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François Girard’s
The Red
Violin
traces the “life” of
a single violin, from its
creation at the hands of
Nicolò Bussotti (Carlo
Cecchi, left) in 1681 to its
modern-day ownership by
Charles Morritz (Samuel
L. Jackson, below). As in
the “life stories” of string
instruments created around
the same time by real-life
luthiers Amati, Rugeri,
Guarneri, and, of course,
Stradivari, the “Red Violin”
by Bussotti changed
hands by theft as often as
by legitimate means, a
mark of the unparalleled
desirability of these
instruments.
instrument of the symphony orchestra,
the violin has felt at home for centuries
in rural America, whether in folk music,
square dancing, bluegrass, or country/
western. And it works in both direc-
tions: acclaimed ddler Mark O’Connor
has taken the country ddle back into
classical concert venues, such as when
he performed the world premiere of his
Double Violin Concerto at Ravinia with
violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg
and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
conducted by Christoph Eschenbach in
August
.
e violin has another, surprisingly
dark, side, namely its identi cation with
death and the devil. e archangel Ga-
briel blows a trumpet, and saints strum
harps in heaven—but the devil plays a
violin. It has been theorized that this
association rst developed during the
Renaissance, when the violin frequently
provided accompaniment to peasant
dancing; and dance—in the eyes of both
Catholic and Protestant moralists—
was the creation of the devil (a notion
enshrined in the hit lm
Footloose
).
During the mid- th century, Giuseppe
Tartini attributed his inspiration for his
most famous sonata to a gi from the
devil. He claimed that in a dream the
devil gave him a violin, upon which
Tartini played a sonata of indescrib-
able beauty. His attempt to reconstruct
it upon awakening failed, but it did
result in the “Devil’s Trill” Sonata. And
during the following century, the violin
virtuosity of Nicoló Paganini was so
jaw-dropping that many listeners felt it
could only have been achieved with the
help of the Prince of Darkness.
e strings of a violin are tuned in
hs, and the eerily open and ambigu-
ous sound of that interval in amed the
morbid side of the Romantic aesthet-
ic. In his autobiography
Mein Leben
,
Richard Wagner recorded the ghostly
tremors he felt as a child while attending
concerts in Dresden: “ e mere tuning
up of the instruments put me in a state
of mystic excitement; even the striking
of hs on the violin seemed to me like
a greeting from the spirit world. … e
sound of these hs, which has always
excited me, was closely associated in my
mind with ghosts and spirits.” Wagner
magically recreated that experience in
the tremulous opening of the overture to
e Flying Dutchman
.
ose same hs open Franz Liszt’s
famous
Mephisto Waltz
No. , depicting
a scene from Goethe’s
Faust
in which
Mephistopheles enlivens a rustic wed-
ding with his own frenzied playing upon
a violin he has seized from a peasant.
Again one hears the devil in his incar-
nation as death tuning a violin at the
start of Camille Saint-Saëns’s orchestral
tone-poem
Danse Macabre
, inspired by
a poem by Henry Cazalis:
Zig and zig and zig! Hark, Death beats a
measure,
Drums on a tomb with heels hard and thin.
Death plays at night a dance for his pleasure
Zig and zig and zig! on his old violin.
Satan was still strung out on the vio-
lin in
, when Stravinsky composed
A Soldier’s Tale
. is time it is a mortal
soldier who gives the devil a violin in
exchange for unlimited wealth. And
as late as
, the devil challenged a
young country boy to a ddling contest
in the Charlie Daniels Band’s hit “ e
Devil Went Down to Georgia.” e boy
is promised a golden violin if he wins,
but he must forfeit his soul if he loses.
Apparently by this time Beelzebub’s
technique had deteriorated, because the
kid wins the golden ddle.
e concept of the aspiring violin
virtuoso pursuing a career at the ex-
pense of everything else in life seems to
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RAVINIA MAGAZINE | AUGUST 20 – SE3TEM%ER 2, 2018
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