Gasparo da Salò – violin maker

Founder of the Brescian school of stringed instrument craftsmen

The bust of Gasparo da Salò in Salò

One of Italy’s earliest violin makers, Gasparo da Salò, died on this day in 1609 in Brescia.

He developed the art of string making to a high level and his surviving instruments are still admired and revered.

Da Salò was born Gasparo Bertolotti in Salò, a resort on Lake Garda in 1542.

His father and uncle were violinists and composers and his cousin, Bernardino, was a violinist at the Este court in Ferrara and at the Gonzaga court in Mantua.

Bertolotti received a good musical education and was referred to as ‘a talented violone player’ in a 1604 document about the music at the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Bergamo.

Bertolotti moved to Brescia on the death of his father and set up shop in an area where there were other instrument makers.

He became known as Gasparo da Salò and his workshop quickly became one of the most important in Europe for the production of every type of stringed instrument that was played at the time.

An example of a
Gasparo violin

His business was so successful that he was able to acquire land and property and provide financial assistance to members of his family.

It is not known whether da Salò was the first craftsman to produce a violin in its modern form. But he built violins that conform to the measurements of the modern violin and developed instruments with a powerful tone that decades later were studied by Antonio Stradivari. He built violas of different sizes as well as cellos and double basses.

About 80 of his instruments are known to have survived to the present day and are in museums. One of his most famous double basses is in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice.

After his death on 14 April 1609, Gasparo da Salò was recorded as buried at a cemetery in Brescia, but the exact location of his grave is unknown.

Travel tip:

Salò, where Gasparo Bertolotti was born, is on the western shore of Lake Garda. Mussolini formed a short-lived republic there in 1943, but the resort recovered after the World War II to become a popular tourist destination and now has a museum commemorating the resistance against Fascism.

Brescia's elegant Piazza della Loggia

Travel tip:

Brescia in Lombardy, where Gasparo da Salò worked and died, is of artistic and architectural importance. Brescia became a Roman colony before the birth of Christ and you can see remains from the forum, theatre and a temple. The town came under the protection of Venice in the 15th century and there is a Venetian influence in the architecture of the Piazza della Loggia, an elegant square, which has a clock tower similar to the one in Saint Mark’s square. Next to the 17th century Duomo is an older cathedral, the unusually shaped Duomo Vecchio, also known as la Rotonda.

More reading:

Antonio Stradivari - maker of the world's most valuable violins

How the Amati family helped make Cremona famous for violins

Muzio Clementi - father of the piano

Also on this day:

1488: The assassination of Girolamo Riario, papal military leader

1920: The birth of Lamberto Dalla Costa, the fighter pilot who became Italy's first Olympic bobsleigh champion



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Nicolò Amati - violin maker

Grandson of Andrea Amati produced some of world's finest instruments

A portrait of Nicolò Amati by French
artist Jacques-Joseph Lecurieux

Nicolò Amati, who is acknowledged as the greatest in the line of Amati violin makers in the 16th and 17th centuries, was born on this day in 1596 in Cremona.

The grandson of Andrea Amati, who is credited by most experts with being the inventor of the violin in its four-stringed form, Nicolò followed his father, Girolamo, and uncle, Antonio, into the family business.

Girolamo and Antonio went their separate ways in around 1590, Antonio setting up a different workshop, which was thought to specialize in lutes.

Initially, Nicolò made instruments that were very similar to those created by Girolamo but later began to add refinements of his own, the most significant of which came between 1630 and 1640 when he created the Grand Amati design.

This model, slightly wider and longer than the violins his father had produced, yielded greater power of tone than the smaller instruments and soon became sought after.

The bubonic plague outbreak that swept through Italy between 1629 and 1633 claimed the lives of both Girolamo and Nicolò's mother, Laura, and that of his main rival in violin manufacture at the time, Giovanni Paolo Maggini, from the Brescian school.

With Antonio also dead, although a few years earlier, and none of Girolamo's other sons having entered the business, Nicolò was left as one of the only active luthiers in the Cremonese tradition.

A 1662 violin made by Nicolò Amati
in the Grand Amati design

He struggled in the years immediately following the plague outbreak, when Europe was gripped by famine and owning luxury violins was not a priority even for the wealthier nobleman. But gradually returned to normal and the success of the Grand Amati model created a demand Nicolò was unable to meet on his own.

As a result, he took the decision for the first time to take on assistants from outside the family and appointed a number of apprentices, including Andrea Guarneri, Giacomo Gennaro and the German Matthias Klotz, who all went on to become great violin makers in their own right.

While there is no clear documentation of his having worked in Nicolò's shop, the brilliant Antonio Stradivari was clearly a student of his style and methods, as were Francesco Ruggiero, Giovanni Battista Ruggiero and the Austrian Jacob Stainer.

Nicolò's son, Girolamo, often known by his Latinized name Hieronymous II, continued in the family line, although without the same level of success as his forebears.

Thomas Bowes still plays a
1659 Nicolò Amati violin

As well as producing a sweet, mellow tone, Nicolò's violins were characterized by their elegance and quality craftsmanship and fetch large prices when they appear in auction houses today, even if not quite in the league of the Stradivarius instruments.

In 2013, the London auctioneers Ingles and Hayday sold a 1658 violin by Nicolò Amati for £432,000 ($654,590; €508,775).

The distinguished English violinist and orchestra leader Thomas Bowes is a prominent performer who uses a Nicolò Amati violin, the one he plays being manufactured in 1659.

Travel tip:

As well as being known universally as the city of the violin, with a number of manufacturers based there today, Cremona is also associated the with composer Claudio Monteverdi.  The Baroque musician, whose 1607 work L'Orfeo is recognised as the first full-length opera, was born in Cremona and studied music at the city's 12th century Romanesque Duomo.

Piazza della Loggia in the historic centre of Brescia

Travel tip:

Brescia, a city in Lombardy situated between Lake Garda and the smaller Lago d'Iseo, is often overlooked by visitors to the area and first impressions are often coloured by the somewhat seedy nature of the streets in the immediate vicinity of the railway station.   However, the historic centre contains some of the best preserved Roman buildings in northern Italy as well as a medieval castle, two cathedrals and the beautiful Renaissance square, Piazza della Loggia.

More reading:

Why Antonio Stradivari's violins are worth millions

Conductor Muti showing no signs of slowing down at 75 years old

Arcangelo Corelli and the development of violin style

Also on this day:

1911: Birth of 'Godfather' composer Nino Rota

(Picture credits:Piazza della Loggia by Manfred Heyde via Wikimedia Commons)

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Amilcare Ponchielli - opera composer

Success of La Gioconda put musician on map

Amilcare Ponchielli composed 11 operas

The opera composer Amilcare Ponchielli was born on this day in 1834 in Paderno Fasolaro, near Cremona, about 100km south-east of Milan in what is now Lombardia.

Ponchielli's works in general enjoyed only modest success, despite the rich musical invention for which he was later applauded.  One that did win acclaim in his lifetime, however, was La Gioconda, which was first produced in 1876 and underwent several revisions but remained unaltered after 1880.

Well known for the tenor aria, Cielo e Mar, and the ballet piece, Dance of the Hours, La Gioconda is the only opera by Ponchielli still performed today and many recordings have been made, featuring some of the biggest stars of recent times.

Maria Callas, Renata Tebaldi and Montserrat Caballe are among those to have played the role of Gioconda, written for soprano, while the lead tenor part of Enzo, whose affections are sought both by Gioconda and another major character, Laura, has been taken by Giuseppe Di Stefano, Carlo Bergonzi, Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo among others.

Ponchielli had such a talent for music that he won a scholarship to Milan Conservatory at nine years old and had written his first symphony by the time he was 10.

He left the Conservatory in disappointment after being denied the professorship that was supposed to have been his prize in a competition and for a number of years his main musical occupation was as a bandmaster, at first in Piacenza and then Cremona.  He arranged and wrote more than 200 compositions for wind instruments.

The Milan Conservatory, which Ponchielli attended
from the age of nine years

His passion for opera was undiminished, however, and he achieved his first breakthrough with I promessi sposi (The Betrothed), an opera based on the novel by Alessandro Manzoni, which he had originally written soon after completing his studies and which earned him his first contract with a music publisher in 1872.

The original premiered at the Teatro Concordia in Cremona in 1856; the revised version was first performed at the Teatro Dal Verme in Milan. The leading soprano role was taken by Teresina Brambilla, from Cassano d'Adda, just outside Milan, whom Ponchielli would marry.

Ponchielli wrote 11 operas in total but none won him the acclaim he received for La Gioconda, which was based on Angelo, Tyrant of Padua, a play by Victor Hugo.

Listen to Luciano Pavarotti performing Cielo e Mar from La Gioconda

Nonetheless, works such as Il figliuol prodigo and Marion Delorme, from another play by Victor Hugo, both performed at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, are recognised as having been influences on a new generation of composers from which Giacomo Puccini, Pietro Mascagni and Umberto Giordano emerged.

In 1881, Ponchielli was appointed maestro di cappella of Bergamo Cathedral, and from the same year he was a professor of composition at the Milan Conservatory, where his students included Puccini, Mascagni and Emilio Pizzi.

He died of pneumonia in Milan in 1886 and was buried in the city's Monumental Cemetery.

Travel tip:

Paderno Fasolaro, a small town in the heart of the Po Valley, is now known as Paderno Ponchielli in honour of its most famous native son.  It was given the name after local residents began a petition on the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1934, although it took until 1950 for the President of the Republic, Luigi Einaudi, to issue a decree making the change legal.

The cathedral at Cremona is a fine
example of Romanesque style

Travel tip:

The city of Cremona has a strong musical tradition, particularly in the production of violins and other stringed instruments.  It was home to rival violin makers Antonio Stradivari, Giuseppe Guarneri and the Amati family.  Cremona has an exceptional Romanesque cathedral, with an ornate facade including a Renaissance logia with three niches, flanked by two orders of loggette (small logias).

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Antonio Stradivari – violin maker

Craftsman from Cremona produced the world’s best stringed instruments

The man who produced violins worth millions, Antonio Stradivari, died at the age of 93 on this day in Cremona in 1737.

Stradivari was an ordinary man who worked as a luthier, a maker of stringed instruments, but experts now consider him to be the greatest ever in his field.

A street violinist in Cremona,
home of Antonio Stradivari

He is believed to have produced more than 1,100 instruments, often referred to as 'Stradivarius' violins.  About 650 of them are still in existence today and in the last few years some of his violins and violas have achieved millions of pounds at auction.

The Stradivari family date back to the 12th century in Cremona and it is believed Antonio was born there in 1644.

It is thought he was apprenticed to the violin maker Nicolò Amati. The label on the oldest violin still in existence, known to have been made by Stradivari, bears the date 1666.

He had enough money to buy a house for himself and his family in Cremona by 1680. He used the attic as a workshop and kept producing better and better instruments until his reputation spread beyond Cremona.

In 1688 a Venetian banker ordered a set of instruments to present to King James II of England, though what happened to them still remains a mystery.

In the 1690s Stradivari’s style changed and he started to use a darker varnish and different methods to achieve even better results. The high quality of the instruments he produced between 1700 and 1720 have made experts call this his golden period.

Some of his instruments are still played by violinists today and many of the top orchestras have, what are now referred to as ‘Strads’, in their collections.

In 2011 a violin made by Stradivari in 1721, which had been discovered still in pristine condition, sold in London for £9.8 million, the equivalent of 14.1 million dollars.

Antonio Stradivari died on 18 December 1737 and was buried in his local church of San Domenico in Cremona.

Il Torrazzo, Cremona's famous bell tower,
at 112 metres is the tallest in Italy

Travel tip:

Cremona is famous for having the tallest bell tower in Italy, il Torrazzo, which measures more than 112 metres in height. As well as violins, Cremona is also famous for producing confectionery. Negozio Sperlari in Via Solferino specialises in the city’s famous torrone (nougat). The concoction of almonds, honey and egg whites was created in the city to mark the marriage of Bianca Maria Visconti to Francesco Sforza in 1441, when Cremona was given to the bride as part of her dowry.

Travel tip:

There is a Museo Stradivariano in Cremona in Via Ugolani Dati. The collection of items in the museum is housed in the elegant rooms of a former palace. Visitors can see how the contralto viola was constructed in accordance with the classical traditions of Cremona, view instruments commemorating Italian violin makers in the 19th and early 20th centuries and look at more than 700 relics from Stradivari’s workshop.

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