INSTRUMENT-MAKER’S WORKSHOP
Eighteenth Century
The rich, velvety, smooth and peaceful legato; the detached or short, sharp strokes; the hammered; the jumping; and the harp-like effects, the arpeggios (or open chords) swinging back and forth, are all accomplished by the bow. Once in a great while, we hear a strange and weird effect caused by rapping the string lightly with the stick of the bow. But this is only a kind of trick that composers sometimes introduce. Liszt calls for it in his Mazeppa; Saint-Saëns in his Danse Macabre; and Strauss in Also Sprach Zarasthustra.
More often the violins (and other stringed instruments) play pizzicato,—that is the violinist rests his thumb against the fingerboard and plucks the strings with the tip of his forefinger.
Beethoven makes an effective use of this in the Scherzo of his Fifth Symphony and so does Tschaikowsky in the Scherzo of his F-minor Symphony.
In the Orchestra violins are classified into First and Second, as we have seen, the First Violins sitting on the Conductor’s left and the Second Violins on his right hand. They sit two and two, each couple sharing a desk. The First Violins sing the high Soprano and the Second Violins the mezzo-soprano. The First Violin in the whole Orchestra is called the Concert-meister, or Concert-master, or simply the First Violin. Very often he plays an elaborate solo passage.
Before the days of modern Conductors the First Violin used to be the Conductor of the orchestra, or, we might say, the Conductor played the violin and led the Orchestra at the same time. But although the First Violin has no longer this double duty, his importance in the Orchestra is very great. On him depends the attack and phrasing of the first violin and to a certain extent of the entire string Orchestra.
With regard to the position of the violin in the Orchestra let us hear Lavignac: “The violin,” he says, “is preëminently a melodic instrument,—the splendid sparkling soprano of the stringed tribe, the richest in varied effects, the most agile and the most impassioned of orchestral elements.”
And now having understood its value as an individual, let us turn to Berlioz to get an idea of its team-work.