Fig. 42.
THE STRADIVARIUS VIOLIN.
[From Grove.]
Stradivari established his own factory about 1680, and continued to make instruments up to 1730. The violin of 1708 weighs three-quarters of a pound. Besides making violins, this eminent artist also made guitars, lutes, 'cellos and tenors. It is wholly uncertain to what extent the peculiarities of the Stradivari instruments were matters of deduction and how far accidental. But there can be no question that the average excellence of his instruments, judging from the specimens still in existence, was much greater than that of any other violin maker.
Many other eminent artists made good violins in the century and a half from the time of Andrea Amati and Gaspar da Salo to Stradivari, among the most eminent being Maggini, of Brescia, whose violins are very highly esteemed. Still, inasmuch as the finishing touches were put to the instrument by Stradivarius, we need not linger to discuss the minor makers.
II.
Before 1600 the organ had attained its maturity, and had become furnished with its distinctive characteristics as we have it at the present time. As this instrument, from the nature of its tone qualities and its peculiar limitation to serious music of grave rhythm, is naturally suited to the service of the Church, it has remained till the present day in the province where it had already firmly established itself at the time now under consideration. The origin of the organ is very difficult to ascertain. There are traces of some sort of wind instrument before the Christian era. The so-called hydraulic organ was probably one in which water was used to perfect the air-holding qualities of the wind chest, in the same manner as now in gas holders. One of the earliest mediæval references to organs is to that sent King Pepin, of France, father of Charlemagne, in 742 by Constantine, emperor of Byzantium at that time. This instrument, says the old chronicler, had brass pipes, blown with bellows bags; it was struck with the hands and feet. It was the first of this kind seen in France.
Prætorius says that the organ which Vitellianus set in church 300 years before Pepin, must have been the small instrument of fifteen pipes, for which the wind was collected in twelve bellows bags.
According to Julianus, a Spanish bishop who flourished in 450, the organ was in common use in churches at that time. In 822 an organ was sent to Charlemagne by the Caliph Haroun Alraschid, made by an Arabian maker. This instrument was placed in a church at Aix-la-Chapelle. There were good organ builders in Venice as early as 822, and before 900 there was an organ in the cathedral at Munich. In the ninth century organs had become common in England, and in the tenth the English prelate, St. Dunstan, erected one in Malmesbury Abbey, of which the pipes were of brass. The instruments of that time were extremely crude.
