The question of wood was of the greatest importance. “The wood must be cut only in December and January and only that part must be used which has been exposed to the sun. You may cut up planks before you find a piece suitable for a really fine back, or belly. Witness the grain of a Stradivari or Amati violin; mark the almost pictorially beautiful health and evenness of its wavy lines, free from all knots, irregularity of growth, studded with symmetrical and billowy veins where the rich sap once flowed. And when the wood is cut it must be tempered and dried, not with artificial warmth but with the slow and penetrating influence of a dry, warm Cremona climate. For no customer, no market could the process be hurried. And the application of the varnish required corresponding care. It was to be perfectly wedded to the rare wood—a companionship destined to last for ages—to outlast so many generations of men and women, was not to be enterprised or undertaken lightly. In the spring when the air got clear and bright and the storms were past, the subtle gums and oils were mixed slowly and deliberately: hours to stand, hours to settle, hours for perfect fusing and amalgamation of parts; clear, white light gleaming from roads strewn with the dazzling marble dust of Lombardy; clear blue sky, warm dry air, and the skill of an alchemist,—these were the conditions for mixing the incomparable Cremona varnish. So deliberately was it prepared and laid on, just where the wood was fit to receive it—laid on in three coats in such a manner as to sink into the dessicated pores and become a part of the wood, as the aromatic herbs and juices become a part of the flesh that is embalmed for a thousand years. All through the summer did that matchless varnish, which some say contained ground amber and which, at any rate, was charged with subtle secrets, sink and sink into the sycamore and deal plates, until now, when age has rubbed away its clear and agate crust in many places, the violin is found no longer to need that protection, for the wood itself seems to have become petrified into clear agate and is capable throughout its myriad pores and fibres of resisting the worm and even damp and other ravaging influence of ordinary decay.”[7]

When Joachim was asked why he preferred a Stradivari to any other violin, he replied: “A Stradivari is a mine of musical sound into which the player can dig and bring out hidden beauties of tone.” And then he went on to say: “While the violins of Maggini are remarkable for volume of tone and those of Amati for liquidity, none of the celebrated makers exhibit the union of sweetness and power in so pre-eminent a degree as Giuseppe Guarnieri (del Gesù) and Antonio Stradivari. If I am to give expression to my individual feeling, I must pronounce for the latter as my chosen favorite. It is true that in brilliancy and clearness, even in liquidity, Guarneri is not surpassed by him; but what appears to me peculiar to the tone of Stradivari is a more unlimited capacity for expressing the most varied accents of feeling. The tone seems to well forth like a spring and to be capable of infinite modification under the bow. Stradivari’s violins affording a strong resistance to the bow, when resistance is desired, yet responding to its lightest breath, emphatically require that the player’s ear shall patiently listen until it catches the secret of drawing out their tone. Their beauty of tone is not so easily reached as in the violins of many other makers. Their vibrations increase in warmth the more the player, discovering their richness and variety, seeks from the instrument a sympathetic echo of his own emotions: so much so that these violins seem to be living beings and become, as it were, the player’s familiars—as if Stradivari had breathed a soul into them in a manner achieved by no other master. It is this which stamps them as creations of an artistic mind, as positive works of art.”

We have talked about the construction of the violin and of its great makers; now let us turn our attention to the actual playing of the instrument.

The four strings—G, D, A, and E—are made of catgut[8] and the lowest—the G—is wound with silver. These strings do not run exactly parallel but taper gradually from the bridge to the nut. The nut is a tiny, raised bar of ebony at the extreme end of the fingerboard; and on the nut the strings rest on their way to the pegs. Through each peg a tiny hole is bored. The string passes through that hole and is looped around itself; and then the peg is screwed up, or turned, until the proper note, or pitch, is found. The violin is tuned in fifths.

These four strings give what are called the open notes—G, D, A, and E. The lowest note possible to get from the violin is this open G.

On the piano every note is ready and waiting for us to touch. Not so on the violin. Every note (except the open ones) the performer has to make. He has only four fingers to make these notes because his thumb simply helps the hand take its various positions. Generally speaking, there are seven positions; for the three still higher ones are rarely used. With each position, the hand is shifted a little higher on the neck of the violin; and the thumb and wrist gradually turn, the thumb from and the wrist towards the face of the player. As the hand creeps up upon the instrument, the fingers come closer together and the notes lie nearer to one another on the strings. The flexible little finger can be extended still further in each position while the position of the wrist and thumb is still retained.

As each finger presses the string tightly and firmly, the player shortens the vibration (or length) of the string and gets a special note. He learns to know his fingerboard and where all the notes lie on the strings with their intervals of whole tones and half-tones; and just what finger to place on these notes if he wants to play in the first, third, or fifth, position,—and so forth. The violinist rarely plays in any one position; but lets his wrist move up and down and his fingers fly all over the fingerboard, playing in all the positions just as he pleases. The player has to have a very accurate knowledge of the fingerboard; and then, beyond that knowledge, a very correct ear so that he may play in perfect tune, or good intonation, as it is called. A beginner on the violin finds this task even harder than to learn to draw a firm, straight, even and liquid bow. He has to listen to every note he produces and test it, as it were, until, after a time, he learns the fingerboard and his fingers drop on the right spots automatically. Of all musicians the players of strings have the most sensitive, accurate and the best trained ears.

On the strings certain other notes are produced called harmonics. At certain places on a string there are nodes, as they are called, where, by lightly touching the string with the finger, over-tones are set vibrating. These are very strange and curious. They sound ethereal and flute-like. There are two kinds of harmonics: natural harmonics and artificial harmonics. The natural harmonics are found on the open strings at certain definite places. There are five of these on each string. The artificial harmonics are produced by stopping the string with one finger and touching it lightly with another. These harmonics are harder to master; and they are a great worry to a violinist, because if his violin gets out of tune (drops a little from the heat of a concert hall, perhaps) the proper harmonics cannot be played. The question of harmonics is one that belongs to the science of acoustics and it is a very hard one to understand.

The strings are different in character and quality of tone. The G is very rich and mellow; D and A (particularly D) are sweet and warm; and E is very penetrating. The French call the latter chanterelle because it so often sings the melody.

One peculiar charm about the violin is that though each of these strings has an individual character they “carry over” into each other so beautifully that a good player can pass from one to another smoothly and evenly. He mixes them, as it were, into a lovely whole. In passing from one position to another the violinist often delicately slides with his finger up to, or down from, a note. This effect is called portamento; and it is one of the charms in violin-playing. Do not think that with his first fingers, the artist slides along the string until he finds the note he wants. Nothing of the kind. He slides up the string with one finger to nearly the place he wants and then drops another finger firmly on the right note. But this portamento is done so beautifully, so lightly and so swiftly that we never hear a slur, but are only conscious of a lovely and graceful effect.

When the composer wants to produce a very soft and veiled impression he writes on his score for the strings con sordini. The sordino is a little brass, or wooden, article that looks like a comb. It is placed on the bridge, teeth downwards, to add weight and to deaden the vibrations. You will often see each of the Strings take his sordino out of his waistcoat pocket and place it on the bridge of his instrument during the performance of a composition. Very few compositions are played with the sordino all the way through.

The left hand of a violinist is, to a certain degree, mechanical and trained to get accurate intonation, perfect position and tremendous dexterity. His right hand has another kind of work to do. The bowing of a violinist is what breath is to a singer and what touch is to a pianist. The beauty and delicacy of tone and the astonishing effects of scattering showers of notes about are all the work of the loose wrist, strong and flexible arm and yielding fingers that hold the bow and draw it across the strings.

The rich, velvety, smooth and peaceful legato; the detached or short, sharp strokes; the hammered; the jumping; and the harp-like effects, the arpeggios (or open chords) swinging back and forth, are all accomplished by the bow. Once in a great while, we hear a strange and weird effect caused by rapping the string lightly with the stick of the bow. But this is only a kind of trick that composers sometimes introduce. Liszt calls for it in his Mazeppa; Saint-Saëns in his Danse Macabre; and Strauss in Also Sprach Zarasthustra.

More often the violins (and other stringed instruments) play pizzicato,—that is the violinist rests his thumb against the fingerboard and plucks the strings with the tip of his forefinger.

Beethoven makes an effective use of this in the Scherzo of his Fifth Symphony and so does Tschaikowsky in the Scherzo of his F-minor Symphony.

In the Orchestra violins are classified into First and Second, as we have seen, the First Violins sitting on the Conductor’s left and the Second Violins on his right hand. They sit two and two, each couple sharing a desk. The First Violins sing the high Soprano and the Second Violins the mezzo-soprano. The First Violin in the whole Orchestra is called the Concert-meister, or Concert-master, or simply the First Violin. Very often he plays an elaborate solo passage.

Before the days of modern Conductors the First Violin used to be the Conductor of the orchestra, or, we might say, the Conductor played the violin and led the Orchestra at the same time. But although the First Violin has no longer this double duty, his importance in the Orchestra is very great. On him depends the attack and phrasing of the first violin and to a certain extent of the entire string Orchestra.

With regard to the position of the violin in the Orchestra let us hear Lavignac: “The violin,” he says, “is preëminently a melodic instrument,—the splendid sparkling soprano of the stringed tribe, the richest in varied effects, the most agile and the most impassioned of orchestral elements.”

And now having understood its value as an individual, let us turn to Berlioz to get an idea of its team-work.

“Violins are capable of a host of apparently inconsistent shades of expression. They possess (as a whole) force, lightness, grace, accents both gloomy and gay, thought and passion. The only point is to know how to make them speak. Slow and tender melodies are never better rendered than by a mass of violins. Nothing can equal the touching sweetness of a score of first strings made to sing by twenty well-skilled bows. The violin is, in fact, the true female voice of the Orchestra,—a voice at once passionate and chaste, heart-rending yet soft, which can weep, sigh and lament, chant, pray and muse, or burst forth into joyous accents as none other can do. An imperceptible movement of the arm, an almost unconscious sentiment on the part of him who experiences it, producing scarcely any apparent effect when executed by a single violin will, when multiplied by a number of them in unison, give forth enchanting gradation, irresistible impulse and accents which penetrate to the very heart’s core.”

Until the bow was perfected there was no brilliant violin-playing as we understand it to-day. It took a long time for the bow to develop. There was a “Stradivari of the bow”; and the name of this person so valuable to the art of violin-playing is François Tourte (see portrait facing page 44). All bows are made on Tourte’s model. A real Tourte bow commands a high price.

To understand what Tourte did, we shall have to go back to the early days of the violin and see what kind of a bow the old players used.

The earliest bow with which the viole, or vielle, and the early violin was played was shaped just like the bow from which an arrow is drawn,—a cord stretched from end to end of a stick. It was a very clumsy affair. In the Thirteenth Century when the violin began to develop as we have seen (see page 17), the bow began to change, too. The first improvement was to make one end blunt and to use hair instead of a cord. The head, or tip, was still sharply pointed. Nothing happened until the time of Corelli, the Italian composer and violinist (1653-1713), who did so much to improve violin-playing. He and others of his time used a straight, short bow, which was not at all elastic, although it was made of light wood. This was a distinct gain, as was also the novel idea of a screw by which the hair could be regulated.

The next change took place in the time of another Italian violinist, Tartini (1692-1770), the one who wrote the Devil’s Sonata, the melody of which he said the Devil played to him one night in a dream. Tartini used a longer bow than Corelli. It was also thinner and more elastic; but the head of it was still scooped like the ancient ones.

Then, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, François Tourte (1747-1835), worked away making bows, as his father had done before him, until he developed the modern bow. It appeared just about the time of the French Revolution. Like Stradivari, Tourte continued to work till the end of his life. He worked all day in his workshop in Paris, No. 10 Quai de l’École, and on Sundays and holidays he sat on the banks of the Seine fishing, just as they do to-day, and occasionally caught a tiny little fish to the envy of excited rivals around him.

With the stiff, straight, heavy, unelastic bow, the violinist could, of course, produce very few effects. Tourte’s improvements almost revolutionized violin-playing. It is said that Viotti, another Italian (1753-1824), and perhaps up to his time the greatest violinist that had appeared, gave Tourte the benefit of his ideas.

It is only by the use of an elastic bow that a violinist is able to produce his wonderful effects. Bowing is to the violinist what breath is to the singer and touch to the pianist: it is only through the bow that the violinist is able to express his emotions and ideas. So until Tourte’s time there was no real Art of Bowing, although Tartini wrote a little book on the subject.

The world was slow to adopt Tourte’s bow; and it was not until Paganini (1784-1840), the Italian wizard, came on the stage that a revolution in violin-playing took place. Paganini used every imaginable movement of the bow and developed the flexibility of the wrist. Then a new School of violin-playing arose and violin-playing gradually developed into what it is to-day.

“Tourte’s first experiments are said to have been made from the staves of old sugar hogsheads from Brazil. This is not unlikely. Probably the best slabs of Brazil-wood employed for this purpose had acquired a certain additional elasticity from the combined effect of exposure to tropical heat and the absorption of the saccharine juices.

“It is certain that the greater elasticity which he secured in the stick by the choice and preparation of the wood, enabled him to carry out to the fullest extent the method of bending the stick of the bow the reverse way, that is, inwards, and thus to realize what had long been the desideratum of a violinist,—a bow which should be strong and elastic without being heavy. By thus increasing and economising the resistance of the stick, he liberated the player’s thumb and fingers from much useless weight. By a series of patient experiments he determined the right curvature for the stick and the rule for tapering it gradually towards the point so as to have the centre of gravity in the right place, or, in other words, to ‘balance’ properly over the strings in the hands of the player. He determined the true length of the stick and the height of the point and the nut, in all which particulars the bow-makers of his time seem to have erred on the side of excess. Lastly he invented the method of spreading the hairs and fixing them on the face of the nut by means of a moveable band of metal fitted on a slide of mother-of-pearl.”[9]

Tourte’s violin bows are from 29 to 29½ inches long; a viola bow is 29 inches; and a ’cello bow is from 28½ to 28¾ inches. The stick of a violin bow is made of Brazilian snake wood, or lance wood, reddish and slightly mottled. It is cut straight, following the grain of the wood and then it is slightly bent by the application of heat. The hair, fastened into the tip by a plug, is inserted into the nut of the bow (made of ebony, or tortoise shell); it can be made tighter, or looser, by turning the screw in the nut. There are from 175 to 200 hairs in a bow and these are taken from tails of stallions. White hair is used for the violin, viola and violoncello and black for the double-bass. Rosin is rubbed on the bow to increase its friction.

A violinist takes just as much care of his bow as he does of his violin. When he has finished playing, he wipes his violin carefully with a silk handkerchief before he places it tenderly in the case; then he unscrews his bow and places it in the rests in the top of the case.