The viol family; the tenor viol; technique of the viola; viola’s place in the orchestra; Mozart’s use of the viola; Beethoven’s use of the viola; Berlioz’s “Harold Symphony”; Wagner’s use of the viola; viola as treated by modern composers; Berlioz on the viola.
The viola is a fifth lower than the violin and an octave higher than the violoncello. Its strings are C, G, D and A. The C string is particularly resonant. The technique is the same as that of the violin; but the bow, though similar in size and shape, is less elastic.
To understand the viola we shall have to go back to the Fifteenth Century to examine a group of instruments that were the ancestors of the present family of Strings.
This was the Viol Family. There were four sizes of instruments. There was the Treble, or Discant (which always played the melody); the viola da braccio (played with the arm), or tenor; the viola da gamba (the leg viola), the bass viol; and the violone, or double-bass.
Another member of this family was the viola d’amore (the viola of love), a choice example of which appears facing page [50]. It had “sympathetic strings.”
These viols were all tuned in thirds, or fourths, instead of fifths, as our modern Strings now tune.
And here we must pause for another moment to speak of an ancient viol-maker named Gaspard Duiffoprugcar (his name is spelled in many ways), who was born in 1514 and who died in 1570. He lived in that very brilliant period, the Renaissance, when Italian painters were producing magnificent works and when poets and dramatists were writing masterpieces every day. The rich lords and ladies who patronized these artists were very highly cultivated and accomplished; and Music was not the least of their pleasures. Every house of wealth had a collection of fine instruments, though this was before the days of Amati and Stradivari.
Duiffoprugcar lived in the Tyrol in the region of pines, in which instrument-makers had long been settled, and he made lutes and viols all his life. His instruments come so nearly to being violins that he is sometimes called the first maker of violins. But in his hands the violin did not quite reach the form that we find in Gasparo di Salò, who, as we have seen (see page [22]) was the true creator of the violin.
Duiffoprugcar’s instruments are valued not only because they are old and rare, but also because they are works of art. They are often elaborately inlaid and carved, such as the one facing page [54]. Another of his instruments, in the Brussels Conservatory, has the plan of Paris inlaid in colored woods on the back, while the scroll ends in a finely carved horse’s head. And still another has inlaid in the back a poetic Latin inscription, which is a riddle that could be applied to any stringed instrument. Translated, it reads as follows:
“I was living in the forest; the cruel axe killed me. Living, I was mute; dead, I sing sweetly.”