Ep 3. Gasparo da Salo Part 3 And his new fancy pants assistant. Violins on the rise!
Stay with our maker as we look at the ups and downs of life and hear from Maxime Bibeau about his instrument and what it is like to share his career with a da Salo.
Maxime Bibeau double bassist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra celebrated for his exceptional talent and profound connection to the historical instrument he plays on made by the famed violin maker Gasparo Da Salo chats to us, in this intimate interview, we gain insights into the unique challenges and joys he encounters while performing on this extraordinary Brescian double bass.
Discover the allure of this instrument, crafted centuries ago in the heart of Brescia, Italy, as we explore its rich tonal character, exquisite craftsmanship, and the historical significance it holds in the world of music. Maxime Bibeau takes us on a sonic voyage, sharing the intricacies of his relationship with this rare double bass and the emotional depth it adds to his performances.
Music you have heard in this episode is by
Unfamiliar faces – All good folks, Budapest – Christian Larssen, Bloom - Roo Walker, Brandenburg Concerto No 4 – Kevin Macleod, Frost waltz- Kevin Macleod, Getting to the bottom of it – Fernweh Goldfish, Telemann Sonata in D maj for viola da gamba – Daniel Yeadon, Crooked old shrew – Fernweh Goldfish
Transcript
Welcome back to the Violin Chronicles and part 3 about the world of Gasparo Da Salo, instrument maker, businessman, and collector of needy nephews and nieces. In the last two episodes, we've seen how Gasparo Da Salo has led a successful career as a violin maker, or a luthier is perhaps a better word, as he didn't just make violins, but a variety of instruments, in Brescia.
After humble beginnings moving to Brescia as a young man, he has made a name for himself, and he seems to have taken his family responsibilities quite seriously. In this episode, we will continue to look at Gasparo Da Salo’s life, and Maxime Bibeau, double bassist in the Australian Chamber Orchestra, will be talking to us about the wonderful Gasparo Da Salo instrument he plays on, and its story.
Gasparo Da Salo came from humble origins, son of a musician, or instrument maker, who died too early, leaving his family to pick up the pieces and move to the city to try their luck in business. Entering his workshop now, there is a profusion of activity. His son and assistant are working at benches finishing instruments that will be sent to France.
When there is an overflow of work, he ropes in his other children to help out. Business continues to flourish. Gasparo Da Salo and Isabella are able to buy their own house and workshop. Family responsibility was something that weighed strongly on Gasparo's shoulders. When his sister and his in laws died in the recent plague, Gasparo felt he had to take responsibility for his nephews and nieces.
He knew better than anyone what it was like to lose parents. And with his connections to the other artisans, there was always opportunities to find work and apprenticeships. And help out he would. One less thing to worry about was Ludovica. He was able to breathe a sigh of relief. It was done. Ouf Now he just had to sort out her dowry. The match with the fur merchant was a good one. Ludovica had a good grasp of business matters. At the age of 22, she was ready to move out and have a family of her own, but not too far away, still in Brescia. She knew she could always come and ask her favourite brother for help if she needed to.
There's An interesting story of Gasparo Da Salo’s little sister who was 12 when she started living with them.
So he'd, at this point, when he was in his late twenties, he had two young sons and his 12-year-old sister Ludovica comes and lives with them, and then she grows up and when she's about 22, she gets engaged to a furrier.
What were furriers doing? Was it just collars? Dr Emily Brayshaw is an honorary research fellow at the University of Technology, Sydney School of Design.
Oh no, no, no, it was everything. So you know, we actually have collars definitely, but also gloves, muffs trims on hats. We know that people wore doublets. And these are a style of jacket that came together at the middle. These are menswear. So it's a snug fitting jacket that's shaped and fitted to the man's body. The doublet gave a fashionable shape and padding to the body. And it also supported the hose, like the pants by providing ties so you could tie your hose to the doublet and it also gave warmth to the doublet but richer men would slash it and show the lining underneath and sometimes we have images of this being fur so you'd have like fur trim poking out you'd have fur collars you know you could wear Fur coats, as much fur as you want to.
And when we talk about fur also from the era, it's really interesting. Like, they're all different types of fur that was worn. So Brescia, there are portraits of one of the young noblemen from the era wearing a gigantic collar made of lynx. Yeah, but people also wore otter. What else were they wearing?
Do you think the lynx would be more classy than the otter? Oh, that's like so yes. Would you look down on the otter wearing one with your lynx coat?
It depends what you were wearing the otter for, right? So we've got there are records of kind of nine different types of fur. So including lynx, of course. Sable, Ermine, which, you know, the super rich war. Also Squirrel, Otter, you know, these kinds of furs, you know, and yeah, obviously the richer you are, the more ritzy your furs. But it's really interesting that the family is kind of positioning itself. So Gasparo Da Salo's family are really positioning themselves in the luxury goods market, right?
He's got the fine instruments. His little sister's gone into the fur trade. He's got another, is it the nephew, doing the fine kid gloves and the perfumes. He's got the shoemaker. And there's this this interesting little story with Ludovica, his little sister. So she, when she gets married, she has a dowry supplied by Gasparo Da Salo, but her five other brothers as well and also she has a generous amounts psuppplied to her dowry by the Count Alfonso Capriatis. Huh. And it's a bit of a mystery why he, he contributes do we know his relationship to the family or what he did?
So the Capriatis were, they were an important family in Brescia. They often engaged musicians to play for them.
Right.
And so they had a relationship of sorts with musical families of Brescia. And, but there is a suggestion that Ludovico and he could have met under other circumstances, but then again, he could have just, you know, had a burning passion for the arts.
Yeah, he might've just been wanting to like getting good with the best instrument makers, you know and coming back to this story of the noble woman who's like, oh, yes I had the entire set made by Gasparo Da Salo and you know, and this guy's like, yeah Well, I know him better than that. I paid his sister's dowry. Mm hmm, you know again a lot of this is about appearances and A lot that's done is really closely scrutinized as well, so particularly among the noble families, Brescia, Florence, these areas, if you're not dressed correctly for the occasion like we were talking about with the women in their funeral before, you could really attract ridicule.
Perceptions of dress were at the forefront of processes around honour and shaming. So it might also be part of this, you know, like these perceptions, this largesse. I've got the means to support the dowry. Yeah.
Now in his early 40s, Gasparo Da Salo is run off his feet. He has a household of children, the older ones can help out in the workshop or look after the younger ones. They have just bought a small country property out of town, hopefully the local farmer he put in charge of cultivating the olive groves and fields yield a good harvest this year.
Tragically, one of his brothers in law died a few months ago. To help out his sister, his niece and nephew are living with them. With the help of his resourceful wife, they will be sure to find a husband for his niece and a trade for his nephew to learn. Amongst their fellow craftsmen, they've found a perfect husband for Caterina a shoemaker. And after asking around, Gasparo Da Salo is able to organize an apprenticeship for their nephew to learn the trade of glove maker and perfumer. This brings us to the question of what place these artisans occupied in society.
John Gagne
It's, I think there's a struggle in the 16th century exactly around these terms, which is the the honor of artisans who work with their hands.
And maybe the place where, I mean, I've studied more is in the history of painters. where painters have this transformation from the 15th into the 16th century where they become sought after as noble artisans. And it wouldn't surprise me if Luthier followed the same kind of pathway. I mean, they're producing highly beautiful objects for very knowledgeable collectors or, you know, sort of big patrons like the church or, you know, or a court. And so my sense is that they would be, and they're also basically not an industrial level. Let's say, you know, by comparison, another large industry in Brescia at that time, the gun makers, I mean, they're working with hundreds and hundreds of men in really dirty conditions. And that's not the world of, you know, intarsia workers who are more in the world of let's say printmakers, who’ve got small workshops often with their families there. So I think they probably already just on that level have a lot more steam because they're, So they're probably, you know making their way up to the level of, but not yet quite at the level of like doctors and lawyers, but they're probably at the level of, you know you know, other tradesmen like leather workers, tailors, shoemakers, you know, the people who are providing necessities and luxuries of the everyday.
Some painters are now in the 16th century vaulting into, you know, international prominence. They're sought after by courts, but frankly so are many musicians, right? Singers, composers, some instrument makers are becoming desired and they're requested to visit court or country. So I think it's, there's probably a, let's say there's opportunity for social mobility, which is very interesting in the 16th century where, you know, these people who had been In previous centuries, kind of stuck in the dusty choir lofts, you know, putting little pieces of wood in places. They’ve now got an opportunity to show off their craft as individual artisans.
In Gasparo Da Salo’s life, there are about 18 monasteries and the monasteries were really centres of art, music, of creativity. So there was this, this huge burgeoning of activity going on coming out of. the sack previously. When Gasparo Da Salo was in his, about his 40s, that's when he would have got the order for this, this double bass that we have here in Sydney.
Ah, yeah. This that has this beautiful inlay, the purfling. The purfling.
I will just explain what violin purfling is, Do you?
Yeah, no, I do not know. My viola doesn't have it. My viola's a 20th century viola, so Well, is it drawn on? No, it's not. Emily Brayshaw.
But you do have purfling and you don't realise it. You do. So purfling, if you look closely at your violin, you will see two black lines running around the contour of the instrument.
Oh yes.
It's like narrow and decorative edging, almost. Yes. And so it's inlaid to the top and the back plate and what it is is actually three Small strips of wood. It goes black, white, black.
And Mine doesn't have white, I don't think, but I do recall that Barry, I call my instrument Barry after Barry White, the soul singer. Because you hit that C string and it's like, oh baby, you know, lay me down by the fire. So I was, I will check out Barry and see if So.
So often it's Tinted wood. You'll have black tinted wood, white tinted wood, black tinted wood.
If you look closely, it probably is there. And then you will, you'll make a groove in the instrument and you will push it in. You will inlay it into it. So on this double bass, the characteristic of Brescian instruments is they used ebony, which is a notoriously difficult wood to work with and not very flexible.
And they, on this double bass, there's this intricate Sort of zigzaggy, it's, what would you call that sort of design?
Just call it like an ornamentation. It's, it is kind of geometric, it's interwoven. It was a highly decorative, highly ornamental era. All done in, you know, at the top of the, in, in beautiful taste.
But, you know, Italy long has this reputation for being, you know, a little bit, a little bit flamboyant, a little bit passionate, a little bit elegant. And, you know, why not extend that into your crafts?
Even the armour, you see the armour made in Brescia. And it's not just It's your suit of armour, it's got these, these engravings, these intricate patterns, these pitches, these seams on it. It's like they turned it into a work of art.
Yeah. A craftsmanship. Yeah, you see that in the tailoring too, like in the very fine embroidery in the clothes. Yeah, you know, and again from materials that are often quite difficult to work with and unwieldy, so, you know, with fabrics, the finer something is, the more delicate something is, the more unusual something is, the trickier it is to work with, you know, and so, you know, this is, this is an ebony inlay.
This is almost like a craftsman's flex. Yeah, you know, it's like not only do I make the best goddamn basses, I can do it with ebony. Which is expensive, more expensive than your tinted poplar. Yeah, it's more expensive and Boom, it's hard to work with, you know. So Gasparo Da Salo, he's got this like really, he's got this thriving workshop.
He's got lots of orders. He's got people helping him out there. He has like the normal dramas of a workshop. You've got this count Anisto, Zanetto, who owes him all this money for instruments. He's not paying.
Of course he's not paying.
And he has to pay suppliers for wood in Venice. He'll get his wood from Venice. He gets his strings from Rome and they come via a monastery. So the monastery will order these strings and he'll go to the monastery, pick up the strings. They were sort of the dealers. Right. Because monasteries had a lot of music happening. Oh, definitely. But also connections. Yeah. Yeah. And the church was spending a lot of money, on, on music and art.
And the church is flexing too in the face of the English Reformation. It's like no, don't even think about this here. Whereas of course the Swiss have got like the reformations happening as well, you know, and Lutheranism and Germany and You know, Italy, of course, being the centre of Catholicism, it's just like Luther actually prints one of his first versions of, I think it might be the Old Testament, in Brescia.
Ah, wow! Yeah, they had printing presses because they had the, the wood and paper was another famous You know, another thing that Brescia was famous for was for paper as well.
I'm Maxim Bibeau, I'm the principal bass of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. The instrument I play is possibly an earlier one. It is very, very large, very big. And I can't understand how anyone could play these at the time. It was probably made for a church, a monastery where it was found in Brixen, Neustift Monastery. It was found there in the 70s by a player in a state of disrepair and black full of soot. It used to double up the sound of the organ in the chapel and there are many accounts of music from the creation of the monastery in 11 something rather. I've even found inside some inscriptions that says it was fixed by the chapel carpenter in 17 something or other.
So it would have The other Gaspar Da Salos were found in the last few decades. That's where all found in monasteries. The quality of the wood is incredible. The bear claw spruce on it is like one I've never seen before. Seeing the width on the instrument, it's got small wings on the edges, but there's still 266 rings on one side, 267 on the other side. The earliest ring is 1166. The latest one is 1534, the day Canada was discovered by Jacques Attier.
Dendocrinology is the scientific method of dating tree rings. It enables us to see when the tree was alive and growing. So we know that the timber used in this instrument came from a tree that was growing in 1166, Genghis Khan was a child at the time, until the latest tree ring that was in 1534. The year Henry VIII of England became head of the Church of England. Now he can get the ball rolling on some divorce proceedings. In any case, this was timber that had been around since before Gasparo Da Salo was born, and the age of the tree itself is something quite amazing.
They're so far apart from each other, those Gasparo Da Salos. It's really hard to compare them, and a lot of them have been cut down, or simply made. I played one in the town of Salo, a more petite one, and I'd love to try the one that is at the San Marco Cathedral in Venice, which used to be owned by, or played by, Domenico Dragonetti, which is the one, very interestingly was in London in the 1700s, which inspired all the local makers, the English makers, to copy that form, that shape, and it's created this British taste, so they all Yeah, they all took slight, slight variations on, on that model, but it's all based on that specific instrument. So I happened to own a Thomas Kennedy, and when I tried the, the solo, I thought, okay, it's bigger, it's slightly different. But in its essence, the, I felt it was a connection. And furthermore, I found the connection. I further saw the bass that Domenico Dragonetti was playing, has a bridge on it, made by Thomas Kennedy. Da Salo was known as a wealthy man in his days, not a poor artist. It sounds like he was doing very well for himself, um, and played the instrument as well. So maybe that's what made it so special, because he did play the basses.
He did play, apparently, he played them in consort. He did probably lower the lower voice down the octave. We hope to find a painting or a drawing, something that correlates to that instrument, because it's so specific, the inlays, that there’s nothing else like it and now we have yet to find anything of the kind. Purfling, as we mentioned before, is the decorative inlay that traces the contour of the violin. And on most instruments, there is one simple set running around the edges of an instrument. But in Brescia, there was a tendency to really go for it and to do fancy designs.
The second row of purfling traced inside the first or swirly motifs that covered various parts of the instrument. I think it's very special and the people that tried it as well, if you can get around it's, share width is a real challenge. So when I'm showing it to specialists I believe that it was made as a three stringer bass, not a six stringed bass.
During those years, there was, these were the transition years, and so who made the first double bass from a violin in this shape? Not sure, but it's very close to being double bass number one. That's why it's the original subwoofer.
And how much bigger is it than the standard double bass?
The string length at this point is definitely four to five or six centimetres longer, depends on what your standard is and the size of the body is definitely 10 percent bigger than your average English sized double Bass instrument. The thickness of the ribs is normal though, which is a saving grace, otherwise I wouldn't be able to. It's very wide, very very wide. It's crazy wide. I think the bottom belt is 76cm wide, which is basically higher than your dining table.
Oh wow, it's like a small boat.
But I think that's where the depth of the sound comes from. Double basses with sloppy shoulders have a thin, shallow sound and it’s I guess there's something in its sound, and it's there's a lot of wisdom in it, it's very hard to describe it, there's a lot of depth, a lot of depth, and it, strangely enough, works best with other instruments around, or on stage, that's where you get the full impact of it. Some instruments sound good close up, and in the distance, the sound loses. This double bass, it gets better with distance seemingly.
Sound waves really come together at 10 meters. This seems to be the ideal spot to listen to it. And also, the depth of its sound, and like a great singer, like the strength of its diaphragm is supporting its sound if you play extremely quiet or very loudly. It always has that massive support, like, yeah, she's a great bass singer throughout its range. It's very rare to find, but you get to hear that with other string instruments around. I had a colleague play it the other day and I was definitely four meters away. I kid you not, I could feel the floor move, so it's remarkable. And obviously the history of what it's done, you always wonder if it could tell its story, where it's been.
You know, I have a feeling it has not been played a huge amount because it would have been played for some services, not every day. And there are accounts of the young monks playing it. The weekend, just having fun with it and one had lessons in Bolzano, like I think this double bass has never been played as much as it has been in the last eight years and I've been trying to play everything. I could possibly do renaissance music to modern to burial sequences on it and yeah, I think our relationship keeps evolving because it's a long term one, hopefully. Yeah, we did a lot of work on the setup and, and. It left Germany in winter, arrived here in December, just before Christmas. And it was in a state of shock, I'd say, for two months, and then we had some work done on it to adjust it to my liking and the way I play. Whenever you come to a concert, when I play on the E string, it’s, it's so big, so wide. So I found the double bass has this ability to resonate with its environment a lot. And you're in a space that the more you, you feel what it, it does to everything else around, just like a subwoofer.
It's not necessarily directional, but the low end of it is just absolutely remarkable. This double bass was never made to play that low, it was never made to be played that high, but throughout its register, it's, it's nice and open and, you know, it's been played a lot of late. Yeah, it's a privilege every time. It does get me a little tired at times.
I wish I'd played something a little smaller. You know, you just have to play this one note and it gives you this incredible feeling of power.
I remember when we were looking at purchasing the double bass or having someone purchase it. For us, for me to play. Someone had said it was not the right instrument for the ensemble because it was too big and lumpy.
And stubborn me said, no, no, no, I am playing against Antonio Stradivarius and a Guarneri Del Gesu and a brothers Amati cello and, and I need as much power as I can. I decided that I was going to try to make my playing. and make the instrument as agile as possible. And because it's so special and beautiful that I really wanted to own it and do all that repertoire on it was worth spending the time on the relationship, getting all these physio appointments for me to be able to get around the instrument without hurting myself.
Stretching your arms.
Yeah, and reinforcing my, support as well, the way I hold myself and whether it's standing up or sitting down, but you, you just need to play the one note and then you understand why it's worth it. Yeah. It gives you a great feeling of power. So I, for it to be nimble, agile, quick, took a little while for me and probably the instrument to change for us to work on a relationship, but I think we've gotten there in the end. So it's very exciting.
When the double base originally arrived in Sydney in December humid Sydney in December versus leaving Frankfurt in the middle of winter where it was dry, it was in a state of shock for quite a few weeks. I guess the wood, different types of wood, were adapting to its new environment.
Climate at different rates. Part of the work I had done on the double bass, I had an extension, C extension added to it that brings, gives me notes all the way down to the low C with capos when I don't need, don't want to jump. I remember the first few times I got a bit worried because Below E flat, it was not really working, it wouldn't, it was not really happy to give me those frequencies and a few weeks later it I embraced it and now it roars through the halls with those notes, it's amazing how they would.
And I still, I wish I could understand. Do you guys understand how the word just gets used to vibrating a certain way? And even though they're very close frequencies, it's like I'm not going to do this. And it's like, please, I'm going to, you know, trick you, trick you into liking this and then it does eventually.
John Dilworth talks to us about the Brescian way of approaching an instrument.
The Gaspar Da Salo and the Brescian ones in general, the G.B Maggini and Gaspar Da Salo, they do vary a lot and I don't think they even used a mould at all. I think that's another big, you know, it's a very sort of nerdy observation from a violin maker's point of view, but I do think it's quite significant that Andrea Amati and Antonio Stradivari, all the cremonese makers, you know, you can take out and they will just lay on top of each other perfectly.
They used moulds, they used them beautifully, and it was all part of the intention to make something distinct, geometrically harmonious. You know, once you've designed this shape, you want it to be finished exactly according to what you've designed. It's an artistic thing. Whereas the, all the Brescian stuff is, is clearly much more improvised, and Gasparo Da Salo, he might have had a drawing which he could tweak and did and, you know, change his mind and blah, blah, blah, but he wasn't fixed to a mould, he didn't have to make a new mould each time he made a new instrument.
In my opinion, and from my own observations, I think that Gaspar Da Salo didn't use a mould, and he didn't use linings, and he didn't use corner blocks, but the ribs are quite thick. So they're sort of self supporting, but he just bent them to a drawing and put the thing together. Yeah, there are limits. You can't bend those ribs to a sort of Stradivarian curve, the ribs meet like that. They don't do that elegant overlap. They just go, because they're not supported by the block. And you see this thing where the inside is carved. The carving on the inside actually bears very little relationship to the edge. You know, he sort of, you can see him diving down with the gouge, you know, a nice safe margin away from the ribs.
It is an intriguing thing that there's this big flat platform all around the inside of the, of the ribs, you know, far more than you would need for linings, but even then it didn't have any linings in the first place. It's quite strange, all sorts of very profound differences in the making technique between Brescia and Cremona, and you always get this really crazy toothed finish, and I had it in mind all the time that you have this thing called a ball rasp. You know, it's a, it's a rasp, but it, it's like a knuckle duster, and you work, there's no sign of a thumb plane or a scraper on the inside. It's, it's, he sort of gouged it and then got this big rasp.
A tennis ball.
Yeah yeah, exactly.
Oh, were they the shoemaking tools?
Was that the So, yes, absolutely right. The connection with the clog makers. Back to the shoes. Yeah, oh, I think we're on to something here. But I think there is a really interesting issue about the, the pine. That all the violins, but there's a very important distinction between all the instruments that Gasparo Da Salo made as violins, or violas, use imported Swiss pine, alpine pine, exactly as the cremonese that comes from the same source, but everything he made beyond the violin family, all the basses, so called cellos, and viols, and braccios, and all these things, are made with this local Bussian wood. It grows on the shores of the lake, Lake Garda, and it's got this very, it's got this very distinct, strong, hazel figure running across. It's very, very distinctive, and he used that a lot, but he never used it on violins and violas, but he used it for all the other stringed instruments he made. And this wood, it is definitely a separate species and it is low altitude pine, it's not grown up on a mountainside. And I find it really interesting that he clearly made a conscious decision not to use that when he was making a violin. You're essentially working with deeply figured pine and, you know, you know what it's like working deeply figured maple and it's just the same really. It chips and it’s I assume that it was easily available to him and therefore a lot cheaper and he didn't mind it chipping a bit. You know, well you can see just from his general workmanship that wouldn't have bothered him much but when Da Salo was making a violin he seems to be aware that he needs to work to slightly raised standards to finish, but the materials Very important, and the other that sort of argues against a lot of what I was saying is in Brescia they always, always, always, always, and then always again used ebony for the purfling and if it's an absolute giveaway, you know, somebody shows you I've got this lovely Brescian violin here and you just Take a quick squint at the purfling. No, you haven't. I'm sorry. It's a German fake. But they used ebony. And if you've ever tried to use ebony purfling, it's, it's not a walk in the park. It's one of these remarkable things that the Cremonese purfling, you know, the poplar and pear, it's just got just the right combination of It's rigid enough that it will take a lovely curve, and if you've made a few slips in the channel, it'll just ride through that beautifully. But it's flexible enough to bend nicely. It just works. It's perfect. And probably inlayers and decorative cabinet makers have been using that forever, even then. Always, in Brescia, use ebony. Which is an absolute nightmare, really. But whether it's because it, it saves them the trouble of staining it, I don't know, but the only way I've found to do it is to inlay it in three separate pieces. Awfully tricky. And that works. You, you do get a lot of gaps, but you get, you see that in the original instruments and it's all filled with paste and stuff. And the, and the central core, I had that identified at the Kew Gardens Library, and it is spindle tree wood. To all intents and purposes, it's, it's the same as boxwood and again, you've got sets of very rigid, you can't glue those three straight, you know, ebony, boxwood, and ebony, and then expect to bend it. The only way you can do it is to put them in separately. And that's very fiddly. That's the way they chose to work. I mean, it's not totally thought through. In the way that the Cremonese instruments always are, you know, just the attention to detail.
What I was going to say is a very expensive material it was clearly already in use for inlaying and decorative work. So there's a supply of it, but you only ever see it in thin, so fingerboards are just veneered with ebony that to, to make a solid ebony fingerboard would have been impossible, I think, at the time.
I mean, they, they were Venetian merchants were getting all sorts of exotic stuff from the far East. I mean, I'm sure. You could get it quite easily, but it would have been very expensive. Anything imported. And they didn't use it for pegs or tail pieces or anything like that. The pegs were all made out of pear or plum or things like that. Just sort of hard fruit wood. Also, this is a bizarre thing that they, they put in twice as much purfling as everybody else did. You know, why? You've got this really difficult stuff to manage, and it's actually quite expensive. So what do you do? You put, you do it twice! And then put all these decorative You know, you've seen these ones with fleur de lis and things inlaid on the back.
You know, that's a huge amount of work with this really unfriendly material. But they, they felt, well, I'm talking specifically about Gasparo Da Salo, they felt that was worth doing.
Have you heard the story about the maple? that the Venetian gondoliers would reject and send to the violin makers. How much truth do you think is in that story?
It's plausible, absolutely plausible, that they were importing wood from the Balkans to the Venetian shipyard, to the Arsenale, and they would reject a lot of stuff that was flamed because yeah, it's not good constructional material.
In 1588 Gasparo Da Salo is in his late 40s. He still has many dependent family members to support. His son Francesco, 23 now and married, is living with them. His second son and three daughters are still at home. They have a manservant and a maid. Business wise, things are becoming a bit strained. There are the usual workshop dramas.
The Count Ernesto Martinego da Zanetto owed him 52 lira for instruments he had made months ago, and getting the money out of him was like getting blood out of a stone. He had to pay invoices from his wood supplier in Venice. And he still had to settle an account with Friar Marco Antonio at the monastery for strings he had brought in from Rome. Another spanner in the works was his French connection. France was having another civil war. This one was the war between the three Henrys. It was particularly confusing because three people called Henry were all trying to be the king of France, hence the war of the three Henrys. Anyway, all this meant that Gasparo Da Salo's agent for his French sales had stopped business, and over the last few years he had started depending heavily on the income from these sales. Just to make ends meet, he would have to borrow some money this year, until things calmed down in France. He could always fall back on his music. He was, nonetheless, a skilled and sought after musician, but he needed this extra income to support his household. He still had a substantial stock of instruments, and his farm was supplying them with a generous amount of beans and olive oil. He just had a cash flow problem.
Although there had been some bad blood between the French and the Italians in the past, there was a strong trade link with France that Gasparo Da Salo relied on, John Gagne explains.
But what we said earlier about you know, some international border limitations that would make it sometimes costly and troublesome to trade across borders. The demand also makes you do that. Gasparo Da Salo had a French student in his workshop. So there may have been interesting, you know, apprenticeship possibilities for, you know, young people from around Europe to come work with some of these makers. But my sense is that, I mean, where a lot of stuff gets traded in the 16th century is, is that international fairs that doesn't seem to me like the obvious place for instruments because you probably want a destination with a relatively reliable seller. You don't want to be sending instruments to the fair and then bringing them all back. So my sense is that, you know, you would have agents basically at work in some of the major cities, Lyon, Paris, some of the places perhaps in between and you would, you know ship on consignment basically, or, you know, with the expectation of selling a lot of stuff to an interested buyer, basically. The French connection makes a lot of sense. I mean, because there were Italian Queens twice in quick succession, I mean, Catherine de Medici arrives in France in the 1560s and is there until she dies in 1589 and then there's Marie de Medici, who marries Henry IV, and she's queen until 1610, and then she outlives him a little while. So there are two sort of seasons with a very short gap, you know, during Gasparo Da Salo’s kind of heyday, when there isn't a French queen. But other than that, I mean, it's a, there is a strong commerce of, Italians at court, you know, the Italian art is, as you just said, like tremendously desired in all its varieties, right? Music, sculpture, painting, architecture. I mean, they're all hugely desirous of Italians. Comedy, you know, all that kind of thing. So yes, it makes, it makes perfect sense to me that there was a hunger for Italian artisanship in, you know, at the, at the French court and probably regional courts as well.
There's a great quote about Mary Queen of Scots being greeted in Edinburgh with a serenade played by “wretched violins and small rebecs”.
It just, you just have to dream of a picture of cold, rainy. These little rebecs, violins, I know, I know so when Gasparo Da Salo is in his 40s he has his son is now married, has his own children but still living with him, yep. And they have a manservant and a maid, so they've also bought a country property which gives them beans, olive oil, and wheat so he's, you know, he's, he's moving on up.
Yeah. Like he's building it up. Yeah. But what happens is in France. It's one of his, where he's sending all these instruments and he's basically really relying on it this income. There's this, another war. Of course, there is. The war of the three Henrys, just to make it really confusing. Yeah. And this sort of shuts down the trade.
Yeah. As we know, war can really affect trade and supply of things. What I find fantastic is in tax, we learn so much through tax records. Oh, absolutely. And fashion and dress scholars also use taxation records as well for exactly this same purpose. Yeah. So he's saying, you know, I need to borrow some money this year. His godfather is still living in a part of their house. He can't ask him to leave. It's his godfather, but the family is really huge. And he needs a bit of money to tie it over until things work themselves out. Yeah. So I was just thinking in Australia, we keep our tax records for seven years. Yeah. And, and here it's like, Oh no, they must file them somewhere.
And then, but here they're like 500 years old. We've got their tax records. They're wonderful historical documents. Yeah. He, but he was also during this whole time, he was also a violini player. So he played the double bass and he was actually quite good at it. And so he always had that to fall back on if he really needed to.
And so this could actually have been him, you know, you're seeing him here in this portrait of a Cremonese artist holding it looks like a gamba, but it could have been, you know, a bass instrument. Yeah, and I suppose a gamba would have been a bit more made you look a bit more important than a violini player, which is more for accompanying in your accompaniment, yeah, you're standing up the back. Yeah, yeah. Whereas your soloist would be, have more of a gamba type instrument.
Part of this sort of you know, I guess social media idea of curating your identity, you know, the stories you want told about you. And that's very interesting. Something that struck me as well is, I wonder if, so all of these instruments, are made for somebody.
So whether he gets to meet them and make according to their specifications or whether somebody just writes him a letter and says I want a 15 inch, a 16 inch and a 12 inch or what, but that wonderful base. that the ACO has.
So Maxime Bibeau is quite tall.
And it makes me wonder whether that was specifically made for someone.
And you know, it ties into with this idea of tailoring, you know, and having your clothes made for you, having your Instruments made for you.
Yeah. And as far as we know, there is no other bass with this intricate inlay. Often they're just quite simple. This one has very complicated. It's very beautiful. The wood is amazing.
Yeah. Ancient. It, yeah, I, it would likely have been a commission. I'd say, you know, and yeah, something like that.
Gasparo Da Salo is now entering his mid-fifties. The workshop is unrivalled in the area, fulfilling orders from wealthy clients. His son Francesco Bertolotti, now in his 30s, is his right hand man, making instruments alongside him. Helping out as well is his manservant, Battista. He has had other apprentices over the years, but now, at the same time that Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet, set in Verona just down the road from Brescia Gasparo Bertolotti was taking on a 15 year old apprentice from Botticino, a town 12 kilometers from the city. Giovanni Paolo Maggini, Gasparo's new apprentice, would become, over the next few years, very important indeed in the story of Bresian violin making.
Maggini was the son of a shoemaker, well, a failed shoemaker in fact his business went bust, and then he died, in 1595, leaving Maggini's mother to sell land to support herself and the children. That same year Gasparo Da Salo took the young Giovanni Paolo Maggini on as an apprentice. Seeing as shoemakers appear to be hanging out with instrument makers a lot here, perhaps he was a friend of a friend, and Gasparo Bertolotti being the kind of man he was, employed the boy, so that he, in turn, could support his own family.
This turned out to be a good move, because as time went on, and Gasparo Da Salo moved into his 60s, his son Francesco Bertolotti existed in his father's shadow. But the young Maggini had the enthusiasm, talent and drive to continue the Brescian tradition. Things were changing more and more. People were ordering violins and the demand for vials was dropping off.
John Dilworth talks about the emergence of the violin in Brescia.
All makers would have had to turn their hands to almost anything, I think, at the time. Before, I mean, the violin sort of suddenly, or seems to suddenly appear very dominant at the end of the 16th, well in the, in the 17th century and everything else just falls away. They found a way of making it much louder, which I think, you know, is the sound post and it suddenly made a quantum leap in development. And before that it was more like a rebec for a little treble viol and it made quite a small noise and it was associated with shepherds and peasant dances and it wasn't a distinguished instrument until, I mean, the first really carefully thought out and constructed instruments appear in Cremona in 1564 and thereafter.
I think this is, this is the point at which some genius. Invented the sound post and the bass bar even. I mean, there's, there's the violin in the Ashmolean Museum that clearly never had a bass bar. There's no way it can accommodate a bass bar. It was that evolution from, you know, developing this offset bass bar, having it down one side of the instrument.
And then, you know, it all seemed very counterintuitive. You make this, set up this instrument in a completely asymmetrical way. But when you do that, it suddenly does become much louder and forceful. And these little, the renaissance instruments, the rebecs and so on, they, I’m absolutely certain they wouldn't have had that.
And they would have just, you know, like these angel consorts in paintings. There'd be this nice little gentle murmuring in the background. And again, it's all connected with the development of public performance and concert halls and moving from, you know, private aristocratic palaces or, you know, just entertainment for the lord and lady over supper to becoming a public thing, you know, needing all this extra volume and definition.
It is interesting that in the Brescian tradition, Gasparo Bertolotti he makes predominantly violas. He makes relatively quite a lot of Double basses, which were actually made as violone, it's not double basses. All sorts of church establishments would have been clients and that yeah, we learned from Tarisio that, or again, it's kind of hearsay really, but he certainly targeted monasteries when he was traveling around Italy, looking for old instruments and a lot of them did turn up there were very, very few actual professional players of any sort at that time or of anything.
I think it would have been very hard to make a living as a musician. Unless you were attached to a palace of some sort. And even then you would probably mostly have been a butler and a footman or something who was asked from time to time to play the violin for a posh supper, you know?
After cleaning my shoes Your shoes are the connection!
Can you just pick up that violin and accompany the dinner.
This is a whole new line of investigation. The role of the shoe in the history of the violin, chopins.
The chopins, yeah, yeah. So there you go. That's a whole exciting new field to investigate.
He was quite ambitious. He was clearly quite ambitious and he, he got quite rich. And you, you can see from all these tax returns, he was a very wealthy man. But what happens subsequently you know, his son Francesco Bertolotti doesn't seem to have done much and I don't know, you know, there's one or two instruments violins, violas that are sort of attributed to him and he, I think he was just not that interested and Maggini took over instead, and then comes 1632 and, there's the pandemic and Brescia's almost wiped off the map.
Gasparo Da Salo is in his 50s still, you know, his workshop's probably the most well known in Brescia and at the same time that he's kind of coming towards the end of his, well, you know, he's over starting to get over the hill in, in your fifties at that time. Yeah. But it's at this time that Shakespeare writes Romeo and Juliet, which happens in Verona, which is just down the road.
We see both men and women of the time wore you know, really, the wealthy in particular wore really bright colours, you know, so it's a riot of colours and the more wealthy you were, the richer your fabrics, but also you can afford better quality dyes, but, you know, colours of the era, we can see scarlets, greys, you were, purples, greens, yellows, reds, browns, deep violets, a lot of different purples, light blues for millions.
Men and women will have cloth embroidered with real silver and real gold thread, you know, amazing hats trimmed with furs and jewels and, you know, I was talking about, and feathers. I was talking about the ruffs you know, they were also trimmed with furs and jewels and there was also a garment called the jerkin that men would wear.
Sounds like an insult.
It does a little bit. Jerkin? But they were fascinating. So the jerkin was leather. And it was worn over the doublet and we might have even seen something like this in Romeo and Juliet because what is so interesting is so we had you know, I think I was talking about was I talking about the French, the Louis, Niccolò di Luigi Caponi, so his portrait from 1579. He was extremely rich, he had textile companies in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy. We know that he shopped for gunpowder and weapons in Brescia. Yep. And he was a total fashionista. He was like super wealthy. And you know, there are lists of his clothing that's extant, but one of the things he had, he had more than 60 leather jerkins and there was a law actually passed in 1585 banning jerkins because they were considered aggressive. So it's kind of like this leather jacket that was worn over the top sleeveless. And it was very thick and they offered protection and they were worn by soldiers. So they were close fitting, usually made of a lighter coloured leather, often without sleeves, worn over the doublet.
But they were banned because it was thought that wearing a jerkin encouraged brawling and duels and fights. It's like, you know, because there's this extra layer of stiff padding.
Like, come and stab me.
Yeah, yeah, you know, brilliant. Think about Romeo and Juliet and the brawls between the Montagues and the Caplets. You know, we may well have seen these outlawed jerkins on the stage. I'm not sure.
So do you think so in Bresca at this time, could we imagine what we see in Romeo and Juliet, how that's how people would've dressed?
Well, no, because historical reproduction, so there's the Globe Theater in London and like English fashion's, kind of same, same, but different, doing kind of its own thing and the fashions on that stage were also being worn by actors and so they were often like hand me downs of rich people's clothing. Ah, so they were just making do with what? Yeah, making do, making do, making symbolic do, whereas these rich Verona families would have totally had all their own thing.
I think the best thing we can do to get the idea is to have a look at, again, of portraits of the era of these wealthy, wealthy people to get a sense for what they're wearing.
And I was reading that they had these, some a duke had a sleeve just covered in pearls. Yeah. Like, costing like the equivalent of millions of dollars.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, because You can. Yeah. Because he can be, and because that's expected of him, because he's portraying this, you know, again like wearing the correct dress was such a thing and if you're not wearing it you're going to get laughed at, you're going to get ridiculed. Something also you were talking about theatre that's really interesting is this Niccolo di Luigi Caponi there are records of what he wore to carnival trips in Florence and so, and he went to see the Comedia del Arte performances, and these are kind of the very first performances that established, like, traditions of schooling and clowning and slapstick. Yeah, so we're seeing these conventions there, sort of starting here, and all of his clothes that he wore to Florence for these performances, and for carnival trips, they were really colourful really, really, really colorful and silk and shiny and like he's getting into the spirit of the carnival. Yeah, because you're saying with your clothes, like I'm here to party. Yeah. Right. And they were.
So Romeo and Juliet's being written at this point. And then at, so it's around about this time that Gasparo, he employs a 15 year old apprentice from Botticino, which is a town 12 kilometres from Brescia. And this was Giovanni Paolo Maggini, who could be considered probably more known than Da Salo. My viola edition of Sebchik has a Maggini viola on the front picture of that. And it just says, an important viola. Doesn't tell us anything about the viola, it's just, you know, made by Maggini at this time, but it's an important viola. Yeah. So G.P Maggini once again, child of a shoemaker, shoemakers everywhere. He was 15 and his father was actually a failed shoemaker. His business went bust and then he died. And so Maggini's mother, just to make ends meet, had to sell off parcels of land that they had and the same year, Gasparo Da Salo takes him on as an apprentice. And we see like throughout his life, he'sv he's helping family members, he's helping his sister's children, he's helping his like nephews and nieces, his little sister, and he, I think he was quite a, quite a nice guy. Like he takes on this 15 year old apprentice whose father has died and he's, he has to, you know, support his family.
And at the same time, Francesco Bertolotti, his son, you know, he was, he was making instruments, but he wasn't really, he just didn't have the drive.
And with any of these fine crafts, that's what differentiates the master from someone who's just kind of good. Yeah, and I think Francesco's life was probably quite easy. It had all been literally given to him. And here you have Maggini, he's lost everything.
And it might have also just been a personal interest as well. Yeah. You know, sometimes you do have people in industries who, you know, they haven't had a particularly difficult life, but they find their passion and it's like, Oh boy, that's, that's what I'm, that's what I'm here for. You know, I'm here for the violas. I'm doing it for the violins. violins.
So, like, so it turned out to be quite a good move on Gasparo's part because Maggini ended up he ended up giving him more responsibilities. Giovannin Paolo Maggini. We think made a lot of the violins that came out of Gasparo Da Salo's workshop and, and Maggini actually becomes good friends with the son of Girolamo Virchi, the, the organ maker, and Paolo Virchi, because he comes back to town after being exiled for 12 years for a crime. Right. But we don't quite know what it was. Okay. But it was bad enough for the magistrates not to want him around. Yeah, it's like, out you go, Sonny Jim. I like, the way how it's like, you've done this really bad thing, we can't be bothered putting you in a prison, so just go away.
Yeah. For your sentence. Like, you're someone else's problem. And I'm imagining other people's problems were coming. Like, to them, this is how it worked.
It might have been, but it also might have been things like it might have been something like speaking out against the government or speaking out against the church or nobles or you know, crimes like treason or something which, or publishing a pamphlet or, you know, there's sort of sometimes these political things.
It's not, you know, as black and white as We're gonna cut, cut your head off and that's it. Sunshine. Yeah. Or you know, if they've a connection to a wealthy family, you know, maybe it's not politically expedient to cut the head off, but you know, it's like off you go sunshine, you're exiled for 12 years.
I like to think it was just something sensational.
Yeah, that would be fun.
It would be better. Yeah. Yeah. Gasparo Da Salo, he is 64 he has his employee. He was paid quite a handsome fee to go and play the base for the feast of the assumption. So he, you know, he still has his reputation. Yeah. And you know, that's quite elderly, I suppose, at that time.
Not necessarily, you know, if you keep yourself fit and young and healthy and stuff. Avoid the plague. Avoid it like the plague. You can make it. And he's probably having a healthy Mediterranean diet. He's got his beans and olive oil from his farm.
He sure does. And he's, you know, staying active.
And then, yeah, so slowly Giovanni Paolo Maggini takes over. Francesco Bertolotti, he's still there. And then in 1609, Gasparo Da Salo dies and he's buried in a church that has links to woodworking trade, and, apparently there was quite a harmonious dividing of the assets.
Oh, okay. That's the family.
Francesco Bertolotti inherited the workshop, and, but he sort of, you know, he was there, but not really there, but then next to it you've got this firecracker.
Giovanni Paolo Magini going off just, yeah, bringing, you know, violin making to another level in Bresia.
As Gasparo Bertolotti’s life was coming to an end, what happened to his workshop and his legacy? Giovanni Paolo Magini became good friends with Girolamo Verchi's son, Paolo Verchi a musician and composer who was newly back in town after 12 years of exile from the Venetian state for a crime he committed. In 1604 Gasparo was invited to play the bass in Bergamo for a handsome fee at the Feast of the Assumption.
Even at the age of 64 he still had his reputation for being a fine bass player. Giovanni Paolo Maggini was turning into an accomplished instrument maker, and Gasparo Da Salo was entrusting him with ever more work and responsibility. He was especially good at making violins, the soprano instrument, becoming more and more popular.
But as for Gasparo, no one could make a bass like him. The sound you could get from one of his basses was amazing. He made them not like a large viol, but in the manner similar to that of the violin family. This was the instrument he loved to make, and play.
In 1609, on a spring day, on the 14th of April, Gasparo Bertolotti died. He was buried in the church of San Giuseppe, a church that had links to the woodworking trade. His death notice reads, “Messer Gasparo Bertolotti Maestro Violini is dead and buried in Santo Giuseppe”.
After his death, his sons divided up his 14 plots of land, a family home and a country estate. The workshop went to Francesco, who didn't really have the drive to continue his father's legacy and preferred to live off his inheritance. While Giovanni Paolo Maggini opened his own workshop and hit the ground running to be the next big thing Brescia saw in instrument making.
Today about 80 of his instruments are known to exist and among those are 12 Da Salo basses that we know of, but it is estimated that between 150 to 200 basses would have left his workshop to be played around Europe.
In the case of Brescia, the violin seems to have evolved from the viola, which in turn evolved from the viol and the lyre da braccia. I also find it fascinating the thought that Brescia could have developed the double bass in an attempt to emulate the organ in an outdoor setting. And that the violin family seems to have superseded, in a sense, the viol family because of the fact that it was more stable and a less delicate instrument.
Musically speaking, we are leaving the Renaissance and moving into the Baroque, where the tenor voiced instruments, so sought after in the Renaissance era, were shifting towards the soprano being the principal voice. And the violin family ticked a lot of boxes, being able to generate a very powerful sound.
Even more fascinating is that 40km down the road in Cremona, A very similar process was taking place at around about the same time. What they chose to make and how they made it was vastly different, but to be sure the violin was now unmistakably present and a force to be reckoned with.
Thank you so much for listening to these episodes about Gasparo Da Salo. I hope you've learned something and have a clearer image of this make. His life and the world he came from. If you would like to experience the amazing Da Salo bass played by Maxime Bibeau, I would encourage you to go along to one of the Australian Chamber Orchestra's concerts, where you will not only be able to see the instrument and hear it, but feel the vibrations.
And lastly, I would like to thank my lovely guest. John Dilworth, Dr Emily Brayshaw, Maxime Bibeau, Dr. John Gagne. In my next series, I will be looking at the Amati family, working down the road in Cremona. Theirs is an extraordinary story. Spanning 200 years, their instruments profoundly influencing all of the Cremonese makers to come after them up to the present day.
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