequent generations of violin makers, including the revered Stradivari and Guarneri families and how they were so greatly influenced by this master luthier.
Through interviews with experts in the field and insights from contemporary violin makers inspired by Amati's genius, this episode offers a deep dive into the world of stringed instrument craftsmanship. Whether you're a seasoned musician, a lover of fine arts, or simply curious about the magic behind the music, Nicolo Amati's story is sure to captivate your imagination.
So, tune in as we unravel the enchanting tale of Nicolo Amati, the craftsman who transformed wood and strings into timeless works of art that continue to resonate with the world's most discerning musicians and collectors. Get ready for an enriching and harmonious journey through the life and work of this true master of the craft.
- Visa fler
