Ep.8 Andrea Amati part 5 Is this the end of the violin?

The Violin Chronicles Podcast

Andreas life is coming to an end, war is raging in France and fashion is dictating how you can hold your violin! Check it all out in this new episode.

As the violin making workshop of the Amatis in Cremona was in full swing, different members of the French royal family were trying not to get murdered as Henry of Navarre soon to be King Henry IV of France married Catherine de Medici’s daughter. In the City of Cremona already renowned for its violin makers we take a look at the different musicians and composers coming out of the cathedral school, Monteverdi being one of them, who would go to work at the famed Mantuan court, and the Amati Brothers taking on a pivotal role in the family violin workshop as Andrea enters old age continuing the family tradition.

Transcript

  It is said that many years ago, the king Agilulf destroyed the city of Cremona, and that for the longest time it remained a pile of ruins, destined to be forgotten with the memory of its people crumbling to dust. But then one spring morning, a war weary Gaelic prince, encamped on the banks of the Po, with his army, near a pile of crumbling stone buildings. And it was there, as he was resting, that he saw an extraordinary sight. A lion, but this was no ordinary lion. It was limping and appeared to be in pain, unable to walk on one of its paws. The gallant and fearless prince approached the animal, and the beast, upon remarking the prince, showed him his injured paw, cut and bleeding, with a thorn sticking out of the wound.

The young man, showing not an inkling of fear, removed the thorn and healed the lion's soft paw. Just imagine the prince's surprise when a few hours later, the lion reappeared with a deer in his jaws. Padding forward, he offered his gift to the young man, laying his catch at the prince's feet as a gift.

The mysterious prince left with his army the very next morning, but as they were setting off, who should appear but the faithful lion, who would go on and follow him wherever he would go. When they reached Rome, the prince realized that the ruined city where he had encamped and met his beloved lion was the city of Cremona.

And so, as he made his way once again through the countryside, he headed for the ruins of this city. But tragically, on the way, his trusty lion died. And so, upon reaching the city, the Gaelic prince decided to rebuild Cremona. Firstly, he buried the lion, and on that spot, he built an incredibly tall tower, called the Torazzo.

This is the bell tower of the cathedral in Cremona. And on top of this tower, for a very long time, was a majestic bronze statue of a lion in the act of raising his paw towards the prince. A few centuries after the lion was placed on the tower, the bronze animal was melted down and fashioned into a large bell that was placed in the tower.

And as the bell rings, the memory of the faithful lion lives on. Today, there are at least 13 lions dotted along the facade of the baptistery, and more in front of the cathedral. Perhaps one of these fierce felines was the prince's faithful friend.

And this is the legend of the Lion 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 of Mirecourt some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker.

In the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we looked at Andrea Amati perfecting the outline of the modern day violin and the French court under King Charles IX, Catherine de Medici's heavy influence as regent on her young son, and the significance of the images painted on the instruments ordered for the king, who was indeed a music loving monarch. And finally, the Amatis working methods that led in part to their success as instrument makers.

Almost five years after the royal tour, Andrea Amati is now 65. His place as a master instrument maker is undisputed. He has received orders from the King of France, no less. His production would have been different to that of violin makers today, in that he would have had to have been more flexible, making different sized and shaped instruments of the Renaissance era. He would have simply been following the fashion and client demand of the time.

I talked to fashion historian Dr. Emily Brayshaw about what people would have looked like back then and what musicians in particular would have worn.

So you've got farthingale sleeves on the men even, but and what it would do though is if you sort of look at these portraits of musicians and portraits of them playing instruments too, you can sort of get an idea of how they moved with that. So, you know, if you've got a massive ruff which is, you know, your 1580s fashion, you're not going to be sticking your instrument under your chin.

You know, there's too much ruff, there's too much lace, there's too much collar. So you might be holding it lower down, perhaps against your upper pecs. If it's a violin you'll be like playing it gamba style on, your lap, you know, or if they're bigger, got variations of them resting on the floor, these kinds of things.

So yeah, it's definitely going to be influencing how you're playing your instruments too. And then, the elbows as well, to be able to move your elbows. That's always an issue.

It is an issue.

Yeah, absolutely. It is an issue. And if you can, you sort of see photos of like these big farthingale sleeves, these slashed sleeves you know, big puffed sleeves, these kinds of things. You're not going to be raising your arms too high above your head. And certainly there would be outfits that they required movement in, you know, like if you're going into battle, you want full mobility or you're training for fighting or these sorts of things. So what's interesting in a lot of these illustrations is they're very idealized bodies coming from the art conventions of the Renaissance that were looking to classical Greek and Roman statues. And in portraits of the era, these shoulders are, we can see in these portraits, the neckline sits right down around the upper forearms particularly over the shoulder. Dress. Yeah, 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 elbow, elbows would have been 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 that we sort of see with that and she's got one of these gowns on and we see the shoulders sloping and falling again with menswear of the 1650s too. 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, 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. Yeah, yeah.

So the, the classic gamba playing posture would have worked.

Oh, would have worked perfectly.

Having to stick your elbows out or lift an instrument high just wouldn't have worked.

No, no, so that's why they're instruments. You know, we do still have pictures of violins being played quite low and held quite low.

And then there was often you would accompany yourself by singing and playing the violin.

Yeah, and you could do that because it's not tucked under your chin. So that's our 1605 kind of look there. Wow, I mean you've got a platform that you could rest your scones on.

Yeah, I mean I'd feel like if I was a man with all that fabric on, I would just feel like putting the instrument next to me, like it would just feel like a stretch holding it the way we do now?

Yeah, I think so, given that there were lots and lots of layers under these too, so you know, again, it's all part of the layering. And also, even though you don't have, like in the 1600s now, you don't have these massive, ruffs in most of Europe. The Dutch held on to the ruffs and these big sort of cartwheel collars for a lot longer than the rest of Europe.

You know, you've got what's known as a falling band, so the lace collars are coming down. You still do have a little bit of a rise on the collars as well. So you've still got, you know, like these collars would not have been necessarily ideal for holding your instrument against it so it's probably going to be held a bit lower, further down the, further down the shoulder.

And we see that in images too, you know, the images slung under the shoulder. All of this stuff was just mind bogglingly expensive. So not only would you have your portrait painted and that cost an absolute motza, you'd be wearing your absolute finest clothes for it.

Were you saying it was like half a million?

Like Oh, and the rest, like in today's money, in today's outfit would, yeah, just one outfit for the portrait that you're wearing would be half a million dollars plus all the other things that were often in your portrait as well. So they're kind of a bit like a selfie filter where you are. You know, flexing, showing your cash.

So, for example, you know, if you were there playing a gamba in a portrait or playing an instrument in a portrait you'd be showing that yes, you're musical, you're cultured, you're, you know, you're part of this, you know, this ideal humanistic world that values the humanities, but also you can afford One of these really expensive instruments too.

It's another layer of wealth.

It is another layer of wealth, yeah, and there's a lot of layers of wealth in these portraits that get built up. Even things like oriental carpets, they're extremely expensive, so some people would have them on a table. Because they're so expensive that you wouldn't have them on the ground. But then you get like the next level nobility who have them on the ground and it's like I'm so rich I can walk on my carpet.

I'm walking on the money.

Yeah, I'm walking on the money. I'm wearing the money I'm walking on the money and you do like, you've got the jewellery embroidered on your clothing and into your clothing.

You've got this fine handmade lace. You've got everything's embroidered, embroidered with gold. The very finest leathers, everything's like just money, you know, even your wigs are money. Increasingly, we see the rise of wigs.

In the 17th century, the French and German and Dutch painters, they would sort of link the violin to like booze and gluttony and stupidity, dishonesty. When you see it in painting, whereas the Italians, it was, it was like a respectable instrument of the court and the theatre. I find it interesting that there was this instrumental competition going on.

There was a tension between the viols and the violins. Yes. Yeah. I talked to cellist James Beck about the tensions between the violin and the viol family. And for people who are listening to this, the viol family is older than the violin family and it's more delicately built and you might say it's maybe got more in common with the lute family in terms of the lightness of the build and so think of it more as a bowed lute.

Whereas the violin is a stronger build.

More sturdy.

More sturdy, yeah. So the violin family was the, at one stage, the new kid in town. And I think there was, there's always that tension between the old and the new. And I think because the violin came out of Italy and was of Italy and just was such an expression of Italian culture, the Italians were a bit more into it.

And whereas the viol family was utterly dominant in France and in England and in Germany right up until the end of the 18th century and it was really considered to be much more refined and much more aristocratic and much more exclusive than the violins and the violins were considered to be crass and strident, maybe a bit too loud and maybe only good for kind of crowd entertainments and not for kind of refined family life.

So all the ruling classes and royal houses gravitated towards the viols. So if you look at all the great portraits at Versailles of the royal family, all the, if the women were playing instruments, they were playing keyboard instruments or viols. No one's playing a cello. No one is playing a violin. Even though they possess these instruments, they were in the vicinity, they weren't for that class of person.

Yeah, whereas if you look at tavern scenes, these street scenes that are a bit more course, that's where the violin is hanging out. And yet it seems to have been embraced from the beginning in, in Italy.

It was, it was an acceptable instrument.

Yeah. Because, well, it, it evolved, well it sort of went to finishing school in Italy, the violin, and So it must have been, sort of, refined that way for the particular Need.

A need that they had. Yeah, yeah. And so, there's a Frenchman called Hubert Leblanc, and he argued in length for the vial which the French did. Like he said, and he wrote this big long treatise called the Défense de la Basse de Viol Contre les Entreprises Violonciel. So it's the defense of the vial, the bass vial, against the enterprises of the violin and the pretences of the cello.

Oh yes, the pretentious cello.

So he was really like, oh, we're in danger so, so they didn't want like, you know, the foul violin flooding the musical scene, and that was in 1740. So it was actually quite late, like that's, you know, Strad's, like at the end of Strad, so it was still this thing that was, that was holding on.

But you can see if you were, if you were running a theatre. And you wanted to give your, be popular, and give a good experience to your audience. You wouldn't be employing the old players because they're too quiet. Go out of tune. And you'd have to have more of them which would be expensive. Yeah. And so you'd definitely be gravitating towards violins because you just get, you know, more sound for your buck.

And so those orchestras are being populated by violin and cello and viola players. Yeah. And, and the double base, which is the, the, the weird compromise between the, the viola and the, the violin family.

Yeah. It is a bit, I think it's technically, well some of them are made like a vial. Yeah. Yeah. And then, so what's interesting is there's another, there's an Englishman John Lenton in 1693. So quite early. But, and he wrote a book called The Gentleman's Diversion or The Violin Explained. So it was, you know, you had people sort of for it as well. And Queen Elizabeth had violins. Elizabeth I.

Yes. Yeah, right. For dancing, possibly.

Yeah. Because she was a big dancer. Yes. Yeah. There's a fantastic portrait of her and she's mid-air.

The toes.

Yeah, you can see the toes hanging out at the bottom of her dress and she's maybe a foot off the ground.

Right, yeah, so yeah, they are, they're the dancing ones. They're not really for sitting around listening to quiet music, which would be a gamber.

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And of course, you know, it was a big thing in England to have a consort of gambers. You'd have a, like a large coffer or chest made and within that would sit, you know, maybe four to six different sized viols. And as a refined family, you would sit around and have a little consort moment, which is the collective noun for viols, a consort of viols.

Oh yeah, yeah. Look, look at that consort of viols arriving.

I think that that 1690s treatise that you were mentioning about basically kind of introducing the violin. The Gentleman's Diversion or the Violin Explained. Yes, I think that's because, I mean there were violins, there were violin makers, there's an early English school of violin making and we know that there were violin makers on Old London bridge prior to The Great Fire. But we also know that when the first Stradivari instruments started arriving in London, that they did, they were passed around and were seen to be quite strange and new. And so maybe there was a renewed taste for these kind of things when the next phase of innovation was coming out of Italy.

And maybe if you're an Italian violinist, that was sort of an exception as well, because you know, you're from Italy, you're playing the violin.

Yeah. Yeah. The Italian thing. Yeah.

And that's the great thing about Cremona because it was producing violins and violinists right back to the early 1500s. There were Cremonese violin players living in Germany and France and London and it was a, seemed to be a real kind of boasting point of like, yes, here's my Cremonese violinist.

Yeah, it's interesting, you've got this, it was a city and it had the cathedral and it had a cathedral school and they were quite proud that they were very, they were very literate city. A lot of the children would go, would learn to read and write and, and then you had this. Cathedral School, which seemed to spit out all these good musicians and composers, but because there was just the cathedral, they couldn't really go, there was a ceiling.

There weren't employment opportunities.

No, but even for playing and composing, if you were a composer, you were limited to the constraints of the Council of Trent. You couldn't, compose everything you wanted to. So they had this, they were producing all these. Musicians and composers, but they weren't staying. They had to leave to do anything other than church music, which was quite a limited repertoire. Yeah. So in one way, it was good. They were making these musicians. And in the other way, by being, by having these constraints, they didn't have a court. So they couldn't, they didn't have anywhere to play secular music.

Yeah. Yeah. And so they had to leave. So you had this, you had the fertile ground, but you also had the conditions that forced those people to, to disperse. Yeah, so, so they were, like if, it was interesting enough to stay, maybe Cremona wouldn't have been as known as it is today because they would have all just stayed there.

So you've got, like the Mantuan Court, they were all there. Yeah, well that's why Monteverde left Cremona. He went to, he went there, and he ended up replacing another guy who'd come from Cremona. So they were producing them and sending them.

It's like when, you know, the dandelions, you know, dandelions with a big fluffy head, and when you blow on them, the seeds go over it.

Maybe it's like a blessing in disguise, the fact that it was a little bit boring musical life there, even though they were being well trained. And to what degree do you think the, the geographical element is like Cremona, it's positioned near forests or near water or near trade routes. So it's a major north south trade route and it's on the Po River and it has, it was a constant point of crossing of armies.

They would all come through there. They were all funnel through. And so, and, and we were talking trade, we're talking no, like wars as well. Like armies. Yes. Lots of armies and trade. And from the trade point of view, you had the river and in that time, moving goods by water was 20 times cheaper than over land because it was just so difficult to, like, roads are not like they are today. Like a road in summer could disappear because it could just be overgrown. Yes. And, or you just couldn't find it or you'd get. It was just really hard getting things somewhere overland. And that's not just, you know, Cremona in the 1500s.

In the mid 1800s in Sydney, it was cheaper to get wheat from South America than it was to get it from Goulburn. Oh yeah. Yeah. Cause you've got to. You had to doing overland and horse and cart and all that. And from Goulburn was more expensive. Than getting it off a ship. Yeah. because you could from South America.

Oh wow. Yeah because you'd get like a really huge ship. You get a huge quantity. Yeah. Oh wow. Isn't that crazy? So even then, yeah. What, 1850s? Yeah. It was like, buy local must buy local water was cheaper than Yeah, maybe that's why we put a jail there. That's the really, that's the really high security jail in Golburn. It's like, try and get out of here. Oh my god. Go to South America first and then come back.

Yet despite Andrea Amati’s success as an artisan, he is still renting his house, unable to buy a property outright. According to the census of that year, there are four people living in his house. This is probably Andrea Amati, his wife, and the two boys, Antonio Amati and Girolamo Amati. The girl's being married off by now. The phrase, ‘who had to buy his own bread’, was used in the census to describe Andrea Amati and his family. This meant that he did not own his own house. Despite this, his workshop was a busy place, with himself and his sons’ producing instruments. One of them for the French king's sister, Marguerite de Valois, no less. The large tenor viola was made then decorated with gold leaf and a painted monogram on the back with golden fleur de lis in the corners and running the length of the ribs in Latin the phrase by this bulwark or fortification, we stand, religion stands and will stand.

A number of similar instruments like this one were made by Andrea Amati and we could imagine that they were played in the royal courts. Especially at this time in Paris, something quite new at court was happening that necessitated more instruments and musicians, despite the wars of religion going on in the background and the ever present intrigue and plotting at court. As in Italy, the Renaissance thinkers and artists were creating academies of poetry and music. The idea was to revive the arts of the ancient world in order to harmonize dance, music, and language. In a way that could result in a higher level of morality, and so was born the court ballet.

Despite universal harmony, music, dance, and the attaining of a higher level of morality, business for Andrea Amati was about to start slowing down, as the tensions in the French court rose. Marguerite de Valois was not going to be ordering more instruments anytime soon. She had a lot of other things on her plate. Being the king's sister and the daughter of Catherine de Medici, she didn't really get to choose who she married. So on the 18th of August, 1572, a spring wedding, she married the very protestant Henry of Navarre. There were not the best love vibes, and it ended in the famed Saint Bartholomew Day's Massacre. Her mum just absolutely ruined her wedding night. But what were they thinking?

So, Catherine the King's mother had a brilliant idea. To calm down the tensions in France between the Catholics and the Protestant Huguenots, she would marry her daughter Marguerite to the Protestant Henry of Navarre. The very Catholic Parisians at court were horrified that the Protestants were coming back into the royal circle. Catherine's son in law, King Philip of Spain, and the Pope were not happy about the situation. She had not listened to King Philip's advisers to just kill the Huguenots to solve the problem. And so here we are. Things were getting tense. The court did not attend the wedding. It was a tricky situation. You didn't want to be caught in the crossfire here.

And to add to the soup, Harvests had been poor and taxes had risen. The people of France were not in the mood for an extravagant royal celebration.

I spoke to Dr. John Gagne, Senior Lecturer in History at Sydney University.

I was reading the different like the spectacles and things and the pantomime for Henry of Neva Neva or Nevaire? Henry of Nevaire's wedding. He had to do this, like, play where he was which was very sort of which they were doing a lot, do the sort of play acting type things. And it was for his wedding where he was in a group of Huguenots and they were sent to hell and his brother in law, the king, would come and rescue him and take him out of hell. And because he's the king and like, restore them, and it was, like, the ultimate humiliation, and then,then, and the next night, he has all these friends murdered, so, it's like, fantastic mother in law there.

Well, yeah, I mean, so you're talking about the, the Night of St. Bartholomew, which is 1572, when, yeah, the idea is that Henri de Navarre, who was, you know, a Protestant prince, would marry the Margot of France, who was Catherine's daughter, and that, yes, I mean, that's, That didn't go well because then the Protestant leadership was murdered.

Dr. John Gagne, Senior History Lecturer at the University of Sydney. That, you know, so 1572. Interestingly, the, the columns on the violins Also appear on a medal stamped for King Charles IX right after the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572. Which, you know, the, the motto around the edge of the medal says Pietas excitavit justitiam, which is piety, aroused justice, meaning that, you know, the Protestants had it coming because true Catholic faith was angered by their existence. And so they were so it's interesting and I think, you know, that I think the columns in that case could be piety and justice. They could, you know, bring in this idea we were talking about earlier of the strength of the monarch in a sort of Herculean fashion, or that, you know, The stability of the, of the nation or the kingdom was strong under him because he had quashed the Protestant rulers, but, or you know, at least their leadership, not rulers. But yes, I mean that, that began what ended up being a 40 year odyssey for Henri Navarre, who became King Henry IV, in which, you know, he was pulled both ways in both directions. He was, you know, he must have converted three times between Catholicism and Protestantism in an effort to soothe angers on both, anger on both sides and to, frankly, find his way to power as well.

You know, famously, although probably Incorrectly or you know, mythically, he said Paris is worth a mass. So yes, it doesn't surprise me that the sort of festivities at the wedding would have involved maybe things that might have angered the Protestant, or used, used the Protestant leadership in a way that made them look like they were damned.

Yeah, I was feeling sorry for him. I'm like, he's getting married, and he has to do this, like, humiliating thing where, like, everyone knows he's Protestant, like, you know, and then. Don't know how he did it. Well, he was just trying to stay alive. Yeah, yeah.

And yet Catherine ploughed on with the wedding festivities, one of them being a pantomime the night after the wedding, organized by herself. A magnificent, masked ball was held at the Petit Bourbon. It included the performance of a pantomime tournoi called the Paradise of Love. King Charles and his two brothers defended 12 angelic nymphs against the Huguenots. They dispatched the Huguenots. Led by Henry of Navarre into hell where, according to an observer, a great number of devils and imps were making infinite foolery and noise. The nymphs then danced a ballet. There followed a combat between knights accompanied by explosions of gunpowder. The king and his brothers climaxed proceedings by rescuing the Huguenots from hell, which was separated from paradise by a river on which floated the ferryman Sharon in his boat. If that wasn't bad enough, after this cringeworthy and awkward piece of theatre, the remaining festivities had to be called off after an assassination attempt on the Huguenot leader, Admiral Colligny, who was shot from a house by an arquebusier. Married at first sight has nothing on these frolicking wedding celebrations.

So here's what was going on. To solve the problem of the pesky Protestants, a hit list to remove a few of the key leading nobles of that persuasion, who had come to Paris for the wedding, had been dispatched. And here is where the events took on a life of their own. Instead of killing the 20 odd leaders to make a point, the instigators of this subtle plan may have accidentally ended up putting into motion an event that killed between 5 to 30, 000 people. As the mania spread over the countryside, it ended in a free for all and a full scale massacre. This may or may not have been the original plan, but at the end of the day it was a disaster for many involved, the effects being felt throughout the country and down into Italy. All the way to the Amati workshop, as the French market would dry up and fizzle out until the country could work itself out.

My name is Susan Broomhall, and I'm the director of the Gender and Women's History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. I'm a historian by training, and I work on women and gender ideologies and assumptions in the early modern period in Europe. I don't believe there's any evidence. I certainly couldn't find any myself of, of Catherine sort of writing to the Amati workshop saying, I'd like to make an order of several, you know, string instruments, and I'd like them to look like this.

Susan Broomhall.

And I, and I'm sort of saying that laughingly and yet. We actually do have accounts from Catherine where we literally have a letter where she's writing, in one case, to a jeweller and saying, I would like you to make this jewel. And I'm going to draw on the side of the letter, a little picture of what I want the jewel to look like and this is what you should put in it. And these are the stones I want you to use. And this is what it means. It's the most helpful letter ever because it sets out exactly the level of detail she is interested in her artistic work. She absolutely knows what she wants. She knows how to spell it out. She knows how to Draw it, and she basically says, go to make it and we know who it's for. So everything about, you know, that particular commission is watertight. So it wouldn't, it wouldn't be impossible to think that she could order this and clearly her Italian connections, not necessarily to Cremona, but to a network of people who could direct her to the right, you know, string makers, instrument makers is entirely plausible, and it's much more likely in 15, in the early 1560s, if that's when these are commissioned, that it's Catherine who's basically holding the purse strings and not her son 13 year old son, who's, who's making this commission. And yet it would make sense that everything on that commission will be representing Charles because that's the person in whose interests Catherine was trying to make political messages at that point in time.

Yeah, I find it interesting I feel like she, she got a lot of things from Florence and at that time there was just one violin maker in Cremona and that was Andrea Amati and it, I find it interesting that she gets these instruments from Cremona and not, not from Florence. And would that have changed the sort of the trajectory of violin making had she got them from Florence?

Yeah, an interesting question. I mean, we do have letters again from her and letters are such a great source for Catherine where she's writing to her cousin Cosimo who becomes the Duke of Florence. And she writes to him saying, can you find me a good artist? I'm looking for an artist to do Y. And she's not always saying necessarily, you know, to bring them to France, sometimes she wants to, but often she's saying, I've got this commission and I think somebody over there would be best for it. So depending on the reputation of the Amati, you know, if, if her task is find me the best then perhaps he did. And you know, unless Cosimo has a relationship with the Florentine violin makers and he wants to support them, then I guess he'd write back and say, well, they were the best. But in this case, it looks like that. That didn't happen. But she doesn't have to work through her cousin. She also just, you know, she writes to ambassadors with these kinds of requests. I've seen that too. It's not just, you know, royal friends and family members. She's writing to everyone all the time saying, find me the best person. So she's also cross referencing the information she gets back before she makes a decision. So, This is somebody who's really active in, in sourcing, yeah, sourcing her commissions. She sounds so, she sounds so efficient. You know, I sometimes look at these letters and think she must've done nothing else all day. Cause I mean, not all of them, they're not all handwritten, but a lot of them are. And when you read into them, the, the level of detail of the sort of issue she's carrying in her head at once just seems phenomenal.

I don't know how she does it. You know, she did. And I think this, I think that probably tells us too, that this is a real interest for her. She was engaged by the arts and so therefore, you know, it kept her, it kept her attention.

So what does this have to do with violins? Well, war, again. It's bad for business, disturbing trade routes and the economy. Fortunately, in Cremona, under the Spanish administration, things were relatively calm. But the French market was important, and civil war was not going to help increase business. So how did Catherine deal with this conflict that was draining the country of even more money that they didn't have to begin with? Well, she organized court festivities. At Fontainebleau, one of the royal residences, Catherine arranged entertainments that lasted for days. These included fancy dress, jousting, and chivalrous events in allegorical settings. I'm sure Henry was just having a grand old time with that mother in law of his, and after only just surviving his killer wedding by the skin of his teeth, there were knights dressed as Greeks and Trojans fighting over scantily clad Demoiselles trapped by a giant and a dwarf in a tower on an enchanted island.

The whole thing would end in drama as the tower, losing its magical properties, burst into flames. In another spectacle, singing sirens swam past the king and Neptune floated by in a chariot drawn by seahorses.

While opera was all the thing in Italy, in France, it was the court ballet. Susan Broomhall talks to us about these spectacles.

A line of sight of the viewer looking at them is a kind of, it’s not quite bird's eye, but it's certainly looking down on a diagonal, let's say so you can see the kinds of arrangements that are being made.

And yes, these, these all have meaning. I mean, these have, unfortunately, incredibly complex kinds of meaning that scholars are still debating exactly what the reference points are. This is a culture where people at court are really steeped in classical traditions, quite often esoteric kinds of material. If you think of Nostradamus is a contemporary to this culture, he's part of this culture in fact. And you think about the endless reinterpretation of the lines of his different works and what they might mean. You might get a, it gives you a little bit of a feel for the kind of complexity of what might be embedded behind both the ballets and the poetry and the arts of the time.

That they have really complex kinds of meanings that aren't. Exactly straightforward to untangle. So they're often classically, they're referencing classical themes. You know, and certainly that's true in the mythology, but they are also referencing things like mathematics at the time early understandings of science. All of this is kind of blended together in a, in a cultural performance that's also trying to do political work. So it's a, lot going on at once. So, yeah.

So if I'm like a courtier and I, like, would I, I would understand all this and go, Oh, look at that. Look at that triangle. Wow. Pythagorean theorem.

And, Oh, did you get that political message? So, I mean, this is kind of what you meant to think, I think. But the fact that you're, I mean, something like this, this, this Ballet Comique publication. Suggest to me that perhaps everyone didn't quite get it and maybe you need it explained to you. Like sometimes we do find kind of explanation books of various ceremonies or let's say an entry to a town that often some of these big big ceremonial moments are accompanied by almost like a handbook and you know sure it's a record of the event but it's also a kind of unpacking of what on earth was being explained in that event. And you know we kind of do it now I'm thinking about recent. Very large ceremonial occasions like the funeral of the, of Queen Elizabeth II or a royal wedding, for example. Often, you know, you might watch that on television and you, and clearly the, the commentators have been kind of given a script to say, Oh, this is what's happening now. And here are the guards coming in and they're going to do this. You know, we have it kind of narrated to us in a certain way to make sense of the different elements. And I think the same thing would have been happening there too. Certainly, sure, the courtiers have a high level of education in things that we now perhaps don't quite know and see straight away. But I think there's also an audience of people who would really like a handbook to help them understand what it was they just saw. And then obviously there's a whole other audience of people beyond the court who would never be able to see this at court. You know, it has a limited audience of prestigious people at court. But some publisher and printer can make an awful lot of money selling the story of it to everybody else who couldn't be there. So, you know, I think people are understanding these things at very different levels. And so Charles IX, he's, he's died by this stage.

Is that it?

Certainly if we're talking about the 1581 ballet, yes, he's passed away. Yeah. So he's, was he king number two out of the three? Yes. So she has three sons who become kings. The first one is Francois II, and he really only lasts about a year. And perhaps he's most famous for being married to Mary, Queen of Scots. So after he passes away as a teenager, he must only be about 16 when he dies. And I think she would be about the same age. She then returns to Scotland, having grown up at the French court and, you know, various disasters unfold for her on her return to Scotland. So then Francois II, then the king who follows him is Charles IX.

In 1574, as the Civil War rages in France, money is a bit tight. And Andrea Amati has to borrow 90 Lira from a neighbour. He is able to pay him back over the next five months. But the same year, their youngest son, Girolamo Amati, gets married to Lucrenzia Cornetti, she comes to live in the family home with them. Andrea Amati, as the head of the family, also receives part of her dowry.

In the next few years, Andrea Amati is finally able to buy the family home, so that in the following census, he is noted as a landowner. The Amati brothers had a pivotal role in the workshop, helping their father, who was entering his seventies. They were all living and working in the same household, spending a lot of family time together.

Then one cold winter's night on Christmas eve of 1577, at the age of 72, Andrea Amati died, leaving his sons, the brothers, Girolamo Amati and Antonio Amati to carry on the family legacy and his business. Without their father's presence, things would never be quite the same. Antonio Amati, the older brother, was now legally head of the family unit, and would have to deal with the responsibilities that entailed. It would not always be smooth sailing for the brothers, and they would surprisingly survive incredible odds to keep plying their trade. But this is a story for the next episode of the Violin Chronicles.

Thank you so much for listening. And if you like what you hear and would be into supporting the podcast so I can make even more episodes, please sign up to Patreon. You can find that on patreon. com forward slash the Violin Chronicle.

This brings us to the end of the series on Andrea Amati, but never fear. In the next episode, I'll be looking at his two sons known as the Amati brothers. I would like to thank my wonderful guests, James Beck, Dr. Susan Broomhall, Dr. John Gagne, and Dr. Emily Brayshaw. I would also like to thank the Australian Chamber Orchestra for their cooperation and permission to play some of their live tracks, and also to the ABC for permission to play Daniel Yeadon's recording of the Telemann Sonata in D major on his viola da gamba.

It's always great to hear from listeners and if you would like to contact me, you can do so via email on the violin [e-mail]. You can also subscribe to the podcast at the violin chronicles.podbean.com, and I also have an Instagram with the handle at the Violin Chronicles. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast, and I'll catch you next time.

​ 

Music Heard in this episode is as follows.

Industrial music box – Kevin Macleod

Bloom – Roo Walker

Danny Yeadon – Telemann Sonata in D Major for viola da Gamba

Aura Classica – Spring the four seasons Vivaldi

Harpsichord Fugue – Copyright free music

Ambush – Brandon Hopkins