Nicolo Amati 1596-1684
Nicolò Amati was the fourth and greatest in a line of influential Cremonese violin makers. But being the “greatest” did not stop this man from having to live with great tragedy, pushed by circumstance he would change the way this craft was transmitted.
Join me as we ride the highs and lows of Nicolo Amati’s life.
Transcripts of Nicolo Amati Episodes
Ep 1 Nicolo Amati.
Once upon a time on the northern plains of Italy, there roamed a hero who went by the name of Romulus. You may have heard of him as the legendary founder of Rome, perhaps? But what's a strapping god like young man to do once he's founded one of the world's greatest cities? One day, as he was travelling through the Po Valley, Romulus came upon a group of people who were struggling to defend their village from the fierce Gaelic tribes roaming the region. The people were in need of a strong leader, and Romulus knew just the man for the job, himself. He gathered the people together and said, “I will help you defend your village from these invaders, but we must build a great fortress to protect ourselves”. The people thought this was such a great idea that they set to work building a mighty fortress immediately on the banks of the Po River.
The people began to dream of a great city that could rival the power and glory of Rome itself. Romulus, who had been a beloved leader of the people, heard their dreams and knew that he could help them achieve their goal. He said to them, If we are to build a great city, we must first establish a strong foundation. We must build our city upon the principles of justice, wisdom, and strength. And so the people of the village began to build their city. They laid the foundation stones with great care and constructed a wall around the city to protect it from invaders. Romulus oversaw the construction and he ensured that the city was built to the highest standards possible.
As the city grew, Romulus knew that it needed a name. He looked out over the fertile fields of the Po Valley and saw the bright flames of the forges that dotted the landscape. He turned to the people and said, We shall call this city Cremona, which means to burn, for it is the fires of our forges that will light the way to our greatness. And so the city of Cremona was born. It grew to become a powerful centre of trade and culture in northern Italy and was revered by many as a shining example of the principles of justice, wisdom, and strength that Romulus had taught them.
And this is the legend of how Romulus founded the city of Cremona.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine Lespets, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie au Mircourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, But here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery, that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to the story of Andrea Amati's two boys, the Amati brothers, Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati. In the last episode, we left them after they split the workshop and Antonio Amati went off to set up on his own, leaving Girolamo Amati with the house and shop to continue alone. The Amati brothers stopped working together in 1588, but if you remember the episodes on Gasparo Da Salo over in Brescia, you would realize that their Brescian competition was still working away, and in 1580, eight years earlier, a future employee of Da Salo's was born. His name was Gio Paolo Maggini, and he would go on to become a roaring success. Girolamo Amati, however, had other things on his mind. As I mentioned earlier, his first wife, Lucrenzia, had died shortly after having their daughter, Elizabeth, and his new wife, Laura, had a full house to look after and a famine looming on the horizon. Girolamo Amati, in this decade, made some beautiful instruments, including the one played by Ilya Izakovich in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, the Baron Knoop violin, and a painted violin for the French King Henry IV, to name a few. Girolamo Amati was now in his late 30s, and Laura was pregnant again. The news wasn't good. The Po River was rising and the plains around Cremona were flooding. The crops would be ruined again, like they had last year. The grain yields were a third of the previous years, and outbreaks of typhus were hitting the rural areas, affecting those who grew the grain, and the disease was even worse in the heavily populated cities.
After several years of bad weather, flooding, and storms, the cities were deeply in debt from having to buy grain from abroad. For the next two years, matters only got worse. News was coming from other cities on the Po Plains, Bologna had expelled the so called useless mouths, people without citizenship, beggars, jobless foreigners, and even those who were employed but not highly skilled in a trade. They were saying that it was to reserve the scant food supplies and to prevent overcrowding and outbreaks of epidemics. The governing bodies in the cities were afraid that the poor would revolt and steal the little food that was left in the city's reserves. But the people from rural areas where the crops were spoiled were flocking to the cities where they knew there were grain stores. Four fifths of the population lived in rural areas but would be turned away at the city gates. Bologna was 150km from Cremona. The same could happen here. Already 10, 000 people had died in that city and 30, 000 in the surrounding countryside. In just 10 years, Cremona had gone from a boom to simply struggling to stay afloat.
In 1594 and 1597, there was a famine and an economic downturn in the region. And it was also the year Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet was premiered. Throughout these lean years, Girolamo Amati was still making beautiful instruments, violas, violins, and cellos. His choice of materials were of the finest standard and so was his workmanship. The sound quality of his instruments differed as well from that of his competition in Brescia. But he was keeping afloat and even had a recent order for a set of instruments for the chapel of the new king of France, Henry IV, who had managed to survive the religious wars by converting to Catholicism, saying famously that Paris was worth a mass. Paris vaut bien une messe. This new set of instruments were to be decorated with the coat of arms and in Latin gold leaf red. King Henry IV, by the grace of God, King of France and Navarre. I speak to Benjamin Hebbert about the authenticity of the Amati Charles IX instruments and musicians at this time. Which is the end of Catherine de Medici's reign and the beginning of Henry of Navarre's reign.
Well, I think Catherine de Medici is, in France, is just such a huge influence. Charles IX is a child king and really has no power. And then he dies, is sickly. And then his brother who had become king of Poland is brought back and he becomes Henry IV. And then Catherine de Medici dies. I'm going to say 1587, I know I'm wrong, but around about that time there's a wonderful quote about, you know, people would give more regard to a dead goat than they would to Catherine de Medici. There was a point at which her power was over. Henry is assassinated within a year of her death, and Henry of Navarre, who is a Protestant, a Huguenot, comes in and becomes, becomes king. And at that time I think what we have to consider is that, you know, so right up until, right up until the end of the Valois dynasty, you know, it's all Catherine, it's all about Catherine de Medici, it's all about her, it's all about her triumphs and her successes. And then one of the things that happens there's been actually sort of various Musicologists have speculated that the Andrea Amatis aren't, aren't authentic. And one of the reasons is that the earliest French orchestral music is for a completely different orchestration than these Italian instruments offer. And what I think when you look at these things, the propaganda of the painting all over them is very specific to the Valois. The Valois were hated. Uh, they massacred enough Huguenots to be really, really hated. When Henry comes in, he's set, you know, they're played by Italian musicians. They're playing music in every corner of the court. Their eyes and ears, which are open for Catherine de Medici, they're, there's not. A lot of difference between a spy and a musician in the 16th century and there's, you know, right the way through spies and musicians are kind of the same things because they're the people who can pay attention to what other people are doing, they don't have any other agenda. So all of that's expelled. I think these things get, you know, stuck in a cupboard somewhere and from the point that Henry of Navarre comes in. So if we, if we only think of them in, you know, in the perspective of Catherine de Medici, then of course it makes sense.
And then, as things started to look a little better on the famine front, the sun poked its head out from behind the clouds, so to speak. On a cold winter's night in December 1596, Girolamo Amati and Laura had their sixth child, Niccolo Amati. His parents were probably just hoping he would survive the winter and his infancy. But Niccolò Amati would not only survive, he would go on to change the course of violin making history forever. I know that sounds rather dramatic, but he does, he really does.
While Niccolò Amati was busy being a baby, 60 kilometres away, a fellow Cremonese citizen, the talented composer, and accomplished viola da gamba player. Claudio Monteverdi was also about to change the history of music in his own way. Monteverdi was working at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga of Mantua, and had been for the last six years. He had had the best musical education, being a student of the wonderful Marc Antonio Ingenieri, the choir master, at the cathedral in Cremona, and was amazing people with his madrigals and other compositions. And so when the current maestro di cappella at the Mantuan court named Gesche de Wecht, (he was Flemish), died in 1596, the same year Niccolo Amati was born, Monteverdi just knew he really, really, really, really wanted that job. The new head of the strings department at the Mantuan court was his. It also paid really, really well. But did he get it? No. Who do you think did? It was Benedetto Pallavicino, the other guy from Cremona. That's who. Okay, so he was like 17 years older than Monteverdi, and in cahoots with the now dead Werth, the old head of the music department, but who was better? Well, Claudio obviously thought he was, and now he had to pretend that this totally didn't bother him. But his time would come. In an age when even royalty can drop dead of an ear infection, only five years later, Palavicino died of a fever. Monteverdi lost no time scratching off a letter to the Duke. He wrote to him, sending his CV via a long winded letter that went something like Blah, blah, blah, blah.
“And finally, the world having seen me persevere in the service of your excellency, with my great eagerness and with the goodwill on your part, after the death of the famous Mr. Strigio, and after that, the excellent Mr Geish And again, for a third time after that, the excellent Mr. Franceschi and No, and again lastly, after the death of the nearly adequate Signor Benedetto Palavicino, and I, who have sought not on the basis of merit, but on the grounds of the faithful and outstanding devotion that I have always displayed in my services of your excellency, the post now vacant in this sacred art.” That was one sentence.
This was an important CV, as you will see, because only a few years later, the most excellent Francesco Gonzaga would ask Montiverdi to write what would soon become a smash hit piece of music. An opera. At the same time I would have a good think about this job that appears to have an alarmingly high mortality rate.
Dr. Emily Haw, fashion historian.
so this is in the Mantuan Gonzaga court and what's interesting with this court is that even though they were very heavily aligned with the Habsburgs. And so essentially the Gonzagas of Mantua, they were kind of only minor players in Europe. And so what these, so they were in like Northern Italy and what these minor players had to do was Habsburgs essentially, like, really depend on big allies and relatives and to bolster their reputation and to protect their borders. And so they kind of aligned themselves with the Habsburgs and in turn they had to show loyalty to the Habsburgs but they couldn't really afford big armies. So what they did, they did it with cultural production, and they spent all their money through cultural production, and we see this in November 1598, and this kind of is almost like the forerunner for these operas of Monteverdi And so Margaret of Austria, who's the Queen of Spain, and so she was a Habsburg Margaret of Austria. She was married to become the Queen of Spain. She passed through Mantua on, for a five day stay on her way to Spain in November 1598. She was 14 years old and off to Spain to get married and Duke Vincenzo of Gonzaga arranged for five days of festivities and amusements and this included a very elaborate performance of Battista Guarani's pastoral play. It's all theatre. And he wanted to, the Duke Vincenzo, wanted to show that Mantua was as magnificent as any other court, but he did that through staging these spectacles. And we've got accounts of the time. These were just amazing apparently.
And it wasn't too far from Cremona, right?
So you know, it's actually, yeah, definitely, definitely, you know, depending where the best ones are. And so we know that, um, you know, he had also at court by 1607, 800 people including writers, artists, musicians, and even a troupe of commedia dell'arte actors, enjoyed Gonzaga patronage. They're also patrons of the Flemish artists Peter Paul Rubens, and so these You know, spectacles held sort of 10 years earlier, you know.
And Monteverdi.
Yeah, Monteverdi is definitely one of these patrons. Yeah, definitely. These lavish costumes and that's the thing with these Medici costumes as well, and then the Monteverdi costumes for these, they're being designed to appeal to contemporary tastes. And so, to give you sort of a sense of these spectacles, the play for Maria of Austria, this big costume, you know, music drama, it's got more than 80 different ones in rich fabrics and colours. And that was used for the inaugural performance of Teatro Olympico. And, in portraits of the era and the shoulders are, we can see in these portraits, the neckline sits right down around the upper forearms part. Off the shoulder dress. Here we've got this here in a Mary Princess Royal portrait, and we've got like this really low down, cut down, and it would have been very, very difficult to raise your arms and your elbows would have been, you know, set right down. And we see this a lot in like the Peter Lely portraits. Yes, so there's a lovely portrait of a woman playing a gamba. You sort of see with that, and she's got one of these gowns on.
A bit of talk about menswear, so this is like a lot of cloth with gold and silver embroidery, and again, that's sort of like a rich flex. Shoes by that period, we're getting like high heeled shoes, and we're starting to see, even before that in the 1600s now, moving forward in that decade, the farthingale, what's happening with the farthingale is the hems are rising. So we're getting these high heeled shoes for the first time with red, heels and, square toes. But yeah, these sloping shoulders that we're seeing in the 1650s would have contributed to that. You know, the elbows being kept closer to the body. You know, keeping your body front on the instrument being held lower against the layers of fabric and then playing like that being everything being held close in.
The classic gamba playing posture would have worked, but.
Oh, would have worked perfectly.
But, uh, having to stick your. elbows out or lift an instrument high just wouldn't have worked.
No, no. So that's why the instruments, you know, we do still have pictures of violins being played quite low and held quite low.
Although Niccolo Amati would have the good fortune to survive plague, pestilence, war and disease, his life would not have been an easy one. He grew up in a particularly turbulent time, even for Cremonese standards. In the marketplace, Girolamo Amati would have participated in discussions about the state of the city and the Spanish governor, Juan Fernandez de Velasco, stated the need to fortify the city's walls, noting that the citizens were “numerous and warlike”.
And if anyone needed a defence wall, they did. If they needed fixing, which they obviously did, who was going to do it? The city's defences and other repair and maintenance appears to have been an ongoing discussion with no one really wanting to fit the bill for the works needed inside the city walls.
But as time would tell, the state of the city's walls would be the least of their problems in the years to come. The Amati household would have definitely been a loud one with 10 children of varying ages, 6 girls and 4 boys. There was Niccolo's eldest half-sister, Elizabeth, who was about 14 years older than him. His oldest brother, Roberto, who was 9 years older than him, had joined the army. His second eldest brother was training to join the clergy, and his parents were probably encouraging some of his sisters to do the same, as dowries for 6 girls were not going to be easy to come by. He also had a little brother who died as a small child and another younger brother Stefano that we know nothing about. All we know for sure is that Niccolo Amati would help his father making instruments and soon would come to be his right hand man. In 1607 Niccolo Amati would have been 11 and most likely helping out his father in the workshop. The Amati family still had their fine reputation and Girolamo Amati had an order for a tenor viola for Pope Paul V.
The painted decorations on the back would be done by a local artist and then returned to the workshop for its final coat of varnish before being sent off. Today this viola has been reduced and the painted griffin on the centre of the instrument has been modified somewhat. I think someone tried to fix it up but it looks like a damp bunyip in between two cherubs unfortunately.
But business was good in these years. Quite a number of instruments left the workshop and a variety of violins of various sizes. Violas and bass instruments were produced. They were at the centre of musical life in Cremona. The workshop had a steady flow of musicians, music dealers, church musicians, clergy and messengers representing the nobility, so that they would have had news early on about the new opera coming to have its debut in town.
What is amazing in Renaissance Italy is that artistically, the area was a shining star, even though politically and economically it was in a free fall. Areas poverty stricken and ravaged by war and heavy taxation. And yet there were amazing motets, madrigals and operas emerging from all of this.
Emily Brayshaw.
So Orfeo, uh, and, and the spectacles in the Mantuan court, the use of the area in front of the stage was also used performance. And there was also an active involvement of the audience and this kind of sought a new balance, scholars have said, in order to connect this fluid continuum of stage and auditorial. And it was kind of this representation of openness peculiar to courtly circles. So, you know, sometimes musicians would have been on the stage or perhaps in front of the stage or don't know that necessarily there was a separate pit all the time. Or, you know, whether they're sort of coming out and playing and then going away, or whether they're coming out on stage performing while some people sing and then there are sort of lots of different. Things that they could be doing. And the Orfeo actually came to Cremona.
Girolamo Amati had just had his sixth child, which was Niccolo Amati. And so he would have been a baby. He would have been about, about two when this had happened. And they'd actually staged this in Cremona. So he could have met, there might have been like a Trip with the, going with them. It could have been local musicians. Um.
So this is something that potentially the Amati family could have gone to and seen.
Oh, look, and you know, if you are making and playing and very much involved in this world, part of keeping up to date is to watch performances, look at performances. Keeps you up to date on trends, tips, techniques. Styles, aesthetics, all of these things are, you know, really crucial to not just like keeping abreast of your skills, but also in a way, you know, the Amatis are part of the tastemakers of this era with their incredible instruments. They're setting quite literally the tone.
And so seeing and hearing how these instruments are then used and engaged with. Because the, Charles IX instruments, they were made, when Catherine and Charles did their grand tour. Right. But I'm, I'd be, I wouldn't be surprised if those same instruments were used, years later in the Ballet de la Reine because they were, you know, they fitted in with all the bling that were covered with gold and decorations and that was. And they were this beautiful, this beautiful consort of instruments that the royal family had. And that's the thing too, like you don't just chuck it away.
All anyone could talk about in musical circles was Cremona's very own Claudio Monteverdi's opera. It was supposed to be an amazing spectacle, mixing singing, dancing and drama. Moving on a few years, as Niccolo was helping his father in the workshop after school, the world of music was being rethought. Where once it was being used to convey the omnipotence of God, his creativity and power. Composers were now using it to convey the human mind and emotions, to feel love, rage, jealousy and passion. Shakespeare was writing plays in England, drawing on classical drama and using Greek and Roman plots to recreate political commentaries of the day. In France, it was Ballet, and in Italy, it was Opera.
It all started in Florence, where a group who called themselves the Camerata met. They were poets, composers, artists, scientists, and philosophers. It was another one of those academies I spoke about earlier. They wanted to recreate ancient Greek theatre, and they believed it was done through song, not the spoken word. The group would meet to discuss what the music of the Greeks would have been and delved into conversations about astrology, literature, philosophy, and of course, singing. One of the members was Vincenzo Galilei, father of the Galileo Galilei.
After years of talking about it, they finally decided to do it. They would create the ultimate art form that would combine music, poetry, drama, dance and design. Things got off to an awkward start in 1600 when they staged a very heavy and somewhat depressing production at a wedding. It was Eurydice's. Totally not reading the room with themes of doomed love and man's arrogance. They were not feeling the vibe at this raucous wedding feast, so that sort of deadpanned. But things really took off when the philandering, hardcore gambling and sometimes murderous Vincenzo Gonzaga, over in Mantua, decided he would like one of these new opera thingies of his own. But the music this time would be written by a young man working at his court, Claudio Monteverdi, a talented composer from Cremona.
This opera was called Orfeo, and like that Poof. Opera. Took off. Fifteen years earlier, the younger Monteverdi had come to the Mantuan court to work for the Gonzagas. Every Friday evening, there would be a musical soiree. Monteverdi would write and perform madrigals, and they would be performed in private concerts above the Duke's own rooms, in a mirrored trapezoidal room. Their reflections would have been reflected into infinity. It must have been psychedelic. When Monteverdi wrote the opera, he wrote about human emotions, drama and passion. It was an immediate success. After being performed at the Gonzaga Court, it went to Cremona, Turin, Florence and Milan. To accompany the singers, Monteverdi had an ensemble of instruments. A harpsichord, a chamber organ, cello, viola da gamba. Harp, and different types of lutes. Normally you would just pick one or two of these instruments, but Monteverdi used all of them. Way to go Claudio.
So here we are in Cremona at the end of the 1500s. The Amati family are in the midst of musically exciting times, and Niccolo is a young boy growing up destined for great things as well.
And this brings us to the end of this episode on the Amati brothers. But stay tuned for the next one as I talk to Timo Vecchio Valve as he tells me all about the fascinating history of the Amati Brothers cello he plays on.
It's a very cool story. James Bond is involved.
This brings us to the end of this Amati Brothers episode. In the next, I will still be talking about Girolamo Amati and his work, but also introducing Niccolo Amati, his son, perhaps the most well known of the Amatis. The father and son's lives and careers overlap, and so do their episodes. I finished this story in the late 1500s, and just a few kilometres away, in Brescia, Gio Paolo Maggini is living and working at the same time as Niccolo Amati, and will be hit with similar catastrophes.
So very soon I will be going sideways and leaving Cremona and the Amati story to fill you in on the Brescian makers before coming back to finish the Amati dynasty. Thank you very much for listening to this episode and I hope you'll join me next time for the Violin Chronicles. Right now, you're listening to a live recording of the Boccherini.
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Ep 2. Nicolo Amati
The man known by many in the streets of Cremona, or the poor houses, went by the name of Omobono, or Good Man. As he crossed the Piazza del Commune, he stopped to give a coin to a beggar, huddled in a corner, and continued on to his destination. He was visiting a family that had fallen on hard times and were in dire need of help, help that he could give them.
Omobono Tucenghi was a tailor and fabric merchant who lived in Cremona in the 12th century. His whole life he had felt compassion for those less fortunate, and a need to make a difference in the world in which he found himself. More days than not, you could find Omobono distributing alms from his seemingly bottomless purse to the poor and needy of Cremona, helping all those who crossed his path.
Over time, Omobono's need to help others did not diminish, quite the opposite in fact, and in his 50s, he decided to stop his trade altogether to dedicate himself to good works. The only fly in the ointment appears to have been his family. His wife and children were not too keen on their father and husband giving away the family fortune to apparently random strangers he found on the street. But this did not deter him as he continued on helping those in need, giving money from his purse that was always full of coins and never emptied by divine providence, and attending Mass every evening. One of these evenings, in the church of St. Giles, On a cool November night, he sang Gloria for the last time, crossed his arms over his chest and fell to the ground. At first, no one noticed the devout Omobono, but when the time came for him to read the Gospels and he did not come forward, his fellow churchgoers approached to find him dead. The citizens of Cremona immediately venerated him as a saint and Sicardo, Bishop of Cremona, personally went to Rome to represent the cause and canonization of Omobono. He wrote in his article “At that time, a simple, very faithful and devoted man lived in Cremona, who was called Omobono. In his death, and with his intercession, God performed many miracles”. Pope Innocent III, satisfied with the official investigation into his life and miracles, canonized Omobonos just after two years, in 1199.
That's pretty quick if you were wondering. And this is the story of the life of Sant Omobono, who is not only the patron saint of Cremona, but also the patron saint of merchants, textile workers, tailors, business people, and entrepreneurs. Some might say that the real miracle here is that Omobono was an honest businessman. But he is also remarkable in that he was the first person canonized despite being both a layman, not in religious orders, and a father of a family. He was neither a martyr nor a king. And speaking of Omobono, there is a podcast for violin makers or violin enthusiasts, if you would like to discover it, called simply Omo. You really should check it out. That podcast is named after one of Antonio Stradivari's sons, Omobono, who was probably named after this Omobono. But now on with the podcast.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School of Mirecourt some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de lutherie in Mirecourt.
As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often, when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love, artistic genius Revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Nicolo Amati was born in 1596 into a country ravaged by famine and disease on one hand, but on the other it existed in the midst of artistic endeavour, exploration and invention. Cremona, the city Niccolo Amati was born into, was not an out of the way sleepy village, it was a crossroads literally for traffic and ideas from across Europe, filled with merchants and artisans. Take, for example, the case of Sofinisba Anguissola, a Cremonese girl who was one of five sisters, all accomplished artists, having been schooled in the Cremonese fashion. She was taken to the Spanish royal court to paint portraits and led a fascinating life. Worthy of an episode in itself. The question to this day remains as to whether she painted the famed Charles IX instruments made by Nicholas's grandfather.
During this time, and in Cremona as well, musically there was instrumental music bursting forth such as the Canzona, the Ricciare, the Fantasia, and dance inspired compositions quite different to vocal music. In France there was ballet, and in Italy, opera. Music was an essential part of civic, religious, and courtly life in the Renaissance, and Cremona was no different. In Casa Amati, Nicolo Amati was a middle child, born into a sea of children, about ten. He was probably number six. His oldest brother, Roberto, joined the army, and his second eldest brother became a priest. He had six sisters, and his youngest brother died presumably as a child, leaving Nicolo Amati the only son to carry on the family business. Nicolo Amati would become the godfather of the modern day violin. He would have attended the local parish school until the age of about 12, and then in 1610 when he was about 14 years old and truly starting his apprenticeship with his father, news came that his uncle Antonio Amati had died. Niccolo Amati’s father and his brother used to have a workshop together that they had inherited from their father. But before Nicolo Amati was born, the brothers had had a disagreement and split the shop, each brother going his own way. They may not have been particularly close, especially if the rift between the two brothers was still a thing, but perhaps 22 years on, Girolamo Amati and his brother may have patched things up. Especially as they were still both living in the same street. Moving on four years, a sad event affected the Amati household once again. The 18 year old Nicolo Amati and his family received the news of an accident on the Po River near Vigivano. Roberto, his older brother, was killed in an exercise during his military service. Nicolo Amati would have felt the responsibility to continue helping his father even more now that there was one less brother to help out. In 1616, the Amati workshop, with Girolamo Amati and Nicolo Amati working, produced two five stringed cellos. Nicolo Amati was About 20 at this time, so we can easily imagine him helping his father with these instruments.
353 years after they were made, in 1969, they were acquired by the Fleming family in England. And today, one of these cellos is played in the Australian Chamber Orchestra.
I spoke to Timo Veikko Valve, Principal Cellist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, about this instrument and what it's like for him playing on it.
My name is Timo Veikko Valve, and I'm the Principal Cello of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. I've been in that role for the past 16 years, and I come from Finland originally, but I guess, Sydney and Australia is now my home. So at the moment I'm playing a 1616 Brothers Amati cello, which I have had the privilege of playing for the past Five or six years. I'm a very lucky owner of this quite, quite special cello, in many ways. I used to play a Joseph Fillius Guarneri cello before that. Which I thought was the ideal cello. And in some ways still, It's a very, I guess, softly spoken and chamber music kind of has a character of chamber music in, in its kind of personality. Whereas the Amati is a more robust and more, assertive and actually can be quite loud. So when I joined the orchestra in 2007, one of the first things that I was asked to do is to go cello shopping. So I found the Guarneri for myself, and uh, so it was my Not bad. No, it was, it was really amazing experience actually to kind of go into that world, which I obviously hadn't visited before, you know, going instrument shopping of that level in London and yeah, funnily enough, the first instrument that I saw on that trip was the Guarneri. It was a bit of love at first sight, but I mean there were a lot of, a lot of other instruments that we tried on that trip, you know, um, Stradivarius, uh, Montagnana, so like Really top end cellos, um, worth much more than what the Guarneri is actually worth, but, uh, but still somehow it's just, it sounded like me.
So anyway, that was my first relationship for 10 years. And now I'm enjoying life with the Amati. Originally, it was built as a five string cello. It was modified into a normal conventional four string cello in the mid-1900s. It was previously owned by a British rather famous cellist called Amaryllis Fleming. Well, she was I guess a superstar of the, of the time. So she owned, a Guarneri, and two Brothers Amati. And both of those Brothers Amati were actually five string cellos. I've met the other one, which still today remains as a five string cello in its original uncut form, which is amazing. So it's a, type of cello that was more common during that time. Nowadays it doesn't really have a, it doesn't get played often. I mean, there's a very limited kind of Baroque repertoire that utilizes the five string cello, but, unfortunately. That's why a lot of those five string cellos have been converted into conventional four string cellos.
Easier to sell.
Easier to sell, yeah. So that's what happened with this one. But what I think is also quite amazing about this particular, my cello is that, and perhaps this is because it was a five-string cello, so it wasn't played so often after it was built. It was, I don't know, perhaps it has sat in a collection somewhere for a long time, but I think in the, certificate, they describe it as a unprecedented amount of original varnish. So if you look at the cello, it looks actually, it has a bit of wear and tear, but it looks relatively healthy and new, you know, given that it's been built around 1616. To have so much of original varnish, especially in the back, um, is quite amazing. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's. It's quite rare.
I remember the first time in the workshop, it was just the instrument and I walked in and I just said, Ooh, what's that?
Antoine was like, Oh, that' Tipi’s. Like, it's quite striking. Like you kind of stop and look at it.
There's another element, I mean, I guess, so like a lot of, a lot of instruments, they would have been cut down, and this one was cut down as well at some point. I guess there's no concrete date for this particular instrument, but the dendrochronology says that, um, that the latest are from 1612, but they can also say. Based on that research that same, same word from the same tree was used in other Brothers Amati instruments, another viola and another cello. So there's, there's, um, kind of a concrete link, which is quite fascinating that they can do that.
Yes. Yeah, it's cool. And it has, it has double purfling, doesn't it?
Yes. Yeah. Which, which I guess is, as far as I know, is not normal for an Amati instrument. But that would have been added when it was re edged. Someone, someone said that it's probably been done to kind of give a visual kind of distraction of the, I mean, the edging work is fine. Perfect. Like you, you can't really see anything. It's, you know, you really have to look in, you can see a couple of spots where you can see seams, but it's done so well that, yeah, I don't know. It's probably just a trick of an eye. When the instrument was introduced to us about six years ago, I wasn't particularly looking for another instrument because I was, you know, I was in a very happy relationship with the old one.
Then the orchestra decided, oh, it's, you It's a great opportunity let's just go for it. Purchased it without a clear view who would play it and but it came quite obvious relatively kind of naturally that it's a cello that kind of needs to sit in the principal cello role or the principal cello seat kind of has the ability to well as a soloist or as a leader to kind of rise above just in kind of power rise above the orchestra if needed.
I really enjoyed the collaboration with the Guarneri, it kind of, it taught me so much about what's possible, what's actually possible on a cello, but on the other hand, that particular cello was very moody. It was very fickle at times,
It, would come unglued a lot. Yeah. I remember that. It would, it would, yeah, it would, it would react to the environment a lot.
It's quite sensitive. Yeah. So for traveling, it would, it would have a lot of bad days and, and then it would have good days as well. Once I met the Amati, things are really easy with this, like, and I can just trust it and kind of let it go. It's kind of almost doing all the hard work for me. So that was also, that was obviously, um, an aspect that was, was, um, kind of appealing. It's a colleague that kind of is making my life very easy at the moment, you know, it's just allowing me to do, I guess, even more things because certain things are just, just easier. And it might be just that physically I have to do less because the power of the instrument, the natural power of the instrument is so generous.
Just play it lightly. Let it happen.
Yeah, it's interesting you've got, like you were saying, there's your personality, your role in the orchestra, the instrument's personality, and then how your instrument fits in with the other instruments. That's right. There’re all these relationships.
Exactly.
Happening. And the bow as well, that's another.
Absolutely, yeah. You know, it definitely, there has to be a, like, it's so obvious if there's no link between the player and the instrument, regardless of what it is, if it's, you know, the best instrument in the world. If there's no chemistry. You can't force them to be friends.
So it's almost instant. Like you can sometimes when we try instruments, you just know directly that, you know, this particular violin that Hayley picks up, it just wouldn't fit her at all and then it would be fine, you know, played by Richard or someone else, but yeah, so it's definitely. I think it's very important that the instruments are, that you forge a relationship with the instrument yourself and find a kind of a comfortable place with the instrument and 'cause it's your, it really is your partner in crime.
So, yeah, I think we, you know, we're obviously very lucky to have all these instruments and kind of being able to go about it in that way that we, we are not, someone just buys a instrument X and then gives it to the orchestra and say, Hey, you have to play this. Sometimes it happens like that, but often it's us looking for the perfect instrument for the player, for the organisation, for the, you know, with the sound of the group in mind and the sort of values that we want to emphasise.
You're auditioning a new housemate.
Yeah, yeah, totally, totally. Oh, and, and it's not like this is an orchestra where there's like one amazing instrument. We're not anymore. No. And it's like, you've got all these. Yeah, it happened. It happened actually relatively quickly. I mean, it used to kind of be like that.
It's it's obviously has to start from somewhere. The first instrument was a Guadagnini violin and that just opened the gates. And relatively soon after that, it became this thing in Australia that, you know, just people wanted to support arts in this particular way and buying instruments. So going from one instrument to what I think at the moment we're sitting at about 10 instruments all happened in relatively small time span, which is amazing.
Yeah, it's exciting. And you've got the new Strad as well.
There's a new violin in the family as well. Yeah, which is just good.
So I was wondering this, so this instrument, what's it like playing, um, music that if Say you're playing on a modern instrument, Bach, for example, or then you're playing Bach on an instrument that's written, like the time that it was made, do you think it adds something to how you play?
It's an interesting question, especially because, you know, in its original form, this cello, when it had five strings, one of the most prolific, The thing that the five string cello was meant for, or what it had in its repertoire, was the Sixth Suite by Bach. That would have been probably the biggest single work that that five-string cello would play.
It's interesting to kind of think that, you know, That's probably the music that's been most played on that cello. And also that when Bach wrote the cello suites, this cello would have already been 120 years old. It would have been an instrument that inspired Bach to write the music. Maybe it even met him at some point, who knows.
And do you set it up with gut strings? I do sometimes, yeah.
How does that go?
Well, yeah, I think all cellos love gut strings. Love to have gut on. At least I've kind of felt that every time I've been with different cellos, if I put gut on, I can kind of feel that they, they feel, the instrument feels happy. Like they, they're relaxed and often I feel that they just open up. Much more than what they would be in a kind of a more modern, tight setup. What I've found that even if you do it occasionally, It kind of, it just, it just gives the cello a bit of a holiday. And then when you go back to the modern setup, It's still kind of, the cello still feels refreshed. I encourage people to do that, Even if you don't want to play gut strings all the time, Or repertoire that you would play on gut strings all the time. It's really interesting to just try it and give your instrument a holiday for a couple of weeks.
A spa.
Yeah. A gut spa. Yeah. It's a weird thought, but it's really, especially with the Guarneri, I felt like the first time I did it, I learned so much more about the instrument. Even though, you know, neck angles and that sort of thing would have been changed from how they were. Originally, it's still kind of, it still feels like that just with changing the strings you're kind of, you know, time traveling with the cello into a place where it was previously like, you know, just jumping back two or three hundred years and meeting that same cello, again. So it's, yeah, it's interesting.
So you're going on a time travelling spa retreat with your cello.
Yes, yes, this is perfect. I should write a book. A time travelling cellist. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think actually another, another interesting aspect of the cello is that, of this particular cello, is that, so Amaryllis Fleming was half-sister of Ian Fleming, the famous James Bond author.
So, so there's um, I guess literature and that sort of stories are kind of linked to this, this instrument. And I guess, you know, potentially, well, not even potentially, I think, you know, because she was a cellist.
And a secret agent.
Well, that inspired him, Ian, to write, uh, I think it was, I don't remember what the movie is now, but, but there's a, there's a couple of scenes where Cello is, uh, is in a main role and I think even her name is mentioned and, anyway.
Yeah, there's always those play on words. Yeah. Girolamo Amati would have made your cello.
I guess I wanted to ask you that question, maybe you know better, because I find it weird that Antonio kind of stopped his affiliation to the business quite early on, but still the label says Brothers for another almost 40 years.
Yeah, so he sort of held back a bit and then when his brother died, he like started using, quite put the label everywhere, but he was still actually using the label before and people think it was more like a brand. Right. Even so, even though the instrument would have been totally made by. Girolamo Amati.
Yeah, it's like when you've got like a company and it'll break up, but they keep that. Yeah. So you keep, you keep the label. And I personally think that maybe he just couldn't be bothered getting more labels printed. Could be. Yeah. So I always thought that, you know, Oh, I mean, uh, that it feels weird that he wouldn't want to then kind of, I guess, advertise himself as the, you know, the prolific main maker.
We don't really know, but I, yeah, the main theory is that it was the brand. It was quite successful. Keep it that way. It would just be confusing. And people were like, actually, I ordered a Brothers Amati instrument, not a, what's this?
Yeah. What's that horrible name that I can't pronounce?
That keeps changing from Girolamo to Heronimous. Exactly. The Ian Fleming thing. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, that's a picture of her. And I think that's, that's the Strad that she's playing. But she, yeah, she had, like I said, she has had Stradivarius, a Guarneri and two Amatis.
So, they were like wealthy to begin with.
I think so. So, she would have been prolific just like the heart of her career would have been like between the worlds, I guess. So, I guess the market would have been a bit more different as well for instruments. And um, I think it says that she gave the German premiere of the Elgar cello Concerto. So very kind of big stuff and, but then was, was in a way shadowed by Jacqueline du Pre kind of stepping onto the scene. And at that point she felt like she needs to then do something else. You know, now Jacqueline is the new cello soloist and you know, I guess there's only room for one. And she started to tour the circuit and so Amaryllis Fleming was getting less, less soloist work than what she had before. One thing that she So what she then decided to do is to look into the, into the performance practice of the Bach suites in their original form.
So that's, that's probably why she actually acquired those two.
Yeah, that's when she bought those two cellos. I believe so. So that she would start performing the suites. I mean, the suites were already obviously being played, but mostly in a kind of a modern sense. And she was one of the first cellists that really looked into the, uh, performance practice and started performing them with instruments that were, yeah, more suited to them, you know, probably using gut strings and then definitely for the sixth suite to use a five-string cello.
That's nice to be able to go, look, I'm the Bach suite. Yeah. I'm going to buy myself two cellos. Two Amatis, please. It's quite, um, it's like, I don't, know if anyone today, like a musician, you know, regardless of, uh, regardless of how wealthy they may be, I don't think anyone today would own a collection of instruments, like a musician.
And she owned them outright. They were hers? I think so, the family, you know, so, so. Because often they're like lent. No, no, I think there's a mention in there that family was wealthy, but yeah, the family did acquire all those instruments for her and now subsequently they've been maintained by this foundation
In the years following the order for these two cellos the inhabitants of Cremona may not have realized the true state of affairs that were surrounding them there was a delayed arrival in the Spanish silver from the Americas to the Spanish court, so Philip II stopped paying his people in Milan.
Cremona made up part of the Duchy of Milan, and mucking up the market, they were in recession now, and then in 1627, the first signs of the dreaded plague started appearing in the countryside and in the larger cities. Nevertheless, as time passed, the Amati's business prospered, and Nicolo Amati enters his mid-twenties. He's living with his parents. His father, Girolamo Amati, is in his late fifties. Some of his brothers and sisters are still at home, and it is life as usual for the time being. Back in the workshop, instruments being produced clearly had Nicolo's hand in style, even though they are labelled with the Amati Brothers label. Their craftsmanship can be seen to differ. Nicolò Amati would make more elongated corners than his father, and his archings were conceptually different, being progressively less scooped inside the edges. He was different to his father also, in that he used maple with a pronounced flame, and the wood was less smooth.
Slab cut on the maple. This type of wood is often seen on the brothers Amati instruments. As Nicolo Amati was the only son helping his father in the busy workshop, they enlisted the help of the two husbands of Nicolo's sisters, his brothers in law, Vincenzo and Domenico. We're not sure what they did exactly in the workshop, but Vincenzo was still working in the shop into the late 1620s, when the lives of the Amatis would be changed forever.
Carlo Chiesa, violin maker, expert and author, living in Milan.
And at some point Girolamo needed, also more people working with him. And since he had only one, male son, but he had daughters he hired, the husbands of his daughters. Vincenzo Tili and Domenico Moneghini. We know their names and we know that they joined because at some point they split.
Nicolò Amati again divided his workshop with his brothers in law. And so since there exists these, notarial documents in which they divide the workshop or one, sells his partnership to the other, we know that before that they were working together. But this gives us an idea of how important the business was. It was a business in which there were three people, three serious, three partners.
So, after he split with his brother's in law, I imagine they stayed in the same street, too.
No, I'm not sure about that, because, they were all in the same street. Yeah, but, this was in the span, I'm, convincing a story that, comes out of a span of 40 years, so it's not exactly.
Okay. But we are speaking of men like we are today, so of course they work together side by side for years, and at some point, possibly, they say, I go, that's it. You want to be the owner, you keep it, but I go. I don't think we know exactly what, the husbands of the daughters, of Amati did, one of them was called the Dei Cornetti, which probably means he was a musician.
From the 1580s, things had begun to strain in Cremona. The cracks in the market could be seen to those who knew where to look. In the 1590s, with famine and economic downturn, it was a slippery slope. A series of setbacks and disasters had accumulated to create a crisis. Individually, they would have been overcome, but the one after the other was devastating to the economy. After the famine, there was a moleskin crisis. That was their textile industry. In the 1600s, there was a collapse of the wool guild. Another of their city's biggest industries. There were more famines in the 1620s, and then boom, in the 1630s, plague killed almost half its inhabitants. This came about with the War of the Mantuan Succession.
This was the war that James Beck was talking about in the Previous episode, where everyone decided to invade Mantua after their Duke died. And there was a bit of a hoo ha about who the Duchy belonged to now. It was basically a war between the French and the Spanish about a highway. This ended up causing the spread of disease and wiping out almost half the population of the country in some areas.
But this is a story for the next episode, where we will see the disappearance of many violin makers, but also the beginning of something big in the history of the violin. Please do go ahead and follow the podcast and leave a comment or rating. I'm always delighted every time I hear from listeners and every rating and comment helps the podcast to happen.
A big thank you to my guests, Carlo Chiesa and Timo Veikko Valve for joining me today. If you would like to support the podcast financially, that would be amazing. And you can head over to patreon. com forward slash the violin chronicles for that. There are bonus episodes I will be putting up on that platform also alongside all the current.
Also, if you would like to contact me, there is the Violin Chronicles at gmail. com. And I have Instagram with the handle, The Violin Chronicles. That's where I put a lot of images from these episodes up. And I'll leave you now with Tipi playing his 1616 Amati Brothers. Cello.
Ep 3. Nicolo Amati
Have you ever heard someone say, this is an Amati Violin? And you've thought, Ooh, wow, that must be old. And then they say, it's a Girolamo Amati or a Nicolo Amati or an Andrea Amati. But by this time, if you're anything like me, you're lost and your mind is wondering, and you can't remember which one of those Amatis it's supposed to be. Is it the grandfather or one of the brothers? Is this the Amati that's supposed to be worth more than the others? And if so, is it the right period in his making? And it is. In the end, you just settle for, it's an Amati and the rest will stay in the murky swamp of information you can't quite remember.
Well, no more, because hopefully by now, if you've been following these episodes in order, because they are in chronological order, you will know that we are now at Nicolo Amati, Andreas grandchild, Girolamo's son, the golden boy. So stick around and we'll see together how a devastating pandemic pushed one to transform the world of violin making.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French violin making school some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine, and war, but also of love. Artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning, and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin.
Welcome back to another episode in which we will be looking at perhaps the most famous maker of the Amati family, Nicolo. So far I have spoken about the grandfather, Andrea, and his father and uncle, Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati, the brothers. And now Nicolo Amati continues on with the family tradition by making fine instruments and waiting for middle age to get married and have a family. Except in Nicolo's case, things are quite a bit more dramatic for himself and his family, as you will see in this episode.
They were at it again, the Spanish, the French, the Germans, and the Piedmontese, fighting over who got what in yet another war, except this time, soldiers managed to spread the Black Death, and in 1628, Cremona was badly hit. Troops passing through, as they always did. to cross the Po River, were carrying and all too willing to spread the disease. This time it was the French and German troops that brought the illness with them and the effects were devastating. The plague was so deadly in this part of Italy in the years surrounding 1630 that it would have very nearly killed every violin maker in the city. This was indeed the case in Brescia where Maggini was working, bringing an end to the instrument makers there. And the history of the violin could have been very different if it were not for the genetically robust and freakishly lucky Nicolo Amati. Well, maybe not so lucky, as most of his friends and family died. But at least lucky not to die, and lucky for us, because thanks to Nicolo Amati’s survival, we have the violin that we do today. So what happened? Well, there was a war. The War of the Mantuan Succession. This was the war James Beck was talking about in a previous episode where everyone decided to invade Mantua after their Duke died, and there was a bit of a hoo ha about who it belonged to now. It was basically a war between the French and the Spanish about a highway. News from Milan was that people were falling ill with the bubonic plague and the city was quarantined. But over the carnival season, as you do, they loosened the restrictions and the disease took off again, spreading like wildfire. 60, 000 people would die in Milan, a city with a population of 130, 000. Things weren't much better in Cremona. In the autumn of 1630, Nicolo Amati’s father, Girolamo Amati, died, and soon after his mother followed by two of his sisters and other members of the family.
Benjamin Hebert, expert and dealer in Oxford, talks about how the plague spread and made its way to Cremona.
And one of the things that we learn about with the Amatis is the plague, which wipes out the brothers Amati. It's Girolamo Amati who survives until 1613, dies in the plague. All of the Brescian makers die in the plague. And actually, we talk about the plague as if it's one thing, like COVID has been over the last few years, but actually that plague was a result of Wars in Europe, where the Austrians Who are the Habsburgs, so Naples at the bottom of Italy, and they wanted to get their troops up through Cremona into Italy itself so that they could then go over to Austria to support, because actually more than troops, food to supply the troops from Naples is really important. So the French invade northern Italy. Northern Italy, in order to stop this supply line from the, from the south, and it's that huge change in population, which creates plague after plague, and also suffering, and a scarcity of resources because the army is there and Cremona is just the middle of a war zone. It's, it's one of the most important crossings connecting the two parts of the Habsburg Empire.
So the plague comes to town in 1630 and Discretion is not its middle name. But the city it hit was not the thriving Cremona that Andrea Amati and the brothers Amati had grown up in. By now, it was a city that was in a vulnerable and weakened state. It just wasn't going so well. We find Nicolo in his late 20s, working with his aging father in their family workshop. I spoke to John Gagne about the curious circumstances leading up to the devastating plague, and to understand what was going on, we have to zoom out and take a look at the big picture.
I'm John Gagné. I'm a senior lecturer in history at the University of Sydney, and I work mostly on European history from the 13th to the 18th centuries. The big context to put this all in is what scholars call the Little Ice Age, which starts in the 1550s. And this is in one way the catalyst for all of these events. The plague, the famine, the war, is that it's temperatures began dropping from the 1550s forward probably caused by a variety of environmental factors. It could have been, you know, the explosion of South Pacific volcanoes, which changed the global environmental pattern. It could have been, you know, changes to the jet stream. Whatever it was, it meant that Europe from the 1550s forward became colder than it had been in a thousand years. And this was, I think, the context against which all of these things were set, was that Europe was becoming colder and all the knowledge that had been built up for agriculture and disease prevention was now faced with a new problem, which was that things were collapsing. So in many ways, it does echo the world we inhabit today, where we're encountering more bushfires and more floods. They were encountering a similar, although different, different phenomenon in reality, but it was leading to grain failures, to, you know, crop failures, to animals giving, you know, less milk or producing offspring at different paces. And so the Little Ice Age just lasts until the 19th century, is part of the the big context of the sort of crisis that emerges around 1600, which is how do you support life in Europe when the environment is changing around you?
So we have climate change, pandemics, famine, it's starting to sound familiar, but ultimately things were not looking good for the citizens of Cremona at this point. How did the plague affect the lives of Cremonese people in the early 17th century?
So I guess the first thing to say is that the plague had been around, you know, for hundreds of years already and recurred frequently. So the, in northern Italy in particular, there had been a rise in plague from the 1570s. So there's the the so called Plague of San Carlo. In Milan, which is 1577- 78. The next big one was, you know, 60 years later in the 1630 plague. And that was even more catastrophic in terms of loss of life. Many of the, you know, Milan in particular lost a huge, a large portion of its population. And much of the rest of Northern Italy was, was badly affected too. I think there was a lot of death in Turin, in Venice, so across the sort of flatlands at the foothills of the Alps. It was, it was really traumatic. And that comes on top of a number of other factors. Famine that had started in the 1590s. So I think in a way the plague, Was attacking an already vulnerable population that had been suffering from a food crisis in the, in the 50, for several decades already.
So how did the plague affect, you know, Cremona was just what they didn't need because everyone was already sort of teetering on the edge of a, of a demographic crisis.
The plague of 1630 was a dark chapter in the history of Cremona. The city was one of many in Europe that was decimated by the outbreak, and its residents suffered greatly as a result. The streets of the city were deserted, grass was even starting to grow on people's doorsteps. No one dared to wander out unnecessarily, and when a family member fell ill, they knew that they might very well be next. At the height of the outbreak, the streets of Cremona were eerily quiet, as many of its residents had either fled or fallen ill. Those who remained behind were forced to confront the horrors of the disease, watching helplessly as friends, family and neighbours fell victim to the deadly illness. When Niccolo's brother in law started feeling unwell, the illness hit him so fast they had to send for the solicitor during the night to dictate his will. He died a few hours later. So also did two of his sons, Nicolo's nephews. When Elizabeth, his eldest sister, wanted to make her will, the solicitor refused to enter the house, so they had to dictate to him standing in the street for fear of the disease. She would eventually survive and recover, but her husband would not. The city's economy was brought to a standstill as trade and commerce came to a halt and many businesses closed their doors. The people of Cremona faced severe shortages of food and medicinal supplies, and many struggled to find the resources they needed to survive. And yet, despite the tragedy, in his family, Nicolo continued to make lovely instruments during this period. The likelihood of him selling them straight away would have been slim, but this was of little importance, he could always sell them in the future.
That's a bit like us, we were just making violins during the pandemic.
Unfortunately for the people of Northern Italy, the plague was not something new to them, to the point that they had systems in place for just this kind of event. But even the authorities could not have anticipated the power of this particular pathogen. Just to have an idea, Yersinia pestis, the bubonic plague, has a mortality rate 200 times higher than that of COVID.
John Gagney.
This part of Italy was a, you know, economic hub of Europe. There's a lot of movement between, you know, Tradespeople pilgrims, that sort of thing. And interestingly, Northern Italy was in fact a European leader in terms of plague prevention. So there were strong measures in place for sanitary passes, for access to, you know, getting in and out of cities, for transit, all the kinds of things that we've had during COVID. It was, a lot of those things were generated in. this part of Europe between the 14th century and the 17th century.
Yeah, because the word quarantine is a Venetian word for the 40 days that the ships had to wait before coming into the port. Yes. To see that they had, didn't have a, was it the plague? Yes. And in fact, that's, that's one of the first measures just as we went into lockdown in March, 2020. In 1630, when the plague was discovered, much of northern Italy went into a form of lockdown, all the way from Florence up to the foothills of the Alps. Successively, obviously not at the same time, but as it was discovered, many of the cities went into 40 day quarantine. But as we know from our own experiences, that doesn't always, that's not a fail safe. And so it was only partially successful. So we're talking about something that Europeans were familiar with. Plague was never out of people's minds. In fact, if, you know, if you look through any of the centuries, the 15th century, the 16th century, the 17th century, and you look at any city in Europe, you're going to see recurrent patterns of plague over the course of, you know, could be two to three years.
It could be 15 to 30 years, but it's there. It's always percolating in the background. Okay, and so, in this particular bout of plague, a lot of people associate it with the, the Mantuan War of Succession, which brought soldiers from France and Germany, I believe. Yes. So in Spain, I suppose the, the, the broader context here is the 30 years war and maybe even the bigger, broader context in which the 30 years war fits is this ongoing European struggle between France and Spain, which had been going on since, you know, at least the 14th century had lasted through the 16th century in the Italian wars. We've talked, you and I have talked about before. And. Yeah. through transformations into the, into the 70th century was still lasting. The French and the Spaniards were still battling over control of Italy, and it was inflected in addition by Protestant Catholic conflicts. And that's, you know, the story of the Thirty Years War is a mixture of this political battle for dominance in Europe with a Protestant Catholic contest.
In 1618, the Thirty Years War is launched by a dispute between the Holy Roman Emperor, who was a Habsburg, and the Kingdom of Bohemia, which were Czech Protestant people. That led to conflict, and that conflict kept going for 30 years. Hence the creatively named Thirty Years War. So, but within those 30 years, of course, there are all kinds of subsidiary The story of the War of Mantua and Succession is interesting. Mantua was a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, so it belonged in theory to the Habsburgs, but had been an ally of France. at least since the 15th century. So this always put the Mantuan rulers at an unusual position because they were technically they owed their allegiance to the empire, but they had also married into the French aristocracy. So from the 15th century, the Mantuan rulers There are Gonzaga elites. That's the ruling house of Mantua, the Gonzaga family. Many of the Gonzagas married into French aristocratic families, including the Bourbon family, which, as we know, became the sort of, the dynasty from Henry IV in the 16, early 1600s forward. So that put the Mantuans kind of at the crossroads between these two warring kingdoms of France and Spain. And so what happens in the War of Mantuan succession in the late 1620s, Is that the last of the Gonzaga heirs dies, and both France and Spain claim to want to have the next So there is a kind of subsidiary Gonzaga who puts himself forward. There are, you know, there are all kinds of lower branches of that family. And so one of the lower branches says, I should go, I should inherit the the duchy. Whereas the Habsburg emperor has a candidate of his own who he And so the War of Mantua Succession breaks out because this can't be agreed in the, by the diplomats. And so they go to war over who will be installed as the next Duke of Mantua. This, of course, brings, brings soldiers from all over Europe, from the south of France, from Germany. up from other parts of Italy. It doesn't last that long. It's sort of like an 18 month, two year struggle. But it does, especially at a moment when the plague is, this is 1629 1630, right? So it's right at this moment when the when the plague is afoot. It's, you know, exacerbates the transmission of plague, most likely. That seems to be the theory of many scholars that this, you know, the conflict leads to further transmission. Yeah, because of all the, like, the to ing and fro ing and coming from different areas. Yeah. So Cremona is minding its own business. They are already stretched for resources. Next door everyone appears to be fighting for Mantua, but to get there they all seem to pass through Cremona. This would have been fine for the Amatis if the soldiers were picking up violins on their way to war, but instead they just brought gems.
The other thing to say about the War of Mantuan Succession is that the toing and froing was also very much a part of what's going on in Milan as a hub of commerce. So sort of Mantua belongs to Lombardy, which is part of the Duchy of Milan. All the Duchy of Milan belongs to the Habsburgs. So Mantua, you know, it's all subsidiary to the Spanish crown, basically the Spanish Austrian crown. And this part of Europe. Mantua, Milan, Genoa is part of what's called the Spanish Road, which is the hub of transit for soldier movement and money movement to fund the war effort. You know, already it's part of this kind of axis. It's a very strategic location. So, you know, the War of Mantuan Secession in a way takes place in the, at the crossroads of an already very busy part of Europe. And, you know, throw into this an increasing, you know, sort of demographic Challenge from a famine in the 1590s, the plague that's circulating in the 1630s, and the war that then breaks out. It becomes a kind of perfect recipe for demographic, yeah, perfect storm for demographic collapse.
Yeah. So it's, yeah, it's a very important city for the Spanish, but then I can imagine, I mean, I was imagining being French and you're feeling a bit of a squeeze because you've got the Spanish, they're down the south, they've taken that bit of Italy, they tried to get England with with Philip, Mary, Mary, but that was before.
They've gone over to the Netherlands, they've almost completely, encircled France, haven't they? The Spanish. So they're probably feeling quite threatened. Like in there, there's that one, that door in Mantua that they don't, that was traditionally allied with France.
Yes. I think this was the concern of the French and many other European states. I mean, what you described is exactly correct. Spain. The Hapsburg Spain was on the rise in the 16th century in a spectacular way. I mean, there had been a Spanish presence in Europe before, but this was immense, largely due to the success of Emperor Charles V in the first half of the 16th century, who was one of those rare emperors who inherits kind of everything in Europe. He was both king of the Spanish kingdoms and Holy Roman Emperor, was also the emperor who was seated when The Americas were brought into the Spanish crown. So, you know, his was the empire, the original empire in which the sun never set. And I think that concerned a lot of Europeans. So France felt itself being encircled, but also other parts of Europe were watching the Habsburg rise with trepidation because they knew that, you know, it was going to be possibly a complete domination of Europe by, by Spain. In fact, I would say by the, by the late 16th century, it effectively was a complete European domination by Spain.
And there was just this like, I can imagine from the Spanish point of view, there was this annoying France just in the middle of it. Like, it's like literally this big blob in the middle of there, what they'd conquered all around.
Now, amidst the stress of death and disease, something quite extraordinary happens. Nicolo Amati makes a violin and places an Amati Brothers label in it. It's a different model to the ones he has been previously making. He conceived a slightly wider soundboard than what they had been making before, the corners being a tad longer and turning just a little bit more. In his experiment to improve on sound and design, he created his grand pattern violin. Whether Nicola realised it or not, this was a turning point in the design of the violin and its future.
I speak to Carlo Chiesa, violin maker in Milan and prolific writer and researcher on many different violin makers. If you look in the front of a lot of books on different violin makers, there is a high chance you will see his name in the historical section, writing about their lives. One of the points is that because instruments, there are many.
By Nicolo, but there are not many instruments, many violence by the brothers. There are more violas by the brothers than by nicolo, probably for historical reason. There was a search for Violas until about the twenties of the 17th century. So about but after 30, the viola was not so important as a musical instrument as it had been before.
And from that point on, Makers went on making mainly violins, and Niccolo made many violins. So that's the first point. If there are many instruments around, you can are a more important maker than other makers who has not, have not so many instruments around. And then he was of course more modern than the brothers.
So his instruments are usually better sounding, in my opinion, for modern ideas than the brothers. And the other point is that he anyway worked a lot developing a new model, and he slightly enlarged, en longed the variant. He made the grand pattern which is the grand new pattern slightly bigger than before, and that gives you a better acoustic results than the brothers.
As a, as a rule, usually I would prefer. The quality of workmanship in the Brothers work, Nicolò's, but I must admit that as musical instruments usually Nicolò violins are better instruments than those by the Brothers for sounding properties. In a modern setup. In a modern setup. I have no idea about ancient setup because We have no idea how they were set up originally.
We have no original neck in an Amati instrument. So we have no idea what it was. And of course there was also a development of different way for necks and bridges and so on in a story of 150 years. So it would be also wrong to say there was a Baroque setup or a Cremonese setup because 150 years And I was wondering when Niccolo made the, developed the grand pattern was Andrea Guarneri working for him at that time?
It was possibly slightly before then then Andrea Guarneri arrived in his workshop. I'm not sure about that. We don't know when. Exactly, Andrea started working for Ola, but yes, it is around the same time, but at first we must consider that Andrea, together with Giacomo Janero, they were just pupils.
So they were probably making just the boys work of rough work in the workshop. And I'm sure that at time. The finishing of the instruments was in the hands of the master, as it was later always in the Amati, in the Stradivari workshop. So you see actually the hand of the master in all his production because he followed the making of every instrument and finished them direct.
And, and then did Andrea Guarneri,
Did he go on to his instruments? Were they based on the Nicola's Grand Patton? Sometimes and sometimes also on the other side. Yeah, that size? Okay. Andrea was a good maker, intelligent maker, and he also, and I'm sure he went on working for Amati also after. He moved it to his own workshop.
So here we see the violin taking over in importance from the viola and Niccolo making lots of instruments. He's also using his grand pattern that leads to good acoustics in a modern setting and these may be some of the factors that lead to his success as a maker we still know today.
There is also something to be said about the sheer number of violins Niccolo made as Carlo Chiesa pointed out. But also Niccolo's instruments were adapted to what musicians wanted now. And that was power. In this episode, we saw just how close we came to losing the Cremonese violin making tradition forever.
But be sure to join me in the next episode where we will see what Niccolo does to make sure this instrument he is making becomes a superstar. And we'll never run the risk of dying out like it almost did. I'd like to thank my lovely guests, John Gagneux, Benjamin Hebert and Carlo Chiesa for joining me today.
If you have enjoyed this podcast, I would like to take this opportunity to ask you to rate and review it on whatever podcasting platform you're using. This is in fact, a great way of supporting the show so that I can continue to make more episodes for you. And if you feel like being an absolute legend, you can become a Patreon over at Patreon forward slash The Violin Chronicle.
I hope you'll join me next time on the next episode of The Violin Chronicle.
Ep 4. Nicolo Amati
Ep 5. Nicolo Amati.
Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Lutherie, in Mirecourt.
Welcome back to the story of Nicolò Amati, the third in this generation of violin makers. We now find him in his mid 40s. He has survived the bubonic plague in which he lost many of his family members. He lives in the house his grandfather, Andrea Amati, bought and passed on to his sons. And now Nicolo finds himself with an odd crew of orphaned cousins, nephews, nieces, and siblings to look after post pandemic.
The world in which Nicolo lived was changing dramatically. These were the years that Europeans were arriving in the Americas. There were the Spanish and Portuguese in the south. Up north were the English, Dutch, French, and the Swedes. In 1644, when Nicolo Amati was entering his late 40s, the young Antonio Stradivari was born.
Most likely in Cremona and not far from the Amati home. The question, looking at Nicolo Amati this week is, was he just an artisan at the beck and call of musicians and wealthy patrons, looking to have a collection of instruments for musicians coming to their house or court? Socially speaking, where did Nicolo Amati sit in the greater scheme of things?
And why was it that Luthiers from Cremona had this reputation of producing excellent instruments? Why were they better than any other city in that part of Italy at the time? Rome, Naples and Venice were all important cultural centres then, so what made this relatively small city stand out? Well, in the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we saw Nicolo Amati surviving the plague and getting on with his life.
He gives up depending on family members to help him in the workshop and starts to employ apprentices who come and live and work with him, notably two teenagers. Andrea Guarneri and Giacomo Gennaro. He also starts to make his grand pattern violin. It is surprising that by making something a few millimetres bigger and slightly changing the outline and archings of the violin, he really does change the potential of this instrument and lay the groundwork for the very well known violin makers to come after him.
Niccolò Amati's clients were often noble families and the church, much like his father and grandfather had. And he would even sell instruments that were not his, such as a local priest and musician, Don Alessandro Lodi, whose family turned to him when he died to sell his collection. Here we see Nicolò Amati’s instruments fetching a good price, where others were selling their instruments for 5 ducati Nicolò's violins were going for 15 ducati and 22 for a viola. The double bass he sold from the priest's collection that was not his. It could have been a Brescian instrument, was only 13 Ducati. From the high prices Nicolo Amati demanded for his instruments, we can clearly see that he was not a lowly craftsman, but was an educated and literate member of his community, having gone to school before learning his trade with his father. It would have been important for him, in dealing with his noble clientele, to have a certain level of learning and a knowledge of business, mathematics, and accounting, as would many of his artisan colleagues. At this time in Cremona, schools were attended mainly by children of merchants and nobles, but not only. At school, they would learn. In addition to the traditional subjects of Geometry, Arithmetic, and even Astrology, subjects such as Geography, Architecture, Algebra, and Mechanics, both theoretical and applied.
Carlo Chiesa, violin maker, expert, researcher, and author from Milan.
It is also worth noting that the Amatis at that point, they were wealthy enough people. This is very important because It means they, the kids had an education. They were able to go to school, to be trained properly, not just in the workshop. And they were artisans of a high level anyway. So the daughters of Andrea who got married, they usually got married with good doweries with the people who were from the same social status, and that is also worth noting important because they were not. It means that they were not working for low class musicians, but usually their commission went. to noblemen or high-class customers, which they were able to deal with. That is also another of the reasons for the success of cremonese making, because the artisans were able to deal with the high class.
Nicolo Amati was a product of the Cremonese system. He was not only a talented artisan, but also had a level of education that enabled him access to the upper echelons of society. And this appears to have always been where violin makers sit. Never being part of the nobility as they were in trade and part of the merchant class, yet their product interested and sometimes fascinated the noble classes, somehow giving them a form of access or small door into their world being almost acceptable. As for Nicolo's workmanship, he had always shown a spirit of innovation and thought. He was experimenting in different sizes of instrument in an effort to improve his product and this reflects the time and place he lived. It was, don't forget, the renaissance, and as their world was a relatively small place, he would certainly have known fellow artisans in town, such as the very interesting Alessandro Capra and his sons. Cremona was renowned for its engineers, both civil and military, who published books on their work. They were, after all, on a military highway. What better place to have your shop window? Alessandro Capra, architect and plumber, had opened his workshop in town where he would display his inventions and offer his services as either a military or civil engineer. He also carried out teaching activities for apprentices interested in learning science, art, maths and geometry. From his workshop, he would obtain commissions from various parts of Italy for machines and inventions. In his domestic artisans workshop, he displayed his machines and various models. Lining the walls were precious books filled with information on land surveying, perspective, applied geometry, arithmetic, and merchant accounting.
These were handbooks written expressly for craftsmen, artisans, artists, and technicians. They were not for a specific trade but information for people involved in these activities. and were practical guides on how to go about business. The printed works of Capras were like professional development manuals. They were presented as a collection of craft and commercial problems useful for the training of future generations of craftsmen and traders, land and real estate owners. It also advised landowners on how to earn more money and lower income earners on how to manage better their real estate. It was a 17th century version of how to make friends and influence people. Alessandro Capra also mentions the benefits of following military campaigns, scientific skills linked to the solution of problems, fortifications, ballistics, engineering, mechanical and hydraulic, management and organization of people. Cremona was a great place to be for this as it was continually in the midst of military campaigns and would have facilitated this scientific environment.
But back to the Casa Amati. Nicolo had two assistants living with him that I mentioned earlier and they are actually quite important to our story. They made a team in the workshop and Nicolo trusted them not only with the work on it, instruments but also in his business dealings and everyday life. They were legal witnesses on legal documents and even civic occasions such as his wedding. These two assistants were of course Giacomo Genaro and Andrea Guarneri. Andrea Guarneri is the first in the great family of the Guarneri makers of Cremona and here we see his close relationship with his master.
Carlo Chiesa explains.
And, and then did Andrea Guarneri did he go on to, his instruments, were they based on the Nicolo's Grand Patten?
Sometimes and sometimes also on the other side, Andrea was was a good maker, intelligent maker. And he also, and I'm sure he went on working for Amati also after he moved to his own workshop because their workshops were very close to each other in the same block. And there was a back alley in which they both had a door. So that through the back alley, the two workshops were very, very close to each other.
They could pass a violin.
There's a customer here. I have not a violin finished. You've got one. Yeah, I'm finishing that one. Take it. Take this one. Put your label in.
In 1640, Nicolo Amati stops using the brothers Amati label. It is now almost as if he is truly affirming himself, starting a new chapter in his life. By using the brothers Amati label, his father's, he was in no way trying to deceive people who knew very well that his father was dead, but rather that he had built this instrument in his father's style. Even though he had made the instrument, it was in essence an Amati Brothers instrument. After his father's death, he did indeed create a different model, his grand pattern, and started putting in his own label. This design he owned in his own right a name.
In 1642, the year after engaging his assistants, Niccolò employs a maid, Catarina, along with his two apprentices living in the house, there was his sister and niece and also an 18 year old cousin, Marilina Urbana, who comes to live with them as her parents have died in the plague. Two years on, business is good for Nicolo. He is comfortably well off and the decision to take on a second servant to help out was necessary because now there were two more of the Urbana cousins, Marilina’s little brother and sister Benedetto, who is 12 and his little sister Valeria is only four years old. Along with the assistance that makes nine people living in the house. As time went on, Giacomo Gennaro left the Amati workshop to go off on his own, but Andrea stayed and was particularly close to Nicolò. He was his right-hand man, and Nicolò was now almost 50. He had no children, and perhaps Andrea would inherit the workshop one day. Nicolò is looking more and more like a confirmed bachelor, and then, boom, it happens. Nicolò falls in love. In 1645, he meets the lovely Lucrezia and thinks maybe it's not such a bad idea to get married after all. But here is the catch. At this moment, in Nicolò's household, there are no less than 10 people. That's right, 10 people. There is his 66 year old sister and her daughter, Elisabetta and Angela. There are his two assistants, Giacomo and Andrea, who are 21 and 19, much closer in age to Lucrencia than Nicolo himself. Three orphaned cousins in his care, who really are children, they are 12, 6 and 3 years old, and two servants to help look after them all. Lucrencia would be a brave woman indeed to marry this man, but Nicolo had a plan. One week before the wedding, he gifts his niece a small property with a house in the parish of San Nicolo. In doing this, he discreetly removes his niece and his sister, who will have to go and live with her daughter because she can't live alone. And this move makes way for his new bride, Lucrezia. In the spring of 1645, on the 23rd of May, the 48 year old Nicolo married the somewhat younger 26 year old Lucrenzia Pagliari. Andrea Guarneri was the witness, and her uncle the priest who married them. Their first child, Giolamo, was born the next year on the 6th of February. Just under nine months later. No scandal there. And if Guarneri thought that Nicolo was not going to have anyone to inherit the workshop, he was wrong. Because over the next 15 years, Lucrencia would have three more sons and four daughters. That is a child every two years for 15 years. A year after their first child, Lucrencia has a little girl they named Teresa. Now at this point, something quite dramatic happens to the city of Cremona. There was a siege, and it was because of a war called the 30 Years War. It was such a vast and complicated thing. thing that they probably just ended up calling it the 30 years war because it went on for, well, 30 years. It involved most of the major European powers and during this war Cremona, which was located in the Lombard region of Italy, was a strategic city and was occupied by the Spanish army, as we know. In 1648, the French army, under the command of Maréchal Henri de la Tour d'Auvergne, laid siege to the city in order to expel the Spanish. The siege lasted for several weeks and resulted in its eventual capture by the French army. Sadly, Nicolo and Lucanza's first child, Girolamo, died at the age of three, just after the siege in September, so this really was a bad year for them. But the next year, on a freezing February morning in 1649, their third child was born, and they named him, wait for it, Girolamo, like the first son. Their little girl Teresa also died around this time, and a year after the second Girolamo was born, the Amatis have another little girl, whom they name Teresa. Around the time Niccolò married Lucrezia, he made a cello that would end up in the collection of the Grand Prince Ferdinand de Medici, son of Cosimo III. From this we see that the calibre of his instruments are such that nobles would desire them in their collections. This instrument is described in an inventory of 1700, along with 100 other instruments for his private use and that of his chamber musicians. In this list are a number of instruments made by Niccolò and also by the Amati brothers. He must have truly appreciated their instruments and regarded them as items of value. They have come down to us today because they have Throughout their existence, being thought of as such and being looked after carefully. After Niccolo and Lucrenzia's first child was born, Andrea Guarneri, who had been living with them for years, moved out. Maybe noticing that he was the third wheel here. But a few years later, just after Girolamo died, The second was born. Andrea Guarneri was obviously having some problems with his housing situation and moved back in with the Amatis. Ciao! I can imagine Nicolo's wife maybe hinting to her husband to find Andrea a wife. 1650 is also a time when Nicolò starts to use his grand pattern violin more and more. His instruments now show all the classic characteristics of his work, the use of the grand pattern model, his golden yellow varnish, and his archings, which are less scooped than the Amati brothers models.
Andrea Guarneri was one of Niccolò's favourites and thought maybe it was time he got married as well. Nicolò happened to know that one of their clients, the talented musician Giovanni Pietro Orcelli, had a young orphaned cousin from a well to do family. She would be perfect for Andrea. Anna Maria Orcelli had grown up just around the corner from the Amati household. She had lost her family, most probably in the recent plague, and so, in 1652, the 29 year old Andrea Guarneri married Anna Maria. They stayed living with the Amatis for a few more months. But by this time, Ana Maria was pregnant, and they were in the process of moving into a house she had inherited just a few doors down from Nicolo Amati and his family. Anna Maria, as part of her dowry, had a house that was so close to the Amatis that their back entrances were almost next to each other. The relatives living there were proving difficult to move on. Finally, the Relos moved out and Andrea and his pregnant wife could move in. Here, Andrea was able to set up his own business with his new family living upstairs, starting a new chapter in his life.
The number of instrument makers in Cremona was on the rise. Niccolo's instruments from this period are only getting better acoustically and it was the instruments Nicolo made in this era that Antonio Stradivari would go on to copy in what we call his Amatis period. In 1653. The workshop is a busy place and many instruments are being produced. Nicolo, who is 57 at this point, has at least four apprentices working for him and living in the family home. In this busy household lived 12 people, and in the summer, Lucrenzia and Niccolo have their fifth child, Giovanni Battista. Sadly, the Amati's youngest child, Giovanni Battista, would die in infancy when he was two years old. Now living with them were their two children, Servants. Apprentices. There were also three boys who would work for the shop and lived with them. They were called the Malagamba brothers. Giuseppe was 20, his younger brother Giovanni Battista, 17, and Giacomo, the youngest, only 10 years old. They most likely made accessories for Nicolo and will work with him for years to come. In 1655, things were looking up in the Casa Amati. In July, Lucrenzia has a daughter, they name her Anna Maria, and Giovanni Battista, one of the Malagamba brothers, who make accessories for Nicolo Amati, marries a local girl, Apollina. The young couple are both 18 years old and they continue to live with Niccolo and Lucrenzia.
Fun fact about the Amati workshop at this point is that there is an apprentice. In the shop at this time, he will go on to have an interesting career after leaving Cremona. His name was Bartolomeo Cristofiori and he would invent the pianoforte when he was working for the Medici family in Florence.
In 1657, Nicolò Amati has his Seventh child. It is a boy, so they call him Girolamo. This youngest child of the his would have been born into a lively, close knit community. The parish they lived in was a small one where everyone knew their neighbors and their business. The Guarneris are just around the corner and four houses down the road live the Ferraboschi family, including their daughter. who would, in a few years time, marry Antonio Stradivari. And across the road are the Capras, whose nephew would be Francesca's first husband, before Antonio. In 1661, the Amatis last child, a daughter, was born, when Nicolo was almost 65. Her name was Euphrosia Scholastica. His many children shared a busy household with extended family members, cousins, aunts and uncles, workshop staff and servants. At one point there were 11 people living in the home.
Nicolo's wonderfully crafted instruments were in high demand and some would consider them to be some of the most elegant violins ever made. In the workshop, they had apprentices and two or three servants, or hired hands, who would be making accessories such as pegs, fingerboards, bridges, bassbars, and even scrolls. Going to mass on a Sunday, or the town market, the Amati children would have bumped into any number of aunts, uncles, cousins, or neighbours. Around the family lived their friends, enemies, godparents, in laws, landlords, tenants, witnesses at weddings, and legal documents. So from the 1660s, Nicolò's instruments create a standard for the Cremonese makers to aspire to. They are tonally powerful and, from a craftsmanship point of view, masterpieces.
But even before this period, Nicolò Amati had changed his instruments to adapt to the musical demands of the day. The Baroque period in which he lived was producing composers and music that demanded more sound volume from its instruments. This movement was particularly strong in Rome, where compositions needed instruments able to compete with whole choirs to be heard. Monteverdi didn't just double up the violins, giving them the same notes as the singers. The violins were now being written specific musical parts for themselves. To shine and to shine. You had to be heard and to be heard, you had to be more powerful. It is also from the 1660s that over spun gut strength started to be made and used by musicians increasing the tension and power of instruments. Nicolo Amati made two sized violins, big ones, and small ones. The larger ones measure between 354 to 358 millimetres. That is regarded as a standard today, and the smaller ones back length are 352mm, which makes them on the smaller side, but that's not the end of the world.
The smaller ones were often, if you dare, referred to as ladies violins, but really not because women were 5mm smaller than men, apparently, but they were referring to the rooms in which they were to be heard. So a smaller violin would be played indoors. It didn't need to be so powerful and Heaven forbid a lady would play outside, preposterous. And this reminds me, and I know I'm getting off track here, but women's clothing at the time didn't have integrated pockets in them because they thought, when I say they, this is presumably men, they thought that women would fill the above mentioned practical storage spaces with charms and poisons to befuddle the menfolk. And to be fair, that was my first thought when discovering pockets in my clothing, so I'll give them that.
In 1680, the Amati home is still a busy place to be. The children have grown up, and Girolamo, whom we call Girolamo II, not to be confused with his grandfather, Girolamo Amati, who was one of the Amati brothers. Gerolamo II is married and living in the family home with his wife, Angela, and their first child, Vittoria. At the moment, she is pregnant with their second child, and most of Nicolo's apprentices over the years were not from Cremona and have moved home. Some of them have set up workshops in town and some like the Malagamba Brothers have moved just a few doors down the street. And then on April the 12th, 1684, the 88-year-old Nicola Amati died. He would've been greatly missed by his family, friends, and the many pupils he had taught over the years. His legacy was vast, and he definitely changed the landscape of violin making in Cremona, leaving it a city of instrument makers. If it had not been for his willingness to take on apprentices outside his family, the history of violin making and the city of Cremona would have looked vastly different. The week after Nicolo's death, Girolamo II Amati baptized his son Nicolo, and a few months later, Anna Maria, that's one of Nicolo's daughters, and Girolamo's sister, who was already married it seems, finally moved out to live with her husband in the house next door. Who knows what was going on there. Anyway, although Niccolo is probably the most well known of the Amatis, it would have to be his son Girolamo II, the least recognized, and yet as we will see, his work and life is indeed significant in the story of the violin.
But what happened to Girolamo
and why was he the last of the illustrious Amati family? This, we will see in the next episode of the Violin Chronicles. And if you have liked the show, please rate and review it on Apple podcasts or Spotify. That would really help out with the making of the podcast so I can continue to bring you more episodes.
Be sure also to head over to Patreon forward slash the Violin Chronicles. If you would like to support the podcast and become a Patreon, there are extra episodes, and I would particularly like to point out a new series called My Encyclopedia of Luthiers. That little podcast I do with my husband, Antoine.
In it, we summarize each maker in under an hour and describe all the little details to look out for. So you can recognize that particular maker's work. And maybe you can become an expert yourself one day. I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles. Goodbye for now.