"But to return to the general fault of the violin student. There is a certain angle at which the bow should cross the strings in order to produce those vibrations which give the roundest, fullest, most perfect tone [he took his own beautiful instrument out of its case to illustrate the point], and the violin must be so held that the bow moves straight across the strings in this manner. A deviation from the correct attack produces a scratchy tone. And it is just in the one fundamental thing: the holding of the violin in exactly the same position when it is taken up by the player, never varying by so much as half-an-inch, and the correct attack by the bow, in which the majority of pupils are deficient. If the violin is not held at the proper angle, for instance, it is just as though a piano were to stand on a sloping floor. Too many students play 'with the violin' on the bow, instead of holding the violin steady, and letting the bow play.
"And in beginning to study, this apparently simple, yet fundamentally important, principle is often overlooked or neglected. Joachim, when he studied as a ten-year-old boy under Hellmesberger in Vienna, once played a part in a concerto by Maurer, for four violins and piano. His teacher was displeased: 'You'll never be a fiddler!' he told him, 'you use your bow too stiffly!' But the boy's father took him to Böhm, and he remained with this teacher for three years, until his fundamental fault was completely overcome. And if Joachim had not given his concentrated attention to his bowing while there was still time, he would never have been the great artist he later became.
THE ART OF THE BOW
"You see," he continued, "the secret of really beautiful violin playing lies in the bow. A Blondin crossing Niagara finds his wire hard and firm where he first steps on it. But as he progresses it vibrates with increasing intensity. And as the tight-rope walker knows how to control the vibrations of his wire, so the violinist must master the vibrations of his strings. Each section of the string vibrates with a different quality of tone. Most pupils think that a big tone is developed by pressure with the bow—yet much depends on what part of the string this pressure is applied. Fingering is an art, of course, but the great art is the art of the bow, the 'art of bowing,' as Tartini calls it. When a pupil understands it he has gone far.
"Every pupil may be developed to a certain degree without ever suspecting how important a factor the manipulation of the bow will be in his further progress. He thinks that if the fingers of his left hand are agile he has gained the main end in view. But then he comes to a stop—his left hand can no longer aid him, and he finds that if he wants to play with real beauty of expression the bow supplies the only true key. Out of a hundred who reach this stage," Mr. Kneisel went on, rather sadly, "only some five or six, or even less, become great artists. They are those who are able to control the bow as well as the left hand. All real art begins with phrasing, and this, too, lies altogether in the mastery of bow—the very soul of the violin!"
I asked Mr. Kneisel how he came to write his own "Advanced Exercises" for the instrument. "I had an idea that a set of studies, in which each single study presented a variety of technical figures might be a relief from the exercises in so many excellent methods, where pages of scales are followed by pages of arpeggios, pages of double-notes and so forth. It is very monotonous to practice pages and pages of a single technical figure," he added. "Most pupils simply will not do it!" He brought out a copy of his "Exercises" and showed me their plan. "Here, for instance, I have scales, trills, arpeggios—all in the same study, and the study is conceived as a musical composition instead of a technical formula. This is a study in finger position, with all possible bowings. My aim has been to concentrate the technical material of a whole violin school in a set of études with musical interest."
And he showed me the second book of the studies, in ms., containing exercises in every variety of scale, and trill, bowing, nuance, etc., combined in a single musical movement. This volume also contains his own cadenza to the Beethoven violin concerto. In conclusion Mr. Kneisel laid stress on the importance of the student's hearing the best music at concert and recital as often as possible, and on the value and incentive supplied by a musical atmosphere in the home and, on leaving him, I could not help but feel that what he had said in our interview, his reflections and observations based on an artistry beyond cavil, and an authoritative experience, would be well worth pondering by every serious student of the instrument. For Franz Kneisel speaks of what he knows.