STRADIVARIUS - Part 2
During his long life (he died in 1737), the great violin-maker worked industriously, and produced a large number of instruments, but a far greater number are attributed to him than he could possibly have made. His usual price for a violin was about twenty dollars, (Haweis says fifty dollars), but a fine specimen from his hand now sells in the auction room for hundreds of dollars. In 1888, a Stradivarius violin brought the large sum of five thousand dollars, and double this sum was paid a few years since for the celebrated “Messie” violin, made by Stradivarius in 1716, and still in perfect condition. Count Cozio di Salabue had bought it in 1760, but never allowed it to be played upon, and when he died (about 1824) it was purchased by that remarkable “violin hunter,” Luigi Tarisio. Thirty years later, he, too, passed over to the majority, and his friend, the Parisian violin-maker Vuillaume, bought the “Messie” from Tarisio’s heirs, along with about two hundred and fifty other fiddles, many of which were of the greatest rarity and value. Vuillaume kept the “Messie” in a glass case and never allowed any one to touch it, and many anxious days he passed during the Commune, fearing for his musical treasures. However, they luckily escaped the dangers of the time, and when, in 1875, Vuillaume died, the “Messie” became the property of his daughter, who was the wife of M. Alard, the celebrated teacher of the violin. From his executors it was bought in 1890 for 2,000 pounds, for the English gentleman who now possesses this most famous of all the works of Stradivarius. Charles Reade, the novelist, who was a lover of the violin and an expert in such matters, in 1872 had thought this instrument to be worth 600 pounds, so that its value had trebled in less than twenty years. The celebrated violinist, Ole Bull, owned a Stradivarius violin, dated 1687, and inlaid with ebony and ivory, which is said to have been made for a king of Spain. In the “Tales of a Wayside Inn” Longfellow speaks of it:
“The instrument on which he played
Was in Cremona’s workshop made,
By a great master of the past
Ere yet was lost the art divine;
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“Exquisite was it in design,
Perfect in each minutest part,
A marvel of the lutist’s art;
And in its hollow chamber, thus,
The maker from whose hands it came
Had written his unrivalled name,—
‘Antonius Stradivarius.’”
Haweis, in his admirable book on “Old Violins,” reproduces for us “the atmosphere in which Antonio Stradivari worked for more than half a century.
“I stood in the open loft at the top of his house, where still in the old beams stuck the rusty old nails upon which he hung up his violins. And I saw out upon the north the wide blue sky, just mellowing to rich purple, and flecked here and there with orange streaks prophetic of sunset. Whenever Stradivarius looked up from his work, if he looked north, his eye fell on the old towers of S. Marcellino and S. Antonio; if he looked west, the Cathedral, with its tall campanile, rose dark against the sky, and what a sky! full of clear sun in the morning, full of pure heat all day, and bathed with ineffable tints in the cool of the evening, when the light lay low upon vinery and hanging garden, or spangled with ruddy gold the eaves, the roofs, and frescoed walls of the houses.
“Here, up in the high air, with the sun, his helper, the light, his minister, the blessed soft airs, his journeymen, what time the workaday noise of the city rose and the sound of matins and vespers was in his ears, through the long warm days worked Antonio Stradivari.”
Among the Great Masters of Music
Scenes in the Lives of Famous Musicians
By Walter Rowlands
Published 1906
