A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit, and a violin; what else does a man need to be happy? – Albert Einstein
Central to the creation and interpretation of music, the violin has become a much cherished and beloved part of our continuing cultural endeavors.
Shakespeare famously wrote “If music be the food of love, play on” and to hear a violin played the way it was meant to, from the heart and with soul and passion, is the musical embodiment and personification of love.
Even though it feels like the violin has been a part of the collective artistic lexicon for eons, it’s origins aren’t mired in the ancient past and are much closer to the modern-day than most of us would ever believe.
Wood and Strings – The Formative Development Of The Violin
While the first stringed instruments are thought to have evolved in India more than seven thousand years ago, musical historians consider the ancestor of the violin to be the ravanastron.
Using a single twenty-two-inch string, the ravanastron had a similar three-octave range to the modern violin.
The number of strings may have changed over the course of the last five millennia, but the ideas and principles that would eventually see the violin emerge from the ravanastron’s long shadow were already in place.
It would be another six thousand years before the first bowed instrument that was played under the chin would appear in the Middle East.
The three-stringed rebec that was supposedly a commonplace instrument in the camps of Crusaders and Saladin’s forces alike didn’t make its way to Europe until the beginning of the twelfth century.
From there, the rebec began its transformative journey and eventually became the Vielle, an instrument that was favored by Medieval strolling players and bards in France.
Out Of The Shadows Of History
Leaping forward nearly four hundred years, the first recorded appearance of an instrument that bears all of the hallmarks of the modern violin is in a painting by Gaudenzio Ferrari which has been dated to fifteen-thirty.
‘Madonna of the Orange Tree’ shows a cherub playing a violin while the oldest dated written record of violin dates back to the same period and was in a treasury record from the town of Vercelli, where Ferrari painted his Madonna and cherub.
During the latter half of the sixteenth century, the violin slowly started to rise to prominence as it became popular among street musicians and the aristocracy after Charles IX demanded the manufacture of a range of stringed instruments to entertain his Royal Court.
Having vast experience of what it meant to fail to satisfy the whims and impulses of whoever was sitting on the French throne, the craftsmen employed by the Royal Court set to work immediately and the popularity of the violin began to spread like wildfire.
Even though the oldest known surviving example of a violin dates back to this period in history, the label from which it draws its provenance has been the subject of some skepticism by scholarly types.
If asked, most historians with an interest in music share a similar opinion about the most significant and important surviving example of a violin, which is presently located in a museum in Oxford.
Antonio Stradivari’s ‘Messiah Stradivarius’ was thought to have been fashioned at the beginning of the eighteenth century and is the oldest known, playable violin that still exists anywhere in the world.
The Times They Are A-Changin – The Evolution Of The Modern Violin
Between the time when the violin became a true instrument of the people following its emergence from the court of Charles IX and now, it has undergone a radical and transformative change.
While it’s true that the instrument that emerged from France toward the end of the sixteenth century was, and is incredibly similar to the instrument that’s part of orchestras all over the world, it did undergo a gradual, but significant metamorphosis.
The majority of these changes were centered around the fingerboard and were a result of the different musical tastes that became part of nineteenth-century high society.
The fingerboards on new violins became longer which made them able to play the highest notes and thus assume their rightful place in any musical ensemble.
Existing violins were also adapted to fit this changing model, which made them capable of keeping pace with their newer counterparts.
As they became a more established part of orchestra’s during the nineteenth century, the fingerboards were also titled back, to increase the level of volume that individual and collective violins were capable of producing.
The bass bar on all violins was also made far heavier, which resulted in higher string tension to allow for the change in the fingerboard and accommodate the more widespread use of higher notes that violin was now capable of achieving.
Louis Spohr And The Last Great Historical Change
The last of the great changes, that saw the violin change from the instrument that was created at the behest of a bored king into the twenty-first-century instrument that humanity is still enamored by nearly five hundred years later occurred when Louis Spohr saw a way to make it more user friendly for musicians everywhere.
Wildly regarded as being one of Germany’s foremost nineteenth-century composers and musicians, Spohr who wrote eighteen violin concerti, ten operas, ten symphonies, and a whole host of other incredible music, knew that he had to do something radical in order to get musicians to play the violin parts of the music he was creating as he envisioned it.
Hailed as one of the last great romantic composers, Spohr was credited by Mendelssohn as being his direct inspiration, and without him who knows what might have happened to classical music and where it might have ended up?
The only thing that we can say with any degree of surefooted confidence is that if it hadn’t been for Louis Spohr’s invention of the chinrest, which was born from a desire to make the violin a more comfortable and easy instrument to play, who knows what might have happened to the violin and what its place in history might have been.
