The Violin... miracle of woodwork… and then there’s the music.

The Music

The Words

Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of the ‘Classical For Everyone’ Podcast… five hundred years of incredible music. My name is Peter Cudlipp and… If you enjoy any music at all then I’m convinced you can enjoy classical music. All you need are ears. No expertise is necessary. If you’ve ever been curious about classical music… or explored it for a while once upon a time… or just quietly wondered what all the fuss was about… then this is the podcast is for you. And because there’s a lot of music out there each episode has something of a theme. And for today it is… the Violin.

I’m going to start with a question. If you think of musical instruments as tools… as things humans create to perform tasks… Other than the violin, is there any other tool you can think of used in an area of incredibly complex human endeavour where the design and construction of it reached its zenith over three hundred years ago and has not been improved upon since?

I thought of a hammer as an example of a similarly unimproved design but even in my lifetime hammers have gone from a lump of metal not very effectively connected to a bit of tree to a solid alloy amongst a hundred other variations… and the new ones are undoubtedly better.

So, that the violin is an anomaly in the ongoing process of human innovation, is perhaps reason enough to devote an episode to it… but of course the real reason is the astonishing music the instruments can make.

A little later in the episode I’ll chat for a minute or two about the theories of what makes the violins made in northern Italy between about 1680 and 1725 so extraordinary. And I’ll tell you the remarkable histories of just a couple of these amazing bits of woodwork. But the main thing will be music… music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Josef Haydn, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Johann Sebastain Bach, Samuel Barber, Ross Edwards & Johann Joseph Vilsmayr.

Ok. I’m going to start with what might be thought of as the opening of a textbook example of a concerto for violin and orchestra. It is tempting to think of the concept of the classical concerto… the idea of a solo instrument showing off in front of a larger group of instruments that then gang up together from time to time in competition with the soloist… as almost perfectly designed for the violin. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote five violin concertos and in terms of music written for a violin accompanied by other instruments I think they can be placed at the exact mid-point in the development of this form. Traditions, techniques, rules of structure and the balance of instrumental forces in a concerto had matured to the point where what preceded seemed evolutionary steps and what followed would be in its shadow.

Here is the opening section of Mozart’s 5^th Violin Concerto from 1775. In this performance the violin is played by Isaac Stern. He is performing with the Cleveland Orchestra and everyone is being conducted by George Szell. It is about ten minutes long and one thing to listen for is that about two minutes before the end the orchestra stops and the violin plays alone what is called a 'cadenza’ from the Italian word for cadence. This was a moment where historically the soloist got to improvise but with time superstar violinists wrote their versions down and these became the sort of defaults. In this recording Isaac Stern plays one written by the nineteenth century virtuoso Joseph Joachim. So, it’s about 9 minutes of Mozart and 90 seconds of Joachim.

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That was the opening section of Mozart’s 5^th Violin Concerto. Isaac Stern was the soloist and the Cleveland Orchestra was conducted by George Szell.

Along with the concerto, the string quartet… music written for two violins, a viola and a cello has, for about three hundred years, been a pretty wonderful way to hear the violin. It is still a vital form being written for by composers today. That said, in this first episode of the podcast dedicated to the violin I am going to opt for an excerpt from a quartet by Joseph Haydn who wrote over sixty of them between 1755 and 1803. As there are so many of them I’m going to give you the catalogue number which is  Opus 20, No. 5. Another way to find it is that it was the fifth in the group of six string quartets published together in 1774 that were given the nickname of the Sun quartets… which has nothing to do with the music. It was a logo on a later version of the sheet music. At the time Haydn wrote these quartets he was in the process of making the form about an equal conversation between four instruments. But the section I am going to play is actually in the earlier style where the first violin has the more dominant role. I read a nice description of it “floating over the theme, sometimes capturing it, then leaving it again”.

Here is the Auryn Quartet (that’s AURYN) playing the Adagio, the 3^rd section of Joseph Haydn’s 5^th Opus 20 String Quartet. It is about six minutes long.

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That was the Auryn Quartet playing the Adagio, the 3^rd section of Joseph Haydn’s 5^th Opus 20 String Quartet from 1774.

Ok, we’re going to leap forward to 1806 to Ludwig van Beethoven’s only violin concerto. Perhaps one of the reasons it was his only one was that it was pretty much an abject failure at its premiere and was never again performed in Beethoven’s lifetime. If the composer and sometime conductor Felix Mendelssohn had not programmed it at a concert in London in 1844 it might have remained ‘lost’ for several more generations. Now, in a nice coincidence, at that landmark performance the solo violinist was Joseph Joachim, the virtuoso I mentioned earlier who was the composer of the cadenza for the Mozart concerto I played you. And to add to the extraordinariness of that Beethoven concert… Joachim was twelve years old at the time of the performance.

Here is another wonderfully gifted human… the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja with the Orchestre Des Champs-Elysées conducted by Philippe Herreweghe… performing the slow section of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto. It’s about nine minutes long.   

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That was the violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja with the Orchestre Des Champs-Elysées conducted by Philippe Herreweghe… performing the slow section of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Violin Concerto.

I hope you are enjoying this first episode of the Classical For Everyone podcast devoted to the violin. I was chatting about the episode with my AI friend Claude and I asked how many violins there are in the world. I was curious to get a sense of whether the ubiquity of violins is why I think we sometimes take these pretty miraculous things for granted. So Claude sensibly said that a real number is unknowable. But the estimate just for musicians in professional orchestras got up to about 18,000. Then if you think of the numbers of kids learning the violin… especially in Asia… plus moderately old violins lying around on top of wardrobes… you can with some seriousness get to numbers in the millions.

Now of those millions there are about 1100 that were made in Italy between 1680 and 1725 that are considered in a class of their own. Still. Today. In 2025. And the best known name of the makers of those very special instruments is Antonio Stradivari from the town of Cremona in what is now northern Italy. As was the fashion he used a Latin version of his name for his instruments so they are each a ‘Stradivarius’.

Now, leaving aside the conjecture as to whether they are indeed significantly superior to other instruments including modern ones… if you accept, as many of the best players in the world do, that these are in a class of their own then that raises the fascinating question of why. For me there are three reasons I’ve dug up that are to varying degrees somewhat persuasive.

First of all… That the three woods used in these violins (those woods being maple, spruce and willow) were from the forests of Croatia where the trees grew very slowly during the cold winters and this led to extremely dense timbers which is factor in the work of an elegant looking timber box whose main job is to amplify horse-hair scraping over cat gut. This argument gains a little more date specific support when the impact of what is called the Little Ice Age, an overall reduction in solar energy reaching the earth from about 1650 to 1750, is factored in… Even slower tree growth, denser wood, better sound.

The next theory… which can be combined with the cold Croation origin story is that the timber had for some considerable time been immersed in salt water. By design or accident when moving timber by sea across the Adriatic an amount of it would have sunk… and the romantic version is that a lot of it ended up in the Venetian lagoon. From where it was salvaged and made its way to the instrument making studios of Cremona. Advocate of this theory argue that the time in salt water impacted the structure of the timber… it retained its overall density but areas of porousness developed and this created opportunities to better absorb the chemicals in the coatings added to the completed instruments.

And this leads on to the theory that the special sound is a function of a now lost recipe of ingredients that made up the original varnishes with which the original instruments were coated. Or that made up some sort of bath the timbers were placed in as part of the process of preparing the wood. In the scientific documentation the wonderful term ‘salt of gems’, borrowed from Renaissance Alchemy, has been attributed to whatever this or these mixtures might have been.

Ok. Time for some Johann Sebastian Bach played on one of these old instruments… a Stradivarius in fact… in the hands of Itzhak Perlman. For the next 15 minutes you’ll hear just the violin on its own. This is the fifth section of a suite of pieces Bach wrote for solo violin in about 1718. He gave each section the name of a popular dance… sometimes using the particular rhythm of the dance for the composition… and sometimes not. This one he called a ’Chaconne’. And you might be able to tell I am a little reluctant to oversell this piece.  I sort of want it to speak for itself. But to give you a recommendation from someone who really knew what he was talking about… Here is what the composer Johannes Brahms wrote about it in a letter to his muse, Clara Schumann…

“for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

I hope you enjoy J S Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ performed by Itzhak Perlman.

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That was Johann Sebastian Bach’s ‘Chaconne’ performed by Itzhak Perlman.

I do think that is a hard act to follow so by way of what I hope will be a refreshing contrast I want to take you now to the New World and to the 20^th century. And an excerpt from another violin concerto. The gestation of Samuel Barber’s only violin concerto is a bit tortured and involved a millionaire industrialist and his ‘ward’ who was a gifted violinist both of whom decided that they knew more about composition than Barber. It seems he, fortunately for us… and I guess for himself, largely ignored them and following the premiere at Carnegie Hall in 1941 the piece has taken its place as one of the most performed violin concertos of modern times. Here is the first section. It is about ten minutes long. Joshua Bell is the violinist and David Zinman conducts the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto

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That was the opening of Samuel Barber’s Violin Concerto and David Zinman conducted the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. The violin soloist was Joshua Bell.

And he conveniently plays a role in the story I am going to tell you now about a particular violin… one of those special Stradivarius ones. As you might imagine they are quite highly valued and because of that quite frequently it seems become enmeshed in what might be called fascinating adventures.

If you recall that the violin virtuoso Joseph Joachim has made a couple of appearances in this episode and here he is again. In 1896 he persuaded his friend the composer Johannes Brahms to attend a performance of his own Violin Concerto at which the solo part would be played by a thirteen year-old boy by the name of Bronislaw Huberman.

I have to say this name was new to me when I was putting this episode together but his story is incredible even in the context of moving Brahms to tears with his performance at that concert. In the 1930s he was instrumental in founding what became the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and used this connection to save the lives of over a thousand European Jewish musicians and their families by giving them jobs with this orchestra in Palestine.

But I said this was going to be about a violin. In 1911 Hubermann was gifted what was then known as the ‘Gibson’ Stradivarius by a Polish Count who had obtained it from the English violin professor Alfred Gibson (hence the name) OR Hubermann bought it directly from Gibson.

For the next 25 years this was Huberman’s principal violin but in 1936 whilst he was on stage at Carnegie Hall playing a piece, that I guess was better suited to his back-up violin, the Gibson Stradivarius was stolen from his dressing room. And it was not recovered in his lifetime.

In fact it was not recovered for half a century. In 1996 an all-round scoundrel and part-time violinist Julian Altman made a deathbed confession to his wife in his prison cell in Connecticut. He told her that the violin he’d been using for the odd wedding was a bit more special than she might have thought.

To cut to the chase, the violin which Altman had stolen from Huberman’s dressing room was authenticated, Lloyds Insurance paid a finder’s fee to Altman’s widow and the violin went out onto the market.

And coming back to the music I’ve been playing… it is now the violin played by Joshua Bell.

If you want to know more about this extraordinary story I’ll put a link on the episode page on the podcast website, classicalforeveryone.net to a seriously moving documentary called ‘The Return of the Violin’. It really is quite remarkable. It’s centred around a performance by Joshua Bell in the town of Chestekowva in Poland where Huberman was born it also covers Huberman’s career, the establishment of the orchestra in Palestine and the theft and recovery of the violin… and very movingly the fate of the Jewish residents of Chestakowva at the hands of the Nazis. Again, the documentary is called… The Return of the Violin

My name is Peter Cudlipp and you have been listening to the ‘Classical for Everyone’ Podcast. I have another couple of pieces coming up but before I get to them I want to give you a little information that I hope you find useful…

If you would like to listen to past episodes, of which there are more than a dozen, or get details of the music I’ve played please head to the website classicalforeveryone.net. That address again is classicalforeveryone.net. And on the individual episode pages of the website there are links to Spotify playlists with the full versions of most of the music played in each of the episodes. I hope you have enjoyed this Violin focused episode of ‘Classical For Everyone’. If you want to make sure you don’t miss the shows as they are released then please Subscribe or Follow wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to get in touch then you can email… info@classicalforeveryone.net.

Alright, to finish this episode I have another excerpt from a contemporary violin concerto. This is by the Australian composer Ross Edwards from 1988 and he gave it the name Maninyas a term he invented to characterise the musical abstraction of insect and bird sounds, lively speeds and rhythms, angular melodies and simple drone-like harmonies.

Edwards wrote about the concerto…

‘I had an “up-feeling” in the piece. I’d been writing deeply introspective music and I suddenly noticed the outside world. It was just intensely ecstatic – the sky was blue, the warm air was full of shrieking parrots and an irresistible impulse to dance suddenly took over the music.’

Here is the final section which is about seven minutes long.This is the first recording of the piece from 1993. Dene Olding is the violin soloist, the conductor is Stuart Challender and the orchestra is the Sydney Symphony.

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That was the conclusion of Ross Edwards’ violin concerto ‘Maninyas’. Dene Olding was the violin soloist, the conductor was Stuart Challender and the orchestra was the Sydney Symphony.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to playing you some more incredible music on the next ‘Classical For Everyone’. This podcast is made with Audacity Software for editing, Wikipedia for Research, Claude for Artificial Intelligence and Apple, Sennheiser, Sony, Rode and Logitech for hardware… The music played is licensed through AMCOS / APRA. Classical For Everyone is a production of Mending Wall Studios and began life on Radio 2BBB in Bellingen NSW, Australia thanks to the late, great Mr Jeffrey Sanders. The producers do not receive any gifts or support of any kind from any organisation or individual mentioned in the show. But, never say never. And if you have listened to the credits… here is a little extra music for you…

Back to the early 1700s and a piece for solo violin by the Austrian composer Johann Joseph Vilsmayr. This is a section from his very strangely named Artificiosus Concentus Pro Camera… which can sort of be translated as "Skillful Harmonies for the Chamber". I guess that was Vilsmayr’s stab at marketing his work. It was published in 1715, is about three minutes long and is performed by Rachel Podger who plays one of the younger violins you’ve heard in this episode. It was made by Antonio Pazarini in Genoa in 1739.

Thanks for listening.