Levs violin, p.8
Lev's Violin, page 8
Violin players who accepted a position in a church orchestra soon after completing their training could not expect to be well paid. Burney’s explanation was that the salaries of church musicians had been static for many years. He blamed this on the opera, which offered enormous salaries to principal singers and musicians. Result? While church music ‘falls into decay and goes from bad to worse… that of theatres receives daily improvements by additional rewards’. Burney even went so far as to remark that ‘all the musici in the churches at present are made up of the refuse of the opera houses.’XIX
Life was very different for the virtuoso players Burney met on his travels, who seemed to earn more by working less. At the Chapel Royal in Turin he met the violinist and composer Gaetano Pugnani, who was paid eighty guineas a year to perform solos, ‘and those just when he pleased’. Even so, Pugnani didn’t appear to be putting much effort into his performance, but that was hardly surprising ‘as neither his Sardinian majesty, nor any one of the numerous royal family, seem to pay much attention to music’.XX Italian virtuosi were utterly cosmopolitan. Pugnani had just returned from a triumphant three-year stint in London when Burney met him, and Giovanni Piantanida, whom Burney saw playing during a morning Mass in Bologna, had spent four years in England, where he published six violin sonatas and sometimes performed with Handel.
Stringed instruments dominated church orchestras all over Italy. Even on the most ordinary occasion there were forty musicians in the choir and orchestra at Basilica di Sant’ Antonio in Padua, of which half were string players.XI These musicians were accommodated in organ lofts suspended high above the ground on either side of the immense building, so that the choirs answered and echoed each other across the vast chancel. The standard of music varied enormously from church to church. Burney always wrote notes in his diary immediately after leaving a service, creating a fresh, honest and unsparing account of everything he heard. Despite its glowing reputation abroad, not all Italian music was good. Burney warned that unless you went to church during a festival or on a saint’s day, you were likely to hear music ‘as grave as that of our church services of two hundred years standing’. The congregations for these services were made up of ‘clergy, trades-people, mechanics, country clowns, and beggars’, who, Burney said, were ‘very inattentive and restless, seldom remaining in church during the whole performance’.
I would have felt quite at home among these congregations, because I knew so little about music when I heard Lev’s violin for the first time. We all invent excuses for our own ignorance, and when it came to music, I liked to blame this void on my upbringing. Although my father was always said to be a musical man, we only heard classical music when I was a child if we got up especially early and went to the cowshed. That’s where we’d find him milking, one ear buried in a cow’s warm flank, the other alert to the two-tone spurt and splash of milk in the bucket at his feet. Or perhaps not, because the enormous Bakelite radio on the dusty shelf above his head was always playing BBC Radio 3 at top volume, so that I came to associate all classical music with early mornings, the fug and jostle of cows and the pungency of fresh milk. Back in the house the only music I heard belonged to my brother. We had adjoining rooms, and by the time I was ten and he twelve I had heard Jimi Hendrix through my bedroom wall for the first time. And the second. And again and again and again. And that’s the second-hand way I first listened to Dylan as well, and all the other things that formed his nascent musical taste. Of course I would eventually build up a soundtrack for my own life, but I never managed to shake off the sense of exclusion I had as a child in my bedroom, listening to those muffled sounds, as if music were a members-only club I would never be good enough to join.
When I heard Lev’s violin play for the first time, it seemed to speak directly to me and deliver a deeply personal message. And now I began to fill my days with the joyful sounds of Corelli, San Martini, Galuppi, Vivaldi, Burney’s great hero Giuseppe Tartini, and all the other composers whose music Burney would describe as ‘pure’, ‘rich’ or ‘grateful’. As weeks of listening turned into months, I began to hear and be absorbed and involved in music in a way I had never experienced before. I expect it had as much to do with confidence as anything else, but whatever the cause, it means that I have burst through the doors of the music club and I am a full member now, for ever on the right side of the wall.
Political Instruments
Violins at the Medici Court in Florence
Violins were destined to be worked to the bone in eighteenth-century Italy. Some were employed by the Church, like Lev’s violin, and others had jobs in the court orchestras and ensembles of petty states and kingdoms all over the peninsula. Cremona violins were still considered the best in the world, and so it is no surprise that many began their careers in the service of a king, queen or duke.
The Medici family, who ruled Florence for hundreds of years, amassed one of the greatest instrument collections in Italy between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. If you want to see what remains of this aristocratic family, all you have to do is walk up Via Ricasoli as I did, join the queue that will be snaking back towards the Duomo and wait your turn to go into the Galleria dell’ Accademia. A thin autumn drizzle was falling when I went, so I was glad of the man touting umbrellas, and even gladder of the bar making its fortune from disappointed optimists like me. We must all have thought that skipping breakfast would secure us a place at the front of the queue, but instead we stood in line for an hour or more, sipping coffee from plastic cups and eating cornetti filled with unmanageable quantities of apricot jam. When it was time to go inside at last, and everyone else surged out of the booking hall and headed straight for the room where Michelangelo’s sculpture of David lives like a convict, forever surrounded by guards, I walked away down an empty corridor to rooms that house what remains of the vast instrument collection created by generations of Medici grand dukes.
Of course there were Stradivarius instruments in the Medici orchestra, because Stradivari creamed off all the best customers for Cremona violins. He couldn’t help it. In 1684 a local marquis called Bartolomeo Ariberti commissioned him to make two violins and a cello as a present for Florence’s Grand Prince Ferdinando II de’ Medici. This was a wonderful commission because, unlike the Savoy princes in Turin, who seemed to employ virtuosi and famous composers out of a dreary sense of duty, Ferdinando had a genuine interest in music. He was a good singer and musician himself, and played the cello, the harpsichord, and eventually the piano, invented under his patronage by Bartolomeo Cristofori. Ferdinando was already taking such a serious interest in music by the time he was sixteen that he arranged for an opera called Colla forza di Amore si vince Amore (‘Love is Won by the Strength of Love’) to be performed in the family’s country villa at Pratolino. His taste was never provincial, and he was already knowledgeable enough in his twenties to strike up a lasting friendship with Handel, whom he invited to Florence. Handel admired the work of Antonio Salvi, the Medici court physician and poet, so much that he engaged him to write the libretti for operas including Ariodante, Rodelinda and Arminio, which seemed to place Ferdinando at the heart of Handel’s operatic career. Ferdinando also exchanged letters with Alessandro Scarlatti, who would write five operas for him, and staged his own opera season every year in the theatre built for him at Pratolino. He was involved in every aspect of these productions, selecting the librettists himself, telling the composers exactly how they should set texts to music, and choosing singers and musicians to deliver it. What a nightmare he must have been for everyone involved.
The opera season absorbed Ferdinando throughout July and August, and then he spent the rest of the year hosting private concerts in his own apartments at the Pitti Palace. He was also a great impresario of musical productions at Florence’s Teatro della Pergola, and of magnificent entertainments in the streets and piazzas of the city, so that during his lifetime Florence became one of the most vibrantly musical cities in Europe. The Medici instrument collection had been at its largest during the 1620s. However, Ferdinando was as passionate about musical instruments as he was about music, and, as his life coincided with those of both Nicolò Amati and Stradivari in Cremona, the quality of the instruments in the collection under his care would never be surpassed.
This would be the unique and demanding setting for the lives of Stradivari’s instruments, and perhaps that is why he took such a long time to deliver them. Six years after the commission, Ariberti finally received a heartfelt thank-you letter from the Grand Prince. Reporting back to Stradivari, Ariberti told him the musicians in the Medici court orchestra all thought his instruments ‘quite perfect’, and said they had ‘never heard a violoncello with such an agreeable tone…’ He signed off by saying ‘I now have to request you to begin at once two violas, one tenor and the other contralto, which are wanted to complete the concerto.’I
So many of Stradivari’s instruments have travelled the world that there is something extraordinary about being able to go to Florence and find the cello from the first commission and the tenor viola from the second still living in the heart of the city. The tenor viola has such delicate f-holes in its gleaming, russet belly, and such a beautifully carved scroll, that it is a perpetual statement of Stradivari’s mastery of his craft. It is the only Stradivarius in the world that has never undergone the standard alterations inflicted on his other instruments over the centuries. The fingerboards on most of them have been replaced with the longer ones that enabled players to reach the high notes demanded by a classical repertoire. Not this viola. It still had Stradivari’s original fingerboard, inlaid with the Medici coat of arms in glamorous mother-of-pearl. The tailpiece was original too, inlaid this time with a jaunty cupid drawing his bow. Stradivari’s pen and ink drawings for these decorations are preserved in Cremona, with a note in his own writing identifying them as ‘coats-of-arms I made to go on instruments for the Grand Prince of Tuscany’. Even the bridge, surely one of the most transient pieces of any instrument, had survived, with Stradivari’s inked-on pattern of flowers and leaves on one side and two colossi on the other.
Other violas, violins and cellos were the real labourers at court. Their taxing lifestyle meant they needed regular maintenance, repairs and alterations at the Medici workshop in the Uffizi, where there were up to a hundred highly talented instrument conservators and makers. However, repairs weren’t always enough to send violins on their way. Musical fashions were constantly changing, and over the years court instruments had to endure minor ops and deep surgery to keep abreast of the times, so that their bodies were eventually transformed into palimpsests of European musical fashion, and of the technical innovations it demanded. The older instruments in the collection hadn’t the projection to perform in a large space, or to be heard against the sound of a full orchestra, so they needed radical interventions if they were to keep their jobs at court. First they had to be opened up and given sturdier bass bars and sound posts to support increased pressure on their bellies and transmit vibrations more effectively. Then their necks had to be raised to increase the tension on the strings and make them produce a more penetrating sound. Even more serious surgery had been carried out on some instruments in the collection. Take the Nicolò Amati cello of 1650. Its strings were originally made from two strands of twisted animal gut. This meant that the lower strings were quite thick and a little bit stiff, and had to be a considerable length if they were to vibrate enough to produce low notes. Long strings meant a long body, and consequently Nicolò Amati’s beautiful cello had always been a bit awkward to play. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, however, string-makers began lining the gut strings for cellos with a very thin wrapping of silver wire, meaning that they could be shorter and thinner without compromising the quality of the low notes.II You might think this would make old-fashioned cellos with their overgrown bodies redundant. Think again. Some skilled luthier in the Medici workshop simply reduced the length of Amati’s cello, removed fillets of wood from the centre of its belly and back to make it narrower, and then re-strung it with a revolutionary ‘overspun’ G string.
When I consider what had been done to Nicolò Amati’s cello, it reminds me of costumes I once saw designed by Léon Bakst for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. They were about to be sold at auction, but in the meantime they were hanging on a rail in a friend’s kitchen, filling the room with lush colour and dynamic shapes. I will forever ask myself what stopped me from trying on one of the costumes for the harem in Scheherazade, which were so suggestive and exotic that they seemed to reinterpret the human body. Instead, I went in among them all and admired expert alterations made over the years, adjustments that meant they could be used again and again by dancers in the casts of many different productions. They had been darned and patched in the most intimate places, and were so stained by sweat that it struck me they were probably impregnated with the DNA of some of the greatest dancers of the twentieth century. Some of these stars had even scrawled their names on the linings of their costumes – a practical precaution against mistakes in the hectic scramble of the dressing room.
Just like the instruments in the Accademia, Bakst’s costumes were never meant to be seen in that static way. He conceived each one as part of a whirling mass of moving colour, made up of multiple costumes and an extraordinarily vivid set. They were all that is left of the magic of these productions, just as the instruments in the Medici collection are all that is left of the music that filled the Florentine court from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century. And like those costumes, the violins, violas, cellos and double basses were constantly adjusted and updated for new players and new repertoires. These days they are as dumb as David in the gallery next door, but from the sixteenth century until the dissolution of the Florentine court in 1861 they would rarely have been silent. Living at the heart of a vast network of relationships between the Medici, their subjects and their rivals at home and abroad, they performed all the music ever played at court, in the gardens of the family’s country villas and city palaces, in their chapels and churches, and in the streets, theatres and piazzas of Florence. They were front-line soldiers in the Medici battle to be best among all the courts of Italy at entertaining foreign rulers and diplomats, best at dazzling their subjects and intimidating their rivals. Sometimes they worked to project a grandiose image, sometimes a fun-loving one, but magnificenza was always at the heart of their performance. They joined colourful processions through the streets of Florence, entertainments in the city’s piazzas and in the grounds of its villas and palaces. They were the soloists during oratorios and festival Masses, and their music dazzled the audiences of plays and operas in ways that distracted them from the hardships of Medici rule. And it was a harsh life beyond the confines of court, for while Stradivari was making instruments for Ferdinando, his father Cosimo III de’ Medici was taxing everyone and everything so harshly that Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury, was shocked by the state of Florence when he visited the city in 1685. He found the countryside surrounding it ‘so dispeopled that the soil in many places is quite neglected for want of hands to cultivate it; and in other places where there are more people, they look so poor and their houses are such miserable ruins, that it is scarce accountable how there should be so much poverty in so rich a country, which is all over full of beggars.’III Yet the voices of violins oiled the wheels of political negotiations, added a glimmer of joy to the sterile celebrations for inter-dynastic marriages and improved the atmosphere on countless other occasions. Sometimes the sounds encrypted in those worn old bodies are all we have left, because much of the music they played on these occasions was never preserved.
The role of violins and their players at court fell somewhere between that of a servant who could be summoned to work at any time of the day or night, and a close relation who was given access to the private heart of the family. They were often called on to play during a formal dinner at Palazzo Pitti, where Cosimo III was obsessed with promoting a vision of affluence. Apparently, ‘no prince or ambassador came to Florence but was entertained with Oriental magnificence, and loaded with gifts on his departure. The banquets he gave for foreign visitors were legendary, the table laden with exotic food served by staff of every ethnic origin, all wearing their national costumes. Cosimo made a great spectacle of having fatted capons weighed at table. The violins playing table music would fall silent at this point, for if a brace failed to exceed twenty pounds Cosimo refused to eat, behaving as if their very appearance were a personal insult.’IV
When they were not entertaining guests at dinner, some of the court violinists might be called on to supply little tunes during plays the Medici children performed for their mother, or take part in tender ceremonies celebrating the safe delivery of a new baby.V Others were given the job of playing soothing music in a sick room or even at a deathbed, and, like perfect guests, violins adapted their tone to all of these occasions.VI These were the usual jobs musicians did in courts all over Italy, but you only have to look at the pictures hanging on the walls of the instrument gallery in the Accademia to know that things were going through a very different phase when Stradivari’s instruments were shipped from Cremona to Florence in 1690. Rich with detail and colour, the paintings were made between 1685 and 1687 by Antonio Domenico Gabbiani. His patron was Grand Prince Ferdinando himself, who gazes out of a portrait hanging by the door of the gallery. He is surrounded by singers, composers and musicians, and it is quite clear from their poses and expressions that these people are not servants, but friends. Gabbiani gave the same scrupulous attention to instruments as people. The glint of the metal on the cello string is as striking as the musicians’ gleaming curls and the play of light on their satin jackets. He also captured a dazed expression on each of the men’s faces, as if we had pushed open the door of a practice room and interrupted a moment of deep concentration between the players.
