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Guarneri del Gesù's
Place in Cremonese Violin-Making
written and researched by - Charles Beare

I would like to ask you all this afternoon to come with me on an imagined historical visit to Cremona, so that we can try to understand something of the background to the working life of Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù. I can almost guarantee that on this December day the whole of the flat plain of Lombardy is a pretty miserable place to be, and if you decided to climb the tower of the Cathedral in Cremona, which is the tallest in the whole of Italy, you would be most unlikely to have a view of anything but the damp, clinging fog that clogs the plain all winter long. You could walk the streets, some of them still cobbled, but except in the shopping area you would be short of com-pany and your footsteps would echo eerily in the dampness. No wonder someone wrote in the 1630s that "the violin cannot be brought to perfection without the strong heat of the sun". He could have added that winter doesn't do the mo-rale of the Cremonese people much good either.
In summer it is hot, often very hot, and you would enjoy your visit, because even though the area where Stradivari, the Amatis and the Guarneris once worked has been drastically altered, there still remains much of the old atmosphere, especially in the area of the Cathedral square, but also in some of the old, narrow streets away from the city centre. Many times I have stood, and looked, and sniffed, and thought "Yes, this must be just how Stradivari or Guarneri knew it". I think their spirit lingers on.
As I am sure you all know, there were two cities, Cremona and Brescia, where the true violin was developed, along with the viola and cello, in the 16th and early 17th centuries. This early development was halted abruptly when famine and plague successively struck northern Italy in 1628 and 1630. In Cremona Nicolo Amati fortunately survived, but in Brescia the long tradition of instrument making came to a sudden end with the death of Gio: Paolo Maggini. Maggini was fifteen years older than Nicolo Amati, but both represented already the third generation of makers in their respective cities, Maggini as a pupil of Gasparo da Salò, and Nicolo Amati in succession to his father and grandfather.
Although today less than an hour's trainride apart, when the cities of Brescia and Cre-mona were not being overrun by foreign armies they were separated by the boundary of the Venetian state. Perhaps this social barrier goes some way towards explaining why the instruments of Gasparo and Maggini differed so much from those of the Amati family, in design, in appearance and in tone. Physically, the larger Brescian violin as made by Maggini was more than half an inch longer than its Amati counterpart, as well as different in every detail, compact in form rather than stylish in the curves of its outline, quite roughly made in comparison with the delicate Amati workmanship, Brescia and Cremona united only by the supreme quality of their closely related varnishes. In tone also they were different, the Brescians being full, rich and rather dark, with a good feeling of power under the bow, the Amati golden, infinitely responsive and rather more soprano. In value too they differed, for we know that in the 1630s a Brescian violin could commonly be had for one-third of the price of a much scarcer Cremonese. One might even see these basic differences as a sort of contest between the two cities, with neither side yielding much to the other during fifty years, and with Cremona winning outright only when the plague eliminated Maggini in about 1632.
Cremona was then the winner by an accident of fate, and yet … The second half of the 17th century saw a tremendous expansion of violin playing all over Italy, and with violinists ex-changing ideas and trying each other's instruments at every opportunity, then just as they do now, I am certain that Cremonese and Brescian instruments were constantly compared. Inevitably - and we know it from the evidence of comparative prices - the Cremonese generally came out on top, but there must always have been something very special in the tone of the Brescian instruments that the Cremonese never quite had, for all their beauty to the ear and to the eye, something luscious, perhaps an earthy ravishing darkness. How wonderful if one could only blend the best of both schools. This exhibition is a celebration of the genius who eventually did it.
The first of the violin-making Guarneris, Andrea, the grandfather of Guarneri del Gesù, was born in 1626, survived the plague and entered Nicolo Amati's household as an apprentice before 1641, staying until 1645. In 1650 he re-turned as a qualified assistant, remaining until 1654, so that one can certainly say that Andrea Guarneri was well versed in the Amati methods and traditions before setting up in business on his own account. Yet he was anything but a slavish follower. His work never had quite the elegant perfection of his master's, rather from the first it had character, personality, the designs of the Amati fully comprehended but executed with sculptural strength rather than precision. `his visual personality reflects also in the tone of Andrea Guarneri's instruments, which have, as well as an immediately likable quality, a certain incisiveness not always found in an Amati.
When Antonio Stradivari began his long career in 1666 he was aged about twentytwo, Andrea Guarneri was in his fortieth year and the elder of his two violinmaking sons, Pietro, eleven years old. The second son, Giuseppe, was born that same year of 1666. The elder statesman of the Cremonese violinmaking fraternity, Nicolo Amati, had his seventieth birthday in 1666 and most of the hard work in his shop was being carried out by his teenaged son Hieronymus. Quite a spread of different ages. Eighteen years into Stradivari's career, when Nicolo Amati died in 1684 at the ripe old age of eighty-eight, the whole balance in Cremona had shifted. Although Hieronymus Amati was a fine maker on his own, capable of rising to heights that he was only occasionally interested in reaching for after his father's death, Stradivari had already eclipsed him completely to become the greatest maker of all time - and still he had more than fifty years of his working life ahead of him.
Were the other Cremonese makers inspired by Stradivari's genius, discouraged, or even paralyzed by it? In the case of Hieronymus Amati probably the latter, though he may have been able to afford to ease off. The Rugeris, father Francesco and sons Vincenzo and Giacinto, were no match at all for the star of the Piazza S. Domenico, but what about the Guarneris? There were, by 1690, strong signs of a competitive streak in the family, of a desire not to be excessively influenced by Stradivari's productions, but rather to seek progress and success in different directions, and in their own style. For Pietro, the elder son, this meant leaving Cremona altogether and starting a new life as a violin maker and mu-sician in Mantua, a move which his father found hard to forgive. The younger son Giuseppe stayed at his father's side and participated fully in his later productions, taking for instance the major part in the development of a cello of smaller dimensions a decade before Stradivari began to have similar thoughts. The Guarneri contralto viola too was a wonderful achievement: William Primrose chose one, and Pinchas Zukerman and Nobuko Imai both play examples of only five known to exist, the first of which was made before Stradivari's of 1672.
In the 1690s Stradivari's originality exerted itself chiefly with the production of his "Long Pattern" violin. As things turned out he eventually saw the Long Pattern as something of a blind alley, returning in the last year or two of the century to the normal dimensions of a "Grand Pattern" Nicolo Amati, but there is no doubt that the Stradivari violins of the 1690s were conceived in an attempt to blend something of the Brescian tonal appeal with what the Amatis and he had already achieved in Cremona. In this it can be said he was only to small extent successful. His main progress in the 1690s had more to do with archings, thicknesses and varnish, than with this concession to the larger Brescian size of violin. After 1700 Stradivari's genius gave us that long progression of miraculous instruments that can never be surpassed, its pinnacle reached just be-fore and just after his seventieth birthday.

In 1698 Andrea Guarneri died, leaving as his principal heir in the Casa Guarneri his son Giuseppe, whom we know as Joseph filius Andreae. I would guess that envy of Stradivari played no great part in Joseph's life, and that they were good friends and colleagues. Both lived and worked a short stone's throw apart in the Piazza S. Domenico, and as Cremona was famous for its violins I am sure that in the early 1700s both houses were able to profit, even when foreign armies were encamped nearby. Probably Joseph's real friends were Antonio Stradivari's sons Francesco and Omobono, for in 1698 when his father died Joseph was thirty-two years old, Francesco Stradivari twenty-seven and Omobono nineteen. As we all know, Francesco and Omobono's part in the appearance of the final details of Antonio Stradivari's violins was a relatively minor one, and I think it may well be that the two sons endured far greater feelings of subservience and inferiority than anything felt by their neighbour Joseph filius Andreae, who was, after all, free to work how and when he wished.
I am sure that Joseph was proud of his own workmanship, carried out in a style which owed little or nothing to that of Stradivari, and at first much less to his father than to his elder brother Peter of Mantua. Furthermore this style developed in its own personal way during the first ten or fifteen years of the new century, matching Stradivari in improving from year to year. The neat, deeply channeled but light-weight edges of the 1690s gradually lost their precision but gained in character, as did the scrolls. The archings, rising in the centre bouts rather flatly to a peak, nevertheless remained little altered, an opposite if you like to those of Stradivari. Increasingly as the years go by one notices more handsome maple - he always had first-class spruce available for his better-paid orders - and more often than not Joseph covered his instruments with varnish of a transparency and warmth of colour that has seldom been equalled and never improved upon.
Apart from the varnish the feature which I personally admire most about Joseph filius Andreae is the conception and cutting of his scrolls. Based on the designs inherited via his father from the Amatis, Joseph's scrolls after about 1705 have for my eye an extraordinary sculptural quality, their formal geometry softened by his feeling for a moving, almost living three-dimensional work of art. One sees this best in his cello scrolls, and he was, in my opinion, one of the great natural carvers of wood.
In his home life Joseph Guarneri filius Andreae had in 1690 married Barbara Franchi, who in 1692 bore him a first son, Andrea, who Duane Rosengard tells us died in 1706. In 1695 was born a second son, Pietro, whom we later come to know as Peter of Venice, and in 1698, on 21st August, there came into this world the child whose later genius we celebrate this year, and in particular at this wonderful exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum. He was baptised Bar-tolomeo Giuseppe in the Church of S. Matteo on that same day, 21st August, and his godfather was his uncle, Pietro Guarneri of Mantua.
Any book published before the great Hill volume of 1931 will tell you that Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù was not the son of Joseph filius Andreae, but a cousin born in 1683. The research that yielded this was carried out for Fetis, Vuillaume's friendly author, in the 1850s, and when it was shown in the 1880s that this Giuseppe had died in infancy another cousin of the same name was discovered, born in 1686. It was Giovanni Livi who found that this child too died young, and in collaboration with the Hills established established beyond any doubt that this Bartolomeo Giuseppe was in fact our man, with the Bartolomeo omitted on all the subsequent census returns. I mention this in some detail because this clear truth has still to be accepted by certain Italian writers, and even Fernando Sacconi used to cling to the old view that del Gesù was a nephew rather than a grandson of Andrea.

Returning in our daydream to Cremona, we can try to imagine Joseph filius Andreae's sons growing up in their simple but not insubstantial house at the edge of the Piazza S. Domenico, the smells of worked wood, Italian cooking and nonexistant plumbing mingling with the smoke of the fire and, in summer, the scent of the master's varnish. The youngsters were doubtless brought out to meet numerous musicians, but it would be surprising if the two future violin-makers didn't spend a lot of time playing at soldiers as well, for early in 1702 Cremona became the battleground of the War of the Spanish Succession. Under Prince Eugene of Savoy the Habsburg army succeeded by various strategems in penetrating the defences of the city, which held a strategically dominating position by the River Po, in fact it was the only place where the river could be crossed. The French troops were driven off, but the war rumbled on for several years, and by the peace treaty of Milan in 1707 Lombardy became an Austrian province, with Cremona the headquarters of the Austrian troops.
Pietro Guarneri of MantuaIn those days it was normal for a child to start work in an apprenticeship at the age of eleven or twelve, and with violinmaking in their blood we can imagine young Pietro and then Giuseppe receiving their first instruction with enthusiasm. By about 1710 they would both have been so engaged, and in 1715 Pietro was already a young man of twenty years. I have seen violins of the period by Joseph filius Andreae in which there may have been just a hint of Pietro's hand, but only one in which I felt it could be detected through and through, and that was the superb instrument belonging twenty years ago to Arthur Grumiaux, which I have since lost track of.
Just as forty years earlier some circumstance had caused Pietro Guarneri of Mantua to leave the family home and settle elsewhere, so history seems to have repeated itself with the de-parture of the second Pietro. We shall never know if it was one of those increasingly bitter situations that arise between an authoritarian father and a headstrong son, or the son's simple desire to work independently, or the appeal of Venice as a city where one could make one's fortune, but something happened in the Casa Guarneri and young Pietro left Cremona for good in December 1717. I think three grown men in one small workshop were undoubtedly too many, and with too many mouths to be fed from the work available, something was bound to give. Pietro could not have competed with his own father in Cremona, so he went to Venice, flourished working at home rather than by having a shop, and in his work contrived to marry the traditions of Cremona with the new energy of the school of Matteo Goffriller. As all significant contacts with his brother and father appear to have ceased, Pietro concerns us no more this afternoon.
I would now like to consider briefly the possibility of a working relationship between the remaining Guarneris and that other great Cremonese craftsman, Carlo BergonziCarlo Bergonzi. Carlo was born in 1683, and when the Hills published their great work on Antonio Stradivari in 1902 they took him to be Stradivari's pupil. By the time the Guarneri book appeared in 1931 they had changed their minds, seeing Carlo as more likely a pupil of Joseph filius Andreae. After much pondering over the years my own feeling is that the Hills were nearer the mark the first time, and that Carlo assisted the Stradivaris, certainly in the 1720s and possibly earlier. I doubt, however, if he was originally a direct pupil. Violin labels are not much help in determining any of this - there are hardly any original Bergonzi labels, the earliest known to me being dated 1733, and although it am sure there must have been a lot of Stradivari shop labels - "sotto la disciplina d'An-tonio Stradivari" - almost all have been replaced for reasons of commerce. I think if we are ever to discover the truth about Carlo Bergonzi's position it will be found among the archives which are currently being diligently searched by Duane Ro-sengard and Carlo Chiesa, and from that direction we already have hints that Bergonzi was friendly with the Rugeri family in the early 1700s.
We are left, then, with the two Joseph Guarneris, father and son, and we are approaching the year 1720. The father is in his early fifties and his son just past twenty, and sure enough when we examine the instruments with the father's label we notice a gradual change in style that confirms the activity of a new pair of hands. At first the scrolls change. Although well-proportioned they lose the sculptura strength which I spoke of just now. Then the archings become more Stradivarian, flatter and less pointed by being fuller as the centre bout edges are approached. Then, surprisingly if Joseph senior was still in charge, the outline changes, with rather angled centre bouts rising to a pinched waist just below the upper corners. The edges appear flatter, with the purfling often set further in from them, and the soundholes, always one of the father's weaker details, gain strength of appearance. Of this narrow-waisted type I am familiar with only a dozen examples, of which only one has its original label of Joseph filius Andreae with the date 1719.
Traditionally W. E. Hill and Sons always certified this type of violin as the work of the father, sometimes adding that the son may have participated in their construction. In the United States they have always been certified as early Guarneri del Gesù, as have a number of instruments of the 1715 period which I personally feel must be predominantly the work of Joseph filius, although they are stronger and heavier looking than those of, say, 1708-10, as one would expect from a maker beginning to feel his years. About this very difficult period of Guarneri work from about 1720 and the years following, one thing only is absolutely certain to me, and that is that the violins are invariably superior in tone to the standard earlier Joseph filius, not necessarily in quality or warmth of tone, because some Joseph filius instruments are wonderful in that respect, but in their capacity to take bow pressure and translate it into the clear, powerful sound required by the solo performer. Pinchas Zukerman gave up his borrowed Stradivari for one of these twenty-five years ago, Daniel Guilet used one, as did Milstein for a time, and Shmuel Ashkenase has led the Vermeer Quartet with one for about twenty years. For those of you who have the standard works of reference available, a typical early example of the type is shown opposite page 60 of the Hill Guarneri book, and another, Shmuel Ashkenase's "ex-Lenau", on pages 404-5 of Walter Hamma.
Haddock Guarneri del GesùPanette Guarneri del Gesù The actual workmanship of these narrow-waisted instruments is not particularly neat, and although in his later years Joseph del Gesù never made a point of neatness for its own sake I rather suspect that his father may still have been responsible for quite a lot of what we see. It is the concept of these violins that is so different and, as I have said, the tonal result, and I think we are safe in giving most of the credit for that to the young man whose life we are celebrating here.
Then there is another type of violin, also without original labels, which I am sure we are absolutely safe in describing as early Guarneri del Gesù. The waist becomes broader again and the outline in consequence more harmonious, and as one looks at a back of this type one can associate it clearly with dated del Gesù violins of the early 1730s. The scrolls, however, again appear relatively weak, characterised by a narrow second turn and long ears when viewed from the front. These violins usually have upright soundholes of Stradivari form, as with the very typical "ex-Corti" on page 406 of Hamma, but a developed example of the general type is here in the, "Dancla". Of this transitional kind I know of only four examples, and then one comes to the "Stretton", the "Baltic" and all the others.
We know from Livi and Hill that the last year in which the census recorded the family living under the same roof was 1722, and after that Joseph Guarneri the younger was gone. But where to? Successive census records fail to show him anywhere in Cremona. Messrs Hill, thinking that marriage would give an answer, had Signor Livi search the thirty-seven parishes of Cremona for a record, but in vain. What he did eventually find was Guarneri junior's reappearance in the census of 1731, married now to Catterina Roda and living in the parish of S. Prospero, a three-minute walk from the Piazza S. Domenico and the Casa Guarneri. Where had he been for those eight years? I wish I could tell you the answer, and so do the archivists who have searched ever more frantically during the past few months.
In the absence of positive information from archive sources our only clues could come from unquestionably original labels lying undis-turbed in the instruments in which they were originally placed. But the labels and thence the clues are few and far between. I have never seen a valid label of father or son dated between 1720 and 1728 inclusive, nor was any recorded by Rembert Wurlitzer, who took a keen interest in labels. Hills record a del Gesù label dated 1726 in the "Stretton" violin shown here, but I would certainly take issue with the originality of the date, as I would with the authenticity of the label dated 1729 illustrated in their book. What I have seen is a pair of original labels of Joseph filius Andreae dated 1729 and 1731, both in cellos. The 1729 cello, pure but worm-damaged, is particularly interesting because whereas the plain poplar back is quite typical of the father's work of earlier years, the front and scroll fit very well with the transitional violins which we believe to be principally if not entirely early works of del Gesù. I have not seen the 1731 cello for thirty-four years, but Sacconi identified it in 1960 as being in its entirety an early work of Guarneri del Gesù, and from photographs that I have I see no reason to doubt that.
When one thinks how many Stradivari instruments were made - and labelled - in the 1720s it is extraordinary how few Guarneri instruments can be attributed with certainty to that decade. Of the transitional types of Guarneri I know of less than twenty in all, and what seems even more extraordinary is that none of those, excepting the violin dated 1719, has its original label. What can that possibly mean? All I can suggest is that they all, like the two cellos, may have come into the world with labels of Joseph filius Andreae that were later removed, perhaps occasionally with some faintly scholarly motive but mostly to gratify the unchanging pattern of human greed.
Sauret del GesùDuane Rosengard tells us that at the time of the 1730 census Joseph senior was in hospital. Joseph junior was, as I have said, still absent and no-one knows where. Brooding on all of this I have come to wonder if 1731 may have been the year when Joseph filius Andreae more or less retired, leaving his son to head the business, such as it was, and with the right to insert his own label. Hieronymus Amati made instruments that bore his father's label for more than fifteen years before Nicolo died aged eighty-eight, and that was the normal custom, but in the fractious Guarneri family who knows what jealousies and resentments may have grown, perhaps with a negative effect on productivity until the energetic son was able to place his own name in his instruments and reap the lion's share of their modest financial reward. It may be significant that the family's patron saint, Teresa, mentioned on the labels of Andrea Guarneri, Peter of Mantua and Joseph filius, was dropped on the labels of the younger Joseph in favour of the IHS with cross symbol which is associated with the Gesùits, among oth-ers, and which gave rise to the nickname "del Gesù". This is pure speculation on my part, but until firm evidence surfaces it may have circumstantial value.
1731 was not only the year of Joseph filius' last known label and the first of del Gesù's that I have been absolutely sure of, but also the great turning point in the younger man's life. For one thing he was back in the centre of Cremona, a married man. For another he stood now on the threshold of his brief but stupendous career, at the end of what we would today call the research and development stage and embarking on that extraordinary series of truly amazing violins, of which most of the very best are currently under this roof. How could he himself, brimming now with determination and energy, have assessed his prospects in 1731? I would certainly assume that he was greatly in awe of Antonio Stradivari, even if he didn't admit it publicly. In 1731Stradivari was eighty-seven years young and from the evidence of his instruments still very much himself, although much assisted by his sons, who were themselves not exactly youthful, Francesco sixty and Omobono fifty-two. But our man must have known from players that there was still an opportunity to produce a great tonal result different from Stradivari's, perhaps even more powerful, combining the best of Stradivari with that elusive quality and response that existed in the old Brescians. This was, I am sure, to be the guiding ambition of Guarneri del Gesù's career, and with stunning virtuosity he achieved it.
King Joseph del GesùRoger Hargrave explained this morning that no changes were necessary to the basic Cremonese design, but I still see Guarneri striving towards a sort of Amatise Gasparo da Salò, with archings resembling those of Stradivari, as Roger again demonstrated, and a thicknessing system combining both schools. This I believe is where he began, quite soon adjusting his soundhole design to be more Brescian than Cremonese as well: more than a hint of this new soundhole can be seen with the "Dancla" example in this exhibition, which in turn is identical to that of the wasp-waisted violin here. But his instruments are invariably much more than just a carefully thoughtout change of detail. Each of them appears to me to be an inspired three-dimensional work of art, visually a reflection of its maker's mood of the moment and at the same time supremely successful in its tonal result. Sometimes Guarneri seems to be leading a relatively settled existence - the "Kreisler" and "King" violins are examples of this, full of character, but carefully thought out and executed. But then look at the freer outline of the "Violon du Diable" and its companion of 1734, the "Haddock", developed from the earlier "Baltic". And then consider the delicate, almost feminine "D'Egville" of 1735 and the strong, slightly more masculine "Plowden" of the same year, happily reunited in the same ownership after a hundred years apart. And what wonderful varnish they all have!
As with Stradivari, sameness was anathema. For both of these great artists nothing could have been more boring than to make the same violins with the same appearance year after year, as so many 20th century makers have done. Rather, they both strove constantly not only to improve their tonal results, but also to produce variety for the eye. Del Gesù had a remarkable selection of wood available, some of his maple as handsome as can be found. Two piece backs, one piece backs, the flames running now this way, now that, now cut on the slab plenty of variety there. Then purfling set close to delicate edges, then further in to give a more masculine appearance - all this you can see in this great exhibition. After 1736 the adjective "feminine" would have to disappear altogether from the vocabulary describing del Gesù's workmanship, and although there are still experiments in this direction or that we see the master fulfilled. The gorgeous violins here of 1737 are, to my eye, the height of elegance and harmony, yet made with the panache of a master craftsman concerned with structure and the overall three-dimensional effect rather than with niceties of detail like the joints of his purfling. You can almost see the power of their tone.
In 1739 or 40 Joseph Guarneri filius Andreae died, and a document discovered by Livi confirms that father and son had been living and working apart since the early 1720s. I said ear-lier that Joseph filius was in my opinion one of the very greatest scroll carvers, and I am in no doubt that the association of father and son had continued in as far as he made many of the scrolls for del Gesù's violins up to and including 1739, since the proportions and cut are clearly recog-nisable from the instruments of his earlier years. Others I suspect may have been made by the father originally, but were gone over by the son for one reason or another, sometimes perhaps because he felt them too heavy in appearance for his more delicate-looking violin bodies. Other scrolls, up to about 1734, were developments of the con-cept seen in the transitional period, and which I described as weaker than those of the father. A significant characteristic of this latter type, which I believe to be the work of del Gesù himself, is the narrow second turn with correspondingly long ears when the volute is viewed from the front - the "Dancla", "Stretton" and "Baltic" are typical. A number of violins made in the early thirties have scrolls of this type, including the one in Cremona and the "Rode" of 1734, and they begin again in 1740 after Joseph senior's death, though in much rougher form, changing gradually but dramatically until we arrive at the extreme yet remarkable "Leduc".
The violins of Jascha Heifetz and Isaac Stern, "ex-Ysaye", have spoken for themselves in concert and on record, and do so again mutely in their glass case. Of the two 1741s, Kochanski Guarneri del GesùAaron Ro-sand's "Kochanski" follows on from the "Ysaye" but the "Vieuxtemps" seems to stand an its own. You can see in the "Vieuxtemps" the Brescian influence taken to an extreme in the fullness, almost bumpiness, of the arching near the edge, and in the outline, which seems to come straight from Gasparo da Salò.
Lord Wilton Guarneri del GesùThe "Lord Wilton", named after an owner who inherited his title, is now owned by Lord Menuhin, who has earned his with a lifetime of music, wisdom and good works. It shows del Gesù making a superb musical instrument while in his most eccentric mood - the "Paganini" seems almost restrained in comparison, except in the massively open volute of its scroll. The "Carro-dus" and the "Sauret", the "Doyen" and the "Ole Bull" all show differing but exciting moods, and finally there is the splendid "Leduc", its sound-holes as carefully cut as any, yet when you first see the scroll you don't know whether to laugh or cry.
One can understand as one examines these late violins why so many legends grew up around the name of del Gesù. My personal opinion changes all the time, with each new experience, but I think whatever his later failings, he has to have been one of the most intelligent violin makers of all time. There remains, and will always remain, much mystery about his character, and that is part of the enjoyment of looking at his violins. He may well, I feel, have been mentally unbalanced at the end, although I never have the impression that he was in physical decline, and although I am sure he liked a drink or two I doubt if he was anything but sober when he conceived and made those last great instruments. I see him as exuberant, full of zest and self-belief, knowingly a master of everything to do with the making of violins;
but since his labour was so unrewarded unrewarded financially I suspect he may have had plenty of thoughts about the unfairness of life when he was away from the workbench. I wonder if, after his father's death, del Gesù's violins may have had in them increasingly something of a protest, a very hot-blooded protest, against the classical disciplines and neatness of finish that had characterised almost two hundred years of Amati-inspired Cremonese violinmaking.
Guarneri del Gesù was buried an 17th October, 1744, cause of death not noted, and thus in the space of seven years the world lost not only him and his father, but also Antonio Stradivari and his two sons, and those five were followed by Carlo Bergonzi in 1747. It was an abrupt end to the great age of Cremonese violin-making.

This is the text of a speech given by Charles Beare on the occasion of the December 1994 exhibition "The Violin Masterpieces of Guarneri del Gesu" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. This appears on Sheila's Corner by kind permission of Charles Beare.

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