Among many interesting anecdotes current of Viotti, and one which admirably shows his goodness of heart and quickness of resource, is one narrated by Ferdinand Langlé to Adolph Adam, the French composer. The father of the former, Marie Langlé, a professor of harmony in the French Conservatoire, was an intimate friend of Viotti, and one charming summer evening the twain were strolling on the Champs Élysées. They sat down on a retired bench to enjoy the calmness of the night, and became buried in reverie. But they were brought back to prosaic matters harshly by a babel of discordant noises that grated on the sensitive ears of the two musicians. They started from their seats, and Viotti said:
"It can't be a violin, and yet there is some resemblance to one."
"Nor a clarionet," suggested Langlé, "though it is something like it."
The easiest manner of solving the problem was to go and see what it was. They approached the spot whence the extraordinary tones issued, and saw a poor blind man standing near a miserable-looking candle and playing upon a violin—but the latter was an instrument made of tin-plate.
"Fancy!" exclaimed Viotti, "it is a violin, but a violin of tin-plate! Did you ever dream of such a curiosity?" and, after listening a while, he added, "I say, Langlé, I must possess that instrument. Go and ask the old blind man what he will sell it for."
Langlé approached and asked the question, but the old man was disinclined to part with it.
"But we will give you enough for it to enable you to purchase a better," he added; "and why is not your violin like others?"
The aged fiddler explained that, when he got old and found himself poor, not being able to work, but still able to scrape a few airs upon a violin, he had endeavored to procure one, but in vain. At last his good, kind nephew Eustache, who was apprenticed to a tinker, had made him one out of a tin-plate. "And an excellent one, too," he added; "and my poor boy Eustache brings me here in the morning when he goes to work, and fetches me away in the evening when he returns, and the receipts are not so bad sometimes—as, when he was out of work, it was I who kept the house going."
"Well," said Viotti, "I will give you twenty francs for your violin. You can buy a much better one for that price; but let me try it a little."
He took the violin in his hands, and produced some extraordinary effects from it. A considerable crowd gathered around, and listened with curiosity and astonishment to the performance. Langlé seized on the opportunity, and passed around the hat, gathering a goodly amount of chink from the bystanders, which, with the twenty francs, was handed to the astonished old beggar.
"Stay a moment," said the blind man, recovering a little from his surprise; "just now I said I would sell the violin for twenty francs, but I did not know it was so good. I ought to have at least double for it."
Viotti had never received a more genuine compliment, and he did not hesitate to give the old man two pieces of gold instead of one, and then immediately retired from the spot, passing through the crowd with the tin-plate instrument under his arm. He had scarcely gone forty yards when he felt some one pulling at his sleeve; it was a workman, who politely took off his cap, and said:
"Sir, you have paid too dear for that violin; and if you are an amateur, as it was I who made it, I can supply you with as many as you like at six francs each."
This was Eustache; he had just come in time to hear the conclusion of the bargain, and, little dreaming that he was so clever a violin-maker, wished to continue a trade that had begun so successfully. However, Viotti was quite satisfied with the one sample he had bought. He never parted with that instrument; and, when the effects of Viotti were sold in London after his death, though the tin fiddle only brought a few shillings, an amateur of curiosities sought out the purchaser, and offered him a large sum if he could explain how the strange instrument came into the possession of the great violinist.
After resigning his position as director of the Grand Opéra, Viotti returned to London, which had become a second home to him, and spent his remaining days there. He died on the 24th of March, 1824.
V.
Viotti established and settled for ever the fundamental principles of violin-playing. He did not attain the marvelous skill of technique, the varied subtile and dazzling effects, with which his successor, Paganini, was to amaze the world, but, from the accounts transmitted to us, his performance must have been characterized by great nobility, breadth, and beauty of tone, united with a fire and agility unknown before his time. Viotti was one of the first to use the Tourté bow, that indispensable adjunct to the perfect manipulation of the violin. The value of this advantage over his predecessors cannot be too highly estimated.
The bows used before the time of François Tourté, who lived in the latter years of the last century in Paris, were of imperfect shape and make. The Tourté model leaves nothing to be desired in all the qualities required to enable the player to follow out every conceivable manner of tone and movement—lightness, firmness, and elasticity. Tartini had made the stick of his bow elastic, an innovation from the time of Corelli, and had thus attained a certain flexibility and brilliancy in his bowing superior to his predecessors. But the full development of all the powers of the violin, or the practice of what we now call virtuosoism on this instrument, was only possible with the modern bow as designed by Tourté, of Paris. The thin, bent, elastic stick of the bow, with its greater length of sweep, gives the modern player incalculable advantages over those of an earlier age, enabling him to follow out the slightest gradations of tone from the fullest forte to the softest piano, to mark all kinds of strong and gentle accents, to execute staccato, legato, saltato, and arpeggio passages with the greatest ease and certainty. The French school of violin-playing did not at first avail itself of these advantages, and even Viotti and Spohr did not fully grasp the new resources of execution. It was left for Paganini to open a new era in the art. His daring and subtile genius perceived and seized the wonderful resources of the modern bow at one bound. He used freely every imaginable movement of the bow, and developed the movement of the wrist to that high perfection which enabled him to practice all kinds of bowing with celerity. Without the Tourté bow, Paganini and the modern school of virtuosos, which has followed so splendidly from his example, would have been impossible. To many of our readers an amplification of this topic may be of interest. While the left hand of the violin-player fixes the tone, and thereby does that which for the pianist is already done by the mechanism of the instrument, and while the correctness of his intonation depends on the proficiency of the left hand, it is the action of the right hand, the bowing, which, analogous to the pianist's touch, makes the sound spring into life. It is through the medium of the bow that the player embodies his ideas and feelings. It is therefore evident that herein rests one of the most important and difficult elements of the art of violin-playing, and that the excellence of a player, or even of a whole school of playing, depends to a great extent on its method of bowing. It would have been even better for the art of violin-playing as practiced to-day that the perfect instruments of Stradiuarius and Guarnerius should not have been, than that the Tourté bow should have been uninvented.
The long, effective sweep of the bow was one of the characteristics of Viotti's playing, and was alike the admiration and despair of his rivals. His compositions for the violin are classics, and Spohr was