If we leave our study of pianoforte music with a laugh it is only because we may be supremely happy in the possession of so much music that need not be hidden before the raillery of any wit, no matter how sacrilegious. Into the hands of Claude Debussy we give the art of writing for the pianoforte. His is the wisest and most sensitive touch to mold it since the day of Chopin. Whatever the music he writes may be, it has conferred upon the instrument once more the infinite blessing of a proper speech. He has once more saved it from a confusion of thumps and roars.
Bach, Chopin, Debussy: it is a strange trio, set apart from other composers because to them the pianoforte made audible its secret voice, a voice of fading after-sounds. Let us not take Bach from among them. It was after all the same voice that spoke to him from his clavichord, more faint perhaps yet even more sensitive. Music whispered to Mozart that she would sing sweetly for him through his light pianoforte. The powers of destiny made themselves music at the call of Beethoven, and they swept up the piano in their force. Through Schubert the hand of a spirit touched the keys. For Weber the keys danced together and made strange pantomimes of sound. Schumann, as it were, spoke to his pianoforte apart, and it opened a door for him into a fanciful world. To Brahms the keys were colleagues, not friends, and Liszt drove them in a chariot race, worthy of Rome and the emperors, or converted them like a magician into a thousand shapes with a thousand spells. But to Bach, Chopin and Debussy this instrument revealed itself and showed a secret beauty that is all its own.
CHAPTER XI
EARLY VIOLIN MUSIC AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF VIOLIN TECHNIQUE
The origin of stringed instruments; ancestors of the violin—Perfection of the violin and advance in violin technique; use of the violin in the sixteenth century; early violin compositions in the vocal style; Florentino Maschera and Monteverdi—Beginnings of violin music: Biagio Marini; Quagliati; Farina; Fontana and Mont’ Albano; Merula; Ucellino and Neri; Legrenzi; Walther and his advance in technique, experiments in tone painting—Giov. Battista Vitali; Tommaso Vitali and Torelli; Bassani; Veracini and others—Biber and other Germans; English and French composers for the violin; early publications of text-books and collections.
I
The origin of string instruments of the violin family is involved in much obscurity and it would be impossible to discuss here the various theories concerning it which have been stated with more or less plausibility by musical historians.[42] A preponderance of authoritative opinion seems to favor the theory that the direct ancestor of the violin was the Welsh crwth, a sort of harp, which seems to have been played with a bow. Venantius Fortunatus (570 A.D.) mentions this instrument in the much quoted lines: Romanusque lyra plaudit tibi, barbara harpa, Græcus Achillaica, chrotta Britana canat. (‘The Roman praises thee with the lyre, the barbarian sings to thee with the harp, the Greek with the cither, the Briton with the crwth.’) The fact that the old English name for the fiddle was crowd furnishes an etymological argument in favor of the crwth. It is, of course, possible that the idea of using a bow with the small harp was first suggested by some instrument already in existence. The Arabs and other peoples had instruments roughly approximating the violin type. One is inclined, however, to the assumption that the violin was not developed directly from any particular instrument, but came into being rather through the evolution of an idea with which various races experimented independently and simultaneously.
Ignace Paderewski.
After a photo from life (1915).
The immediate forerunner of the violin seems to have been the rebec, of which there is a drawing in an extant manuscript of the ninth century. The Benedictine monk Ofried, in his Liber Evangeliorum of about the same period, mentions the fidula as one of the two bowed instruments then in use, though to what extent the fidula differed from the rebec we are unable to ascertain. In the psalm-book of Notker (d. 1022) there is also a figure of a rebec and a bow. Drawings, written references and bas-reliefs enable us to follow the development of the violin clearly enough from this time on. In the abbey of St. Georges de Boscherville, Normandy, there is preserved a bas-relief which shows a girl dancing on her head to the accompaniment of a band which includes two instruments of the violin type, played with the bow. The Nibelungen Lied speaks of a fiddler who ‘wielded a fiddle-bow, broad and long like a sword,’ and although this epic was completed in the twelfth century it is probably safe to antedate the reference considerably. There is in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris a crowned figure with a four-stringed violin, and in the Abbey of St. Germain des Près there is a similar relic showing a man with a five-stringed violin and a bow. Both date from the eleventh century. From these and similar evidences it is plain that a violin of a rudimentary type was used extensively in the eleventh century. Its musical possibilities must have been very slight, and probably it was used chiefly to accompany the song or the dance.