Characteristics of Baroque and Classical violins

Characteristics of ‘Baroque’ and ‘Classical’ violins

Violins of the Baroque period are distinct in a number of basic features from their modern counterparts. The neck, usually shorter than on modern instruments, projects straight out from the body so that its upper edge continues the line of the belly's rim (fig.13). The neck is fixed by nails (or occasionally screws) through the top-block rather than mortised into it as in modern instruments. The fingerboard is wedge-shaped and, again, shorter than the modern fingerboard. Bridges were cut to a more open pattern and were very slightly lower. The bass-bar was shorter and lighter and the soundpost thinner. Violins (and violas) lacked chin rests. The tone of these instruments is brighter, clearer, less loud and less ‘mellow’ than that of their modern counterparts.

Such a summary, necessarily peppered with inexact comparative adjectives, may be useful enough; but getting beyond it is no easy matter. Throughout the period all these instruments underwent change, which took place unevenly in different parts of Europe. To acknowledge this is to recognize the term ‘Baroque violin’ as merely a serviceable generalization. Instruments which have never been altered are scarce and may be of dubious value as models: their survival intact may be attributable to their lack of appeal to discriminating players. Contradictions and approximations in other sorts of evidence create difficulties.

The James Talbot manuscript of around 1695 (GB-Och Music MS 1187) gives measurements for a whole range of wind and string instruments but its laconic notes are sometimes tantalizingly inconclusive.

Another late 17th-century manuscript, the violin method attributed to Sébastien de Brossard (F-Pn Rés.Vm), contains a few apparently detailed measurements, but these are surprising. The bridge, for example, seems thinner rather than thicker than modern bridges: ‘about a demie-ligne’ (1:125 mm) for the base, and the top should be ‘thin, but not too much so or it will cut the strings’.

The term ‘Classical violin’ is another convenient generalization. The key features of violins that were used in the second half of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th were the size of the soundpost and bass-bar and the length of the neck and fingerboard. (Chin rests and shoulder rests still did not exist.) Not surprisingly, these dimensions on Classical instruments lie mostly somewhere between 17th-century and modern averages. This is not to say that the Classical violin should be regarded as a ‘transitional’ instrument, at least not without acknowledging that the violin has always been and continues to be in a state of transition.

Hardly any extant soundposts can be positively identified as late-18th-century, but the manuscript treatise on violin making completed by the Bolognese violin maker G.A. Marchi (fl from c1755) in 1786 suggests that some makers must have been inserting soundposts as large as the modern standard (6·5 mm), with a diameter ‘such that it can only just pass through the f-holes’. More substantial bass-bars were used as the century progressed – but the picture is far from simple. Surviving examples show great variation within an overall trend towards increase in mass. Compared with Baroque period models, original necks from the later 18th century tend to be longer and slightly tilted back. Fingerboards show considerable variation in length (and besides, some late-18th-century players were using instruments built long before). Mozart owned an early-18th-century Mittenwald violin which still has its original fingerboard (long enough to play up to d'''). An unaltered 1783 violin by Antonio Gragnani (Smithsonian, Washington, DC) allows for a range of a 12th above the open string, that is, up to b'''. Marchi noted that it was better to copy longer fingerboards ‘because some players today are so good that they can exploit the whole length’. Galeazzi advised that fingerboards should be long enough to produce the note two octaves above the open string.

Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, the most sought-after violins were those made in the previous two centuries, especially Cremonese instruments. But virtually all of these have been altered to bring them into line with later ideas about tonal quality and strength in a violin. Quite a lot of updating must have taken place as an incidental by-product of repairs and more drastic alterations. Many over-confident makers and repairers took it into their heads to adjust the thicknesses of backs and bellies on instruments that came into their workshops. By Marchi's own account, he made comparatively few new instruments since he was kept very busy repairing and ‘improving the quality and strength of tone’ of old instruments. (He mentions in particular reducing cellos to smaller forms.)

Antonio Bagatella, in his Regole per la costruzione de' violini (Padua, 1786), said that he got his break as a violin maker because Tartini sent many violins to him for adjustment. He described altering a great many old violins to give them either a ‘voce humana’ (suitable for solos) or a ‘voce argentina’ (for orchestral playing). The essay gives dimensions for the neck (virtually modern length) and bass-bar (puzzingly small), and describes in detail how the soundpost should be fitted; but it never even hints that those found in older instruments would need altering. Bagatella described a gadget he had invented for ensuring that the neck is correctly aligned, and from this it is clear that he was still using the traditional way of fixing the neck to the body with nails through the top-block.

The Hills, in their pioneering study of Stradivari (B1902), quoted from the journal of Dom Vicenzo Ascensio who described alterations he made to the quintet of Stradivari instruments at the Spanish court in the 1783. In the interests of what he called ‘improving the tone’ Ascensio almost certainly modernized the dimensions of neck and bass-bar (though claiming to be following Stradivari's principles). But this was all mixed up with more barbaric acts; Ascensio, too, ‘corrected’ thicknesses, as shown by his description of repairs to the violoncello:

I pieced the centre, replaced the bar by one adjusted to mathematical proportions based on that of Stradivari. I corrected the thicknesses, pieced the four corner-blocks, took the back off and inserted a piece in the centre, as it was too thin. I had to replace the neck, which I did in the most careful manner. I then adjusted the instrument, the tone of which was rendered excellent by all these changes.

Marchi, Bagetella and Ascensio were among many craftsmen working in the second half of the 18th century who participated (at least piecemeal) in what we now see as something of a revolution: the adaptation of old instruments to modern requirements. The nonchalance with which they write about what would now be considered fundamental transformations in an instrument suggests that much of the modernization must have been carried out with no other aim than to apply current best practice in the craft. It was only from the early 19th century onwards that the practice of replacing bass-bars and resetting necks was explicitly acknowledged. In 1806 the Abbé Sibire wrote at some length on the subject in La Chélonomie. He described these structural changes as a response to changes in musical expression:

I shall confine myself hereafter to a daily occurrence …. It is a kind of restoration (loosely called) which is purely accessory and yet at the same time crucial. This is a process which does not imply the slightest deterioration and yet which virtually every old violin, no matter how well preserved it is in other ways, could not avoid: REBARRING. The revolution which music has experienced needs to be replicated in instrument making; when the first has set the style, the other must follow. … Formerly it was the fashion to have necks well elevated, bridges and fingerboards extremely low, fine strings, and a moderate tone. Then the bass bar, that necessary evil in the instrument, could be short and thin because it was sufficient for it to have enough strength to sustain the weight of five to six pounds which the strings exerted on it. But since then music, in becoming perfect, has placed a demand on violin making. The tilting back of the neck, the raising of the bridge, of the fingerboard, and the amplification in sound, necessitate increasing by a full third the resistant force. Repairers have only one choice: strengthening the old bar, or replacing it with a new one.

Vincenzo Lancetti (Notizie biografiche, Milan, 1823) suggested that the process of replacing necks was in full swing by the end of the 18th century and implied that this started in Paris: ‘About 1800 the Brothers Mantegazza were restorers of instruments who were often entrusted by French and Italian artists to lengthen the necks of their violins, after the Paris fashion, an example which was followed by amateurs and professionals all over North Italy’.

Violin strings in the 17th and 18th centuries were usually gut, although metal stringing was known and liked for a short time at the beginning of the Baroque period. In his Syntagma musicum, ii (2/1619) Praetorius expressed the opinion that ‘when brass and steel strings are used on these instruments they produce a softer and lovelier tone than other strings’. There were various types of gut string. Exactly what 17th-century musicians understood by such terms as ‘minikins’, ‘gansars’, ‘catlines’, ‘Lyons’ and ‘Pistoy basses’ is not absolutely clear, but the vehemence with which these were variously recommended or condemned indicates that the distinctions were important. The invention in the late 20th century of strings made of roped gut to which the term ‘catline’ has been appropriated is not based on secure historical evidence, although they can sound good. By the early 18th century gut strings wound with silver were being used on various instruments. These appear to have been invented in Bologna in the mid-17th century (see Bonta, B1977). They must have reached England by 1664 since John Playford (i) advertised them then as a ‘late invention … which sound much better and lowder than common Gut Strings, either under the Bow or Finger’. Because they allowed for an increase in mass without an increase in diameter (and consequent loss of flexibility), covered strings could produce good-sounding bass notes from a shorter vibrating length than pure gut strings of the same pitch. For the violin this meant a more resonant and refined-sounding G string. There is, however, evidence that in parts of Europe (notably Italy and Germany) violinists continued using pure gut G strings until well into the 18th century. French sources mention strings which are half covered (‘demi-filée’ i.e. wound with a single open spiral of metal thread). The manuscript treatise attributed to Brossard recommends them for the D string. Such strings are extremely resonant and mediate well between the covered G string and a pure gut A.