Part IV: Violin Making Outside Cremona

The influence of Jacob Stainer

The Amati family and Antonio Stradivari had succeeded in making Cremona synonymous with fine violin making. If you wanted a violin in the 18^th century, and you wanted the best, you went to Cremona.

Only Jacob Stainer enjoyed any sort of a comparable reputation at that time. During a fair proportion of the century, Stainer’s designs, although plainly derived from those of Amati, offered an alternative template for makers throughout northern Europe and Italy itself. For a short time, he was the gold standard — even Mozart played on a Stainer violin — and the lighter, more silvery tone of his instruments seemed better suited to the period’s compositional and performance requirements, which were adapting from grand palace ballrooms or outdoor festivals to more intimate chamber recitals.

Stainer’s influence extended briefly to makers in Venice and Florence, but was more marked in England and of course Germany. What is perhaps most remarkable is Stradivari’s foresight in engineering a new violin for the grand stage, for the fireworks of 19^th century performance, which ended the fashion for Stainer’s work. There must have been a need for more volume and power in violin tone by 1700, as the other makers in Cremona – Guarneri, Bergonzi and Girolamo Amati II — all quickly followed Stradivari’s lead, but it does not seem to have been fully exploited for another fifty years. Outside Italy, it made little sense for instrument makers to try to compete with the products of Stainer or of Cremona. Because the local clientele would naturally tend to be the less affluent musician, provincial makers offered a cheap alternative. Still, this didn’t prevent them from aspiring to the obvious workmanship and artistry of Amati.

Matteo Goffriller, the first of the great Venetian violin makers, came to Venice from Brixen (known to Italian speakers as Bressanone) in the northern Trentino region. In Venice, he joined the shop of the Füssen-trained maker Martin Kaiser. Enricus Catenar brought violin making from Füssen to Turin, and influenced the very stylishly Italian Giofreddo Cappa. Christopher Rittig and Martinus Heel settled in Genoa. Alessandro Gagliano probably learned his craft in Naples from another of the Füssener Kaiser family, and the Augsburg-born David Tecchler established the Roman school.

This repeated an earlier migration: only a few generations previously, the celebrated Füssen-born lute makers Tieffenbrucker and Maler established workshops in Venice and Bologna. Violin making re-entered Italy via the scenic route, but soon the new professionals had fully acclimatised themselves to their new home, and their lutherie became Italianised.

Of the other great traditions, only Milan, Florence and Mantua can be said to be purely Italian, owing their existence respectively, to the Grancino family, Giovanni Battista Gabbrielli, and Pietro Guarneri, the son of Andrea Guarneri of Cremona. Once established, however, the various schools of violin making flourished and developed in a way that outstripped any of their non-Italian rivals.

Italian violin making developed and spread quickly. Throughout the 18^th century there is little to differentiate the Italian makers from the relatively few other makers abroad, aside from a stylish approach that probably reflects the Italian makers’ extra efforts to earn the premium prices their instruments could command. Even when the conscientious work of the Grancinos in Milan degenerated into the clumsy later efforts of the Testore family, the instruments seem to have retained a certain tonal advantage. The prolific Gagliano family, quick to incorporate Stradivari’s advances into their work in the mid-18^th century, also produced many violins of a rapidly and sometimes thoughtlessly worked type. These instruments nevertheless still command great interest from players as well as collectors.