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There was a dead-and-gone romance which had broken his heart, sentimentally speaking a romance long since crumbled into dust, which had sent him for comfort into the study of osteology and the music of the Stradivari; yet the memory thereof made him considerably more lenient to Koosje's weakness than Koosje herself had ever expected to find him.
If she had spoken the thoughts to the professor himself, she would have received a very emphatic assurance that, much as the study of osteology and the Stradivari had blinded him to the affairs of this workaday world, he was not yet so thoroughly foolish as to join his fossilised wisdom to the ignorance of a child of sixteen or seventeen.
A family of almost equal fame was the group of violin makers of Cremona, the Stradivari. The founder of the house, Antonio, began his life romantically enough. When he was a youngster of seventeen or eighteen, he fell in love with Francesca Capra, a widow of a man who had been assassinated. She was nine or ten years older than Stradivari, and they were married on July 4, 1667.
Antonia bore Stradivari five children: a daughter, who died at the age of twenty; a son, who died in infancy; a son, who died at twenty-four; a son, who became a priest and lasted seventy-seven years, and, finally, a son, Paolo, the only child of Stradivari that seems to have married, and certainly the only one who handed down the family name.
Looking through the doorway into the workshop at the back, James can be seen sitting as quietly and contentedly as his master in the front. He is engaged on some fitting of small pieces into some fractures of the upper table of a Stradivari. Having been told to do them neatly, cleanly and with every precaution, experience and deft handling of tools, he has got these latter into nice cutting order.
In the workshop of Stradivari was a fiddle-maker named Andreas Guarnieri, who had two sons, Pietro and Giuseppe, who had a son named Pietro, and a more famous cousin named Giuseppe, who was a dissipated genius, and blasphemously gave himself the nickname, "del Gesù."
Just men with Stenson's brains and character; wishing for a hundred instrument makers with Stenson's skills would have been unreasonable, even for wishing. There was only one Henry Stenson, just as there had been only one Antonio Stradivari. Why a man like that worked in a little shop on a frontier planet like Zarathustra.... Then he looked, pridefully, at the globe.
She was Francesca Capra; her husband had been assassinated three years before, leaving her a child. The boy Stradivari and the widow were married July 4, 1667, and on December 23d, a daughter named Julia was born. Francesca bore Stradivari six children.
As the art of violin making developed, so did that of violin playing, but, whereas the former reached its climax with Stradivari, the latter is still being developed, as new writers and players find new difficulties and new effects.
For example or examples, suppose I found, crowning the severe, almost rigid column of the soundhole of Del Jesu, the mobile bend of Stradivari? or, at the turn of the companion lines of Stradivari, the Gothic arch of Del Jesu? with the base of each of a like nature do you think I should pass such without a severe growl of condemnation?
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