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Globe Trekker's Justine Shapiro - on the fiddle in Cremona,
Italy
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When you think of Venice and classical music, you think of
Vivaldi - no doubt the greatest musical name to live
here in the seventeenth century. There are plenty of concerts
in the city to enjoy but if you're feeling a bit more adventurous
and want to find out a bit more about the history of the violin,
take a day trip out to its birthplace in Cremona.
About Cremona - the world's
Violin City
Cremona is Violin City, the most famous centre for
the production of stringed instruments in the world. Cremona
claims to be the birthplace of the violin and it has been
its champion since 1566 when Andrea Amati invented
the prototype modern violin from the viol - the Medieval
fiddle. Demand across Europe initiated a golden age of violin
making when Andrea's grandson Nicolo Amati and his
pupils Antonio Stradivari and Guiseppe Guarneri
made the best violins in history.
Walking around Cremona you can easily pick out the elegant
curves and scrolls on the brick and terracotta palaces that
inspired the instrument's Baroque form. A good place to start
your string-driven tour is the Palazzo del Comune.
Begun in 1206 as the seat of the Ghibelline party it
now houses the most amazing collection of famous violins,
including one of the most impressive and valuable violins
in the world - the 1715 Golden Cremonese by one of
the most famous craftsmen of Cremona, Antonio Stradivari.
Antonio Stradivari - Italy's
legendary luthier
Italy's most famous luthier (maker of string instruments)
produced over 1,100 violas, guitars, cellos, and violins.
Around 600 of his instruments exist today. They are often
called Stradivarius (Latin form of his surname), or
abbreviated to Strad, and their stature is legendary.
Although he was well renowned as a violin maker during his
lifetime, his instruments did not become popular until the
beginning of the nineteenth century when the incisive and
powerful yet clear tone was found to be ideal for either the
intimacy of the chamber music salon or the vastness of an
orchestral auditorium. Italian violinmakers of the seventeenth
and eighteenth century had neighboring workshops in Cremona
and most likely used nearby forests of the Southern Italian
Alps as their source of spruce wood. Stradivarius
instruments seemed to have been made of something special
and for more than 250 years people have tried to discover
his secret. According to the great violin virtuoso Nicolo
Paganini, Antonio Stradivari used only "the wood
of trees on which nightingales sang". Even the wood he
used was of unusual density owing to the freezing conditions
of the seventeenth century "Little Ice Age" in which
it grew.
When Stradivari died on December the 18th, 1737, he was interred
in one of the small chapels in the Church of San Domenico,
across the plaza from his home, in the plot he had purchased
from the descendant of a family of minor Cremonese nobles.
He had no qualms about buying a used grave to serve as his
own and even appropriated its original owner's tombstone.
He simply had the previous family's name and coat-of-arms
partially effaced and his own name carved on it.
Today, 50 violin makers, or liutai as they are called,
keep up the tradition using similar methods but all searching
for that secret Strad ingredient. They are so mad about violins
in Cremona that they've even set up an International School
of Violin Making to keep the tradition alive. |
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