Violin Trivia
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117 free Violin trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Sixty-one violin trivia questions for players, parents at the back of the recital hall, and anyone who has wondered why a wooden box with four strings can sell for £10 million. The quiz covers how the instrument works (what the strings are tuned to, what the bow is made of, why the sound post is called the soul), the great makers of Cremona, and the people who made the violin famous, from Paganini and Heifetz to Perlman, Lindsey Stirling and Andre Rieu. There is a fiddle side too: the Hardanger fiddle in The Lord of the Rings, the golden fiddle in 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia', Fiddler on the Roof and the Titanic bandleader's violin. Questions start easy enough for a beginner and climb to the details only a conservatoire student would know, and each one is marked with a difficulty score. Every answer has been checked against a Wikipedia article or another primary source, and every question links to the page it came from, so if you think we are wrong you can see the evidence for yourself.
30 of 117 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01From lowest to highest, what are the standard notes of a violin's four strings?
G, D, A, E
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.
Q 02Adjacent strings on a violin are tuned what interval apart?
A perfect fifth
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.
Q 03The violin in its present form first emerged in the early 16th century in which region?
Northern Italy
Brescia and Cremona became the first great centres, and the word itself is Italian: violino, the little viola.
Q 04Andrea Amati supplied a set of 38 string instruments to which 16th-century French king?
Charles IX
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.
Q 05Which wood is traditionally used for the top plate (soundboard) of a violin?
Spruce
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.
Q 06The small wooden dowel wedged inside a violin is also known by what evocative name?
The soul post
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.
Q 07Bow hair for a violin traditionally comes from the tail of which animal?
A horse
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.
Q 08What do violinists rub onto their bow hair so it grips the strings?
Rosin
Rosin is refined pine resin; without it a bow slides silently across the string.
Q 09The word 'violin' comes from the Italian violino, a diminutive of which word?
Viola
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.
Q 10In which Italian city did Antonio Stradivari build his instruments?
Cremona
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.
Q 11Roughly how many of Antonio Stradivari's violins are thought to survive?
About 500
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.
Q 12The 1721 'Lady Blunt' Stradivarius was auctioned in 2011 to aid victims of which disaster?
The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami
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.
Q 13The pristine 1716 'Messiah' Stradivarius is kept in which museum?
The Ashmolean, Oxford
Q 21The Stradivarius Joshua Bell now plays was stolen in 1936 from a dressing room at which New York venue?
Carnegie Hall
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.
Q 22Which hymn is popularly said to be the last piece Titanic bandleader Wallace Hartley played?
Nearer, My God, to Thee
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.
Q 23Which Beatles song has no Beatle playing an instrument, only a string octet with four violins?
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.
Q 14The labels of the 18th-century violin maker nicknamed 'del Gesù' carried what?
The IHS Christogram
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'.
Q 15Paganini's beloved 'Il Cannone' was made by which family of luthiers?
Guarneri
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.
Q 16Niccolo Paganini was born in 1782 in which city?
Genoa
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.
Q 17Why did the Church refuse Paganini burial in consecrated ground in 1840?
He received no last rites
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.
Q 18Which composer wrote all five of his authenticated violin concertos as a teenager, four of them in a single year?
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
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.
Q 19Busking incognito in a Washington Metro station in 2007, violinist Joshua Bell collected roughly how much from commuters?
About $30
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.
Q 20Which scientist told an interviewer in 1929, 'I get most joy in life out of my violin'?
Albert Einstein
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.
Eleanor Rigby
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.
Q 24Vivaldi published each concerto of The Four Seasons together with what?
A sonnet
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.
Q 25Which British violinist's 1989 recording of Vivaldi's Four Seasons sold more than two million copies?
Nigel Kennedy
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.
Q 26Fine violin bows have traditionally been made from which wood?
Pernambuco
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.
Q 27Roughly how many hairs make up the ribbon of a violin bow?
About 150
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.
Q 28Bernard Herrmann scored which Hitchcock film for a string orchestra alone, with no brass, woodwind or percussion?
Psycho
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.
Q 29Franz Clement gave the 1806 premiere of which composer's only completed violin concerto?
Ludwig van Beethoven
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.
Q 30Itzhak Perlman contracted which disease at the age of four?
Polio
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.