The Titanic Violin

As the Titanic sank, the band famously played 'Nearer my God to thee' as it sunk.

And more than 100 years after the tragedy, the violin owned by the band leader has been confirmed as a survivor.

The instrument, which is cracked, water stained and only has two strings, is said to have belonged to Wallace Hartley, whose band continued to play – most famously, the hymn “Nearer, My God, To Thee” – as the ship filled with water.

It was thought the violin had been lost to the sea when Hartley and the rest of his band drowned along with 1,500 others on April 15, 1912.

But in 2006 an unnamed man found the instrument in a leather suitcase in the attic of his mother’s home.

Some experts doubted its authenticity, saying it could not have survived after being submerged in sea water. Historians, scientists and forensic experts, along with specialist Titanic auctioneers, Henry Aldridge and Son, and Hartley’s biographer, spent seven years examining it and researching the story behind it before declaring they were able to prove its authenticity “beyond reasonable doubt”.

They said Hartley had strapped it to his chest in a leather bag and it had been returned to his fiance, Maria

Wallace Hartley with his violin

Robinson, before being passed on to The Salvation Army.

From there it was given to a violin teacher, who in turn gave it to the seller’s mother, herself an amateur musician.

It was bought by an British collector of Titanic memorabilia at the sale in Devizes, Wiltshire on Saturday. When the buyer’s premium is added, the total paid was £1.1 million.

The previous record for a single piece of memorabilia from the Titanic was £220,000, which was paid in 2011 for a 32ft plan of the Titanic used in the inquiry into the sinking of the ship.

However the story of Hartley’s band is one of the most enduring of the disaster. Within minutes of the ship striking an iceberg, Hartley was instructed to assemble his musicians to play to maintain calm.

They performed on the boat deck while the passengers lined up for the lifeboats.

When Hartley’s body was recovered, the violin was not listed among the official inventory of items found in his possession. However a newspaper later reported that Hartley was found with it strapped to his body in his leather bag.

The research appears to suggest that it then either simply floated off in the Atlantic or was stolen by somebody involved with handling the bodies.

Whatever its initial fate, a transcript of a telegram dated July 19, 1912 in the diary of Miss Robinson, to the

Provincial Secretary of Nova Scotia, reveals it was eventually returned to her.

She states: “I would be most grateful if you could convey my heartfelt thanks to all who have made possible the return of my late fiance’s violin.”

She had given the instrument to Hartley in 1910 to mark their engagement and had it engraved accordingly.

Miss Robinson, who never married, kept the violin in the leather case as a shrine to her late fiancé until she died in 1939.

Her sister, Margaret then passed it on to Bridlington Salvation Army and told its leader, Major Renwick, about the instrument's association with Titanic.

The research shows Major Renwick in turn gave the valise to one of his members, a local music and violin teacher.

In the early 1940s, the seller’s mother was a member of the Womens’ Auxiliary Air Force stationed at Bridlington. She met the music teacher who later dispatched the valise and violin to her.

A covering letter which has been found stated: “Major Renwick thought I would be best placed to make use of the violin but I found it virtually unplayable, doubtless due to its eventful life.”

It remained there until its discovery seven years ago. It was then taken to the Government’s Forensic Science Service in Chepstow which concluded the corrosion deposits on it were "considered compatible with immersion in sea water".

An silver expert on the council for the Gemological Association of Great Britain studied the plate on the base of the violin and confirmed the plate was an original fixture on the violin and the engraving was contemporary with the hallmarks on the panel that were made in 1910. 

Reposted from the Telegraph 

Brothers Amati and Nicoló Amati

Though violin making reached its zenith in the hands of Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù , the story of the violin begins much earlier in Cremona. Andrea Amati was a luthier, from Cremona, Italy.  It was in the workshop of Andrea Amati, Italy, in the middle of the 16th century that the form of the instruments of the violin family as we know them today first crystallized.

This violin, now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, may have been part of a set made for the marriage of Philip II of Spain to Elisabeth of Valois in 1559, which would make it one of the earliest known violins in existence.

Lorenzo De Medici

The first violin was ordered by Lorenzo De Medici in 1555. His letter to Amati stated the instrument was to be made of the highest quality materials like that of a lute, but simple to play". The first violin was intended to be used by illiterate musicians, so the design was simple and it was easy to play.

Nicolo Amati

Several of his instruments survive to the present day, and some of them can still be played. Many of the surviving instruments were among a consignment of 38 instruments delivered to Charles IX of France in 1564.

His sons Antonio and Girolamo, commonly referred to as the Brothers Amati, took over the shop after his death. Nicoló Amati, the most famous member of the family, was born to Girolamo in 1596 and took over the family business after 1630. For centuries, musicians and connoisseurs have prized Nicoló Amati violins for their superb craftsmanship and wonderfully responsive tone. During the 17th century, the name Amati was virtually a synonym for a fine violin.

As important as Nicoló Amati was as a violin maker, he was perhaps even more significant to the ultimate success and perfection of the violin as a teacher and inspiration. As a result of his pupils and followers, nearly all violins made in the 17th century were based in some way on Amati models either from direct contact with the master or through imitation of his instruments.

Peter McGuire of the Minnesota Orchestra play the 'King Henry IV' Brothers Amati violin

 

Cello or Violoncello

   
The cello, originally called the violoncello, is about twice as large as the violin and has four strings tuned an octave lower than those of the viola. As the bass viola da bracchio it was originally tuned a tone lower than it now is, but the present tuning had become standard by 1700. Because of its size, it is played between the knees like members of the viol family. The bass viol was favored for solo playing in the 17th and early 18th cent., and the cello became an important solo instrument only after the disappearance of the viols and the subsequent refinement of cello technique by Jean Louis Duport (1749-1819). The cello was, from its beginning, an important member of the orchestra and is also indispensable in chamber music. It now has an extensive solo literature of its own.


 

"The King" Violoncello by Andrea Amati, Cremona,  after 1538 ca. 

   Violin by Nicolo Amati, Cremona, 1628

  NMM 3356.  Violin by Nicolo Amati, Cremona, 1628.  Ex colls.:  C. J. Read, Salisbury, England; Rev. James Moore; W. H. Symes; R. E. Brandt; E. A. Willmott; Richard Bennett; George Kemp; William MacNeil Rodewald, Jr., Paris and Palm Beach, Florida.  Witten-Rawlins Collection, 1984.

This violin bears an authentic label from the shop of Antonio and Girolamo Amati, run at that time by Nicolo's father, Girolamo. Nicolo assisted his father in the shop and, from about 1615-1620 onwards, Nicolo's was the dominant hand in the instruments bearing the label of the Brothers Amati. This violin, made when Nicolo was about thirty-two years old, is a very well-preserved, grand pattern instrument of the long-cornered design, emulating the work of Nicolo's grandfather, Andrea Amati.

Just a few years after he completed the NMM's violin, Nicolo Amati (1596-1684) found himself in the position of being the pre-eminent violin maker in Italy. This was due not only to the fact that he was a highly talented luthier, but also by virtue of the fact that he miraculously survived the plague that decimated northern Italy in 1629-1630. Subsequent census records document the fact that Nicolo Amati regularly had several non-family members living in his home, including some presumably taken in as orphans of the plague. Others were apprentices in Nicolo's shop, young men representing what was to become the next generation of Cremonese luthiers, including such notables as Andrea Guarneri (ca. 1626-1698) and Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737). 

 

 

Was Sherlock Holmes an accomplished violinist?

‘His powers upon the violin... were very remarkable but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments'

Sherlock Holmes in "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", which appeared in The Strand Magazine in January, 1893. Original caption was "HE EXAMINED THEM MINUTELY."

221b Baker Street

Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle’s most famous literary character, first appeared in1887 and went on to feature in four full-length novels and 56 short stories. His day job was as a ‘consulting detective’, for which he used his powers of deduction to outwit criminal masterminds, but he is also one of fiction’s most famous music lovers and violinists.

While Holmes’s association with the violin is well known through radio, television and film representations of his character, substantial allusions to his musical passions are relatively few and far between in Conan Doyle’s original books. References to his playing are rarer still, but they are sufficient to give a picture of a cultured, if unusual, player who – of course – possessed a Stradivari.

The majority of Conan Doyle’s Holmes narratives are voiced by the detective’s regular companion, Dr John Watson. In The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone (1921), Watson describes a visit to Holmes’s London residence, 221B Baker Street, and his delight at being reacquainted with ‘the scientific charts upon the wall, the acid-charred bench of chemicals, the violin-case leaning in the corner, the coal scuttle which contained of old the pipes and tobacco’.

As for the contents of the violin case, The Adventure of the Cardboard Box (1892) finds the long-suffering Watson taking lunch with Holmes, who would ‘talk of nothing but violins, narrating with great exultation how he had purchased his own Stradivarius’, which he acquired from a broker in Tottenham Court Road for 55 shillings. Holmes’s estimate in the same story is that the violin is worth ‘at least 500 guineas’. Holmes evidently got a bit of a bargain – and the detective is no slouch when it comes to stringed instrument history. The Field Bazaar (1896) finds him studying ‘a very interesting article upon the trees of Cremona and the exact reasons for their pre-eminence in the manufacture of violins’.

Paganini heads Holmes’s list of performers on his own instrument. Watson describes in The Adventure of the Cardboard Box how ‘we sat for an hour over a bottle of claret while he told me anecdote after anecdote of that extraordinary man’.

In A Study in Scarlet (1887), Holmes can be found attending a concert by the 19th-century

Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda

virtuoso Wilhelmina Norman-Neruda, whose ‘attack and bowing are splendid’, and a performance by Sarasate draws both Holmes and Watson to St James’s Hall in The Red-Headed League (1891). Sarasate was obviously to Holmes’s taste as, by Watson’s account, he sat in the concert, ‘wrapped in the most perfect happiness, gently waving his long, thin fingers in time to the music’.

As for Holmes’s own playing, he embarks on some of Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words for Watson’s listening pleasure in A Study in Scarlet. In the only story where the violin plays a tangible part in the plot, The Adventure of the Mazarin Stone, Holmes fools his foes by telling them he is about to play the Barcarolle from Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann in an adjoining room. In fact he puts on a record of the same piece, but the villains of the story fail to notice that it is a recording rather than a live performance.

Was Holmes any good as a player? Here opinion seems to be divided. Although his listening tastes incorporate mainstream classical music, there are few references to Holmes actually playing such repertoire on his own instrument – and he is never described as playing from a score. Nor is there any evidence that he took part in chamber music, or even played with an accompanist. In A Study in Scarlet, Watson paints a picture of Holmes’s abilities: ‘His powers upon the violin... were very remarkable but as eccentric as all his other accomplishments.’

Watson describes Holmes in The Red-Headed League as ‘an enthusiastic musician, being himself not only a very capable performer, but a composer of no ordinary merit’. However, in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of A Study in Scarlet, the author and critic Iain Sinclair is less complimentary. He finds Holmes ‘sawing away on the violin like something out of the Incredible String Band... a boho poser, a Huysmans aesthete’.

Sinclair’s assessment of Holmes’s playing may well be based around the description in A Study in Scarlet that Holmes would ‘scrape carelessly at the fiddle which was thrown across his knee’. In our modern parlance, referring to a Stradivari as a ‘fiddle’ would be on a par with describing Holmes as a policeman – slightly inaccurate and certainly an understatement. And the idea of him ‘scraping carelessly’ sounds at odds with the descriptions of Holmes’s musical prowess put forward in other novels. However, the dates and sequence in which the stories were written have a role to play. A Study in Scarlet is the first story to feature Holmes. It describes several aspects of the detective’s skills and character that are contradicted in later novels, and Conan Doyle may have decided to elevate his creation’s musical skills as time went on.

Holmes’s unusual practice of playing the instrument ‘thrown across his knee’ could point not to any shortcoming in abilities, but to a study of folk music (which would also be in keeping with referring to the instrument as a ‘fiddle’). It has even been suggested that Holmes wasn’t playing a violin at all. In a 1965 article in the New York Times, the music critic Harold C. Schonberg suggests that he might even have been playing a vielle, a five-string ancestor of the modern instrument.

The Ernst 1706 Stradivarius

Only small clues to Holmes’s musicianship can be found in Conan Doyle’s own life. The author claimed that his primary inspiration for Sherlock Holmes was Dr Joseph Bell, an eminent physician and amateur sleuth for whom Conan Doyle had worked in Edinburgh. Bell seems not to have had any musical inclinations of his own and although Conan Doyle’s detail of concerts and players of the time is accurate, most of the references could easily have been pulled together from concert flyers of the period. With the exception of a reference to a ‘little thing of Chopin’ played by Norman-Neruda in concert in A Study in Scarlet, there is little more than generic detail around Conan Doyle’s musical references.

Whatever scant evidence the original texts offer, Holmes is as closely associated with the violin as he is with his deerstalker hat and unusual curved pipe. Unlike those last two objects, at least Holmes the violinist is a genuine Conan Doyle creation – neither the headwear nor the curious smoking apparel are mentioned in any of the original works.


This article first appeared in The Strad in May 2009 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Arthur Conan Doyle.