The Violin Chronicles Podcast

Continue listening to the life of Andrea Guarneri, student of Nicolo Amati and father of 2 very important violin makers.

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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. 

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.

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.

​ 

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 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.

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.

What's the process to subscribe? The annual subscription is a hundred dollars and allows you unlimited access to as many makers and as many instruments as you want.

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.

​ 

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?

1. 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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