Europe's
Most Romantic Instrument

Herr Mozart Senior knew his onions.

In his important book about violin-playing (1756) he spoke about the viola d'amore, writing that it was a charming little devil of an instrument. Said it hit different when the sun goes down.

Or, for the pedants hanging on exact words:

Es ist eine besondere Art der Geigen, die, sonderheitlich bey der Abendstille, recht lieblich klinget.

The beauty of the d'amore lies in a clever bit of instrumental architecture. It has six or seven proper strings (or more, or fewer, fiddler, forbear). You bow and finger and out flows the usual business of melodic intention. Straightforward enough.

But ah! Beneath this diligent battalion lurk another six or seven (or thereabouts), and these fellows don't pull their weight. One neither bows nor plucks 'em; they just lie there, with an air of faux-industriousness.

Except...

Soon as you get them top strings vibin' these cats wake up through that peculiar brand of physics whereby one vibrating thing sets another vibrating thing to vibrating. The result is an otherworldly shimmer, a halo of sound that persists after the bow has wandered off to prosecute other business.

Leo, just in case you're curious, dropped the specs: an instrument with six gut strings, of which the lower ones are over-spun, and under the fingerboard, six steel strings.

By the late seventeenth century, the viola d'amore had infiltrated European courts and salons where it was gawked at by instrument makers and composers alike, yet it steadfastly refused to clean itself up and join the violin family business.

It kept changing its mind about how many strings it ought to have, or what shape suited it best, depending on which part of Europe it woke up in that morning. In short, the viola d’amore existed in a perpetual identity crisis, forever hovering on the brink of definiteness, daring anyone to point and say, 'There! That’s a viola d’amore, and nothing else!', before deciding, at the last moment, not to bother.

Durkin's research (The Viola d'Amore – its Heritage Reconsidered, 2013) demonstrates the viola d'amore had multiple, coexisting forms. She documents wire-strung viols, englische violets, octave-barytons, and the 'modern' viola d'amore all cruisin' the scene together, with the name viola d’amore being slapped onto a variety of instruments in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.

As the eighteenth century trundled onward, powdered wigs bobbing, minuets minuet-ing, the violin family stepped forward with great confidence and declared themselves to be In Charge. Orchestras and chamber ensembles, afflicted with a sudden craving for order, began demanding precision not only from the musicians but from the instruments themselves.

No more eccentric freelancing! Everything had to behave, line up, and play nice.

The violin family genuflected before these demands. They settled into their final, respectable forms, became the little minions of the orchestra, and made themselves thoroughly useful.

The viola d'amore looked at this whole spectacle of conformity and usefulness and chose to linger at the impractical edge of history.

The above depiction from Musicalisches Theatrum has the ethopoeia:

Ich heiß Viol d'Amour mit recht weil die verliebten mein ungemeiner Schall, in Luft und Freude setzt doch werd ich öfters auch gerühmet von betrübten als die in großem Leid, der süße Thon ergetzt wer die Music versteht und liebt wird leicht bekennen Ich sey die Anmuth selbst ihrer jederman zu nennen.

I am rightly called Viol d'Amour because my extraordinary sound fills lovers with pleasure and joy, yet I am also often praised by the sorrowful, as in great suffering my sweet tone delights. Whoever understands and loves music will readily admit that I am grace itself, for everyone to name.

Compare this to the violin from the same book:

Was uns das Allerthum an alten Fiedeln weist, nennt man zu dieser Zeit, die edle Violin, ob sich an jenen nun zwar schön der Meister übt, so heißt es doch: jetzt erst ist Geist und Leben drinn. Ein großer Welt-Monarch, der Kunst und Music liebet, ist's, der der Künstler Schlaf mit Lorbeern offt umgiebet.

What antiquity shows us in old fiddles is now called the noble violin. Although masters practiced beautifully on those instruments of old, it is still said: only now is there spirit and life within. A great world monarch, who loves art and music, is he who often crowns the artists' temples with laurels.

The violin text is written in third-person narrator, while the d'amore's text is first-person prosopopoeia. When an instrument must defend its own existence rather than having its importance proclaimed by the world at large, well, that tells you something about its place in the chaos of history.

The violin here tells a story of historical progression, while the d'amore references cultural capital, transcending hierarchy through aesthetic quality.

Giuseppe Tartini

Monsieur Berlioz, in 1844 throws us a shrug in print: 'This instrument is slightly larger than the alto [viola]. It has almost everywhere fallen into disuse, and except for Mr. Urhan, the sole artist who plays it in Paris, it would be known to us only by name.'

FYI, Mr. Urhan is Chrétien Uhran, who played it in the Opera orchestra in the first act of Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer.

The modernists had won. The practical had triumphed. The viola d'amore, it seemed, had reached the end of its story.

As Paul Shirley wrote in 1920: 'Many beautiful specimens of the viola d'amore were produced... but like so many other eighteenth-century institutions, the viola d'amore was swept away and forgotten in the cataclysm of the French Revolution. And during the Empire, the sound of fife and drum did not allow it to be remembered.'

And so it might have been, retiring to museum cases and private collections, a pleasant memory of bygone days.

But History, as is her custom, had other ideas.

Scholars and musicians with a taste for historical rummaging began poking around in the past and the early music revival was born. With it, the viola d'amore returned. New instruments were built, old ones restored, and composers from Hindemith to Prokofiev, Massenet to Strauss, were drawn to its strange voice.

Thus Amor with the bandaged eyes, 

Fit symbol of hushed numbers, 

Most musically wakes and sighs 

After an age of slumbers: 

Beneath your magic bow's control

 The Viol has regained her soul.

Mathilde Blind