67 Fun Facts About Violin

From lowest to highest, what are the standard notes of a violin's four strings?

G, D, A, E. The thin top E is usually the only string given its own fine-tuning screw at the tailpiece, because the wooden pegs alone are too coarse to set it easily.

Adjacent strings on a violin are tuned what interval apart?

A perfect fifth. The older viols were tuned mostly in fourths, and so is the double bass, the one orchestral string instrument that breaks the violin family's rule.

The violin in its present form first emerged in the early 16th century in which region?

Brescia and Cremona became the first great centres, and the word itself is Italian: violino, the little viola.

Andrea Amati supplied a set of 38 string instruments to which 16th-century French king?

Charles IX. The instruments were painted and gilded with the king's emblems, but the set did not outlast the French Revolution, and only a few of them survive.

Which wood is traditionally used for the top plate (soundboard) of a violin?

Spruce. Makers pick it because it is light yet strong, which suits a plate that has to vibrate under the strings, while the back, ribs and neck are usually cut from maple.

The small wooden dowel wedged inside a violin is also known by what evocative name?

The soul post. French makers call the sound post the âme and Italians the anima, both words for soul; it carries vibrations from the top plate to the back, and where it stands shapes the instrument's tone.

Bow hair for a violin traditionally comes from the tail of which animal?

A horse. With use the hair stops gripping the string and hairs break, so a good bow is not thrown away but rehaired with a fresh hank every so often.

What do violinists rub onto their bow hair so it grips the strings?

Rosin is refined pine resin; without it a bow slides silently across the string.

The word 'violin' comes from the Italian violino, a diminutive of which word?

Viola. Italian sizes the family by suffix: a violino is a little viola, a violone a big one, and violoncello, the cello's full name, is literally a little big viola.

In which Italian city did Antonio Stradivari build his instruments?

Cremona. Stradivari kept making instruments there into his nineties, and the city's violin-making tradition is now on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage.

Roughly how many of Antonio Stradivari's violins are thought to survive?

About 500. Stradivari worked into his nineties and built over a thousand instruments, so his violins are precious without being rare, and soloists still play many of them.

The 1721 'Lady Blunt' Stradivarius was auctioned in 2011 to aid victims of which disaster?

The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Japan's Nippon Music Foundation sold the violin three months after the disaster, and its £9.8 million was more than four times the previous record for a Stradivarius.

The pristine 1716 'Messiah' Stradivarius is kept in which museum?

The Ashmolean, Oxford. The name came from its owner Luigi Tarisio, who bragged about the violin for years without ever showing it, until a violinist quipped that, like the Messiah, it was always awaited and never appeared.

The labels of the 18th-century violin maker nicknamed 'del Gesù' carried what?

The IHS Christogram. The three letters, an old monogram of the name Jesus, appear with a cross on his labels beside his own name, which is how he came to be called 'del Gesù', meaning 'of Jesus'.

Paganini's beloved 'Il Cannone' was made by which family of luthiers?

Guarneri. Paganini probably received the 1743 violin as a gift in Livorno, came to prefer it to every other instrument he owned, and called it 'my cannon' for the fullness of its sound.

Niccolo Paganini was born in 1782 in which city?

Genoa. Paganini left his favourite violin to his home city in his will, and the winner of the city's Paganini competition is invited to play it.

Why did the Church refuse Paganini burial in consecrated ground in 1840?

He received no last rites. A priest sent to his bedside believed he had turned the sacrament away, and his body waited until 1876 for a church burial, in Parma.

Which composer wrote all five of his authenticated violin concertos as a teenager, four of them in a single year?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. A court concertmaster in Salzburg, he wrote the last four in 1775, when he was nineteen; no later violin concerto is securely his, though he lived another sixteen years.

Busking incognito in a Washington Metro station in 2007, violinist Joshua Bell collected roughly how much from commuters?

About $30. More than a thousand commuters walked past; only a handful stopped to listen and just one recognised him, days after he had played the same pieces to a paying concert audience.

Which scientist told an interviewer in 1929, 'I get most joy in life out of my violin'?

Albert Einstein. He told the Saturday Evening Post that he often thought in music and that, had he not been a physicist, he would probably have been a musician.

The Stradivarius Joshua Bell now plays was stolen in 1936 from a dressing room at which New York venue?

Carnegie Hall. Its then owner, Bronisław Huberman, was on stage with his other violin when it vanished, and it stayed missing until a musician's deathbed confession to his wife in 1985.

Which hymn is popularly said to be the last piece Titanic bandleader Wallace Hartley played?

Nearer, My God, to Thee. Survivors disagreed, and the wireless operator recalled a tune called 'Autumn', perhaps a waltz, but Hartley had once told a colleague this hymn was one of two he would choose on a sinking ship.

Which Beatles song has no Beatle playing an instrument, only a string octet with four violins?

Eleanor Rigby. By John Lennon's account the violins were Paul McCartney's idea, after Jane Asher introduced him to Vivaldi; George Martin wrote the score, and the players were miked unusually close.

Vivaldi published each concerto of The Four Seasons together with what?

A sonnet. The poems, possibly Vivaldi's own, describe the barking dog, the sleeping drunkards and the hunt, and the printed score marks which passage of music paints which line.

Which British violinist's 1989 recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons sold more than two million copies?

Nigel Kennedy. The album earned a Guinness entry as the best-selling classical recording of its day and carried him far beyond the classical audience; he went on to play Jimi Hendrix at jazz festivals.

Fine violin bows have traditionally been made from which wood?

Pernambuco. The Brazilian wood was first shipped to Europe for making dye; the tree is now endangered and its export restricted, so many players are turning to carbon-fibre bows.

Roughly how many hairs make up the ribbon of a violin bow?

About 150. Makers comb out any kinked or unusually thick hairs so that only straight ones lie side by side in the ribbon; the bows of the larger string instruments carry a wider ribbon with more.

Bernard Herrmann scored which Hitchcock film for a string orchestra alone, with no brass, woodwind or percussion?

Psycho. Herrmann chose strings alone for what he called a black-and-white sound to match the photography; Hitchcock wanted no music in the shower scene, but Herrmann scored it anyway and the director kept it.

Franz Clement gave the 1806 premiere of which composer's only completed violin concerto?

Ludwig van Beethoven. He finished it only shortly before the concert; in 1844 Joseph Joachim, not quite 13, played it in London with Mendelssohn conducting.

Itzhak Perlman contracted which disease at the age of four?

Polio. It damaged his legs, so he walks with crutches and plays sitting down; a violin recital he heard on the radio as a small boy is what made him want to play.

Perlman played the violin solos on the Oscar-winning score of which 1993 film?

Schindler's List. After seeing a rough cut, John Williams told Steven Spielberg the film needed a better composer than he was; Spielberg is said to have replied, 'I know, but they're all dead.'

Which violin virtuoso wrote the 1946 Bing Crosby hit 'When You Make Love to Me' under the pseudonym Jim Hoyl?

Jascha Heifetz. He wrote several pop songs in the 1940s with the lyricist Marjorie Goetschius, hiding behind a pen name that kept his initials; Margaret Whiting recorded this one too.

Fiddler on the Roof is based on stories by which Yiddish writer?

Sholem Aleichem. He began his Tevye the Dairyman stories in Yiddish in 1894; the show's title is usually traced to Marc Chagall's paintings of fiddlers above village rooftops, though it copies no single canvas.

Fiddler on the Roof was Broadway's longest-running show until which musical overtook it in 1979?

Grease. Fiddler had taken the musicals' record from Hello, Dolly! and closed after 3,242 performances; Grease ran past it to 3,388, only to lose the title to A Chorus Line four years later.

In the Charlie Daniels Band's 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia', what prize does Johnny play for?

A fiddle of gold. The Devil stakes it against Johnny's soul and loses; Charlie Daniels played both fiddlers himself and said the idea may have come from a Stephen Vincent Benét poem he read in high school.

The Hardanger fiddle, with its extra sympathetic strings, is the national instrument of which country?

Norway. Only four of its strings are bowed, while four or five more run under the fingerboard and ring in sympathy; the name comes from the Hardanger fjord region, where it probably began.

Howard Shore made the Hardanger fiddle the voice of which people's theme in Lord of the Rings?

Rohan. Shore chose the folk fiddle because the films picture Rohan's riders as a Northern European people; its theme is first heard in The Two Towers.

Composer-violinist Louis Spohr invented which violin accessory around 1820?

The chinrest. Players had steadied the violin against the collarbone; once the jaw could hold it, the left hand was freer, and shifts and vibrato that had been awkward became much easier.

The Stroh violin, invented in 1899 with a metal horn instead of a wooden body, proved especially useful for what?

Early sound recording. Ordinary wooden violins barely registered on the acoustic recording horns of the day, so studios used the Stroh's louder, aimed sound until microphones made it unnecessary in the late 1920s.

Violinist Vanessa-Mae competed in alpine skiing at the 2014 Winter Olympics for which country?

Thailand. She raced under her Thai father's surname, Vanakorn, and came last of the 67 finishers in the giant slalom, some 50 seconds behind the winner.

Before her YouTube fame, violinist Lindsey Stirling competed on which TV contest?

America's Got Talent. She did not win, so she took her dancing-violinist act to YouTube instead, where millions of subscribers let her sell out tours with no radio play at all.

In the 1998 film The Red Violin, what gives the instrument's varnish its colour?

The maker's wife's blood. She dies in childbirth, and he mixes it into the varnish of his last violin, which the film then follows to Austria, England, China and a Montreal auction house.

Which composer conducted the 16-year-old Yehudi Menuhin in a 1932 recording of the composer's own violin concerto?

Edward Elgar. Menuhin recalled that the 75-year-old heard him briefly in rehearsal, declared himself satisfied and went off to the races; their recording has stayed in the catalogue ever since.

Menuhin's Grammy-winning 1967 album with sitarist Ravi Shankar was called what?

West Meets East. The two had been friends since the early 1950s, and the album grew out of a duet they played at the Bath Festival in 1966; it did well enough to start a trilogy.

Tartini's Violin Sonata in G minor is better known by what nickname, after a dream he described?

The Devil's Trill. Tartini said he handed the Devil his violin in a dream and heard playing so fine that the sonata he wrote on waking seemed a poor copy; scholars date it decades after the 1713 he claimed.

Beginners in the Suzuki method first learn variations on which tune?

Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Shinichi Suzuki reasoned that children learn to speak before they can read, so his pupils learn to play by ear first, starting with rhythmic variations on a tune they already know.

Which instrument does the concertmaster call on to sound the A when tuning the orchestra?

The oboe. Its pitch is steady and its penetrating sound carries over the rest of the woodwinds, so the whole orchestra takes its A from the first oboe.

Mendelssohn wrote his E minor Violin Concerto for Ferdinand David, concertmaster of which orchestra?

Leipzig Gewandhaus. Mendelssohn conducted the orchestra and had made David, a childhood friend, its concertmaster; he promised him the concerto in 1838, then spent six years on it, taking David's advice on the solo part.

Berg inscribed his Violin Concerto 'to the memory of an angel', the daughter of which couple?

Alma Mahler and Walter Gropius. Their daughter Manon died at 18 in 1935; the concerto in her memory was the last work Berg finished, and he died four months before its first performance.

Which composer revised his only concerto, for violin, after its 1904 premiere went badly?

Jean Sibelius. He had once set his heart on becoming a violin virtuoso himself; after the Helsinki premiere failed he cut and tightened the piece, and the new version was first played in Berlin in 1905.

Traditional 'catgut' violin strings are actually made from the intestines of which animal?

Sheep. Cats were never involved: dictionaries suggest the word may be an altered 'kitgut', from kit, an old name for the small fiddle that dancing teachers carried.

Meryl Streep took up the violin to play a real East Harlem teacher in which 1999 film?

Music of the Heart. Streep stepped in when Madonna left the project, and the director was Wes Craven, the horror specialist behind Scream and A Nightmare on Elm Street, in a rare break from the genre.

In 1935 Fritz Kreisler admitted what about pieces he had credited to Pugnani, Tartini and Vivaldi?

He had written them himself. Kreisler had passed the pieces off for some thirty years as old works he had found, so that his own name would not appear too often on his recital programmes.

Nero 'fiddled while Rome burned' centuries before violins existed, so which instrument is he said to have played?

The lyre. Later accounts had him singing as he played, but Tacitus reports that only as an unconfirmed rumour and puts Nero at his villa in Antium, some 35 miles away, when the fire broke out.

Stephane Grappelli co-founded the Quintette du Hot Club de France in 1934 with which guitarist?

Django Reinhardt. In 1934 both were sidemen in a dance band at a Paris hotel, and by Grappelli's account the quintet grew out of the jam sessions the two of them held backstage.

Andre Rieu tours the world's stadiums with an orchestra named after which composer?

Johann Strauss. Rieu started the orchestra with just twelve players and built it to around fifty, taking Viennese waltzes out of the concert hall and into arenas; the press calls him the King of the Waltz.

Brahms arranged for piano left hand alone the celebrated solo-violin Chaconne by which composer?

Johann Sebastian Bach. Brahms marvelled that a single stave could hold 'a whole world of the deepest thoughts', and kept to one hand so the pianist would work within something like the violinist's limits.

Which fictional detective plays a Stradivarius that he boasts of buying for just 55 shillings?

Sherlock Holmes. He tells Watson the violin was worth at least five hundred guineas, nearly two hundred times what he paid a broker in Tottenham Court Road for it.

What are the two openings cut into a violin's top called, after the letter they resemble?

F-holes. The older viols mostly have C-holes instead, and a violin's pair double as the way in for the special tool a luthier uses to adjust the dowel wedged inside.

What is the carved end of a violin's neck, just above the pegbox, called?

The scroll. Makers are judged on how well they carve it, and when an old violin needs a new neck, restorers usually keep the original scroll and graft it onto the new wood.

Why do luthiers glue violin joints with animal hide glue rather than white glue?

It can be undone with hot water. Its joints also crack cleanly under a knife, so a repairer can usually lift a violin's top off undamaged, and because fresh hide glue bonds to old, little original wood is lost.

Which wood is preferred for a violin's fingerboard because of its hardness and resistance to wear?

Ebony. It shrugs off years of fingers and strings pressing into it, and cheaper violins often use another wood stained or painted black to pass for it.

Among violinists, what is 'fiddler's neck'?

A mark on the skin. Friction and pressure from years of holding the instrument under the jaw can roughen and darken a patch of the neck.

Which carved maple part holds a violin's strings above the body and passes their vibration to it?

The bridge. The pull of the strings slowly tips it, so players check after tuning that it still stands straight, because a crooked bridge dulls the whole instrument.

What is the term for plucking a violin's strings with a finger instead of bowing them?

Pizzicato. The word means pinched, and in virtuoso showpieces a violinist will even pluck with the fingers of the left hand, leaving the bow in place for the next note.

In the technique called col legno, a violinist strikes the strings with which part of the bow?

The wooden stick. Holst opens 'Mars' in The Planets this way, the whole string section tapping out its menacing rhythm with the backs of their bows.

Which showpiece by Vittorio Monti contains an entire section played in artificial harmonics?

Csárdás. This Hungarian-style showpiece was written around 1904 by an Italian: Monti was born and died in Naples, and published it for violin, mandolin or piano.