Silver brooches shaped as violins, such as those manufactured by Adie & Lovekin of Birmingham in 1898, are among several commercial artefacts produced during the decades when violin culture became rooted in Britain. Others include sentimental greeting cards depicting violin-playing angels, and short stories and novels about violins and violinists, the best known of which are the Sherlock Holmes detective novels (1886–1927) by Arthur Conan Doyle.Footnote ¹ Together, such products speak to the growing presence of violin culture in the national imagination well into the 1920s, and to the instruments’ remarkably broad appeal. Indeed, when BBC radio featured cellist Beatrice Harrison duetting outdoors with a nightingale in May 1924, the public “went mad with enthusiasm … and photographs, sketches and cartoons … appeared in numerous newspapers and magazines,” while rebroadcasts in subsequent years sealed the moment in the collective memory.Footnote ²

This chapter addresses the evolving idea of the instruments of the violin family – emblematized by the violin – in the social consciousness, asking why they captivated so many individuals, what associations became attached to both the instrument and the person who handled it, and what underlying social currents those associations suggest. Following a recap of string playing’s appeal to players, discussion considers how old Italian craftsmanship not only impelled the hobbies of making and collecting violins but also affected how the playing community viewed and valued instruments. Relatedly, it examines how written and visual depictions of people’s sensory-cum-sensual responses to stringed instruments registered to a broader population the instruments’ strong allure, and how much such depictions sometimes did so to comment on contemporary social matters.

The Appeal of String Playing

Previous chapters have shown that the development of a robust culture around string playing in Britain in the 1880s and 1890s created favorable conditions for its continued regeneration through the 1920s. Thanks to the sounds of strings being so much “in the air” – in both public and private spaces – men, women, and children were often drawn into this new pastime by dreams of becoming a soloist or orchestral musician. The jaw-dropping playing and the gathering “superstar” status of high-profile soloists such as Mischa Elman and Jascha Heifetz fueled the growth of aspirations. But so, too, did the possibility of contributing to orchestral sonorities and textures – sounds that were often relatively unfamiliar, even novel, for much of the period under discussion. “[T]he most amazing sounds on earth” was how W. H. Reed (later leader of the London Symphony Orchestra) remembered his first boyhood encounter with a major London orchestra (1880s), the experience firing his resolve to one day play in such an ensemble.Footnote ³ Over time, too, the increasing access to recorded sound surely enticed many newcomers and sustained their interest. In 1926, W. W. Cobbett declared that the technologies of gramophone and radio had played their part in revealing the violin’s “wonder and mystery” and claimed that to the “man on the street” the instrument now represented “the very poetry of sound.”Footnote ⁴

Undoubtedly, the appeal of strings had several social tendrils. As Chapters 6 and 7 pointed out, the possibility for connecting with other music-makers in amateur ensembles was a potent motivator for starting on and persevering with an instrument. Here, ease of portability (especially of violins and violas) was a boon – and emancipating for women brought up with the domestic piano. Meanwhile, violin playing became glamorized by the heap of late nineteenth-century fiction that featured women violinists, while the real-life hoo-ha and mystery around fakes and forgeries kept stringed instruments in the public eye. In a different realm, an educational magazine of 1892 (Teachers’ Aid) hinted that social appearance could be as much a magnet as musical allure, noting that “children like to be seen bringing their violins to school.”Footnote ⁵

Once smitten, advanced players frequently acknowledged the instrument’s expressive power and potential as its major source of attraction. An interview with the soloist Daisy Kennedy in 1919 exemplifies this view, reinforcing the time-honored comparison between the violin and the human voice. She explained:

Cellists might have demurred. In a radio talk for children, chamber musician Thelma Bentwich said that she had “loved the cello more than the violin,” which she had initially learned, “because its voice was more human.”Footnote ⁷ There were also emotional rewards in communicating music to others – rewards of the sort that led amateur violinist T. L. Phipson to note that his main concern when giving concert solos was to “charm” his listeners “by the beauty of the music and the expressive style with which it is performed.”Footnote ⁸

In truth, there were many reasons – social, practical, ideational, as well as emotional – why players, listeners, makers, and collectors were drawn towards the instruments of the violin family. Likewise, there were many ways in which the attraction was construed in period sources, and still more ways in which the idea of a stringed instrument was conceived. Comprehensive discussion is beyond the scope of this book, but a useful point of entry to the topic can be found in collectors and makers, for whom stringed instruments held distinctive intellectual, aesthetic, and historical appeal.

The Aura of the Past

From the 1870s, the intersecting hobbies of collecting and making violins contributed substance and energy to both violin culture’s vitality and the ideas that attached to it. The two activities were fueled to greater or lesser extents by the Victorian bug for collecting, the opening of public art galleries and museums, growing markets for instruments, and increased interest in violin construction.Footnote ⁹ Both hobbies were dominated by men of means, but while violin making crossed into the lower-middle and working classes, collecting valuable instruments almost always did not.Footnote ¹⁰ This was because what collectors – sometimes dubbed fiddle-fanciers – most wanted were fine violins, violas, and cellos made by members of the Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri families or other revered seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Italian makers, which were in limited supply.Footnote ¹¹ Considerably superior in tone and volume to the instruments that most jobbing players could afford, and much sought-after by top-tier soloists, these exemplars were well within the financial reach of wealthy middle-class individuals until 1930. (Prices, which began to inch up in the 1910s as the market internationalized, would only start to soar after World War II.)Footnote ¹² Indeed, as a leisure pursuit, violin collecting fell within the same bracket as fine art collecting and was backed by a connoisseurship that required not only knowledge of how instruments were constructed but also abilities to discern visually a genuine old violin from honestly made “copies” and the many instruments (both good and bad) with fake labels that were in circulation. H. R. Haweis’s Old Violins and Violin Lore (1898; reprinted 1923) was one of several advice manuals that, along with streams of commentary in violin magazines, offered useful resources to new collectors.Footnote ¹³ In addition, a fine line existed between collecting and trading, some individuals shifting between developing a hobby and making money.Footnote ¹⁴

Information about collectors’ lives, motivations, and methods of collection is scant, history having favored the dissemination of information on instruments and provenance over their owners per se.Footnote ¹⁵ However, a few observations can be made. Violin collecting had enjoyed a presence before violin culture took root, but by the end of the nineteenth century men whose prosperity came from “new money” had augmented the existing body of collectors with inherited wealth.Footnote ¹⁶ Richard Bennett (1849–1930), a farmer/cotton spinner’s son turned bleacher and chemical manufacturer (his Lancashire factory employing 223 people in 1881), collected a range of artefacts: rare books, Chinese porcelain, and “some of the world’s most coveted violins.”Footnote ¹⁷ These instruments included some of what came to be considered the most superior Strads, such as the “Lady Blunt” (1721).Footnote ¹⁸ To the disdain of most active musicians, several collectors were not players and (worse still) lacked interest in hearing their instruments sounded. As Haweis bemoaned, such people “don’t play, and still more often they seem to have an objection to other people stringing up their treasures and playing on them.”Footnote ¹⁹ It was a popular characterization, sometimes intensified by the notion of eccentricity: as with the collector in James McGovan’s detective story “The Romance of a Real Cremona” (1884), whose home outside Edinburgh housed a collection of rare violins.Footnote ²⁰ This “eccentric connoisseur” was obsessed with buying rare instruments, “which he never did, and never could, play upon.”Footnote ²¹ Still, the charge of eccentricity was more than a fictional conceit – Bennett was described thus in 1930;Footnote ²² moreover, as Jacqueline Yallop observes, Victorians tended to think of avid collectors of any objects as “life’s losers” and to view the very act of collecting as a means of “compensating for personal shortfalls.”Footnote ²³

Not all violin collectors prevented their instruments from being heard. John Rutson (1829–1906), whose large private wealth enabled him to amass prints, art, and instruments, was known to be “devoted to music” – and in all probability was an amateur violinist.Footnote ²⁴ He loaned several of his violins to renowned soloists (as did others) and bequeathed his exceptional collection of instruments to the RAM and RCM for student use.Footnote ²⁵ Ernest Howard was a private pupil of violinist Margery Bentwich (c. 1908) and a man described as a “lover and patron of all the arts, buyer of Strads, and passionate amateur of string quartets”;Footnote ²⁶ it is reasonable to assume he played his acquisitions. Also, a tiny number of professional players had enough financial means to acquire high-quality instruments. In later life, George Haddock (1823–1907), a respected violinist and teacher who had collected violins and bows since c. 1860, welcomed interested visitors (including “musical celebrities from far and near”) to his home in Leeds, one guest in 1890 noting how the “peculiar oblong cases … overflow[ed] the dumb-waiter, the side-board and tables, and even [took] possession of the chairs.”Footnote ²⁷ On this occasion, Haddock showed off his instruments, holding forth on their remarkable workmanship and visual beauty, before demonstrating their sound qualities. Of his “chief treasure,” the “Emperor” Strad of 1715, one observer wrote:

Networking and insider knowledge played a crucial role in the processes by which collectors obtained instruments. As Haweis put it: “All the finest violins are known and carefully stalked – the health of their owners watched.”Footnote ²⁹ Many were bought at auction after a collector’s death;Footnote ³⁰ several were sold by dealers trading in high-quality instruments, such as Hill’s in London. Still others circulated privately. Violin magazines served as public noticeboards, carrying announcements of upcoming auctions and ads from dealers and private sellers. Compared to hobbyists’ collections of stamps, china, butterflies, and so forth, violin collections were not large. One authority noted in 1895 that the “largest and finest assemblage of instruments ever brought together” had been in the hands of John Adam, a London connoisseur, in 1879: 16 violins (including 7 Strads and 4 Guarneri “del Gesù”), 4 violas, and 3 cellos of indisputable authenticity – 23 instruments in all.Footnote ³¹ To judge from the source material, a collection of some 50 valuable old instruments would have been considered large.Footnote ³² Haddock had more than 80.Footnote ³³

If one motivation for collecting such instruments was a wish to better appreciate their construction, another was the satisfaction of owning beautiful specimens that were reliably proven genuine. Many fanciers approached an old Italian violin as an objet d’art, seeking fine exemplars for private acquisition and display in much the same way that other antiques were. Viewed as cultural history, collecting violins looks not unlike the serious collecting of antiques in the early 1900s, which Deborah Cohen positions as stemming from connoisseurs’ desires to seek refuge from a changing social order through the acquisition of “pure” and timeless old artefacts: objects in which enthusiasts could find a form of spiritual transcendence.Footnote ³⁴ It also resonates with Leon Rosenstein’s suggestion that the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie acquired old, crafted objects with high monetary value, aesthetic beauty, and known provenance out of despair with the modern, rapidly industrializing world of mass-produced, identical goods.Footnote ³⁵ (Paradoxically so, since some “new money” collectors were industrialists.) In this regard, the widespread fixation with fine violins crafted by hand in the Cremona region of northern Italy – a fixation that had ratcheted up during the nineteenth century and sunk into the popular imagination – granted them a special aura, to the detriment of other European and British-made instruments.Footnote ³⁶

Strads, especially, acquired the cachet of exceptionalism, which Maiko Kawabata attributes in part to their association with great players and to the romanticization of Stradivari as a solitary genius whose work was unsurpassed and whose working practices (especially the secret recipe for his varnish) defied full comprehension.Footnote ³⁷ Their relative rarity in the marketplace and the reverence accorded to their tone further contributed, as Rachael Durkin has emphasized, to a “halo effect.”Footnote ³⁸ Indeed, from the late nineteenth century the canonization of old Italian makers was reinforced through myriad commercial goods: whether titles for magazines (The Strad, The Cremona), the content of popular fiction and poetry (J. Meade Falkner’s The Lost Stradivarius of 1895; Marion Scott’s “A Dream Song: Dreamed with My ‘Guadagnini’ Fiddle” and “To the ‘Betts Strad’” in her Violin Verses, 1905), or the branding of accessories or businesses (Hawkes’s “Golden Strad” strings; Bernard Harrison’s dealership at Cremona House, SheffieldFootnote ³⁹). Rare must have been the performer who was untouched by the idealization of the Italian craftsman or who did not fantasize about playing a Strad.

The cultural elevation of old Italian violins may also be usefully viewed against the backdrop of upper-class British society, which had long prized the historic depth of Italian high culture, in the eighteenth century sending young aristocrats across the Alps on the Grand Tour to learn about Italy’s fine arts and antiquities and in some cases to purchase pieces.Footnote ⁴⁰ Members of that social class had also embedded an Italian opera house in the heart of London and become strongly associated with attending operas based on classical or historical topics. In the nineteenth century, despite the growing domination of Austro-Germanic music in the concert hall and a rebalancing of opera-house repertoire (to include French, German, some English works, and a declining quantity of opera seria), newer Italian operas and Italian star singers retained a strong presence in British musical life – a trend that continued into the 1920s and fed Italophilia. More pertinently, the violin-playing world fostered its own reverence for the Italianate roots of much string repertoire, pedagogy, and artistry through celebrated virtuosic Italian violinists, teachers, and composers (Viotti, Pugnani, Geminiani especially, and, in more recent memory, Paganini) – a reverence that readily fused with the veneration for old, handcrafted Italian instruments.

Like the collecting of high-end violins, the predominantly male leisure pursuit of handmaking violins predated violin culture, but it intensified in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ⁴¹ By 1920, the Rev. Meredith Morris, compiler of an idiosyncratic yet useful dictionary of British violin makers, counted 50–60 “professional luthiers” (men who earned their main livings from making) and estimated at least ten times more “amateur and occasional” makers (though, unsurprisingly, he ignored rough-hewn violins made by workaday carpenters, as well as instruments fashioned from ad hoc materials like those made out of chocolate boxes that the Wood brothers in North Wales played).Footnote ⁴² Morris’s book, compiled from survey responses, presents entries on more than seventy hobbyists. Among them is Ethel Fleck, widow of amateur maker William Fleck (1852–1914) – rare evidence of a woman maker. She both assisted her husband and made her own violins; Morris judged her work “beautifully and delicately finished.”Footnote ⁴³ Despite amateurs’ occupations not being consistently recorded, the dictionary reveals a majority of hobbyists from the traditional middle-class professions: engineering, the clergy, and medicine especially. (Morris himself made a few violins; Fleck was a physician.) A smaller subgroup came from artisan backgrounds. Several of those who practiced wood carving, carpentry, joinery, and cabinetmaking – the skills of which adapted fairly easily to violin making – went on to work as professional makers.Footnote ⁴⁴

There was a considerable difference between someone who made instruments recreationally and sold one or two of them privately – which some self-described amateurs did – and the person who worked fulltime as a professional luthier.Footnote ⁴⁵ Even so, a clear line between the amateur and professional can be hard for modern eyes to delineate and such categorization risks being unhelpful, as Brian Harvey has noted.Footnote ⁴⁶ Moreover, hobbyists who developed their pastime while young sometimes became determined to make violin making their livelihood and gained considerable success in that sphere.Footnote ⁴⁷ What follows treats makers who align best with the amateur/hobbyist realm.

A few hobbyists came to violin making through playing a stringed instrument. Ten-year-old Edward Heron-Allen (1861–1943), who became a recognized authority on violins, began lessons with Otto Peiniger (a student of Joachim’s) at Harrow School, subsequently pivoting to violin making while an articled clerk.Footnote ⁴⁸ Another middle-class London dweller, Alexander Ritchie (b. 1888) was, according to Morris, not just a talented amateur maker but “an engineer by profession, a clever draughtsman, [and] a violinist of repute,”Footnote ⁴⁹ while John Jones (1833–1906), a plasterer in Port Dinorwic (Wales) who had taken up “the gouge very late in life,” played the cello “for many years” at a local Anglican church.Footnote ⁵⁰ But far more hobbyists seem to have had no playing experience. One such, Anthony John Moore (1852–1915), a merchant’s son from Sunderland who made a living as an artist, became visually “enamoured” with the instrument when reading George Hart’s books on the violin. By 1904 he was spending “most of his leisure time in experimenting and in working out the geometrical construction of the instrument.”Footnote ⁵¹ Another was James Parkinson (c. 1858–1930), owner of a well-regarded Liverpool firm of cabinetmakers and an expert on timber, who developed a fascination with violin construction in old age and became a successful maker of violins and violas, donating the proceeds from any (private) sales to charities. Albert Sammons, Arthur Catterall, and William Primrose played his instruments.Footnote ⁵² The celebrated music-hall entertainer George Robey (1869–1954) was also a hobbyist who attracted soloists’ attention. He developed his interest during World War I, in response to what a biographer describes as an “urge to use his hands … for the purpose of making things.”Footnote ⁵³ Scrutinizing Robey’s work after his death, Yehudi Menuhin found the instrument “beautifully finished” and possessing a “[n]ice warm sound”; he noted that Heifetz, Kreisler, and Elman had previously held and, he assumed, admired, it.Footnote ⁵⁴

Learning the skills for making instruments by hand – whether the selection of wood and varnish; the cutting, planing, and carving of the parts; or the finishing and fitting-up – took time and application. Some hobbyists benefited from in-person guidance and expertise, whether from family members, other amateurs, or working craftsmen. While following his apprenticeship at his father’s law firm in Soho (where several violin-making businesses were situated), Heron-Allen gained access to the local workshop of the esteemed Georges Chanot and paid him for lessons over two years.Footnote ⁵⁵ The experience enabled him to produce not only two instruments of his own but also a series of copiously illustrated essays on violin making for the magazine Amateur Work Illustrated (1882–1884), which he revised and incorporated into what became a much-consulted book, Violin-Making as It Was and Is (1884).Footnote ⁵⁶ Others followed suit, including journalist John Broadhouse, whose essays “How to Make a Violin” were serialized in early issues of The Strad (June 1890–October 1891) and quickly went into book form. His stated aim? To give “the amateur detailed information respecting the various processes to be gone through in the workshop, from the time when the wood in the rough lies on the bench to the moment when the finished article is ready to be fitted with strings for playing.”Footnote ⁵⁷

What soon became a wealth of self-instruction publications proved invaluable to some novices. Charles Tweedale (fl. 1900–1940), a Yorkshire vicar, began by “procur[ing] Heron-Allen’s book, and under the charm of that work commenced to make a fiddle, and … did not rest satisfied till he had finished two.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Meanwhile, collectors, who shared with makers an interest in the violin’s materiality and the science of its construction, on the one hand, and its sonic and visual aesthetic value, on the other, may well have been drawn to such materials for the factual information they contained. Besides practical guidance, Heron-Allen’s book covered the instrument’s history, its constituent parts and design, and celebrated makers. Broadhouse’s added a list of recent sale prices of old violins to its second edition, suggesting collectors were indeed part of its target readership.

Patterns taken from instruments of Italian master-craftsmen, usually Antonio Stradivari or Guarneri “del Gesù,” were fundamental to amateur violin making. Novices were encouraged to utilize paper templates (sold by some violin shops and sometimes included in an instruction manual). Seasoned amateurs might trace an outline from a modern copy of a Strad. The convention of patterns – employed by professional makers, too – further contributed to the cultural veneration of old Italian instruments and their workmanship. Meanwhile, commercial advertising affirmed these values more broadly – to players especially – by hyping the debt of modern violins to Italian craft practices and endorsing the quality of certain older instruments (French, German, and English exemplars included) while upholding artisanal work in general.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thus, William Evans, who positioned himself as a “Collector and Certified Connoisseur of Violins,” had “Specimens of all the Old Makers known to mankind” at his West Bromwich shop;Footnote ⁶⁰ the “HIGH-CLASS” violins made by H. J. Walker of Whitby were promoted as possessing “The Real Old Italian Tone”;Footnote ⁶¹ and Whitelaw’s Cremona-Amber Oil Varnish, sold nationally for decades, was touted as enabling “an amateur to finish his work equal to the best of the Old Masters.”Footnote ⁶²

***

An ad for John Broadhouse’s 1894 handbook The Art of Fiddle-Making (a short tract, aimed at novice makers), which reproduces the imagery of the book’s title page (Fig. 8.1), encapsulates the respect-cum-idealization accorded to older ways. A bespectacled, aproned, elderly maker is focused on his woodworking, his sleeves rolled up and his hands moving a saw. His modest workshop (itself constructed of wood, underlining the activity’s intrinsic connection with the natural world) reveals tools and violin parts, and contributes to the viewer’s appreciation of the slow, intricate processes of violin making, the simplicity and interiority of an artisan’s life, and the humanity of a workplace devoid of modern machinery. With hindsight, we can see the idealization of the artisan worker who could – on his own – produce a beautiful, fine-sounding instrument as being bound up with a general antagonism towards the poor-quality, factory-produced violins from France and Germany that continued to flood the British marketplace. It was also likely tied into broad concerns about where the industrialization of violin making, along with other technological innovations that were affecting musical life, might be leading. But it also appears indicative of deeper social anxieties about the negative impact of Britain’s industrial economy on urban factory workers, which from the 1870s bred a nostalgia for rural lifestyles and the values of the past, especially among the middle classes.Footnote ⁶³

Figure 8.1 Advertisement for John Broadhouse’s The Art of Fiddle-Making (London: Haynes, [1894]) in Strings (July 1894).

Image courtesy of the Sibley Library, Eastman School of Music, University of Rochester.

More specifically, the sensibility captured in the 1894 illustration is reminiscent of the contemporaneous Arts and Crafts movement, which decried the ugliness of mass-produced goods and the dehumanizing effect that the industrial workplace had on its workforce. This is not to claim that British violin makers – professional or amateur – were signed up to the movement in significant numbers, or to suggest that all the movement’s ideas (e.g., the creation of beautiful objects for functional use in the home) can be applied to their work, but rather to point up the broader affinities between the violin world and Arts and Crafts principles.Footnote ⁶⁴ A linkage was concretized in the Arts and Crafts Book of the Worshipful Guild of Violin-Makers of Markneukirchen, from the Year 1677 to the Year 1772, a translation (1894) by Edward and Marianna Heron-Allen of a German text that nostalgically depicted the “artistic handicraft” in the small town that had subsequently become a well-known location for industrialized violin making.Footnote ⁶⁵ Some British makers, too, were involved with craft organizations: Arnold Dolmetsch (1858–1940), leading figure in the early-music revival in Britain, was a member of the Art Workers’ Guild and although he mainly built keyboard instruments, lutes, and viols, he did make a few violins; he had also trained as a violinist.Footnote ⁶⁶ Amateur maker John Beamish worked in London for the Peasant Arts Guild in the late 1910s.Footnote ⁶⁷

With the Dolmetsch connection in mind, we might consider how important parallels are between, on the one hand, those who made violins following older principles or who collected, studied, or played exquisite old violins, and, on the other, those who were advocates of the nascent early-music movement. Certainly, the two interest groups occupied some common ground, as evinced by the 1872 exhibition of “ancient” instruments at the South Kensington Museum, which embraced old violins as well as lutes and viols.Footnote ⁶⁸ However, most early-music advocates were motivated by an intellectually driven musical antiquarianism: a contrasting sensibility to that embodied by the heritage-conscious artisanship of violin making. Besides, the making of violin-family instruments represented a historical continuity and did not need to be resurrected, regenerated, and absorbed into contemporary musical life.

Of course, neither amateur nor professional violin makers wound up producing exact replicas of rare Italian instruments: even when worked from the same template, no two handmade violins ever turned out the same in terms of construction or sound. Makers who openly acknowledged their copying may have positioned themselves proudly on that historical continuum, and imaginatively so in the case of Arthur John Rowley (1880–1937), who ran a business in Coventry and gave his instruments a “Godivarius” label, bringing their debt to Stradivarius into dialog with local legend;Footnote ⁶⁹ yet the fact of the matter was that many extant “old” violins that makers and others revered had been altered to varying degrees in the intervening decades, often through repairs. Some authorities on the violin wrote about alterations and “modernizations” (e.g., to the length and design of the neck and fingerboard), but these procedures were unlikely to have been well understood by many people, including some hobbyists and most consumers.Footnote ⁷⁰

At heart, what violin culture’s makers, collectors, and instrument experts shared was an engagement with the past that blended veneration for the high craftsmanship of the Cremonese makers with deep respect for artisanal methods. Observing a postwar violin-making class for ex-soldiers run by the Northern Polytechnic Institute (London), the violin writer Towry Piper commended the students’ attention to their work and the quality of the results, which showed “none of the stereotyped sameness” that resided in violins made on the assembly line of “the big continental factory,” further noting the instruments’ consequent “individuality.”Footnote ⁷¹ Making and collecting also helped preserve some understanding of the old ways of violin making. While makers contributed through their determined actions in keeping skills alive, collectors assisted by conserving fêted exemplars. Someone like Haweis grasped that without collectors, many excellent instruments might have decayed or been destroyed, causing valuable information about their construction to disappear. As much as locking up instruments in cases (glass or otherwise) annoyed him, he perceived greater threats in their being damaged by novice players with little understanding of how to handle violins or in their becoming blemished by subpar repairs. Speaking of collectors, he opined:

Meanwhile, the prestige of oldness and of owning or playing a prized, “authentic” instrument touched almost everyone bound up in violin culture, trickling down to popular perceptions of stringed instruments that fed the clichéd dream of discovering a long-lost Strad. Equally, the broader veneration of violin craftsmanship drove the commercial marketing that gave mass-produced goods – including factory violins – connotations of vintage, and also had the potential to encourage respect for anti-industrialized values of the past in populations of learners and players: a point developed in the concluding section of this chapter. Even violin cases could be streamed through the artisanal lens: the prominent elements of a Shell Case Co. ad for its gussied-up plywood boxes were an illustration of a violin maker at his bench and an imposing headline: “CRAFTSMANSHIP.”Footnote ⁷³

Fathoming Allure: Senses and Emotions

At the height of the violin craze, the violin developed a grip on the cultural imagination that was strongly fed by the printed word. Such material often took conceptions of the violin beyond notions of the old, the antique, or the artisanal, to offer reading publics other ways of knowing what “violining” was all about. Written representations of violins – and, to a lesser extent, cellos – that were circulating around the century’s end in creative literature and nonfiction are peppered with sensuous descriptions that provide further insights into the allure of strings. Material of this sort resonates with several contemporaneous trends, including theories from the physical and physiological sciences that framed the experience of hearing sound as bodily sensation or mental perception,Footnote ⁷⁴ as well as the movements of Aestheticism and Literary Decadence in the arts – Literary Decadence being characterized by its “preoccupation, even obsession, with extreme sensations,” as evinced in works by A. C. Swinburne and Oscar Wilde.Footnote ⁷⁵

Useful guiderails for interpreting period constructions of the violin family’s appeal can be found in the recent scholarly turn towards what Wendy Parkins describes as “the interrelation between body, mind and imagination in [Victorians’] sensory encounters with things,” and in Constance Classen’s contention that the “sensory life of a society” is informed by that society’s broader cultural values.Footnote ⁷⁶ By considering written accounts of bodily and emotional responses to stringed instruments from players, listeners, collectors, and makers through the lens of the tactile, visual, and aural, we can grasp something of how impactful people’s encounters with the violin (especially) could be, how such responses were framed by writers, and what that framing signified in broader, social terms. For reasons that should become apparent, I distinguish in the discussion below between “sensory” (of the senses), “sensuous” (appealing to the senses), and “sensual” (appeal that has sexual undertones).

*

Amongst violin culture’s stakeholders, the violin had long been acknowledged to have strong appeal to both the emotions and the senses (mainly, of course, the ear). George Dubourg’s popular book, in its fifth edition in 1878, spelled out the well-established correlation between the sounds that could be made on a violin and the timbre of the human voice, reinforcing the instrument’s capacity to communicate emotion:

In a society that prized singing, the analogy with vocality held considerable sway, and among string players a good cantabile was considered an important skill, one that T. L. Phipson, for example, remembered learning.Footnote ⁷⁸ In addition, advanced performance techniques encouraged players to employ vibrato and portamento to intensify expressive moments in much the same way that singers did.Footnote ⁷⁹

The violin’s sonic ability to express and communicate feeling (and affect mood) was a recurring topic in publications from the 1880s into the 1910s. In nonfiction writing, for instance, the instrument was a “rare vehicle for the emotions” trumped only slightly by the human voice (Haweis) and it produced a “soothing effect upon the ear” (Violin Times), while for Phipson it had eased a lifetime of personal sorrows.Footnote ⁸⁰ Responses could be intense and kinesthetic in both listeners and performers. Popular poet and author Norman Gale claimed in the Christian World that there were men at concerts who would “wait an hour for a certain phrase, and then shed tears when it [the cello] cries out from the orchestra,” asserting that when well played, a cello could play havoc with the emotions.Footnote ⁸¹ Privately, performer Thelma Bentwich confided to her diary during the first months of World War I that she was seeking “consolation” through her cello playing, sometimes finding that making music “persistently” brought “tears to [her] eyes,” while at other moments viewing her capacity to “give of its beauties to others” a “blessing.”Footnote ⁸² Meanwhile, anyone drawn to imaginative literature would have likely read multiple times about characters viscerally and emotionally moved by a violinist’s playing. Those fictional listeners might hold their breath, smile with excitement, listen “with open mouths and ears as upright as those of any wild-ass of the desert,” or even burst into tears.Footnote ⁸³

In step was a technical fascination with music’s ability to stimulate the mind, nerves, and muscles; and scientifically inclined readers were probably aware that the emerging discipline of sound science was grappling with some of these issues. In particular, the writings of German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, who had begun to delve into the physiology of the body’s response to musical sounds, drew significant attention in Britain.Footnote ⁸⁴ One music writer familiar with such science was the polymathic Haweis, who in his autobiography of 1884 referenced Helmholtz’s theories on sound and hearing. In the late 1890s, he set down his views on the role of touch in violin playing and the relationship between touch and emotional expression/communication, itself a contribution to what Heather Tilley sees as the “scientific and creative exploration of the tactile” within nineteenth-century life.Footnote ⁸⁵ Principally addressing the nonplayer, Haweis defined accent, sustaining ability, and modified tone as the crux of the violin’s unparalleled potential for the production of varied sounds, and explained how these qualities are generated by a player’s hand pressure on the bow and finger pressure on the strings.Footnote ⁸⁶ Moving on to argue that “the outpourings of sound … are in reality the outpourings of the musician’s soul,” he invoked the role of touch to broach why two accomplished violinists playing the same piece might move a listener in markedly different ways.Footnote ⁸⁷ Matter-of-fact treatment of a similar question came from Cambridge don Sedley Taylor, author of an accessible treatise on musical acoustics (1873; second edition 1883), who diagnosed perceptible small differences in performers’ sounds as tied up with the caliber of the instrument (“differences exist between individual instruments of the same class and maker”) and the nature of the player’s touch (the “manner in which the performer handles his instrument”). As he put it: “On the violin we perceive endless gradations of quality, from the rasping scrape of the beginner up to the smooth and superb tone of a Joachim.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Haweis, however, was adamant that there was much yet to be fathomed about a performer’s touch, particularly its role in communicating emotion. Inching towards a topic that would not receive empirical attention in psychological science for decades,Footnote ⁸⁹ he wrote:

Of course, players were not the only people who engaged sensorily with instruments. Artisanal violin making had its tactile aspects and required fine motor precision from the hands that wielded tools, with master craftsmanship hinging on an eye for detail honed over time – a point well communicated by the bespectacled, elderly maker in Fig. 8.1 and in George Eliot’s 1873 paean to Antonio Stradivari’s craft, in which she paints the luthier as having worked “full fourscore years” and “[c]herished his sight and touch.”Footnote ⁹¹ Violin connoisseurs, both collectors and enthusiasts, aspired to some of the same sensory sophistication. In this, the visual element was ultra-important. Haweis termed it keeping the “eye in,” remarking “[i]f you leave off looking at violins you soon get out of practice, you fail to see the subtle differences, you get like a tea-taster off his palate.”Footnote ⁹² Thus, as the visitor to George Haddock’s collection (1890) put it: “To the eye of the ordinary observer, all violins have a pretty strong resemblance. … But to the connoisseur, instruments are full of ingenious and instructive degrees of difference.”Footnote ⁹³ Still, experts did not have a monopoly on visual gratification. The writer of the 1885 guide to the musical instruments displayed at the International Inventions Exhibition in London pointed out to nonexperts how much a fine violin’s decoration and graceful lines were a “source of pleasure to the eye,” advising them that “in the famous Cremona violins the combination of satisfaction to the senses is the most complete.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Sensory appreciation was relative, nevertheless. Recall from Chapter 2 how Nellie Purkiss described the moment in her childhood when she “beheld” her “beautiful new [factory-made] violin” lying on the red felt of its violin case. Meanwhile, collectors could find pleasure in handling violins as well as looking at them. George Du Maurier evokes such gratification in a vignette in his 1894 novel Trilby (discussed more extensively in the following section), in which the collector dusts and strokes his instruments.

Fathoming Further Allure: Gendering, Connection, and Desire

Authors of fiction like Du Maurier used portrayals of string players, collectors, makers, and their instruments both as symbols for underlying narrative themes or concepts and as a means to develop plot and characters or explore inner lives. In addition, creative writers did much to register to large sectors of the reading population the astonishing appeal of stringed instruments in the contemporary world through their recourse to sensuous language. So, too – perhaps surprisingly – did some writers of nonfictional material. Mostly in descriptions of music-making, whether imagined or real, writers carefully evoked aural, visual, and tactile experiences of playing or listening to stringed instruments, in order to trigger the sensory memory or imagination and to offer non-string-playing readers relatable ways of understanding the effect that the sounds of stringed instruments and the experience of playing them (or of seeing/hearing them played) could have on individuals. This technique would have also enabled readers who were or had been string players to access afresh the embodied sensation of playing the instrument, or even of handling it: Richard Marsh, in his short story “The Violin” (1900), asserted that “genuine” musicians did the latter reverently, rapping the back “softly” with their knuckles, peeping inside the f-holes, and smelling the wood.Footnote ⁹⁵ Moreover, as will shortly become clear, word choices intended to stimulate visual and tactile imaginings often segued into sexually suggestive language and content in relation to the violin and cello especially (the principal solo instruments, much in the public eye). Sensual cues were particularly effective because of how the violin family had become both anthropomorphically referenced – “family” itself a term that makes the analogue with human relationships – and gendered in this time period.Footnote ⁹⁶

A common trope across many genres of writing was the bond that string players developed with their instruments, which/who were often cast as loyal friends and sources of solace in a musician’s old age. The twenty poems authored by violinist and writer Marion Scott are testament to the phenomenon: many are addressed “to” particular violins, the entire collection dedicated to her “friends among fiddles.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Gale fantasized about growing old with his cello, the instrument an “obedient … comrade” who could offer comfort in old age (“We shall sit close together, often, very often”).Footnote ⁹⁸ Such images offered ways for understanding the extraordinary devotion that many players demonstrated to their music-making, and the close attachment to a familiar instrument that some individuals displayed. The friendship between instruments in Thomas Hardy’s poem “Haunting Fingers” (1921) offers a further twist to these anthropomorphizing tendencies. Hardy’s verses imagine a memory-laden nighttime conversation between instruments in a museum. All are unhappy at their silencing: a “viol” (the term here meaning violin) once used for dancing “feels apt touches on him/From those that pressed him then,” suggesting not only that the instrument misses its player but that it has what Catherine Charlwood calls a “residual memory” of being played upon.Footnote ⁹⁹

Sometimes writers postulated affectionate relationships between players and instruments. In his autobiography, Phipson recollected hugging his violin “with more tenderness than ever” when required to take piano lessons as a child, and an anonymous account of Sussex fiddler Michael Turner’s death in 1885 staked the claim that Turner “actually passed away with his fiddle in his arms.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Popular novelist Marie Corelli’s journalistic piece about a solo performance given by Dutch cellist Joseph Hollmann at the Albert Hall (London) in 1884 dubbed the instrument “his ‘big friend,’” which Hollmann carried “tenderly” onto the platform and made talk in its sleep.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Such caring behavior was not limited to players: the most celebrated Italian violin makers could be framed in technical writing as having “bestowed loving care on every single instrument,” while a collector might be reported as “tenderly” handling a Strad.Footnote ¹⁰²

How contemporary readers interpreted such allusions would have been bound up with their awareness of how stringed instruments, particularly the violin, were gendered. By the late nineteenth century, the violin had become firmly aligned with the feminine, its shape mimicking the contour of a young woman’s body, its compass in the lower fingering positions paralleling the combined ranges of a soprano and mezzo-soprano voice, its size and delicacy (“weighs no more than about 8½ oz.”Footnote ¹⁰³) suggesting youth and vulnerability, and its high-tension stringing generating easy allusions to what was considered women’s emotional, often ultra-tense (highly strung) nature. By common consent, areas of the instrument were labelled with terms that connoted the human body: neck, waist, ribs, belly (words also used for the other violin-family instruments).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Occasionally, other elements of the violin’s construction were likened to human attributes: for Haweis, the f-holes were the “very mouth and nostrils” that emitted the sound; for Phipson, echoing the double-meaning of the French word âme, the soundpost was the instrument’s soul.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Associated ideas positioned the instrument as having either the soul or voice of an angel, the angelic now amassing connotations of feminine purity.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In addition, as Paula Gillett’s work in this arena shows, the parallel between a violin and a woman’s body had already accrued “erotic overtones.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Dating from the eighteenth century, these overtones intensified during the nineteenth, as the bow became cast as the controlling male who draws sound vibrations from the female violin’s strings, a conceit replete with allusion to sexual experience.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ In late Victorian imaginative writing, the violin was thus often framed as a female-gendered object of human desire.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

The cello’s gendered associations differed, as George Kennaway’s study of cello playing, 1780–1930, reveals.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The common characterization, forged in times when only men played the instrument, favored masculinity. With its low compass, large size, and weightier frame, the cello paired naturally with ideas of manliness in the social imagination. To George Hart, remembering inspecting Gillott’s cello collection lined up in rows in his factory, the fifty-odd instruments “looked in their cases like a detachment of infantry awaiting the word of command!”Footnote ¹¹¹ However, as Kennaway observes, there is cross-cutting evidence, coincident with women cellists becoming more publicly visible in the late nineteenth century, that the cello’s masculine characterization became “diluted,”Footnote ¹¹² occasionally taking on a clearly feminized persona: country church musician Tom Taggart (1847–1933) on the Isle of Man apparently referred to his cello as “Herself.”Footnote ¹¹³ That said, writers, where they endowed a cello with humanlike characteristics and emotions, seem to have mostly left its gendering opaque or at least to have sidestepped overt sexual allusions – perhaps deliberate ambiguities, as noted in the paragraphs towards the end of this section.

Meanwhile, the viola and double bass, which had yet to gather a soloist’s repertoire or notable current practitioners, functioned as ensemble instruments – largely hidden in plain sight – and escaped much gendering in period writing. The viola was distinguishable from the violin only by a practiced eye or ear, and in gendered terms would have classified as a female, maybe a mature one (thus less sexualized) on account of its alto register. The double bass was readily imagined as a lumbering grandfather figure because of its size and especially deep range. The considerable challenges of transportation meant that it was, for the most part, rarely seen being carried on the street.Footnote ¹¹⁴

***

Paula Gillett has shown that in a substantial amount of verbiage, much of it laced into verse and fiction of the fin de siècle, writers built erotic depictions of violinists beholding or playing their instruments.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Violin magazines carried much such imaginative writing. Gillett discusses “My Fiddle,” a poem printed in the Violin Times in 1905.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Composed by Ethelbert Ames, a carpenter from Kent, and narrated in the first person, it draws attention to the player’s visual appreciation of the curvaceous female form (“How oft thy full and shapely bosom/Hath charm’d my ravished eye”) and his tactile pleasure when caressing the instrument’s head and neck. However, for all that it was à la mode, the conceit had older roots. In “The Poor Fiddler’s Ode to His Old Fiddle,” published in the Musical World in 1841 and reprinted as the frontispiece to the 1878 edition of Dubourg’s The Violin, the versifier uses sensory language to trigger the reader’s sensual imagination and evoke the achievement of heavenly-cum-sexual rapture:

In each example a (male) poet employs sexual allusion to communicate the powerful hold that the violin could have on its player and the intensity of the violinist’s musical experience; but he also demonstrates a way of writing about sexual experience in times and contexts where open discussion was unthinkable.

In other settings, metaphors could be more explicit. British music hall, despite its shift towards greater social respectability, spun sexual raciness by cloaking it with humor and double entendres.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In the 1890s, music-hall entertainer George Chirgwin popularized the song “My Fiddle Is My Sweetheart” (words by Harry Hunter; music by Chirgwin), in which the instrument is declared a stand-in for his girlfriend, responsive to his lovemaking, and he the punning bow (beau) to her body:

Chorus:

Under the cover of wholesomeness (the couple are faithful to one another), the lyrics supply much suggestive innuendo, amplified by an appeal to multiple senses, while underlining the pervasiveness of societal assumptions about the man’s control of the woman’s body and the desirability of her social subservience:

Chorus:

Music-hall regulars may have got to know the song from joining in its refrains, though an even wider audience is suggested by the publication of the words and tune (with additional tonic sol-fa symbols) for domestic consumption by Francis, Day & Hunter in 1896.

Some sixteen years later in The Trespasser, Modernist novelist D. H. Lawrence called on a similar technical device in his depiction of an amorous couple, employing his characteristic sexual candor and erotic tone to sharpen the sexual analogy and highlight male physical dominance. To depict the young Helena’s grieving for Siegmund, her deceased lover and violin teacher, Lawrence makes explicit parallels between Helena’s body and Siegmund’s instrument, invoking his touch, and also noting her memories of his smell:

One unusual presentation of male fascination with the female body resides in a vignette in George Du Maurier’s hugely popular novel Trilby (1894; initially serialized in the American Harper’s New Monthly Magazine). In it, Little Billee, one of a group of British art students in Paris, is portrayed as a celibate who, having been spurned by the alluring female protagonist, has become uninterested in pursuing romantic attachment. In a burst of sensual language, Du Maurier likens Billee to an obsessive violin collector with a “harem” of instruments, which he loves for their symmetry, neatness, color, and “lovely lines and curves.”Footnote ¹²² Billee enjoys dusting, stroking, and tuning them. He also infantilizes them, using “sweet little pet names,” and confiding his troubles, which elicits murmurs in return. What makes Billee different from most men, though, is that he will “never draw a bow across the strings, nor wake a single chord – or discord!”Footnote ¹²³ The violin thus serves as an emblem of society’s view of women as sexual objects – an analogy underscored by Du Maurier’s own illustration for the vignette (Fig. 8.2) – but, yoked to the construct of the oddball collector, it places a spotlight on male sexual behavior that resisted societal norms.Footnote ¹²⁴

Figure 8.2 George Du Maurier, drawing of Little Billee in his novel Trilby (New York: Harper, 1894).

Image reproduced from the collections of the University of IllinoisUrbana-Champaign.

In the above examples, the players and collector are known, or assumed, to be men. But seemingly far more common, at least during the heady violin craze, were suggestive depictions of respectable woman violinists and their (female-gendered) violins. Gillett has identified underlying auto- and homoeroticism in several sources, including Marion Scott’s two confessional poems (published when she was in her late twenties) titled “To My Violin,” which describe the intense relationship between player and instrument.Footnote ¹²⁵ Regardless of whether contemporaries read the violin in such literature as a troubling stand-in for a woman, there sits amidst the sexual ambiguities another suggestion: that this is an independent woman who finds satisfaction in life through something other than marriage.

More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that suggestions of female erotic pleasure were not limited to imaginative writing. In the preface to his history of the violin (1904), Paul Stoeving attempts to convey the “exceptionalism” of a Stradivarius instrument from the viewpoint of an imagined onlooker/eavesdropper, and he uses an overabundance of sexually suggestive language that both conjures up the image of a young woman kissing the instrument and draws a comparison between a violin being played and a trembling “maiden” being kissed by her lover (gender not noted):

And what of cellists? Figurative characterizations of them responding to their cellos are rare in written material of the same era and, where found, are typically subdued or more ambiguous in terms of sexual suggestion: For Norman Gale, a cello “answers the heart” and “wants your guiding hand,” even while he describes his own instrument variously as “obedient comrade,” old-age companion, mate, and confidante (1896).Footnote ¹²⁷ For a piece of concert criticism, Marie Corelli’s account of Joseph Hollmann as a performer, written twelve years earlier, is startling because it employs both sensual allusion and far more imagery-laden language than was normal. Player and instrument “love each other … whisper and laugh and murmur … fondle and caress,” and Hollmann forces “wild confessions from its quivering strings.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Yet Corelli alludes only obliquely to the instrument’s gender – the “big friend” is cast as a “heavy, cumbrous thing” – and she avoids describing its register and timbre, even while she refers to a “living, talking being … capable of quick pulsations of joy and strong shudders of passion near akin to pain.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Published when the cello’s gendering was still mostly, though not exclusively, masculine, her account is richly ambiguous.

In recent years, scholars have complicated notions of Victorian prudery and attitudes towards homosexuality, arguing that there was considerable awareness of same-sex desire in parts of society, and have opened up the possibility that creative writers used coded techniques to express such ideas on the page.Footnote ¹³⁰ Scott’s violin poetry is certainly consonant with the use of “alternative languages and imageries” or “the eloquence of forms of silence” to communicate same-sex desire.Footnote ¹³¹ More generally, though, writers’ avoidance of firmly gendering cellos when depicting them in performance (and the account of Hollmann’s cello playing especially) was conceivably intended to duck charges of either homoeroticism or heteroeroticism. Consider, too, a short story in a magazine of 1896 that sets up a courtship between a male cellist, who claims to be at one with his cello, and the young woman next door. The woman hears the instrument (which is never “he,” “she,” or “it”) making deep groans and wails of agony only ever through the party wall.Footnote ¹³² Further, Gale’s use, in a description of a man’s relationship with his cello, of the gender-neutral pronoun suggests heightened moral discomfort with the possibility of the cello-human analogy being construed in sexual terms: the essay originated in a Christian magazine.

In the face of period propriety, one might wonder about sensual allusions to women playing cellos. Kennaway discusses a handful of examples from fiction and nonfiction available in Britain in the 1910s and 1920s, in which young women “coax” or “draw” sounds from their implicitly masculine cellos, but on the whole such constructions are rare.Footnote ¹³³ Obvious sapphic constructions of women with “female” cellos are especially elusive, although homoeroticism might be inferred from parts of the unpublished poem “This Is My World” (1903) by poet, short-story writer, and amateur cellist Katherine Mansfield, whose sexual preferences have been much discussed and debated. Written while a student at a London ladies’ college, where Mansfield met and formed an “ardent schoolgirl bond” with Ida Baker (“LM”),Footnote ¹³⁴ the poem celebrates objects in her room there. These include her cello, the verses about which, if read as private confessional, can translate the instrument to a female object of desire or a channel for Mansfield’s sexual consciousness. Physical sensations are prominent, the “magic” created by the cellist’s hand on the bow:

Because societal mores seemingly conditioned how writers framed erotic allusions to violins and cellos, the reasons for the enduring popularity of the trope of a sensual relationship between string player and instrument have proven complex to unpack.Footnote ¹³⁶ In fiction, the device was undoubtedly a useful mode for subtly conveying characters’ sexual desires and activities, and one that benefited from violin culture being du jour. But more significant perhaps among all the writers discussed above is their shared need to make sense of the extraordinary, almost frightening, intensity with which many people (including middle- and upper-class women) had taken up a stringed instrument, and to explain something of what was, for many onlookers, an unfathomable attachment to playing it. With the violin family being seen and heard “live” in a variety of public spaces, there were ample opportunities for audiences to experience the theater of performance and its associated mysteries. In any case, the erotic metaphor was apt: stringed instruments not only looked quasi-human but responded to their players’ touch and body movements. It will also have been evident to observers that some players experienced considerable sensual-emotional pleasure from making music.

String Players Observed

It ought not surprise us that so many writers called on their readers’ tactile and visual imagination in their depictions of violins and cellos being played, since effectively verbalizing how a piece of music sounded in performance was immensely challenging. When fiction writers invoked the reader’s aural imagination, they tended towards generic comments (as per “a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, broken here and there by strange barbaric clashes” in Robert ElsmereFootnote ¹³⁷). Sometimes, an author supplied descriptions of a particular work (the “bright and lively” scherzo of Schumann’s D minor Violin Sonata, No. 2, in Armorel of LyonesseFootnote ¹³⁸), which might well have triggered the aural memory of readers who knew the piece, but even then the approach had limited ability to convey, in the moment of reading, sound worlds that unfolded over several minutes. Such difficulties may have led creative writers to place greater emphasis on descriptions of sensory responses that readers could more quickly interiorize – namely, touch and sight. Indeed, in times when amateur string playing and concertgoing proliferated, touch-led descriptions of a fictional character playing an instrument would have had immediate relatability for readers who were players, triggering their “felt” memory.Footnote ¹³⁹

Further, in real-life concert situations, looking at performers was inherently bound up with listening, at least for those who chose not to close their eyes; thus, when someone watched, visual information stood to enhance aural perception and intensify appreciation. An observant, trained player might pay close attention to a performer’s technique during a concert. Edmund Fellowes, for instance, remembered Wilma Norman-Neruda (first violin) playing a high-register downward scale passage in the finale of Schumann’s A minor String Quartet (No. 1) with a sparkling up-bow staccato.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Also, whether their eyes were open or not, listeners who were players might have experienced the music vicariously – especially works they had themselves attempted – through imagined touch and bodily response. Nonplayers, though, may have found that their optical attention dominated, leaving strong visual memories afterwards. Jelka Delius (herself a painter) confided in a letter to a friend after a performance by the young Russian cellist Alexandre Barjansky in 1923 that “[h]e looks extraordinary when he plays, so ecstatic with a delicate, sensitive face and hair like an Italian primitive.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ More so, in an avowed nonmusician’s review of a performance by Guilhermina Suggia (1927; discussed in the penultimate paragraph of this section) the visual takes center stage.

Once women violinists started appearing on the concert platform in the 1870s, reviews and press commentary flowed. As scholars have frequently noted, a good deal of this male-generated commentary marginalized them as performers by employing what would become a familiar battery of gendered language (elegant, graceful, refined, clever, etc.); some journalists were skeptical, even antagonistic, towards their skills, musicianship, and the fact that they were playing what had traditionally been considered a man’s instrument. In addition, some writers commented on women’s appearance, demeanor, and physical movements while playing, in prose that assumed the male gaze, regardless of authorial gender.Footnote ¹⁴² A trivializing review of Viscountess Folkestone’s all-women orchestra (1884) depicted, complete with hoary pun, its “fair executants,” clad in “perfect and elegant dress of white with shoulder knots of pink,” who, “if not always strictly in tune, were never otherwise than charming in style and manner; a state of things perhaps to be accounted for by the presence of their beaux (Bows).”Footnote ¹⁴³ A magazine writer in the 1890s visualized a young player similarly as “[s]weet and picturesque in a quaint gown under the light of a chandelier, her violin resting under her soft, white chin, and her fair hands and arms showing to advantage as she wields the bow.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ Concert reviewers rarely described male performers visually, and where they did, their remarks typically addressed soloists whose physical attributes appeared striking or unusual in a string player, or whose platform presence seemed well outside norms. Adolf Brodsky was described (1898) – by a critic encountering his playing for the first time – as a “tall, squarely built, stout man, with large, round head, amiable bull-dog face, and a remarkably small white hand.”Footnote ¹⁴⁵ The young Czech violinist Jan Kubelík, the London sensation of 1901, had a “peculiarly lamb-like bearing.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶

By the early twentieth century, with women’s participation in violin culture largely normalized, tendencies to objectify them had mostly faded from concert criticism.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ But elsewhere, visual imaginations sometimes still ran riot. Paul Stoeving, in his history of the violin (1904), penned a suggestive visualization of an all-women conservatoire (likely string) orchestra concert in Queen’s Hall, London. His text conjures up a “heavy-breathing” audience and a “moving, glittering sea of white [dresses]” to suggest that listeners are provoked to religious ecstasy by the music and musicians. The latter become “descending and ascending angels clothed in white with fiddles, viols, ’cellis [sic] in their arms, radiant faces looking up in rapture to the source of light and goodness.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ At the time, the conceit of women as string-playing angels was unlikely to have surprised anyone, since sentimental, feminized stylizations of angels-as-players were prevalent in contemporaneous popular imagery (see Fig. 8.3), white garments underlining notions of purity.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Indeed, as noted earlier, angelic ideas were also becoming attached to the violin itself – a notable counterbalance to the demonic or supernatural associations that continued to surround the violin through the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁵⁰

Figure 8.3 Christmas postcard manufactured by Raphael Tuck & Sons (c. 1908), addressed on reverse to Miss Lily Spender, Stoke Newington, London.

Courtesy of TuckDB Postcards.

In addition, the rush of violin fiction that shadowed the violin craze of the 1890s was beset with plots that profiled a young, middle-class woman violinist, who was invariably visualized in the act of playing. Such material is valuable to historical enquiry for its ability to harbor topics that generally evaded public commentary. Gillett’s analysis provides an important roadmap, pointing up the tendency for novel and short-story writers to detail thick tresses of hair and even low-cut necklines as a means of signaling young women violinists’ sexual availability, their steadfast focus on their music-making contributing to their sensual allure.Footnote ¹⁵¹ The trope of men watching can appear, as in Mrs. Humphrey Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), where Rose is glimpsed playing her violin more than once by a suitor.Footnote ¹⁵² Meanwhile, in-text illustrations sometimes enhanced the effect. In Walter Besant’s novel Armorel of Lyonesse (1890), illustrator Frederick Barnard provided considerable gloss to a passage in which the gifted and “really beautiful” Armorel gives a salon performance of Schumann’s Second Violin Sonata.Footnote ¹⁵³ Barnard drew a slender-waisted violinist looking intently at her music, oblivious of her audience. Most of the men in close earshot strain their necks to peer in her direction as they listen; and since they do not simultaneously cup their hands to their ears, we may assume the illustrator was intentionally depicting their visual fascination, as opposed to showing them struggling to hear because of background noise. In both examples, then, what the Victorian reader/viewer was being invited to “gaze” at through camouflage, if we assume the gendered instrument was a stand-in for another woman, is an intimate, same-sex communion: a potentially unsettling visualization for some readers; the makings of a sexual fantasy, perhaps, for others. Relatedly, the woman’s self-absorption carried inferences of autoeroticism and a woman’s rights to sexual desire or independence.

More important, the intense bond between the woman string player and her instrument became a useful concept for encoding societal attitudes towards changing norms for women in daily life. In Du Maurier’s richly layered Punch cartoon “The Fair Sex-tett” (1875; Fig. 8.4), published around the time that women violinists were starting to gain attention, the eye is drawn to six highly feminized, exaggeratedly buxom women musicians on a public stage; five are string players.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ The women are deeply caught up in their music-making (playing from memory), almost denying their entirely male audience and dominating the stage and image – themes Gillett has discussed in depth.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ Notable, too, is the depiction of women on viola, cello, and double bass, since these were instruments that women had yet to take up in significant numbers, suggesting that Du Maurier was envisioning (and warning against) a women-focused workforce of the future. Only men are watching. Off to the side, a binocular-wielding individual in a theater box levels his sightline at the standing players’ bosoms; two oddly smiling oglers are among those seated below. The rest of the men – more prominently and less satirically drawn – are passive and literally reclining: a reversal of the traditional gender roles of male–female sexual experience. Acknowledging the women’s powerful allure, Du Maurier’s image simultaneously seems to expose deeper male anxieties about what this new fad might be heralding in terms of wider social life, the music profession, and sexual behavior. After all, the New Woman string player who sought financial independence through a career might delay or eschew marriage, rendering men inert, while she who trained to an advanced level might take jobs from male musicians, creating further masculine consternation. In addition, a married woman who found as much, if not more, satisfaction alone with her instrument as with her husband suggested an emotional and sexual independence that might shake family life. As Gillett’s work shows, novelists and short-story writers echoed these themes, suggesting a persistence of deep-seated, subconscious fears about what this revolution in the string-playing world meant for men.Footnote ¹⁵⁶ In Du Maurier’s image, crosscurrents of fear and attraction effectively index a society that was still working through the innovations of women playing the violin in public and their claim to be part of the musicians’ workforce. They also speak to a society that was starting to confront shifting ideas about sexuality in times that avoided plain speaking about such matters.

Figure 8.4 George Du Maurier, “The Fair Sex-tett,” cartoon (Punch, 3 April 1875).

Nearly fifty years after Du Maurier’s cartoon appeared, societal qualms about women publicly playing stringed instruments, including the cello and double bass – initially construed as “unladylike” choices – had largely dissolved, even though issues around equality of opportunities across the music profession were unresolved. By this time, too, discussion of women’s sexual pleasure in Britain had been brought somewhat into the public domain by the Victorian physician and pioneering sexologist Havelock Ellis, whose controversial, seven-volume Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928) demystified much sexual behavior and championed the idea that women’s capacity for sexual enjoyment was comparable to men’s.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ It is in this context that a lengthy and extraordinarily sexually suggestive account of a solo performance by Portuguese cellist Guilhermina Suggia (who used the leg-straddling position), then living in Britain, can be appreciated. The essay, written by the Irish political journalist Stephen Gwynn, was published in Country Life magazine in 1927, a little after the Tate Gallery in London acquired Augustus John’s striking portrait of her and at a time when women cellists were increasingly claiming ground as soloists.Footnote ¹⁵⁸

In Gwynn’s prose, which was constructed, he admitted, “through the eyes” on account of his lack of musical understanding, the cello – Suggia’s “rigid partner” – is likened to her “mount”: a racehorse that she commands through a series of physical movements. The cellist emerges from the performance “a little breathless and smiling,” after what Kennaway, who discusses this passage insightfully, terms “surely a self-absorbed sexual experience.”Footnote ¹⁵⁹ Gwynn’s account is certainly outlandish by the standards of mainstream reviews of women cellists in the 1920s, which refrained from commenting on appearance, let alone bodily movement, but its publication would have been unthinkable in the 1870s; moreover, its assumption of a woman’s right to play the cello in public contrasts sharply with fears of the kind that underlay how Du Maurier drew the cellist in his cartoon (Fig. 8.4). Kennaway, hinting at Gwynn’s voyeuristic position, adds: “Beneath the exuberant language, this is a description of a self-contained, controlling and sexually dominant woman. The cello is … a means to her own private fulfilment. Gwynn looks on.”Footnote ¹⁶⁰ A tool of pornography, voyeurism works by encouraging the viewer’s sensory imagination to the extent that their body responds physically; it can be triggered by written and visual media. In Du Maurier’s cartoon the viewer observes the voyeurs: men watching highly sexualized women play their instruments. In Gwynn’s review, the reader is asked to visualize Suggia in performance through observations and analogies. Had Gwynn appealed to the reader’s tactile imagination, the sexual suggestion in the account might have carried further punch; for, as we have seen, allusions to physical touch had, since the 1880s, been a means for fiction, verse, and other writing to eroticize evocations of both women and men playing stringed instruments.

A thornier question is to what extent concertgoers in real life were susceptible to visual suggestion, especially in relation to the acknowledged intimacy between violinist and instrument, which was enhanced by the conventional side-on stance of soloists when performing. (Violinists, unlike cellists and double bass players, were and are trained to perform at that angle to maximize sound projection.Footnote ¹⁶¹) The stance creates potentially tantalizing suggestiveness for the onlooker, because, as Kennaway notes, the violinist “turn[s] away from the listener in an attitude of eroticized self-absorption.”Footnote ¹⁶² Dress would have often heightened the effect, especially around the end of the nineteenth century when women soloists typically wore their hair “up” and dressed in highly feminized gowns that often revealed their upper backs and the backs of their necks – features that were made visible by the side-on stance. We can only guess at reactions, of course. But we might entertain the possibility that as part of an emotional, aural experience, the concert’s visual dimension catalyzed some listeners’ sensory imaginations, causing them to identify with what they saw happening on the platform: be that through the vicarious appreciation of a “musicking” experience, a mental projection of themselves as the soloist, or a psychosexual response arising from watching and hearing the player. A generation of concertgoers primed by violin fiction may have easily moved between several such registers.Footnote ¹⁶³ None of this thinking negates the commonsensical assumption that the overarching draw for most listeners was the affecting experience of hearing music performed. However, it does allow for the privacy of the listening experience, and for the visual impact of seeing string players performing live to have fused with emotional responses arising from the sounds that were coming from the stage in ways that were unique to everyone.

Codetta: Pastness and Humanity

At first glance, the strong appeal of stringed instruments in Britain can seem paradoxical when set against the relentless march of technological innovation and industrial processes at the end of the nineteenth century – developments that affected the manufacture of musical instruments and the very nature of musical life. One way of squaring the circle is to acknowledge that some of the allure of these fragile, wooden instruments to players lay in the fact that they appeared to be unlike most other contemporary instruments, which were clearly the products of a modernizing, technologically driven world – namely, pianos, brass, and winds. Of course, not all violins were old, and many cheap instruments were produced through industrial processes. But whether they were new or old, factory-made or handcrafted, stringed instruments were known to sit in a continuum of centuries-old craft practices, and some people’s awareness of this aspect may well have drawn them towards the violin family. Commerce and advertising played a considerable role in foregrounding the violin family’s associations with pastness, artisanal values, and the natural world, contributing to a larger matrix of qualities and meaning that became attached to the instruments during the late nineteenth century. Chief among the instruments’ most-cited attributes were their humanesque responsiveness and their ability to create expressive sounds that were felt to rival those of the singing voice.

One element of the “natural” inclination can be seen in the idealization of an instrument made by hand out of once-living materials that were derived from trees (maple, white pine, deal) and animals (horsehair, sheep’s gut). Another may have been less tangible and more humanizing: a consciousness of lineage to a collective past, born of the fascination with old violins and the artisanal methods of the master Italian makers. In addition, there was the matter of the way the sounds were produced: unlike a hidden intermediary mechanism in instruments such as the modern piano, the “natural” surfaces of stringed instruments directly responded to human touch. As players literally drew sounds from the instrument – the skin on their fingers making contact with the (usually) gut string or with the heel of the pernambuco (brazilwood) bow – they opened up a range of emotional and sensuous satisfaction not only to themselves but also to people who were listening, as many writers pointed out.

Intensifying these notions of the natural and the human were the deep-rooted anthropomorphic associations of the instruments’ shapes, compasses, and timbres, while the deep (for some, unfathomable) attachment that many players displayed towards their instrument invited conceptions of the violin (and violin-family instruments more generally) as a close human friend or lover. Alongside emerged the notion of violin playing as a sensual, quasi-sexual pleasure: a construct that lurked most often as subtext or double meaning in creative art and writing but held additional potency as a means not only of communicating the string family’s powerful hold on so many of its players but also of alluding to broader concerns about sexuality and women’s lives in times of social change. Seen in the round, the multifaceted conception of the violin family delineated in this chapter reveals the lived experience of string playing as a rich site for explorations of how music addressed, both at the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, pressing late Victorian questions of what it meant to be human.