-Anecdote of the Violinist
Veracini.--Tartini's Scientific Discoveries in Music.--His Account of
the Origin of the "Devil's Trill."--Tartini's Pupils.

I.

The ancestry of the violin, considering this as the type of stringed
instruments played with a bow, goes back to the earliest antiquity; and
innumerable passages might be quoted from the Oriental and classical
writers illustrating the important part taken by the forefathers of the
modern violin in feast, festival, and religious ceremonial, in the fiery
delights of battle, and the more dulcet enjoyments of peace. But it
was not till the fifteenth century, in Italy, that the art of making
instruments of the viol class began to reach toward that high perfection
which it speedily attained. The long list of honored names connected
with the development of art in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries is a mighty roll-call, and among these the names of the great
violin-makers, beginning with Gaspard de Salo, of Brescia, who first
raised a rude craft to an art, are worthy of being included. From
Brescia came the masters who established the Cremona school, a name not
only immortal in the history of music, but full of vital significance;
for it was not till the violin was perfected, and a distinct school of
violin-playing founded, that the creation of the symphony, the highest
form of music, became possible.

The violin-makers of Cremona came, as we have said, from Brescia,
beginning with the Ama-tis. Though it does not lie within the province
of this work to discuss in any special or technical sense the history of
violin-making, something concerning the greatest of the Cremona masters
will be found both interesting and valuable as preliminary to the
sketches of the great players which make up the substance of the
volume. The Amatis, who established the violin-making art at Cremona,
successively improved, each member of the class stealing a march on
his predecessor, until the peerless masters of the art, Antonius
Stradiuarius and Joseph Guarnerius del Jesu, advanced far beyond the
rivalry of their contemporaries and successors. The pupils of the
Amatis, Stradiuarius, and Guarnerius settled in Milan, Florence, and
other cities, which also became centers of violin-making, but never to
an extent which lessened the preeminence of the great Cremona makers.
There was one significant peculiarity of all the leading artists of this
violin-making epoch: each one as a p