Part 1 (1/2)

The Violin.

by George Dubourg.

PREFACE

TO THE PRESENT EDITION.

After a lapse of nearly sixteen years since this little work first appeared in print, I have been called upon to prepare it anew for the press, incorporating with it the additional matter necessary for the extension of the subject to the present time.

My new readers may like to know, at the outset, what is the intended scope of the following pages. This is soon explained. My object has been to present to the cultivators of the Violin, whether students or proficients, such a sketch (however slight) of the rise and progress of that instrument, accompanied with particulars concerning its more prominent professors, and with incidental anecdotes, as might help to enliven their interest in it, and a little to enlarge what may be called their _circ.u.mstantial_ acquaintance with it. This humble object has not been altogether, I trust, without its accomplishment;-and here, while commending my renovated manual to the indulgent notice of the now happily increasing community of violin votaries, I would not forget to acknowledge, gratefully, the liberal and generous appreciation with which, when it first ventured forth, it was met by the public press, and introduced into musical society.

G. D.

_Brighton, August, 1852._

CHAPTER I.

ORIGINAL AND EARLY HISTORY OF THE VIOLIN.

First seat him somewhere, and derive his race.-DRYDEN.

The Fiddle Family, like other tribes that have succeeded in making a noise in the world, has given exercise to the ingenuity of learned theorists and time-seekers, who have laboured to discover for it an origin as remote from our own era, as it is, I fear, from any kind of truth. It has probably been conceived that the Fiddle, a.s.sociated as he has been, from generation to generation, with jigs, country-dances, fairs, junketings and other rusticities, had descended too low in the scale of society-that he had rendered himself, as Shakspeare for a while did his own genius, ”stale and cheap to vulgar company”-and that he required to be reminded of his primitive dignity, and of his very high ancestral derivation-if he _had any_. This latter point was of course to be first established; but, as your zealous antiquary is a wholesale dealer in time, and is never at a loss for a few centuries to link his conjectures to, the matter was easy enough; indeed, the more doubtful, the better, since doubt is the very life of theory. Accordingly, we have been invited to fall back upon ”the ancients,” and to recognize the _Epigonion_ as the dignified and cla.s.sic prototype of our merry and somewhat lax little friend, the Fiddle. To certain ancient Greek tablets relative to music, which have been somewhere brought to light, Professor Murchard has minutely a.s.signed the date of 709 years before the Christian era; and the following pa.s.sage, Englished from his translation, is stoutly alleged by the antiquarian advocates of the glories of the violin race:-”But Pherekydes began the contest, and sat himself down before all the people, and played the _Epigonion_;-for he had improved the same; and he stretched four strings over a small piece of wood, and played on them with a smooth stick. But the strings sounded so, that the people shouted with joy.”

This is plausible enough, but far from conclusive. It is but the outline of a description, and admits of various modes of filling up. _If_ the instrument partook _at all_ of the violin character, it might seem, from the reference which its name bears to the _knees_, to have been the rude progenitor of either the double-ba.s.s or the violoncello, which have both, as is well known, their official post between the knees: but then, the prefix of ?p? would denote that it was played _upon_ the knees of the artist. ”Very well,” says the antiquarian; ”it was a fiddle _reversed_.” ”Nay, Dr. Dryasdust, if you yourself _overturn_ what you are about, I have no need to say more.” _Au reste_, let any body stretch four strings over a small piece of wood, and play on them with a smooth stick, and then take account of what it comes to. No, no; whatever the _Epigonion_ may have been to the Greeks, he is nothing to _us_: he may have been a respectable individual of the musical genus of _his_ day, when people blew a sh.e.l.l or a reed, and called it music; but we cannot for a moment receive him as the patriarch of the Fiddle Family. As soon should we think of setting up Pherekydes against Paganini.

Dismissing the Epigonion, we come to the _Semicon_, another pretender of Greek origin. This also, we are farther told, was a _kind of violin_: but we deny that he was father to the _violin kind_. The Semicon is said to have been played on with a bow; and yet a learned German (Koch), in the fulness of his determination to have _strings_ enough to his bow, has claimed no less than thirty-five, as the complement of the Semicon.

How could any bow pay its devoirs distinctly to thirty-five strings?

Here, then, the dilemma is this: either to translate the thing in question into a _bow_ is to _traduce_ the term, or else the _strings_ are an impertinence. _Utrum horum mavis, accipe._

If the word _plectrum_ could, by any ingenuity, be established to mean _a bow_, quotations enough might be acc.u.mulated to prove that instruments played with bows had their origin in a very remote period.

But the translation of the word into _a bow, or such like thing_, as we find it in the Dictionaries, arises simply from the want of a known equivalent-a deficiency which makes it necessary to adopt any term that offers even the shadow of a synonym.

It has been stated, on the authority of a pa.s.sage from Euphorion's book on the Isthmian Games, that there was an ancient instrument called _magadis_, which was surrounded by strings; that it was placed upon a pivot, upon which it turned, whilst the performer touched it with _the bow_ (or, at least, the _plectrum_); and that this instrument afterwards received the name of _sambuce_.

The hieroglyphics of Peter Valerian, page 628, chap. 4, present the figure of a muse, holding, in her right hand, a kind of ba.s.s or contra-violin, the form of which is not _very_ unlike that of our violins or ba.s.ses.

Philostratus, moreover, who taught at Athens, during the reign of Nero, gives a description of the lyre, which has been thus translated:-

”Orpheus,” he says, ”supported the lyre against his left leg, whilst he beat time by striking his foot upon the ground; in his right hand he held _the bow_, which he drew across the strings, turning his wrist slightly inwards. He touched the strings with the fingers of his left hand, keeping the knuckles perfectly straight.”

From this description (if _bow_ it could be called, which bow was none), it would appear as if the lyre to which Philostratus alludes were, forsooth, the same instrument which the moderns call the _contra-violin_, or _viola di gamba_! To settle the matter thus, however, would be _indeed_ to beg the question.

As before observed, the word _plectrum_ is, in the dictionaries, translated by _bow_; but, even if this were a warranted rendering of the word, it remains to be ascertained not only whether the bows of the ancients were of a form and nature corresponding with ours, but also whether they were used in the modern _way_. Did the ancients strike their bow upon the strings of the instrument-or did they draw forth the sound by means of friction? These questions are still undecided; but opinions preponderate greatly in favor of the belief that the plectrum was an implement of _percussion_, and therefore not at all a bow, in our sense.

A recent French writer, Monsieur C. Desmarais, in an ingenious inquiry into the Archology of the Violin, takes us back to the ancient Egyptians, to whom he a.s.signs the primitive violin, under the name of the _chelys_, and suggests that its _form_ must have resulted from a studious inspection of one of the heavenly constellations!

M. Baillot, in his Introduction to the _Methode de Violon du Conservatoire_, speculating on the origin of the instrument, has a pa.s.sage which, in English, runs thus:-