Ep 21. Francesco Rugeri Part III

The Violin Chronicles Podcast

Join me as we continue to look at the life of this innovative violin maker who was literally living outside the box. His workshop has been successfully set up, he has a young family and work is pouring in. Francesco now has to take on apprentices but who could they be? Keep listening to find out.

Transcript

  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 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, feminine 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.

This week's show is sponsored by Tarizio Fine Instruments and Bows, and I just happen to have bumped into Mr.Jason Price.

Hello, I'm Jason Price. I'm the founder and director of Tarizio, Tarizio was started 25 years ago in New York City, and now we have offices in London and also Berlin. We do auctions, we do private sales, and we also are the maintainers and curators of this thing called the Cozio Archive.

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Welcome back to this series on Francesco Ruggeri. We find ourselves in Cremona, a city in Northern Italy on the Lombard plains. Yet this relatively small centre had a far reaching reputation for the production of fine instruments in many European cities. Over in England, the country just could not keep a monarch on the throne for very long, and this had been going on for quite a while. Whereas France, another superpower, had a lot of stability with their sun king, Louis XIV. Lully was in full force and ballet and opera and ballet operas were all the thing at Versailles.

Well, now it's all about the cello and it's this little guy's time to shine. Rugeri's workshop may have been on the outskirts of Cremona, but it was an industrious hub of activity with instrument after instrument being produced. He was beginning to get a reputation for his fine sounding cellos that he made to a smaller and more manageable size. Their rich sound meant orders kept coming in. His workshop would have been attached to his house where you could find Ippolita and their ever growing brood of children. Francesco's boys were too young to help out in the workshop, so it seems logical, with the quantity of instruments emerging from the Ruggeri workshop, that there were apprentices, or other hands helping him out.

Although Antonio Stradivarius's apprenticeship has often been assumed to have been in the hands of the Amatis. Even though there's no actual proof of this, here we find Antonio Stradivari in his mid teens, and from a biographical point of view, he is the right age to be apprenticed to Ruggeri, given also that some researchers think his work resembles more that of Ruggeri in his early work, stylistically and technically, than Amati's. So there is always a possibility that this young maker was working with Francesco Rugeri in the shop churning out instruments. W. E. Hill and Sons concede that they, quote, “failed to find the hand of Stradivari in any of Niccolò Amati's work, although the unmistakable hands of Andrea Guarneri and Francesco Ruggeri are evident”, end quote.

In the previous episodes, I spoke to Dan Larson about the evolution of gut strings, and now we are at a point where, as Dan will explain, the wound gut string will enable makers such as Francesco Ruggeri to make different sized instruments and how that was possible through new string technologies.

Dan Larson.

What we had was the invention of the concept of changing the mass of the string. Because, as I mentioned before several times, up to that point, there was only one type of material that they had, gut. And if you wanted to lower string, you had to just add more gut. But if you had the technology to combine materials, then you could start putting heavier materials together with the gut and have a thinner string, which meant that you could start to control the weight of the string, as well as control the size of the instrument and the size of, you know, the pitch that you were using and so forth. And I think that the important thing about this concept of the gimped string, whatever it was, the important thing is that it gave instrument makers the ability to control the weight of the string and that opened up a whole new world of, of instrument design for them. It meant that they weren't restricted by the, the fundamental laws that Mersenne talked about. About length and pitch and, and tension and so forth. That they could change the length. And they could make it shorter, for instance, and just make a heavier string. They could make it a little bit longer and use a lighter string. And I think that opened up a tremendous amount of, of possibilities.

So people think that Strad was sort of copied him, his smaller instrument model, his B model cello they think is based off of Francesco Ruggeri's, who was doing this 50 years before. So we often say Stradivari made this, the modern standard cello, but Francesco Ruggeri was doing this. At this time, when the strings were making it possible to make a smaller instrument, and would it also have made, at this point, violins more, more sort of powerful as well, with that, those strings?

Dan Larson.

Not necessarily. I've heard a lot of instruments with all gut strings that are pretty powerful, especially if they're all gut strings is strong and equal tension. They can be, they can be quite powerful indeed. So, no, I don't think that would necessarily mean it would have any more energy in it than it, than it would with a plain gut string.

Yeah, so before was it that they had to also you get a lot of very wide, cellos before? And that would, was that sort of dictated by the strings as well?

It could be. It could be. I know I certainly prefer wide instruments myself because I have a tendency to use primarily gut strings. And I find with gut strings that having that width gives a more fundamental tone then it tends to reduce the upper partials of the note and the tone and sort of reinforces the fundamental of the of the note. So, you know, it could be, but that's just total anecdotal thinking on my part because that's what I like.

As time goes on for the Rugeris in the 1660s, the couple has two more sons, Vincenzo then Carlo. And here is where things will start to get confusing, because it is now that the young Giovanni Battista Rogeri, who will eventually move to Brescia, starts his apprenticeship with Niccolo Amati in town, around the years 1661 to 1663. Matters are not helped by the fact that Francesco's eldest son, who is about 10 years younger than Giovanni Battista Rogeri, is also called Giovanni Battista, which makes him Giovanni Battista Rugeri.

Here is Duane Rosengard, who we spoke to in the previous episode.

In that interval from 1653 to 1666, Francesca Rugeri's four sons are born, and you can probably pretty easily imagine that once they were of a certain age to help, and it could have been 12, it could have been 11, could have been 13, depending on their personalities and physique, they got involved in father's business and they lived out there in the country and had room to roam and, not at all like life in a medieval city. As it were. It's really, that's the first, the first chapter of the book. As I see it, a Francesco is his obscure origins in the province, his connection to Amati, and then starting his own family and having so many children.

Yeah, and his children would have been the same ages as close to Niccolo Amati and Andrea Guarneri's?

Yes, that's a very excellent point, right? The children of Francesco are roughly the same age, even almost the same age spread as Andrea Guarneri's two sons, or three sons. One, Andrea Guarneri had one son who was a priest and two who were violin makers, and of those, Pietro Guarneri, the older son, seems to have been as occupied with music at playing instruments as he was making them. So yeah, they were all in that, let's call it two generations after the Black Death, let's call it.

Life, music, art, and architecture around them is changing. We are firmly in the Baroque period at this point, having left the Renaissance. The way music is played and composed has a direct impact on the violin makers of Cremona, and one of the moving factors for this movement that the Ruggieri's find themselves in comes from the Reformation. If you haven't already, go back and listen to Episode 5 of The Violin Chronicles, where I talk about what the Reformation was and the profound impact it had on the city of Cremona, and the way music was composed. Well, after the Reformation, there was the Counter Reformation, and that was the Catholic Church's response to Protestantism. While the Protestant churches decided to remove statues and artworks that risked looking like something resembling idol worship, to end up with very simply decorated buildings, almost even austere in some places, the Catholic Church's response was to go literally Baroque.

Now, the movement we call Baroque, as I mentioned, emerged from the Reformation and started in Rome with the Catholic Church encouraging this style to really contrast to the simplicity of Protestant architecture, art and music. Baroque anything is pretty full on, but some characteristics to help recognize the style in art, for example, are the use of deep colors, movement, lots of flowing fabric, intense emotions, and contrast. Think of Caravaggio's portraits for contrast and emotion with the clairobscur, and Peter Paul Rubens for movement and flowy fabric. There's a lot of drama, asymmetry, and the use of primary colors and allegory. This meant that there was often a story being told in the image, that would often involve windswept clothing consisting of meters of fabric flowing around them.It was intense.

Take Judas Slaying Holophane by Artemisia Gentileschi. There's emotion, almost spotlight lighting. There's fabric galore and a story to be told. Buildings were characterized by exuberant detail and grandeur. There's a crowded, dense sense of ornamentation. There was always room to stuff in sculptures of baskets, of fruit, of flowers, trophies and weapons into an already loaded structure. The more the merrier. And you couldn't get any further from the Protestant ideal of simplicity. But that was exactly the point.

The Baroque period went from about 1600 to 1750 and our violin maker Francesco Rugeri lived from 1629 or 28 to 1698. That places him slap bang in the middle of the Baroque.

Emily Brayshaw.

I was just thinking, so we've come from the Renaissance where it's this like explosion of colors and textures and, you know, stripes and things, and we're coming into the Baroque era. Is it still very colorful?

Oh, absolutely. And yeah, it absolutely is. For men and women.

Often I have this idea that it's all blacks and greys and browns and regions.

No, no, no. So the thing with blacks of course is you still do have a lot of black and that's coming out of Holland a lot of the time and because it's quite a protestant thing to be wearing black with these Dutch merchant classes. So with the Reformation maybe like just wearing colors you were like I'm definitely not Protestant. You know, with the Spanish Inquisition, maybe you could, it was a bit like hairy there for a bit. You didn't, you really didn't want to be Protestant in Cremona. You were being,

yeah. Okay. So maybe with your clothing, you could say, well, the thing is though, like not all blacks are created equal. And the thing about this Dutch merchant classes is as well, like for a long time black. is associated with wealth. A really good quality black dye is actually very expensive to make, one that's stable and fast, and so not all black clothes are created equal. And so you can still express, you know, like luxury and wealth through black and black materials. And you can also you know, express that, you know, this lack of Protestant sobriety, you can also express, you know, decadence and extravagance through black, not all black textiles are created equal, so you can do that. Yeah, definitely. So we're still seeing these colors. What's happening though, is particularly in the Baroque era, we're moving into an era where. It's more about the primacy of the textile. And so particularly in the UK, you’re seeing more of these one color silks, and it's about the quality of the silk and the cut of the silk, and it's being trimmed like with things like laces. And also in the Baroque too, by, you know, the 1660s, you have the rise of really incredible lace trimmings. And you've also got ribbons, like, because ribbons are incredibly expensive to make, because you've got to set it all up to make these incredibly thin strips of luxury silk textiles. And so if you can, the more ribbons, you know, the richer you are.

Right, so ribbons are a big thing, and of course you can have ribbons in all sorts of different colours, and this is also a nice trimming that kind of can filter down, you know, so perhaps you've got a poorer woman who can afford one beautiful ribbon in her hair, versus again, you know, these Baroque courtly leaders who have, just have ribbons for days. Like they have ribbons, like the men will have ribbons on the bottoms of all their breeches and adorning their coats and, you know, just all over the shop, like it's a ribbon city.

In little women, they're always going, Oh, I'm going to, going to go and buy some ribbons. And they're always off to buy, they're always off to the shop to buy some ribbons.

Yeah, and the great thing about ribbons too is that, and I mean that's part of why little women are talking about it as well, but it's a really cheap well not cheap, but it's a really simple way that you can change up your outfit really quickly.

So this is what people were wearing at this time, when the young Ruggeri was running his workshop with his burgeoning family. Okay, so he wasn't wearing the chains and ribbons and fancy pants. And let's face it, high heels are just not practical in the workshop. Believe me, I tried. But he was definitely making instruments for some of these people and would have come across these fashions in downtown Cremona.

You know, they'll wear chains around their necks. These are men, you know, also men really have extravagant shoes as well. So you've got the rise of the Louis heel, the court in France, for example, you know, in the time of Louis XIV, you've got the red. What we've got though, which is really interesting in Cremona. So something that pops up is this sort of style of men's court called the Juste corps, which comes from France. And it's a really long outer coat, really, really long, with huge pockets.

Because today, the Juste corps is a singlet.

Which doesn't That's hilarious!

Because they're like, why isn't your baby wearing a little juste corps. Yeah, so it's called a juste corps, just to call it, and it's a long men's over jacket, and this sort of like evolves over the Baroque period, and you'll get like the huge cuffs, which are you know, often embellished. It'll be in a very, very fine wool or velvet, depending what you're doing with it. On either side, we'll have incredibly expensive buttons and embroidery. And something that pops up in this period too is, as you probably know, is the pochette or the kit. Yes. Which comes from the, so these juste corps have huge pockets and we see the dance masters wearing them and with the kit that they can carry in their pocket. Yeah. Of the just decor. And this is where this is coming from. And we know, for example, that I think Amati made different styles of kits for the higher quality ones. And what we're seeing is what's really interesting is these dance masters have to dress in the most expensive clothing that they can possibly afford because their clients are nobility. Right? Or they're aspirational wealthy people who are looking to learn how to dance or get their daughters to learn how to dance so that they can marry well. And so you've sort of got like the dancing master dressing the very best he can to kind of try to fit in, even though these classes like they need his services, but they will still mock him because he's a type of dancer.

Yeah, he's another one of those people. I feel like with the instrument makers that are between worlds, they're, they're catering to the very wealthy their working class themselves, but they're kind of on the, on the upper end of these skilled artisans. Yeah. Like the skilled tailors.

This was the age of the pochette, or kit violin, that you could put in the pocket of your French juste de corps jacket, if you were a dance master. The word pochette means pocket, and these kit instruments, as they were called, were in fact tiny violins. They were not proportionally small, they often had a full length neck and scroll on what looks like a tiny little shrunken body of a violin and their purpose was to play music as you practice dancing. A teacher didn't have an orchestra at his disposal at all times. And so he would pull this little thing out to play a tune for his students. There are some really stunning instruments made like this, and they would often come in little boxes or tubes to transport easily. There are pochettes made by Stradivari and Amati, amongst others.

In Venice and parts of Italy and it moves to France, you've got like the lace makers who are making these incredibly labour intensive, beautiful, handmade laces that become part of a garment that just takes off boom in 1660, known as the cravat, which revolutionizes menswear. Okay.

So that was during Ruggieri's lifetime as well. He lived through a really all this stuff was happening. So, from the 1640s to the 1660s, the violin sort of exploded. It became really popular. That's when it became so popular. And before then, it was sort of the viola, and then it sort of, and then, and then the violin starts to take over now. And in the second half of the 1600s, we get over spun strings. So we have wire wrapped around the gut, which means that big bass instruments could be made smaller, more manageable before they so you can play them without them going all you, you didn't need a giant gut string. You could make a thinner gut string. So Ruggeri, he, he made these smaller cellos. They were 10 centimetres smaller than what people were making at the time. And this was like, this was huge for violin makings. He was living in sort of this, this age of, of great change, you know, you've got the cravat.

Yeah. The, cello is, appearing. You've got the violin is taking off. It was, I, it was, yeah, it was exciting they'd gone through this lull with the plague and now they were sort of, you know, revving up to. Trying to boost it up again. And again, you sort of see that in like Cremona trying to rebuild itself, you know, prop itself back up with these making raw silks, textiles, the flaxes, the linens, things like that. A lot of foodstuffs, even agricultural foodstuffs.

So what did this mean for music? Because that is what is going to influence Francesco Rugeri more than flowy robes in paintings and baskets of fruit on facades. Music, as with art and architecture, was creating a heightened sense of emotion. It was heavily instrumental. Composers were starting to use the keyboard and the violin more and more. And the Catholic Church encouraging composers to write music to appeal to the masses. Emotion evoking music. It was, it was to be dynamic and contrasting. Composers used counterpoint, or that that meant the layering of several melodies on top of each other, to create a supercharged piece of music. Into this mix, we see the rise of opera and the development of new genres such as the concerto and the sonata.

I'm Stephen Mould and I'm an associate professor at the Conservatory of Music in Sydney. And I teach mainly in the areas of opera studies and conducting. Yeah, sure. Basically during that century from about 1600. Okay. Where we were, if you'd been alive then, you wouldn't have woken up one morning and said, Oh, opera's been born in any way, shape, or form. Opera like works have existed, well, since the ancient Greeks. Or even in the 16th century, there were lots of works, which if you listen to them today, you'd say, well, that's basically an opera. What happened at around 1600 was a group of noblemen got together and decided that they wanted to revive the ancient Greek notion of opera. So it's quite a self conscious thing. They were all poets. An important aspect of opera is the Gesamtkunstwerk. That's what we call it today, which is this idea, which already comes from the Greeks that, that opera is a collection of different things, text, music, decor, drama, and that all of these, all of these particular areas come together in some mysterious harmony, To create a wonderful operatic work. It's the ultimate art form. Ultimate art form. It's a kind of alchemical sort of, it's an idea. The idea of opera got, if you like, kickstarted around 1600, because these noblemen got together and decided that they were going to revive this form. Now, being poets, they wrote poems. What for the time was, was wonderful poetry. And then they had it set to music. Now already you've got a problem because you've got the poet with their wonderful text. And then you've got maybe a composer who is trying to write the next great tune. And so there's this, this question that runs through the whole history of opera. What comes first, the words or the music, or in fact, what dominates the words or the music? It's pretty clear you can't have, it requires a librettist to write the opera and then a composer to set the text. So the person writing the music wasn't necessarily the person writing the story. Absolutely not. There's always been these two different, the poet plus the, the musician. So you know, today, if we talk about any opera, if I say the marriage of Figaro, you'll probably say Mozart. Yeah. If I say Il Trovatore, you'll say Verdi. Yeah What about the poor old librettist? What's happened there? And, and so the way we talk about opera is extraordinary because a lot of modern opera goers couldn't tell you. Who had written some of their favourite operas. Who had written the text for some of their favourite operas.

Yeah, that's extraordinary. We do just think of the composer and the whole idea of opera was that it was this mixture of dance music, poetry. And what I found interesting is the, the, the mise en scène, the, the, the decor. You don't really think of the person doing the decorations, but for them, it was just as important.

Absolutely. So it is this idea. I mean, today in modern terms, we'd call it an ecosystem that all of these very, very, very different areas find this magical balance. So Wagner created this word, Gesamtkunstwerk. He didn't create it, he kind of brought it back into the language, which means total work of art. Wagner was one of the great plagiarizers or borrowers of all time, depending on what era you live in. So he didn't invent that much, but he appropriated a lot of things to create something original. So he put this term out there basically as his own invention, which it wasn't. So, this group of literati who wrote the Libretti, their idea was that the word was the primary thing. They wanted the person who set the opera to set it with very, very, very plain, syllabic settings so that the words were always clear. Audible. The words were almost always foremost in the audience's mind.

The splendour of the Baroque age. It epitomizes grandeur and elegance. The music is mirroring other baroque works, such as art and architecture in Paris at the court of Louis xiv. Jean Baptiste Lully was in full swing. In Italy, Vivaldi and Corelli were soon to come onto the scene. Corelli was a master of the trio sonata, and that had two violins and a continuo. This was a very popular musical format. May account for the dip in popularity of the viola at this point and the rise of the violin and increased demand for the cello at this time, as the trio sonata would have two violins and a bass, which, which would remove the viola part. Courtly dances were the basis of many Baroque pieces. These came from Renaissance dances from Germany, France, and Italy. The Baroque composers took these dances and developed them into instrumental pieces without the dance. There's the Allemande, or the jig, the Sarabande, and the Carante. The harpsichord became the backbone to most ensembles, and it formed the continuo with the cello. Flutes, oboes, trumpets without valves, and timpani were developing, and became established instruments into orchestras. And as the quality of instruments improved, composers continued exploring the capabilities of the orchestra, being able to use contrast, soft and loud sounds, and that would fit right into the Baroque aesthetic.

You can hear some of these very early operas for around 1600. They're boring by modern standards. Some of them have had historical recreations in under certain settings, but they would never, ever survive a commercial season in a modern opera house. They, they're all, they're very nicely written, but they are like poetry with a bit of music. Yeah. Things. This is very blunt tool, but sometimes the blunt tool is useful. Tunes and divas. If you don't have both of those and, and they're not even part of the Gazant Kunstverband, but that's what keeps opera alive. The thing about Monteverdi was he was a great composer. He wrote. Fabulous music. So when, when certain intensity was happening in the drama, he knew how to turn up the, the harmonies and, and mirror what was going on stage with, with the right harmonic palette. And he also wrote great tunes. He was what I would call a man of the theatre. And we also have to contend with the fact that he was also the Maestro della Musica of San Marco in, in Venice. So this whole idea of secular and, and sacred is an interesting mix as well. There's a fascinating. scene in, in Orfeo, who we always manage playing on it. Imagine playing on his lyre, where Orfeo is literally trying to sing himself or perform himself across the river Styx to get to the underworld to find Euridice. Monteverdi takes a couple of violins to do all these flourishes and runs. And then there's also a harp involved. So it's this idea of using musical virtuosity that that Orfeo is not just, not just a musician, but one.

So Cremona's very own Monteverdi is getting into opera and giving the violin star parts in his operas. These companies coming out of Venice would tour around the country, and perhaps our violin maker Francesco Rugeri even saw one around this time. He would definitely have been in contact with musicians working in the theatre, and in the ever-increasing orchestras now being put together. And as time goes on, we will see in the up and coming episodes, how Francesco's workshop will flourish and grow with his sons coming on board. And with all this manpower, the production of incredible instruments is to come.

I would like to thank my guests, Stephen Mould. Dr. Emily Brayshaw, Dan Larson, and Duane Rosengard.

Thank you also to the Australian Chamber Orchestra for permission to use their recordings of Timo Vekkio Valve playing the cello. And if you've liked this show and would like to hear bonus episodes, go to patreon.com/theviolinchronicles, or another way to support the podcast is to rate and review it on the application on which you're listening.

So stay tuned and I hope you will join me next time for another episode of the Violin Chronicles.

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