Bowhold Comparison(Update: Check out this great video of Itzhak Perlman talking about his bowhold!… And, watch a video of me teaching a Basic Bowing Lesson, excellent for understanding the basics to achieving a great and steady tone! )

Finally, the photos of a few of history’s violin Greats and their bow holds are here!

In general, there have been two schools of thought concerning the bow hold: the Russian bow hold, and the Franco-Belgian bow hold (although, there is what can be considered either a third school or a variation on the Franco-Belgian; this hold is generally called the Galamian bow hold). Arguably, it appears that more violinists have favored the latter hold(s), and the Galamian is the bow hold most predominantly taught to beginners, at least as of late. However, as you observe the gallery of historic pictures, notice how each bow hold becomes a variant on the theme, adequately suited for the individual’s hand, and sometimes the distinction between the main holds is fuzzy.

Nathan Milstein and Jascha Heifetz. Notice the sharp leaning of the hand toward the index finger, and the leaning of the whole body, really, into the instrument. In the Russian hold, pressure is exerted through the bow by way of weight in the right index finger, providing great power and sharp rhythmic control to the violinist’s tone. It is said that some Russian-grippers do not often approach the frog, due to the lack of flexibility in the right fingers. Perhaps to compensate this phenomenon, the bow hair is kept looser (it is not stretched so tightly, and therefore feels softer along the strings). Milstein is said to have been the master of bow speed and contact point, moving his bow rapidly near the fingerboard.

Itzhak Perlman, Pinchas Zukerman, David Oistrakh, Yehudi Menuhin, Pablo de Sarasate, Isaac Stern, Joshua Bell, and Shinichi Suzuki. Characteristics of the Franco-Belgian bow hold include flexible, rounded fingers (especially the rounded pinkie, as opposed to the straight pinkie of the Russian hold), a slightly defined rise in the right wrist, tighter or firmer hair, and a tendency to tilt the bow-stick away from the violinist. The Galamian hold seems very similar, except for a smaller, more natural spread of the index finger and a flatter wrist. It has been noted that this hold is more and more the “American school” of current bow holds. Zukerman, a recognized master of the Galamian hold, is said to have used more bow pressure than speed in his sound. For both of these like-minded holds, it is the fingers and wrist that do much of the work in the bow stroke.

It is important to note that there is more to a violinist’s tone than the shape of their bow hold; namely, bow speed, contact point, and bow pressure or weight. The combination of these factors , while shaped by the bow hold, is what brings color and emotion to the music. Also, notice the slight variations, or hybrids, in the different bow holds. Every violinist is unique, and each of these presented in the gallery has more than proved their technical capability! The “ideal” bow hold, therefore, is one that simply does the job of emoting the subtleties of the musical style most fitting to an individual performer. Each one has tended to remain within a Classical flavor that compliments their style of playing; in a word, it’s comfortable for them to play, it suits them.

Aaron Rosand on how to produce a beautiful toneIn the first of a series of articles on violin technique, the American violinist examines the role of the bow in tone production

December 19, 2013

How do you produce a beautiful tone? It is a question frequently asked. The simple answer is: with the bow. There is no sound until the bow touches the strings. Several factors are involved and coordinated in order to achieve the desired tone using the bow: grip, finger pressure, bow speed and bow changes.

With the grip, the fingers must be close together – not spread apart with the index finger extended. Three fingers draw the sound, with the little finger close but not pressing. The basic grips primarily in use today stem from two schools: the Franco-Belgian (pictured bottom left), epitomised by Eugène Ysaÿe, and the Russian School (bottom right), by Leopold Auer. My great teacher Efrem Zimbalist, who was a pupil of Auer, introduced me to the Russian School. He was an exponent of the long bow and drawing a thick sound on the flatter hair. When playing a work such as the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto I use the Russian grip because I want a thicker sound. It was Leon Sametini, a pupil of Ysaÿe, who taught me the Franco-Belgian grip that I use for playing works by composers such as Mozart and Bach, and pyrotechnical works. I employ both grips depending on the composer, and the textures and nuances you can achieve will be subtly affected by the grip you use.

With both types of grip, one must practise creating the sound that can be made when one draws the bow without exerting pressure on the stick. Most importantly, do not tighten the hair so much that the bow loses its arc. The bow stick must vibrate to produce its own sound – a good reason why bows by makers such as Peccatte or Tourte are so expensive. The pressure should only come from your hand and fingers, not your arm. The amount of pressure applied must be proportionate to your bow speed – herein lies the secret to creating a quality tone rather than a forced tone. Try using a flat hair on the down bow to get a thicker tone. Draw with the fingers working closely together and the palm facing out. On the up bow, the stick is turned slightly and played at an angle.

Remember that all moves are circular at the point and frog. We perform figure of eights at all times. When I was twelve years old I auditioned for Leon Sametini, and after I had played he told me that my left hand was good enough to play anything but my right hand needed work. For six months I had lessons on open strings, drawing the bow from frog to tip. For diversion I was given Handel’s Sonata in D major, but I never got past the first two lines of the first movement. An occasional wrap on the wrist with a yardstick kept my wrist down and flexible so that my fingers could affect seamless bow changes. My best advice would be to spend the first five to ten minutes of your daily practice session drawing bows on an open A string, making sure that between the up and down bows the sound does not break. If you can master this bow technique, your tone will certainly improve.

The Russian violin school is largely misunderstood

Russian violinist, teacher and conductor Igor Bezrodnyi gave his thoughts on the Russian method of string playing before his death in 1997

November 4, 2014

What is most characteristic of the Russian school? Firstly, the maximum naturalness of the handwork ― I mean the violinist’s motor process. I think the best Russian violin teachers were trying to instill in the violinist an exact realisation of the fact that each hand had to be extremely productive ― which part, which muscle or group of muscles to use. That’s the way to achieve naturalness. I remember one of Abram Yampolsky’s phrases: ‘Remember that the muscle which works when you play must be elastic.’

The second feature is that a great deal of attention is paid to the violinist’s feeling for acoustics and its possibilities. I mean the sound of the violin. Yampolsky and several other great Russian teachers made great demands on the sound, on its purity, richness and colourfulness.

Another feature which is unusual and I think important, is the Russian school’s full freedom of execution. In my opinion, all variations of interpretation are possible, apart from tasteless ones.

The typical Russian school is perceived in an inexact way. It was distorted by representatives of the school now teaching in the West. Today’s representatives use individual superficial devices of the Russian school and assert them dogmatically. I have to listen to people saying that what is characteristic of the Russian violin school is that it dictates. That is, it makes categorical demands on how to play, how to move one’s arms, how to interpret music. And the violin must be played only like that, not in any other way, they say. The Russian violin school is also accused of playing very fast and loudly to the point of aggressiveness.

You need to know where all this stems from. This gives rise to the question of international competitions, which I have experienced both as a participant and a juror. A competition jury is made up of various musicians of different schools with different views as to how the violin should ideally be played. Marks are awarded. I can give the

highest mark to a violinist with a vivid individuality who fascinates me, but next to me another professor will not accept this and gives a low mark. Our marks are added together, and as a result the interesting, promising violinist ends up with a lower mark than someone who corresponds to all the criteria, but who did not move or enthral anyone. Say for instance a very young violinist who is still studying learns about the results of the competition. He says to himself, ‘I don t really like that violinist, but he won the first prize so that’s probably how I have to play at competitions, to achieve recognition and get on to the stage via these competitions and give concerts.’

So that’s how one layer goes on top of the other (there are a lot of competitions) and gradually an urgent style develops, which, unfortunately, has often justified itself by receiving the first prize. The style of playing has been standardised and an upbeat, penetrating style has developed. And it’s just that style which is now often perceived as containing the main chalacteristics of the Russian violin school. It is an annoying misunderstanding.

I would like my pupils to understand that the violin is an aristocratic instrument. I sometimes say to them: ‘If you want to mess around and make impressive sounds which will shock the listener ― go for a different instrument, don’t touch the violin.’ I think the violin is basically a singing instrument. We all know what has been happening to the violin lately: it sounds like a saw, a percussion instrument. I don’t think that is native to the violin.

Naturally, there are works or sections of works which demand a genuinely virtuoso violinist. I often use the example of two remarkable violinists who have gone down in history: Heifetz and Kreisler. Listen to Heifetz and Kreisler play the finale of the Mendelssohn Concerto. Both are virtuosos, with just one difference: Kreisler plays the finale of the Mendelssohn Concerto about twice as slowly as Heifetz. And they are both virtuoso players! This means that it is not simply a matter of speed, but the masterly manner in which they play. We see that nowadays many young violinists are fascinated by speed alone. I don’t think this is necessary.

Nowadays everyone is worried about the environment. They are afraid of perishing. But what about perishing spiritually? I would compare the current situation in Russian art with a poisoned ocean. There are still small islands of sincerity and truth, but these islands are getting smaller. My musician friends tell me that the attention-seeking performances of today are a result of people’s needs. But if music is a gift from God, can you imagine a minister in a church before beginning his sermon, which is going to be on something lofty and eternal, saying to the worshippers, ‘What would you like to hear today? What would you like me to talk about?’ I think that would be an unnatural situation.

The decline of the 19th-century German school of violin playing - Clive Brown

There has been much recent debate about the notion of 'Schools' of musical performance. It is clear, however, that musicians  frequently believed themselves to

belong to a school and often saw themselves in opposition to another school, which espoused different aesthetic values or technical means. In the history of violin playing, schools have often been identified by contemporaneous commentators, sometimes when they perceived the emergence of distinctive technical and stylistic features that distinguished the playing of one group of violinists from others.  This was certainly the case with the school variously identified as ‘Viotti’, ‘Paris’, or ‘French’ around the beginning of the nineteenth century. Thus a reviewer of a concert at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in 1803 noted that ‘It is well known that Messers Rode, Kreutzer, Baillot etc. form a high-school of violin playing in Paris such as could scarcely be said to have existed before’ (Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung,5(1802-3), col. 585). And by 1825 G. C. F. Lobedanz, discussing whether there could be schools in music as there were perceived to be in painting, stated that a precondition for the existence of such a school was that its founder must have ‘developed a previously unknown style, which was acknowledged by the best authorities of his time as a model’ (in article: ‘Gibt es in der Musik, wie in der Malerey, verschiedenen Schulen, und wie wären solche wohl zu bestimmen?’ Cäcilia, 2(1825), p. 265). With respect to violin playing, he observed there was a ‘French School, founded by Viotti, Rode and Kreutzer’, which had been ‘more or less adopted by almost all present-day violin virtuosos’ (Ibid., p. 267).

The case was somewhat different with the schools that were identified by contemporaries in the middle years of the nineteenth century as ‘Franco-Belgian’ and ‘German’. Whereas the ‘Viotti/Paris/French school’ was seen to have dominated the world of string playing for several decades at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Franco-Belgian school, generally regarded as having its roots in the playing and teaching of Charles de Bériot (1802-70), was perceived to exist alongside and, to some extent, in opposition to a less clearly defined German school (it should be understood that throughout this article the word ‘school’ is used as an historical term rather than a substantial concept). Like the Franco-Belgian school, this German one had also been inspired by the tenets of the Viotti/Paris/French school as interpreted by such influential teachers as Louis Spohr (1784-1859) and Joseph Boehm (1795-1876). Of course, neither school was monolithic, nor did they remain static in their teachings or stylistic precepts. The practices and principles of the Franco-Belgian tradition were moulded and amplified by such influential figures as Henri Vieuxtemps (1820-81), Henryk Wieniawski (1835-80), and Eugene Ysaÿe (1858-1931), while those of the German tradition were further transmitted and developed by pupils of Spohr and Boehm, most notably Ferdinand David (1810-73), Jacob Dont (1815-88), Joseph Hellmesberger (1828-93), and Joseph Joachim (1831-1907). Joachim (a pupil both of Boehm and David), a towering figure in late nineteenth-century performance and a revered teacher, was widely seen by the end of the century as the personification of a distinctive tradition in German violin playing. By the early years of the twentieth century, however, the artistic and technical precepts that lay at the core of this German tradition were becoming increasingly out of touch with the changing tastes of the day. Within a generation of Joachim’s death in 1907 few of the aesthetic aims, and virtually no trace of the distinctive techniques that had characterised his approach to violin playing (laid out in painstaking detail in the Joachim and Moser Violinschule of 1905) survived in the world of professional music making.  

The third volume of the Violinschule begins with a series of ten short essays entitled ‘On Style and Artistic Performance’ (Vom Vortrag). Although these was written by Moser, they undoubtedly reflected Joachim’s views, for in his preface to the first

volume, Joachim stated that ‘even the most insignificant questions of detail were subject to joint scrutiny and nothing was decided until we were in total agreement.’ (Violinschule I, p. 4. My translations; Moffat’s English translation is not always reliable.) Moser’s final essay discusses changes in violin playing that had occurred during Joachim’s lifetime. It begins with a reference to Wagner’s account of the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 1839, in which he praised the ‘masterly skill’ of the French string players. Moser commented that ‘the violinists of the celebrated Conservatoire Orchestra were at that time still fully in possession of the classical traditions of the Italian bel canto, and of a bowing technique that is closely related to it,’ adding that, as pupils of Viotti, Rode and Kreutzer, or at least of Baillot and Habeneck, they ‘came under the influence of a school of which almost all trace has since disappeared in France’ (Ibid, III, p. 32). In other words, Moser believed that the newer Franco-Belgian School had almost entirely displaced the older Viotti/Paris/French School.

Moser characterised the older school as teaching ‘above all a singing tone on the violin, free from mannerism and artificiality’, a left-hand technique required by the nature of the instrument, and a ‘supple and independent style of bowing that served the characteristics of the various  types of bowstroke’. He stressed that this was not merely a style and technique appropriate to virtuoso violin playing but that the ‘teaching and technical acquirements of that school lay at the roots of the treatment of the instrument by all masters of instrumental music from Haydn to Mendelssohn.’ Having identified Joseph Boehm (a pupil of Rode), alongside Dittersdorf, as one of the agents by which this Italian style of playing reached Vienna, he referred to Spohr’s residence in the city, describing him misleadingly as a product of the Mannheim School, which ‘always cherished a special predilection for the classical Italian-French style of violin playing, to which their own school was closely related.’ He completed his panegyric on the style of playing he believed to have been cultivated by members of this Italian-French-German school with the statement:

If we go on to consider that Joseph Haydn wrote the majority of his string quartets and all his violin concertos for his friend and intimate, the Italian artist L[uigi] Tomasini, that Mozart was brought up as a violinist by his father in the Tartini tradition, and Beethoven was alternately connected with Kreutzer, Rode and Böhm [sic], it is clear that we must look upon the compositions and studies of that classical school as the violinistic model and standard for all the chamber and orchestral music that was created on Austrian soil; and only those who make the teaching of that school their own will be able to satisfy the demands this music makes on the performer’s technical capabilities, so that the animating spirit of these art-works can receive meaningful expression.

Moser concluded his introductory remarks with the observation that the essence of this tradition could be summed up with Tartini’s dictum: ‘Per ben suonare, bisogna ben cantare’ ('to play well it is necessary to sing well' Ibid, III, p. 32).

With these arguments and assertions Moser advanced the case for seeing a direct and intimate connection between Joachim’s approach to violin playing and the principles that had determined the treatment of the instrument by great composers from Haydn to Mendelssohn (and, by implication, Brahms). Moser’s portrayal of the characteristics and ideals of this school and his assertion that Joachim, as its heir, was in a position to

perpetuate its teachings may be problematic from the point of view of historical accuracy, yet there can be no doubt that Joachim, a protégé of Mendelssohn in the early 1840s, genuinely believed himself to be a guardian of the true traditions of classical violin playing as he understood them.

Underlying Moser’s argument, but in fact central to it, is the supposition that the principles and practices preserved and disseminated by Joachim through his teaching and playing offered the only key to performing the German musical classics in the manner intended by their composers. The purpose of his exposition becomes clear when Moser turns to a consideration of the direction string playing began to take in the second half of the nineteenth century; he immediately refers to ‘Franco-Belgian violinists’ and the ‘peculiar aspect’ works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven take on in their hands. The reason for this, he writes, is that although these virtuosos may possess an astonishing left-hand technique, they have ‘not only completely forgotten that healthy and natural method of singing and phrasing, that is based on the bel canto of the old Italians [...] but have continuously offended against it.’ After further criticism of their bowing and tone production ‘which aim merely at sensuousness of sound’ and fail to achieve the ‘characteristic qualities of different bowstrokes’, he condemns them outright because ‘they do not bring out the spirit of the art-work they imagine they are playing, but merely exhibit faults and mannerisms that result from deficient bowing, hand in hand with those bad habits of singing, which fail to take account of the most elementary demands of natural melody.’ Although he admitted that among the products of this tendency there might be some ‘truly sympathetic and even distinguished artists’, this seems more like unwillingness to offend individuals than a genuine acknowledgement of the validity of alternative approaches (Ibid, III, p. 32f).

Moser’s account of how this situation came about clearly reflects Joachim’s view of the developments in violin playing he had experienced during his career. Joachim was born at the time of Paganini’s epoch-making tours of Europe north of the Alps, which shattered any notion of the hegemony of a ‘Viotti/Paris/French School’, and he must quickly have become aware during his early youth of the tensions this phenomenon created. As a student of Boehm in Vienna, around 1840, he was in the midst of a musical society that was still trying to come to terms with the technical and aesthetic implications of Paganini’s playing. Under Boehm’s tutelage he will have been made ‘acquainted with all the new publications of violin literature, for he [Boehm] was of the opinion that only all-round technical ability made for independent violin playing.’ (Andreas Moser, Joseph Joachim. Ein Lebensbild, 2nd edn, 2 vols. (Berlin: Verlag der Deutschen Brahms-Gesellschaft, 1908–10),  I, p. 30. My translation.) Joachim’s study material at this time may already have included music by Paganini, but it is certain that he played Paganini in Leipzig shortly afterwards under the tuition of Ferdinand David (who was to publish an annotated edition of Paganini’s Caprices in the early 1850s), for he wrote to Boehm on 15 October 1844, telling him that he was working at music by Spohr, Paganini and Bach.(Letters From and To Joseph Joachim,selected and  trans. Nora Bickley (London, Macmillan, 1914), p. 2)  It is nevertheless clear that at the root of Joachim’s schooling under Boehm were the fundamental precepts of the Viotti/Paris/French style as it was practised, in Lobedanz’s words, ‘by almost all present-day violin virtuosos’ during the period immediately preceding Paganini’s advent in Vienna. Thus Moser focused on the aspects of Paganini’s influence that Joachim believed to have been most damaging. Attempting to emulate the ‘tremendous technical feats on the fingerboard’, which were peculiar to Paganini’s idiosyncratic

technical abilities, ‘caused his imitators not only an immense expenditure of time and labour, but also meant the denial of the nature of our instrument’. The neglect of the instrument’s singing qualities soon led to the ‘utter downfall of bow technique in its classical sense’. French violinists employed ‘artificial bowstrokes’ to achieve astonishing effects, but their ‘stiff bowing’ inhibited their ability to achieve ‘vocal and spiritual ends.’ This meant that they could not interpret musical art-works ‘in the spirit of their creator’. At that point Moser had the difficulty of explaining the career of another Boehm pupil, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1812?-1814), whom Joachim deeply admired. Ernst had been one of the most successful of Paganini’s imitators, but Moser explained that he escaped the worst consequences of developing his virtuoso technique because of ‘his healthy musical nature and the training he had received under Joseph Böhm,’ and because he already had ‘such an established artistic personality when he went to Paris that he was quite safe from the dangers to which, to the detriment of art, his French rivals succumbed’ (Joachim/Moser, Violinschule, III, p. 33).

Having dealt with this difficult issue, Moser returned to his description of the ‘spiritual decay’ of Franco-Belgian violin playing, which required him to discuss the career of Henri Vieuxtemps, the most prominent ‘Franco-Belgian’ violinist of his time. Elsewhere Joachim had expressed the view, that although he ‘greatly admired Vieuxtemps as a solo player’, he considered him less impressive in chamber music ‘because – like most violinists of the Franco-Belgian school in recent times – he adhered too strictly to the lifeless printed notes when playing the classics, not understanding how to read between the lines.’ (Moser, Joseph Joachim, II, p. 292) It was impossible for Moser (Joachim) to deny that Vieuxtemps was ‘just as much a brilliant virtuoso as an extraordinarily gifted composer for his instrument’, but he was characterised, with undisguised disapproval, as ‘the most typical representative of that kind of musical pathos that is commonly designated “modern French”.’ Moser grudgingly conceded that although he did not ‘question the right of this kind of pathos to exist as such’, its influence beyond its own sphere, particularly through the agency of Vieuxtemps’ imitators had been disastrous (Joachim/Moser, Violinschule, III,  p. 33). These inadequate violinists,

in order not to seem uninteresting when inner feeling failed or, when, where it was present, it could not express itself because of bad mannerisms, made up for the lack of natural expression in cantabile by means of that flickering tone production resulting from unbearable vibrato, which combined with a portamento that was mostly incorrectly executed, is the deadly enemy of all healthy music-making.

As a result of these deficiencies, Moser explained:

the epigones of those masters who a century ago approached so closely to the ideal that is noblest in musical performance, now not only debase the compositions of the classical German masters by treating them in an operatic manner, but are no longer capable of interpreting even the old masterpieces of their own country with purity of style. France today probably does not possess a violin player who is capable of rendering Viotti’s 22nd concerto in a manner worthy of that wonderful work or its creator (Ibid, III, p. 34).

In a final condemnation of those violinists, Moser protested:

greater distinctions between the classical exponents of French violin playing and representatives of the newer Franco-Belgian tendency can hardly be imagined: on the one side natural singing and healthy music-making, on the other bad performance mannerisms and a total lack of style! That which strikes us as so alien in the performance of classical works by the more recent Franco-Belgian virtuosos is only to the smallest extent to be put down to differences in national sensitivities, for at an earlier period when the musical world was still under the influence of a universal language, rooted in Italian singing, those distinctions were hardly perceptible (Ibid, III, p. 35).

Although these words were penned by Moser, there can be little doubt that they precisely reflected Joachim’s opinion. Indeed, scrutiny of Moser’s later writings, published years after Joachim’s death, when the style he had championed had been virtually ousted from the public sphere, reveals almost nothing of this disapproval of the Franco-Belgian School’s style, and its exponents’ inability to perform the music of the classical masters in an appropriate manner. Moser’s Geschichte des Violinspiels (1923) levelled no criticism directly at players such as Kreisler for his vibrato, or Thibaut for his portamento, which were of a kind that must have made Joachim turn in his grave, even though the German classics lay at the heart of the repertoire of both these violinists. (Andreas Moser Geschichte des Violinspiels  (Berlin, 1923), p. 462 (Thibaut) and  p. 472f (Kreisler). He avoids discussion of schools of playing in his own time.)  In the Geschichte des Violinspiels Moser  failed to discuss portamento, as such, at all and levelled only one barbed shaft at vibrato usage, in the final pages of the book, where he referred to ‘the abuse of this fashionable violinistic disease of our time,’ about which ‘even whole books that preach its continual use have recently been published’ (Ibid, p. 564).

*

At the distance of a century it is difficult for us to appreciate the distinctions between stylistic practices that were so apparent to people in the early twentieth century and provoked such strong feelings. Differences of technique and style between the ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ string players of the period are subtle and complex, and the relative importance of particular aspects of performing practice did not all change at the same rate or in the same manner. Early recordings, however, can complement or elucidate written texts, allowing us greater insight into the changing aesthetics and practices of the period than either type of evidence provides on its own. But by the time recording becomes available, the style of violin playing advocated by Joachim was almost dead. Although Joachim himself made five short recordings in 1903, few players who were regarded at the time as faithful representatives of his style were considered worthy of the recording studio during the next couple of decades.

Among Joachim’s later pupils who made recordings were Karl Klingler (b. 1879), and his great-niece Adila Fachiri (b. 1886); but both of these players were trained at a time when Joachim’s style of violin playing was already coming to be seen by most younger players as old-fashioned, and their recordings reveal a curious mixture of older and newer traits. Karl Klingler pursued a successful career in Berlin until the 1930s as

leader of a quartet that was widely regarded as the successor to Joachim’s quartet, but he did not establish a reputation as a solo player. Moser remarked that ‘despite the excellent state of his technical capability he has not really been able to make his mark on the wider public’ (Moser Geschichte,  p. 553).  Klingler’s recordings, apart from a movement of a Mozart Duo, are all of quartets. The recordings date from 1911-1934. The earlier ones contain many features that suggest kinship with Joachim’s chamber music performances, in some of which Klingler had taken part during his master’s last years, but notwithstanding Carl Flesch’s comment in 1933 that Klingler ‘has not yet succeeded in getting away from the spiritual fetters of his teacher, which have held him in bond for thirty years’ (Carl Flesch The Memoirs of Carl Flesch,trans. H. Keller (London, 1957), p. 82), the recordings suggest a progressive, if cautious assimilation of more modern vibrato practice, alongside characteristics such as portamento, bowing and treatment of rubato that remained closer to Joachim’s style. In Adila Fachiri’s recording of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata op. 96, made with Donald Francis Tovey in 1928, her occasional portamento is light and her vibrato quite obvious and frequent in cantilena passages, though not entirely continuous, producing a sound noticeably different from Joachim’s. Her playing also exhibits little of Joachim’s approach to rhythmic flexibility, especially agogic accent. Tovey is closer to Joachim in this respect. (As a young man Tovey had frequently accompanied Joachim. See Mary Grierson, Donald Francis Tovey. A Biography Based on Letters, (London, New York, Toronto, Geoffrey Cumberlege, Oxford University Press, 1952))

Leopold Auer (b. 1845), who studied for two years with Joachim in 1861-3 is the oldest of his students to have made any recordings, but he was even older than Joachim when he did so in 1921 and it is difficult to know to what extent age may have affected his playing (Leopold Auer, Violin Playing as I teach it (London, 1921), p. 4). In any case, as an influential teacher in St Petersburg for many years, he had undoubtedly developed his own approach to violin playing that will have differed from Joachim’s in significant respects, not least because of his development of the so-called ‘Russian’ bow grip. (See Carl Flesch, The Art of Violin Playing,  trans F. Martens  (New York, Carl Fischer, 1924,  revised edition 1933),  p. 54,  and Leopold Auer, Graded Course of Violin Lessons (New York, Carl Fischer, 1925), I, p. 12.) About the time Auer made his recordings he railed against excessive use of vibrato and portamento in terms even more violent than Joachim’s (Auer, Violin Playing, p. 59ff). Although his recordings reveal rather more frequent use of vibrato than one might expect, it is far closer to Joachim’s, both in terms of application and execution, than to that of any of his own students (among them Heifetz, Elman, and Zimbalist) who made gramophone recordings. In his recording of Tchaikowsky’s ‘Mélodie’ Auer employed prominent portamento, including the type of ‘French’ portamento, much more frequently than his treatment of the subject in Violin Playing as I teach it would suggest, and in ways that appear to contradict his own instructions (Ibid., p. 63f).  

The only one of Joachim’s older recorded pupils, who was clearly and frequently described by contemporaries as playing in a style that closely resembled his was Marie Soldat (1863-1955). (After her marriage in 1889 she was variously known as Roeger-Soldat and Soldat-Roeger (or Röger). Some sources, including Grove 3, give her birth year as 1864.) In 1883 Clara Schumann, greatly impressed by Soldat’s playing of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, noted in her diary ‘I think she has a future. One immediately hears that she is of the Joachim School’ (quoted from Barbara Kühnen Marie Soldat. Aspekte der Biographie einer vergessenen Musikerin. Wissenschaftliche

Hausarbeit zur Ersten Staatsprüfung für das Lehramt an Gymnasien. Universität Kassel: Unveröffentlichtes Typoskript, 1995, p. 29 on the MUGi website http://mugi.hfmt-hamburg.de/A_lexartikel/lexartikel.php?id=sold1863).

During Soldat’s first visit to England in 1888 The Musical Times commented on her performance of the Brahms Violin Concerto: ‘Her method and style are those of her master, who must have found it an easy task to direct the studies of a young lady so highly gifted with musical feeling and intelligence’ (The Musical Times, 29(1888), p. 218). And in 1896 a reviewer of her quartet’s performance of works by Mozart, Beethoven and Mendelssohn in Berlin observed: ‘It appears to me as if the dashing leader has best understood Joachim’s style. With closed eyes one could believe that the Master were sitting at the first desk.’ (Kleines Journal, 19 Jan. 1896, quoted in Urtheile der Presse über das Streichquartett Soldat-Roeger (Vienna, 1898), p. 2f.) Although Moser, in his Geschichte des Violinspiels, might have cited Marie Soldat alongside Klingler as a worthy standard bearer of their master’s ideals, he confined himself to characterising her in a short paragraph as having ‘made a resounding name just as much through the performance of classical compositions, including the Brahms Violin Concerto at the time of her tours with the Meiningen Orchestra under Steinbach, as through her leadership of a string quartet consisting exclusively of ladies, which she founded in Vienna’ (Moser, Geschichte, p 549). As Moser’s account suggests, however, she enjoyed a high reputation in her youth both as soloist and quartet player. She was particularly noted for her performances of Brahms; in the year after Joachim’s death The Musical Standard remarkedthat ‘in Brahms’ Violin Sonatas Frau Marie Soldat-Roeger has no rival’ (TheMusical Standard,  30(1908),  p. 302). By the time she made her only recordings, in 1926, she was in her sixties, and we cannot know to what extent her playing might have changed in the intervening years. It seems almost inconceivable that she could have been completely impervious to the developments in violin playing that were happening around her, yet her style in those recordings still displays remarkable similarities to the tantalising glimpses of Joachim’s that can be heard in his 1903 recordings.

Marie Soldat’s position in the history of nineteenth- and twentieth-century violin playing has received little attention. Biographical material from the diaries of Margaret Denecke and other English sources are examined in Michael Musgrave, ‘Marie Soldat 1863 –1955: An English Perspective’, in Reinmar Emans and Mattias Wendt (eds), Beiträge zur Geschichte des Konzerts Festschrift Siegfried Kross zum 60. Geburtstag, (Bonn, Gund Schröder, 1990), p. 326. Further biographical and bibliographical information can be found on the Music and Gender website (http://mugi.hfmthamburg.de/A_lexartikel/lexartikel.php?id=sold1863). The most substantial  recent discussion of her violin playing is in David Milsom’s online essay, ‘Marie Soldat-Roeger (1863-1955): Her Significance to the Study of Nineteenth-Century Performing Practices’ (http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/dm-ahrc/docs/Marie-Soldat-Roeger-Article/MarieSoldat-RoegerandherSignificancetotheStudyofNineteenth-CenturyPerformingPractices.doc), which reflects research we undertook together during his AHRC Fellowship at Leeds University between 2006-9.  Despite her neglect in the literature, the importance of her recordings for understanding the momentous changes in technique and aesthetics that took place in the early twentieth century cannot be overestimated. These recordings, which reveal a very impressive technique despite her age, preserve a style of playing that must already have seemed distinctly old-fashioned to younger musicians. Her apparent unwillingness to adapt significantly to the

prevailing taste of the time, rather than any failure of her technical powers, was almost certainly a key factor in the decline and virtual eclipse of her public career. Not only her fidelity to Joachim’s portamento and vibrato aesthetic, but also her style of bowing and phrasing, as well as her rubato were increasingly out of step with public taste. The brief entry on her by Walter Cobbett in the 1927 edition of Grove’s Dictionary is written as though her career was over and concludes with the unenthusiastic comment that she ‘had a following among those who admire solid before brilliant acquirements.’(Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 3rd edn, IV, p. 800)  Paul David’s judgment, that Joachim’s similar style of playing ‘appeared especially adapted to render compositions of the purest and most elevated style’(Ibid, II, p. 779, reprinted with additions from the 1904 2nd edition of Grove) suggests the extent to which taste had changed since the early years of the century. In fact, however, as late as the seasons of 1929 the critic of a London journal reviewed sonata performances by Marie Soldat and Fanny Davies appreciatively (Gamba, The Strad, 40(June 1929), pp. 69-70); it was a lasting impression, for in the following season he recalled: 'I heard them play a Brahms sonata last year and it was memorable' (Gamba, The Strad, 41( June 1930), pp. 70-71).

The biographical details of Soldat’s early career may be briefly summarised. Born in Graz she first studied violin with a local musician, Eduard Pleiner, between 1871 and 1877, then with August Pott, who had been a pupil of Spohr in the early 1820s. In summer 1879, during a concert tour of Austrian spas, her playing so impressed Brahms that he introduced her to Joachim, and in the autumn of the same year she enrolled at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, where she studied violin with Joachim and piano with Ernst Rudorff, winning first prize in the Mendelssohn competition in 1882 for a performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. After her graduation she remained in Berlin until 1889 and continued to receive lessons, free of charge, from Joachim. During this time she made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in December 1882 with Bruch’s Kol Nidrei. In the spring of 1884 in Vienna she gave a series of performances, including Spohr’s Eighth Violin Concerto, which was considered ‘a real delight’ and ‘after which there was no end of hearty applause’ (The Monthly Musical Record,‘Music in Vienna. [From our special correspondent]’,14(1884), p. 104), as well as Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, which ‘obtained for her a genuine triumph,’ and Brahms’s G major Violin Sonata (The Musical World, ‘Foreign Budget. (From Correspondents)’, 62(1884), p. 229). Then, in 1885, she became the first female violinist to play Brahms’s Violin Concerto in public, giving a stunning performance in Vienna, conducted by Hans Richter, after which ‘she was called for with a storm of applause again and again.’(The Monthly Musical Record,‘Music in Vienna. [From our special correspondent]’, 15(1885), p. 81) The delighted composer is reported to have exclaimed: ‘Isn’t little Soldat a brave fellow? Isn’t she equal to ten men? Who could do it better?’ (‘Ist die kleine Soldat nicht ein ganzer Kerl? Nimmt sie es nicht mit zehn Männern auf? Wer will es besser machen?’ Max Kalbeck, Johannes Brahms (Berlin, 1904-1915), V, p. 159) And he presented her with his own richly bound full score. Three years later she gave a highly successful performance of the concerto in London (it was reviewed enthusiastically in The Musical World, The Musical Times, and  The Saturday Review  among others), which marked the beginning of an association with Britain that lasted until the 1930s. Her close musical relationship with Brahms lasted until the end of his life; they played together and she was said to be his ‘favourite violinist for his sonatas’ (The Musical Times,74(1933), p. 548). In Fig. 1 Soldat is standing immediately behind Brahms

Fig. I: Brahms with Marie Soldat (left) and two other ladies c. 1894

Shortly before the composer’s death, Soldat’s quartet, with Richard Mühlfeld, played him his Clarinet Quintet Op. 115, a work they had already performed together. (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2 Programme of Concert in Graz 13 March 1896 (In private possession)

Among the most significant aspects of her activity in these early years was her involvement in quartet playing. In 1884 it was already reported that she was ‘said to

play also in quartets in a superior manner’ (The Monthly Musical Record,14(1884), p. 105). Three years later she established her first professional ladies string quartet in Berlin, but this lasted just one season, for in 1889 she married, gave birth to a son the following year and retired temporarily from professional life. She resumed her musical career in 1892, however and founded a second ladies string quartet in Vienna in 1894 with the same cellist as in Berlin, Lucy Campbell (later replaced by Leontine Gärtner), and  two other Viennese musicians, Ella Finger-Bailetti (later Else von Plank) and Natalie Bauer-Lechner, as second violin and viola (Fig. 3). 

Fig. 3 From left to right Marie Soldat, Lucy Campbell Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Ella Finger-Bailetti

Many early reviews of Soldat’s quartet playing evince great enthusiasm. The contrast between the cool retrospective estimation of her violin playing in 1927 and the positive reaction that had greeted her early performances is striking.

Soldat’s continuing relationship with Joachim is well documented. During her 1888 concert tour to England she and Joachim played together on several occasions, and newspaper reports show that they continued to collaborate closely until at least 1901. Among the material in a private Viennese collection belonging to descendents of Ella Finger-Balletti and Natalie Bauer-Lechner is a fan on the segments of which are inscriptions typical of an autograph album. Across the three central segments is a portrait of Joachim by Ludwig Michalek together with, in Joachim’s hand, a musical quotation of the beginning of Brahms’s A minor String Quartet and a dedication ‘Zum Andenken an das / Berliner Quartet / dem lieben Mitglied / des Wiener Quar / tets / Joseph Joachim / Berlin d. 5 Febuar / 1897’ (Fig. 4).

The similarity of her manner of playing to Joachim’s was apparently both a blessing and a curse for Marie Soldat. It was a significant factor in her rise to prominence, but after the turn of the century it seems increasingly to have become a hindrance to the further development of her career. The growing popularity and influence of the style of the Franco-Belgian violinists, against whom Joachim and Moser had directed their barbs in the 1905 Violinschule, rapidly made the markedly different sound and style espoused by Joachim and other violinists who shared his aesthetic seem outmoded. Joachim himself had such a firmly established reputation that he retained his following until his death in 1907 (despite recognition that his technique was no longer entirely reliable in later years). But by that date the tide of public taste was turning; in the early years of the twentieth century, and especially after the First World War, the rising generation of musicians and music lovers were predominantly concerned with ‘progress’ and there was an increasingly wholesale rejection of ideals and practices associated with the nineteenth century. In this context the later representatives of Joachim’s school found that they had either to adapt their playing or reconcile themselves to a slow but inexorable decline in popularity. While Klingler managed to adapt to a certain extent, Marie Soldat seems to have remained much more faithful to the style of the 1880s. The situation is nicely illustrated by a journal article in 1910, which described her as ‘a very interesting personality amongst the lady violinists of today, not only on account of her qualities as an artist, but also because she is the representative of a class which is rapidly becoming rare. She represents the Joachim school at its best period, and is imbued with all the traditions of the great classical school’ (Barbara Henderson, ‘Marie Soldat-Roeger’, The Strad, 21(1910), p. 362).

Marie Soldat’s recordings, therefore, offer us a remarkable glimpse into the rapidly darkening twilight of a nineteenth-century tradition of violin playing that had flourished for more than a century. They reveal a quite different approach to vibrato, portamento, bowing, phrasing, and rubato than that of the vast majority of recorded violinists.

Vibrato

To modern ears it is the treatment of vibrato that most obviously differentiates string players recorded during the first decades of the twentieth century from one another. This is not only a question of whether they used it selectively or more continuously, but also a matter of how they executed it and where they employed it. For Joachim, as for all nineteenth-century treatise writers, vibrato was only to be used as an occasional ornament. In his view ‘a violinist of taste and healthy sensitivities will always recognise the steady tone as the norm and use vibrato only where the requirements of the expression make it absolutely necessary’ Joachim/Moser, Violinschule, II, p. 96a). Thus the Joachim and Moser Violinschule reiterated the orthodox guidance that had prevailed throughout the nineteenth century in all the methods that addressed the matter (some ignored it altogether), which was to treat vibrato as an embellishment, to use it only in appropriate places, to vary the rapidity of the oscillations, and to ensure that its amplitude remained very narrow. (See Clive Brown, Classical and Romantic, p. 545ff.) In fact, rather than including a wholly original section on the subject, more than half of the one-page treatment of vibrato in the technical part of the 1905 Violinschule (it warranted another page in Moser’s essays in volume 3) was quoted verbatim from Spohr’s Violinschule of 1833 (Joachim/Moser Violinschule, I, p. 96).

Not until 1910 did a treatise appear in which continuous vibrato as an aspect of beautiful tone production was openly advocated. (Siegfried Eberhardt, Der beseelte Violin-Ton  (Dresden, Gerhard Kühtmann, 1910), English translation as Violin Vibrato its Mastery and Artistic Uses (New York, Carl Fischer, 1911)). By that date, however, recordings make it abundantly clear that most prominent string players were already employing vibrato more as a continuous element of tone than as an ornament.On the other hand, recorded violinists born before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and many born somewhat later, did not use a fully continuous vibrato; they tended to employ it on most or all longer notes, but left many shorter ones without noticeable vibrato. Joachim’s 1903 recordings, therefore, in which it is still an occasional ornament (many notes having no detectable vibrato), stand in sharp contrast to the majority of other early recordings of concert violinists. At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, there were undoubtedly still many violinists, not celebrated enough to have made solo recordings at that time, who employed vibrato even less than Joachim, or not at all; the playing of the un-named violinist who provided an obbligato for the castrato Moreschi in the Bach-Gounod ‘Ave Maria’ in 1904 reveals no trace of vibrato (Opal CD 9823).

In 1933 Carl Flesch, a ‘reformer’ of violin technique, and advocate of more continuous vibrato, who considered that ‘even the greatest violinistic genius will play out of tune without a levelling and corrective vibrato’ (Flesch, Memoirs, p. 21), described the changes he had observed in his own lifetime, stating that ‘even in 1880 the great violinists did not yet make use of a proper vibrato but employed a kind of Bebung, i.e. a finger vibrato in which the pitch was subject to only quite imperceptible oscillations’, and observing that it was ‘regarded as unseemly and inartistic’ to use vibrato ‘on relatively inexpressive notes’. He identified Ysaÿe as ‘the first to make use of a broader vibrato’ and attempting to ‘give life to passing notes’, and Kreisler as not only resorting to ‘a still broader vibrato’, but also trying ‘to ennoble faster passages’ with it (Ibid, p.120). Kreisler himself believed that what he referred to as ‘French’ vibrato went back further than Ysaÿe, identifying Wieniawski as having ‘intensified the vibrato and brought it to heights never before achieved’, and also stating, rather implausibly, that Vieuxtemps (fifteen years older than Wieniawski) ‘also took it up’. Of course Kreisler could not have personally experience the playing of Wieniawski or Vieuxtemps. The supposed founder of the so-called Franco-Belgian School, Charles de Bériot, was, on the evidence of his Méthode de Violon (1858), just as opposed to frequent vibrato as Spohr and Baillot. He asserted that Ysaÿe ‘became its greatest exponent’ (Louis Paul Lochner, Fritz Kreisler (London, 1951), p. 19),  and considered himself his direct heir in this respect, although Kreisler’s own vibrato was distinctly more pronounced and continuous than Ysaÿe’s.

Moser, as the quotation from his Geschichte des Violinspiels indicates (footnote 18), remained un-reconciled to the new aesthetic. He was certainly not alone, and resistance to it continued after his death. In 1927 F. Bonavia labelled vibrato as ‘a curse’, calling it ‘death the leveller - for it kills all musical tone’ and at the climax of his vehement attack declared: ‘The fact that vibrato in excelsis is only useful and indeed necessary in the jazz band, where it matches the bleating of the saxophones and the yawning of the trombones, ought to be a sufficient deterrent. Is it not pretty obvious that what suits the slobbery tunes of the jazz-band will not do for music?’(The Musical Times,68(1927), p. 1077) In contrast, Boris Schwarz (1906-83), just old enough to have heard a few late exponents of the older style of vibrato, was typical of younger violinists who had grown

up with continuous vibrato. He considered that with its adoption, ‘the violin became a much more sensuous-sounding instrument, and the public loved it. Soon, a violinist with the old-style vibrato had no chance of being successful’ (Boris Schwarz, Great Masters of the Violin (London, 1984), 285-6). Schwarz’s use of the word ‘sensuous’ is significant, for it is precisely the substitution of ‘sensuousness’ (specifically condemned by Moser) for ‘healthy music-making’ (Joachim/Moser, Violinschule, III, 35) that lies at the core of the Joachim and Moser diatribe. That this tension between ‘moral health’ and ‘sensuality’ in violin playing was current at the time is suggested by Flesch’s extraordinary evocation of the effect of Kreisler’s vibrato on young violinists around the turn of the century, as creating ‘an unrestrained orgy of sinfully seductive sounds, depravedly fascinating, whose sole driving force appeared to be a sensuality intensified to the point of frenzy’ (Flesch, Memoirs, p. 118).

Towards the end of his Geschichte des Violinspiels, Moser praised Karl Klingler for his resistance to the vibrato epidemic (Moser, Geschichte, p. 564), approvingly quoting a passage from Klingler’s recently published Grundlage des Violinspiels (1921), which warned against making the vibrations so wide that the pitch is no longer clear, complaining that ‘unfortunately this widespread bad habit, which to the universal detriment of taste is only too often heard, even from famous violinists, particularly in high positions.’ Although Klingler also reiterated the old teaching that vibrato, as a ‘means of expression’, should only be used ‘where it is supported and justified by excitement or feeling’ (Karl Klingler Über die Grundlagen  des Violinspiels (Leipzig, 1921), 18f. See also Leopold Auer’s much more vehement strictures against vibrato in his Violin Playing as I teach it). It is clear from the later Klingler Quartet recordings that, as stated above, he developed a vibrato quite different from Joachim’s. Even in the early recordings Klingler seems to leave few longer notes without at least a hint of vibrato, and in the later ones it is more continuous and broader, though still discreet by comparison with most contemporaries.

Marie Soldat’s recordings, on the other hand, reveal a vibrato usage that closely resembles Joachim’s, both in placement and execution. This is perhaps not surprising, since her style was fully formed by the early 1880s; but it sets her apart from her exact Austrian contemporary Arnold Rosé, whose recordings show him to have used a much more continuous and conspicuous vibrato, which may perhaps help to explain the greater longevity of his career. Carl Flesch described Rosé’s vibrato as ‘noble if a little thin’ (Flesch, Memoirs, p. 51); it was certainly much narrower and less continuous than Flesch’s, which to judge from his recordings was modelled on Kreisler’s. In comparison with other violinists during the early years of the twentieth century, therefore, Soldat’s very sparing use of vibrato may have contributed to adverse reactions to her tone. An otherwise admiring reviewer in 1907 remarked that ‘the quality of her tone struck one as being rather thin’ (The Musical Standard,  28(1907), p. 345). This contrasts with a comment a few years earlier about Ysaÿe, with his much more prominent vibrato, creating ‘quite a sensation, the tone being so rich and full’ (The Violin Times, 8(1901), p. 146). But it also contrasts strongly with a review of Soldat’s performances in London in 1888, when Ysaÿe’s style of vibrato will have been unfamiliar in England, which elicited the comment that in a performance of a Spohr duet with Joachim, she demonstrated ‘the same powerful tone and mastery over her instrument as she had done in Brahms’s difficult concerto’  (The Musical Times,29(1888), p. 217).

The vibrato in Soldat’s performance of the Largo from Bach’s Solo Sonata BWV 1005 is remarkably like Joachim’s in the Adagio from BWV 1001; it is detectable only on a few longer notes.  The rapid Prelude from Bach’s E major Partita BWV 1006, provides little opportunity for it, but it occurs on two longer notes in the final bars.  In the Adagio from Spohr’s Ninth Concerto she sometimes used vibrato where Spohr did not mark it in the annotated version in his Violinschule (for instance the second bar), but there are also places where she ignores his wavy line and plays a pure, un-vibrated note, especially in higher passages on the E-string. Many sustained notes in her performance of the Adagio have no discernible vibrato, and she was consistent in playing the longer notes that occur on weak beats at the end of a phrase without any vibrato at all. In the Beethoven F major Romance she used vibrato somewhat more often than Joachim employed it in his own C major Romance, but it is remarkably similar to his, recalling the finger vibrato described by Flesch as Joachim’s ‘thin-flowing quiver’; and like Joachim she scarcely used it at all on higher notes. Vibrato is used rather more frequently in the arrangement of Schumann’s ‘Abendlied’, a favourite encore piece of Joachim’s, but, as in the other pieces, it is very discreet. The recording in which vibrato is most obviously used is Wilhelmj’s arrangement of Bach’s Air for the G string, corresponding with nineteenth-century evidence that vibrato was more extensively used in playing on the G string, but here too it is narrow and by no means continuous. See, for instance, Spohr’s annotations in the middle section of the Adagio from Rode’s Seventh Violin Concerto in his Violinschule, p. 209.  All in all, her recordings indicate that she was affected extraordinarily little by the stylistic changes that had occurred in vibrato usage during her career.

Portamento

Another contributing factor to ‘unhealthy music-making’, in Joachim’s opinion, was tasteless portamento. This clearly did not mean that he advocated the total suppression of portamento, and his recordings show that he used it as a normal concomitant of legato position changing, although perhaps introducing it  rather less frequently than some of his contemporaries might have done in that repertoire. As with vibrato, he was concerned that it should be executed ‘correctly’ and used in the right places. In fact, portamento was evidently seen by Joachim as a more important, indeed more indispensable aspect of expressive performance than vibrato, and it received considerably more attention in the Violinschule, where its discussion, taking up six and a half pages in the second volume, preceded that of vibrato. In the essays in the third volume, Moser stated that ‘portamento stands in the first rank’ among the vocal effects that can be recreated on the violin (III, p. 8).

Relevant technical and aesthetic aspects of portamento have been discussed in detail elsewhere (Brown, Classical and Romantic,  pp. 558-587). It is sufficient here to reiterate that audible shifting within and sometimes between bowstrokes was an inevitable outcome of nineteenth-century teaching on position changing, but that the location of a position change was expected to be selected on the basis of its musical aptness, that the intensity (bow pressure) and speed of the shift should be determined by musical considerations, and that certain types of portamento were regarded as tasteless by some authorities. Warnings about the ‘improper’ execution of shifts were already made by Spohr, but the manner he condemned, in which the slide was made with the finger that stopped the target note rather than that which was used for the starting note (Spohr, Violinschule, p. 120),  seems to have been used with growing frequency during

the second half of the century. It was commented upon in Germany and England from at least the 1880s, often specifically referred to as ‘French’ portamento. Hermann Schröder, for instance, deplored it in 1889 as a ‘perverted mannerism’ deriving from French players, but now employed in Germany (Schröder, Die Kunst des Violinspiels, p. 33);  and in 1898 John Dunn observed that this type of portamento was ‘a striking mannerism common to many, but not all, players of the modern French school’ ( John Dunn, Violin Playing, (London, 1898), p. 31), while Flesch in 1924 wrote that ‘among the great violinists of our day there is not one who does not more or less frequently’ use it’ (Flesch The Art of Violin Playing, p. 30).  Early recordings provide a wealth of information about the employment of portamento during the first half of the twentieth century, confirming not only that the use of ‘French’ portamento in various manifestations became increasingly widespread during the early decades of the century, but also that portamento as a whole was still extensively employed in string playing and singing until at least the 1930s, after which it rapidly came to be regarded as a bad habit and has been largely eliminated from more recent performing practice. (The suppression of portamento went hand in hand with changes to fingering practices.) As part of the process by which portamento became discredited during the twentieth century its origins and function were forgotten. Few musicians of the present day are aware that its employment as an indispensable expressive practice in string playing dates back to the late eighteenth century, for along with other old practices, such as piano arpeggiation and dislocation, the musical generation that rejected it seems to have believed it to be a tasteless perversion indulged in by their recent predecessors.

In all but one instance (discussed below) the execution of Marie Soldat’s portamentos in the 1926 recordings is entirely within the parameters of good taste that were laid out in Spohr’s Violinschule. In this respect, her treatment of the Spohr Adagio is particularly revealing. There is good reason to believe that it was one of her regular repertoire pieces from an early stage. She played it during her first visit to Britain in 1888 and at a concert in Edinburgh was praised for performing it ‘with a sweetness and purity of expression that took the house by storm’ (The Musical World, 14(1888), p. 276). In 1896 the critic of the Athenaeum remarked that in this piece ‘her style singularly resembled that of Herr Joachim’ (The Athenaeum , 3604(1896), p. 722). It also appeared in the programme of a concert given by her quartet in Olmütz on 6 January 1896 (programme in private possession).  In her recording Soldat mostly seems to have employed the fingering marked by Spohr, and executed the portamento implied by it, but she occasionally departed from his fingering to achieve an additional portamento effect (she executed twelve portamentos in the first sixteen bars, all but two of which were implied by Spohr’s fingering).

Portamento, though still an integral aspect of her expressive language, is less prominent in Beethoven’s Romance in F, where its use is not so integral to the expression, although all her position changes within legato passages are audible (as in Joachim’s playing) and, in most cases, clearly chosen for their musical aptness. Prominent portamento is even less evident in the first movement of Mozart’s A major Violin Concerto, suggesting her understanding that the embellishment was more appropriate in some repertoires than others. This too was surely a legacy of her study with Joachim. (Karl Klingler’s writings make it clear that this kind of stylistic awareness was integral to the Joachim tradition. See Karl Klingler: “Über die Grundlagen des Violinspiels” und nachgelassene Schriften. ed. M. M. Klingler and A. Ritter (Hildersheim, Olms, 1990).) Soldat’s performance of the Largo from Bach’s C major Sonata for solo violin,

therefore, is somewhat unexpected.  Although a reviewer in 1897 had observed that Marie Soldat ‘played two movements from Bach’s suite in E, quite in the Joachim style’ (The Musical Times,38(1897), p. 20), her recording of the Largo contains much more portamento than Joachim used in his 1903 recording of the Adagio from the G minor Sonata (although not more than Rosé, for instance, employed in that Adagio). The character of Soldat’s Bach performance seems considerably more impassioned than Joachim’s. It is unclear what edition she may have learned the sonatas from, since Joachim’s own edition did not appear until 1908, but it is likely that it was Ferdinand David’s; several of the portamentos suggested by printed fingerings in that edition occur in Soldat’s performance.

In any case, since a particular passage can be played with various fingerings, she also introduced portamento in places where none is implied in the fingerings indicated in the editions that would have been available to her. Her performance of Schumann’s ‘Abendlied’ is also rich in portamento, although the piece could easily have been played with very few position changes; it contains some twenty-three portamento effects (many, however, quite subtle and unobtrusive) in twenty-nine bars, creating an extremely expressive cantabile performance. All of these are of a kind that might have been approved by Joachim, although whether he would have introduced so many and in the same places cannot be determined. Joachim certainly used fewer portamentos in the 1903 recording of his Romance in C (the transcription in my book Classical and Romantic Performing Practice (pp. 450-454) marks only the most prominent portamentos; there are, for instance, seven quite audible position changes in the first sixteen bars although I indicated only three of them.), but it may be argued that the character of that music invites them less than the much slower-moving and more intense ‘Abendlied’. The evidence of portamento fingering in Spohr’s Violinschule, especially in the Adagios of Rode’s Seventh Concerto and his own Ninth Concerto suggests that mainstream practice in the German tradition allowed more frequent portamento in particularly expressive contexts than the rather puritanical Joachim might himself have employed.

Soldat’s performance of the Bach-Wilhelmj ‘Air on the G string’ stands apart from her other recordings, all of which belonged to Joachim’s repertoire , not only because it is a piece Joachim detested  (Flesch, Memoirs, p. 48 footnote), but also because in performing it, as well as using very frequent vibrato, she employed some ‘French’ portamento. Perhaps her sense of style and tradition, which determined the use of classic portamento elsewhere, permitted her to use this much criticised portamento in the context of a piece that belonged to a different tradition. Wilhelmj, a favourite pupil of Ferdinand David (whose playing and teaching was seen as combining his inheritance from Spohr with aspects of Franco-Belgian practice; see Ferdinand David as editor), seems to have had more in common with the Franco-Belgian tendency than the German. A sense of stylistic aptness similar to Soldat’s in this recording may explain Joachim’s use of this French portamento in his recording of Brahms’ First Hungarian Dance, presumably because it was also seen as a characteristic of Gypsy fiddling.

Bowing and phrasing

Styles of bowing can scarcely be discussed on the basis of recordings alone, for it is frequently impossible to link the sounds heard in a recording to specific bowing types or movements of the arm. The implications of Moser’s strictures about the poor use of

the bow by Franco-Belgian musicians, therefore, are more difficult to investigate through recordings. As with questions of vibrato and portamento usage, the necessary comparison of written texts, annotated editions, iconography, and recordings has yet to be undertaken extensively and systematically enough to achieve reliable conclusions. One aspect of the physiology of bowing, however, that is abundantly clear from documentary sources, is that a fundamental change in teaching about the position and action of the right arm and hand occurred during the first half of twentieth century. Standard instructions from the middle of the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, illustrated graphically and photographically in numerous violin methods (see my article ‘Physical parameters of 19th and early 20th century violin playing’), demanded a lowered right elbow, quite restricted movement of the upper arm, very extensive flexibility of the wrist between the point and heel of the bow, and, in most cases, a bow grip in which the fingers lay close together and the stick rested between the first and second phalanxes of the index finger. In the closing section of the Geschichte des Violinspiels Moser had praised Karl Klingler’s fidelity to the Joachim principles in respect of bowing, but ten years later Carl Flesch criticised Klingler’s bowing as ‘still dominated by the fallacious theory of the lowered upper arm and “loose” wrist’ (Flesch, Memoirs, p. 250). In his Art of Violin Playing in 1924 (just three years after the appearance of Klingler’s Grundlagen des Violinspiels) Flesch rejected the old German method of holding the bow declaring that ‘the majority of contemporary violinists have, however, already turned their backs upon  it’, and adding that the ‘the newer Franco-Belgian, as well as the Russian manner of holding the bow already control the field absolutely and incontestably’ (Flesch, The Art of Violin Playing, p. 54).  He favoured the latter, which he attributed to Auer. If we cannot, in the present state of knowledge, identify the progress and consequences of these changes more precisely in early recordings, we can certainly hear the results of the older method in the recordings of Joachim himself and his pupils Klingler and Soldat.

There is good reason to believe that Soldat’s bowing was broadly faithful to Joachim’s method, not least because of the numerous reviews that referred to the similarity of their playing style. Her mastery of the bow was acknowledged, for instance, in a review from 1909, which remarked upon ‘her beautiful bowing being especially noteworthy’ in performances of three Beethoven Violin Sonatas’ (The Musical Standard, 28(1907), p. 345).  Among the features frequently mentioned in written accounts was its vigour. This can be heard distinctly in her recordings, in the first movement of Mozart's A major Violin Concerto, the middle section of Beethoven’s Romance, and Bach’s prelude from the E major Partita BWV 1006. 

A review of her performance in Brahms’ B major Piano Trio and Bach’s E major Partita by the distinguished Manchester music critic, Samuel Langford, in 1908 provides an interesting insight. He observed that she 

plays Brahms to perfection, and did gloriously in the Trio; she also gave to older music – the E major sonata by Bach for violin alone – a Brahmsian breadth and vigour. We have never before heard the Sonata played so vigorously throughout, and we certainly prefer the opposite method adopted by Señor Casals, of finding all the lightness that is possible in Bach. But whatever could be done by beautiful tone, intelligent phrasing and natural dignity to add force to her method Madam Soldat-Roeger did admirably. She might have convinced many that her style, too, was right, but we were not of the number. [The Manchester Guardian, Nov. 2, 1908,

p. 8. The reference to Casals is interesting because he and Marie Soldat played piano trios together, with either Leonard Borwick or Fanny Davies, between 1909 and 1913.]

This style of bowing for continuous passages of faster-moving notes is clearly related to the type of détaché described in the Paris Conservatoire Méthode of 1803, Spohr’s Violinschule and many later German treatises, including the Joachim and Moser Violinschule. In his Geschichte des Violinspiels Moser stressed the importance of this bow-stroke; rejecting F. A. Steinhausen’s contention that the older teachers dealt only with the use of the wrist, he insisted:

absolutely to the contrary, not only Joachim, Böhm and Rode, about whom we definitely know it, but probably also their predecessors Viotti and Pugnani etc., put much more emphasis on the cultivation of the elbow joint to produce a spirited management of the bow, because without its looseness a free forearm stroke, the most important for playing passagework, can certainly not be achieved. (Ganz im Gegenteil haben nicht nur Joachim, Böhm und Rode, von denen wir es positiv wissen, sondern wahrscheinlich auch schon ihre Vordermänner Viotti und Pugnani usw. Zur Erzielung einer schwunghaften Bogenführung ungleich mehr Nachdruck auf die Kultur des Ellbogengelenks gelegt, weil ohne dessen Lockerheit ein freier Unterarmstrich, der wichtigste für das Passagenspiel, gar nicht zu erreichen ist. ’ [Moser, Geschichte, p. 555.]

During the early twentieth century this bowing style was rapidly being displaced by the ‘lighter’ type of bowing referred to in Langford’s review, which involved quite different movements of the arm and hand. Although springing bowings of various types were certainly employed by Joachim and his pupils, they were equally certainly not employed in the same way or in the same contexts as nowadays.

Another aspect of Soldat’s bowing can be heard particularly in the legato sections of the Beethoven Romance, Schumann’s ‘Abendlied’, and Spohr’s Adagio. These pieces reveal her remarkable cantilena, in which the bow changes are often almost undetectable. Such extreme smoothness of bowing is seldom encountered to this extent in recordings by younger performers, who could undoubtedly have achieved it, but seem not to have been concerned to do so. The Adagio also demonstrates her perfect command of the ‘Spohr’ or ‘firm (festes)’ staccato, executed with remarkable delicacy and precision.

Rubato

Joachim was famed above all for his incomparable ability to bend the music expressively within an essentially constant pulse. Both Karl Klingler’s and Marie Soldat’s recordings present many examples of similar qualities, which, combined with other stylistic features, must have played a part in fostering the widespread opinion that their playing was very much in his style. This was not, however, merely a peculiarity of the performing style of Joachim and his pupils at the beginning of the twentieth century; players with quite different backgrounds employed related types of rubato, for instance Ysaÿe and Flesch, but in ways that were different from Joachim’s. (This can be easily observed subjectively. A more empirical investigation of different types of rubato in early recordings is still to be undertaken.) The Joachim style of rubato is closely paralleled, however, in the piano playing of Carl Reinecke (1824-1910), suggesting a connection with Leipzig traditions stretching back at least to Mendelssohn’s time.

Joachim specifically referred to Mendelssohn’s ‘elastic management of time as a subtle means of expression’ (Violinschule, III, p. 228); and Spohr clearly described this kind of rubato in his 1833 Violinschule (p. 119).  Particular aspects of the rubato heard in Mozart and Beethoven recordings by Klingler, Soldat, and Reinecke, particularly the unequal performance of slurred figures in which the elongation of the first note is compensated for by hurrying the subsequent notes under the slur, appear to represent the preservation of eighteenth-century traditions.  (See Clive Brown ‘Performing Classical repertoire: the unbridgeable gulf between contemporary practice and historical reality.’ Basler Jahrbuch für historische Musikpraxis XXX (2006) (Winterthur, Amadeus Verlag, 2008), 31-44, and  ‘Leopold Mozart’s Violinschule and the performance of W. A. Mozart’s violin music’ in Cordes et claviers au temps de Mozart / Strings and Keyboard in the Age of Mozart ed. Thomas Steiner (Lausanne, Peter Lang, 2010) pp. 23-49). All of them also played dotted figures freely, often over-dotting in a manner that recalls Leopold Mozart’s advice, but was also an aspect of Brahms performing practice, as a reviewer in 1933 pointed out with reference to Soldat’s flexible performance of the dotted figures in the second movement of the G major Violin Sonata op. 78 (The Musical Times,74(1933), p. 548)

Soldat’s masterly performance of the Adagio from Spohr’s Ninth Concerto represents a freer style of tempo rubato that corresponds closely to Spohr’s precepts and gives a very strong impression of preserving the style of performance its composer envisaged. Either Pott, whose years of study with Spohr were close to the composition of the Ninth Concerto, or Joachim, who had heard and admired Spohr’s playing, or perhaps both of them, may have been responsible for coaching her in the composer’s style of performing this music. Comparison of Soldat’s performance with accomplished modern performances of the same piece, in which, however, it is played more or less strictly in time, with continuous vibrato, scarcely a hint of portamento, modern bowing, and far from seamless legato (Ulf Hoelscher CPO 999 232-2 and Christine Erdinger Marco Polo 8.223510); Erdinger plays the Spohr staccato, marked with dots under a slur,  with separate bows, creating an entirely different effect from the one intended, while Hoelscher’s slurred staccato is crude in comparison with Soldat’s pearl-like execution of that characteristic 19th-century bowstroke. This  reveals how fundamentally different such music becomes when played with the styles of tempo rubato, ornamental vibrato, expressive portamento exquisite  phrasing , and distinctive style of  bowing that were cultivated by Spohr, Joachim, Soldat and other violinists in the nineteenth-century German tradition.

*

It is clear from her recordings that Marie Soldat was an artist in her own right, not merely an epigone of Joachim. At the same time, however, it is evident that, more perhaps than any other recorded violinist, her performances preserved many of the essential features that led her to be described as a faithful student of the Joachim School. It is also credible that she was directly linked through August Pott to a Spohr tradition, and tempting, indeed plausible, to imagine that her manner of playing the Adagio from Spohr’s Ninth Concerto would have seemed perfectly idiomatic in almost every respect to its composer.

For musicians who aspire to perform 19th-century music, and perhaps also that of the late 18th-century, in a manner that more closely reflects the expectations of its

composers, Soldat’s recordings offer many fascinating perspectives in all the areas examined above. Although modern or period violinists may not wish to play Bach in the 19th-century manner created by Ferdinand David, Joseph Joachim and their contemporaries, there is every reason to believe that in repertoire from Mozart to Brahms, her way of playing is far closer to a stylistic world with which those composers would have been familiar, than any kind of modern performance we are likely to hear at present, ‘historically informed’ or not.

The Russian style, for many years, had to do only minimally with the bow hold, but much more with an approach to sound and style, and also with choice of repertoire, and choice of career path. I am remembering Oistrakh's recordings of Mozart Concertos and Sonatas, which were marvelously Russian in terms of slow tempos, big lush sound, choice of long on the string bowings, etc. etc.Today's musicians are characterized by their broad, eclectic range of activities, such as Yo Yo Ma delving into jazz and HIP playing, Perlman playing Klezmer, Rachel Barton Pine playing with a rock group, Joshua Bell and Nadia Salerno Sonnenberg conducting from the concertmaster chair, Hilary Hahn interviewing other musicians on Youtube, Charles Yang doing multimedia, Mark O'Connor breaking down more barriers every year, etc, etc.

In the beginning, there was Italy

Italy was the birthplace of the European Renaissance. Starting from the late 15th century, it saw an explosion of art of all kinds. As the Renaissance grew and developed, it began to spread an artistic influence over all the other countries of Europe. During this time, the violin and the violin family saw a significant growth in popularity. Italian and Italian-trained musicians began to number a majority of European positions (the Italian-trained George Frideric Handel (1685-1789) and the Italian violinist and composer Francesco Geminiani (1687-1782) are two such examples). The influence of Italy also gradually brought about a decline in the distinctness of local traditions of playing and composition, so by the mid-18th century until the early 19th century, the Italian school had become dominant in most countries of Europe. Paganini was the pinnacle of this old Italian tradition. His virtuosity and output will always have a lasting impact on violin technique and methods of composition for the violin. However, Paganini didn’t have much effect on the “pedagogical” passing down of violin technique to future generations. Only two of the students he accepted enjoyed a lasting success, and neither one considered Paganini helpful or inspirational.

However, before Paganini, there were two main figures near the end of the 17th century who were to have a lasting impact on Italian violin playing: Arcangelo Correli (1653-1713) and Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741). Through them, traditions were passed down

and developed by great teachers like Somis and Pugnani, resulting with Giovanni Battista Viotti (1755-1824). Most scholars identify Viotti as the most influential figure to define and spread the techniques that were to lie at the heart of European schools of violin playing. Viotti even influenced Paganini through his student August Duranowski. In France, his influence on performance style was firmly established upon his French pupils Pierre Baillot (1771-1842), Rudolphe Kreutzer (1766-1831) and Pierre Rode 1774-1830). Each of them became professors at the Paris Conservatory. Their lasting impact on the identity of the French school of violin playing is what earned Viotti the often-coined title as the father of the French school.

Then there was France

Even though Germany demonstrated a marked level of individuality in violin playing (seen most notably through the treatises of Leopold Mozart and Louis Spohr) and particularly in composition, France was the one country where Italian tastes and playing methods were challenged by native scholars and performers. As far back as the Baroque, French practices were more distinct and followed different rules (much more specific rules, I might add). And in spite of the fact that Viotti – a highly influential artist and product of strong Italian tradition – made his mark there, the pupils he met had been raised in the French system. It’s not surprising then, that by the beginning of the 19th century, there was a shift. The French style of playing, now beefed up by the Italian tradition, earned an international reputation of violin playing that had previously been dominant in Italy.

The French assimilated and continued the traditions of the Italians. Baillot, for example, wrote his extensive treatise: The Art of the Violin. His work however, unlike Italian versions that had come before, focused not on the amateur violin pupil but instead focused on training the professional. Furthermore, it was French luthiers who established the practice of rebuilding old instruments to achieve better capabilities (resulting in the modern violin), and the French innovator, Francois Tourte, who developed the modern bow.

The French tradition can still be seen today… what serious violin student hasn’t studied the etudes of Kreutzer or Rode? Later figures were Charles Dancla (1817-1907) and Lambert Massart (1811-1892), who taught Fritz Kreisler and Martin Marsick. Marsick taught Carl Flesch and George Enesco. It is said that the techniques of the French School represented a violinistic technique that was driven by “good taste”, but that double-stops or harmonics were not often employed. Baillot also gives directions in his treatise for holding the bow, using a straight thumb and straight fingers. However, I imagine the best models for studying the playing style of the French School would be to study the works by Viotti, Baillot, Kreutzer and Rode. The four of them together composed more than 70 concerti (!) as well as countless other pieces.

Germany, Hungary and Belgium

The rise and influence of the French School is said to have a diminishing quality on the distinctiveness of other schools, similar to Italy’s affect a century earlier. One thing that might have contributed to this has to do with the construction of railways throughout

Europe, which is a smaller-scale version of what has happened globally since World War II (I’ll write more about that below). An example of this diminishing quality is on Louis Spohr (1784-1859). Spohr had a very inventive and unique style that was very much affected by the German traditions that had been passed down by Johann Anton Stamitz. However, after hearing a concert by Rode, Spohr became entranced with the French style and sought to emulate Rode in his playing and even in composition. One of Spohr’s concertos was modeled after Rode and won Spohr great success. After that Spohr never quite fell back on his German heritage according to one writer (forget the name), who also points out the influence of Rode in Spohr’s treatise: Violinschule.

The main figure of the German school became Joseph Joachim (1831-1907). I read mention that a feature of this German school was a low right arm and emphasis on right wrist movement in playing. Joachim’s pedigree can be traced back to Viotti through Dont, Böhm, and Rode. Joachim and Dont in turn taught Leopold Auer, father of the so-called Russian School.

It is interesting to see how the students of Viotti branched out to form the different schools of playing that were so often referred to during the 20th century. The Hungarian violinist Joseph Böhm (1795-1876) is a particularly interesting figure, and though it is said that he taught Auer for a time (leading to the Russian school), he also taught many Hungarian students in Vienna, a few who became very influential in their homeland: i.e. Jeno Hubay and again, Joachim.

Joachim and Hubay formed a line of influence in Hungary, which has even reached down to two very modern proponents trained in Budapest: Kato Havas and Paul Rolland. It should be noted, however, the emergence of new philosophies in violin pedagogy that occurred around the beginning of the 20th century in Hungary. It seems to be provoked by a book by the author Friedrich Adolf Steinhausen titled: The Physiology of Bowing. What I’ve been able to find out is that Steinhausen’s brother was a student of Joachim, who encouraged Steinhausen to write the book. Steinhausen however was not a professional violinist, but a doctor! The books principals became deeply imbedded in the teaching of Imre Waldbauer, who taught both Havas and Rolland in Budapest. Rolland credits Waldbauer as the most significant influence to his playing and teaching, which in turn has influenced so many players of America today. Rolland even goes on to say that Waldbauer did him the favor of stripping away the old German-Hungarian tradition passed down by Hubay, which had negatively affected his playing previously.

But I digress… back to Viotti. Another of his students, Charles de Beriot, formed a line that leads down through Vieuxtemps and Wieniawski to Ysaÿe, forming what many know as the Belgian violin school. That same line continues then to Enescu, Thibaud and Gingold. The Belgian school was highly influenced by the French school but is still said to have formed its own identity, one that was increasingly more romantic in style. Players today often refer to the Franco-Belgian bow hold, wherein the fingers make contact to the bow closer to the first joint and much emphasis is placed on finger movement in bowing and collé.

Russia

The influence of Viotti and his students is something I find pretty miraculous. In fact, what I find is that the violinistic pedigree of virtually ALL modern classically trained violinists can be traced back to Viotti in some way, shape or form. Fascinating!

As I mentioned before, Leopold Auer (1845-1930) is often referred to as the father of the Russian School. His students include Heifetz, Elman, Zimbalist, Yampolsky, Graffman and many more. Auer’s school almost entirely transported to America as a result of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. One of his pupils, Abraham Yampolsky, carried on his traditions in Russia, teaching Leonid Kogan who in turn taught Viktoria Mullova. Many players today refer to the Russian bow hold as an aspect of Auer’s Russian school. The characteristics of this bow hold feature the index finger making contact at the second joint, and the whole arm engaging in sweeping motions of the bow.

However, what is often not mentioned (at least in America) is that there were TWO very distinct Russian schools. Another of Viotti’s students, Friedrich Wilhelm Pixis, formed a line of students that leads all the way down to Sevcik and Stolyarski. Stolyarski is the father of the second Russian school. He had an eye for cultivating talent in young students and was the teacher of David Oistrakh, Igor Oistrakh and Nathan Milstein to name a few. David Oistrakh taught Gidon Kremer and many others, and Igor Oistrakh was one of Zakhar Bron’s principal teachers. Bron has become one of the most famous teachers in the world today (with students like Vengerov, Rapin, etc.).

If one were to compare the two Russian schools, I think of Auer’s heritage as being born out of French (via Dont), German (via Joachim) and (pre-Steinhausen) Hungarian influence. Stolyarski’s school on the other hand was more Belgian influenced through Vieuxtemps, Wieniawski and Ysaye who all spent considerable time in Russia.

American in the 20th Century

So, I’ve shown how from Viotti, several branches of violin pedagogy were established that branched and lead to somewhat distinct schools of violin playing. But branching out continues from all of those sources as well, branches overlap in several places and it all just gets increasingly more and more confusing. So, for the purposes of outlining violin playing (or “schools”) in the 20th and 21st centuries, I will focus (at least mostly) on America.

Probably the most influential teachers in America during the 20th century were Joseph Gingold and Ivan Galamian, followed closely by Dorothy DeLay. Gingold was born in Belarus and studied in New York with Graffman (a student of Auer). He then lived in Belgium for several years, studying with Eugene Ysaÿe. He spent several years as the concertmaster of the Cleveland Orchestra but is best known for the position he held as violin professor at Indiana University. Some of his best-known students are Joshua Bell, Jaime Laredo, Dylana Jensen, Joseph Silverstein and Miriam Fried. Galamian was born in Tabriz, Iran to Armenian parents ad his initial studies were in Moscow with Konstantin Mostras, who was a student of Auer. After that he studied in Paris with Lucien Capet, a desendent of Baillot’s teaching and the French School (incidentally, Capet wrote a very enlightening treatise on bow use called: Superior Bow Technique). Galamian taught for several years in Paris but his eventual and primary position was in

New York at Juilliard. He has taught countless influential violinists of today such as Perlman, Zukerman, Laredo, and Dicterow. Perhaps part of the genius of Gingold and Galamian is that they each represented their own “hybrid school” that used the best from their varied backgrounds.

When Galamian died, his assistant, Dorothy DeLay, took over his studio at Juilliard. DeLay students abound the concert halls of America today. Highlights of a few of her students are Midori, Perlman, Zukerman, Nigel Kennedy, Gil Shaham, Sarah Chang and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg (that’s only a small handful).

Now, if we look at teachers in America today, things get much more confusing. There are hundreds of hybrid schools. Several teachers stick out as being more influential than others, but violin virtuosos are popping up from all over the place, from hundreds of different teachers. The lines are all crisscrossed.

America in the 21st Century: The Digital Age

Earlier, I mentioned the building of railroads in Europe and how that assisted the rise and influence of the French School at the beginning of the 19th century. The French School had such an impact in fact; that national styles of playing which had been distinct from the French (or earlier Italian) School began to die out (most notably some German traditions). This is a small-scale version of what has happened today since World War II. With the creation of jet planes and the Internet, the world is so much smaller (figuratively speaking). Gobs of information can be found right at our fingertips. Areas that had been more isolated are suddenly international hubs. Russian is a great example, now that the iron curtain is (more or less) gone.

In my experience, it seems like several minds are still stuck in the mid-20th century where talk of specific schools like Russian and Franco-Belgian was still applicable to the playing characteristics of the day. But I cannot honestly agree that these schools exist anymore! Nobody has sufficiently documented what has happened in the violin world over the past 30 years. All violinists have become products of hybrid schools whose definitions are even more varied than Galamian or Gingold. Very few players show distinct school styles in their playing because we all study and are influenced by a handful of teachers from varied backgrounds, absorb the best of each and assimilate them in personal ways.

An unfortunate result of this, however, is that few modern violinists – especially those now studying in Colleges or Universities (I was one of them) – have a reasonable understanding of the history of the techniques or artistic heritage that is being passed down to them, and the wealth of experience developed in different geographical areas is diluted. But I think it is important to preserve the past, to understand it and learn from it. It would be great if there was some kind of violinist database, where one can go online and trace their own personal violinistic pedigree.

One must raise the question, however; what are the advantages here? For example, just because it is more difficult to define geographically distinct heritages of performance does not mean there is any shortage of different opinions or viewpoints. Violinists of today have more freedom to seek out their own unique pathways and study with those

teachers they identify with the most. So then perhaps it can be said that today, the main distinguishing feature of players is the approach to sound, not setup. Judgements of sound can be subjective, nonetheless, I can instantly tell differences in an approach to sound or phrasing from one player to the next.

There are so many specializations nowadays as well: one person may focus on and make a career playing contemporary music from todays composers; another may focus on symphonic repertoire, take auditions and maintain a career in a major orchestra; still another might make a living playing chamber music; while another devotes their life to training future violinists, thereby passing on their own vision (or school) of sound that becomes part of the individuality of future generations who absorb that vision in unique ways. Choice of pedagogical repertoire can also be a major factor in developing specific concepts of sound, or more engagement in alternative styles.

There are also pedagogical trends that didn’t exist before. The Suzuki philosophy (which is not a “method” by the way) has totally changed violin pedagogy in America and throughout the world. But it’s also a great example of a new phenomenon… there are several new approaches developing due to extreme cultural and lingual differences. The Suzuki philosophy, for example, is the result of western traditions remolded through the filter of Japanese early childhood instruction. Is this a sign of something new happening?

To answer that let me start from the beginning. First there was Italy who developed and spread technique resulting in specific national styles; the French School absorbed all the best features of those styles and then branched out again; the same thing is happening today, in which players are absorbing the best from all schools. So what is for the future… global styles? Do we already have them? – I think so. Where do popular and ethnic styles fit in (look at the Indian approach for example – completely different)? Give it some time and there may be a South American style, an Asian style, an African style, or a middle-eastern style. Then if we follow the same circular pattern, what will result? It’s fun to think about, but who knows what will happen. All in all, it’s an exciting time to be a musician!