Projects for the next three years
Three years packed with workshops and exhibitions.

Andrea Amati’s work predominated throughout the sixteen hundreds, the century when the musical instruments of the violin family were developed. It was also the century during which Europe’s major royal courts called upon on Cremona to express their supremacy and power also through instruments intended for music. That was how Cremona developed its leadership. After Andrea, his sons, Antonio and Girolamo, and his grandson Nicolò, the Guarneri family, the less renowned Ruggeri family and Antonio Stradivarius and Carlo Bergonzi followed in his footsteps. Two centuries of industrious labour in the shadow of the city’s Dominican basilica. This was the time in which the knowledge and experience pioneered by Andrea Amati was handed down from one generation to the next. Two centuries of innovation in which music played the leading role, in symbiosis with performers and composers. Continuous experimentation, with the instruments fine-tuned to satisfy emerging needs. In two hundred years, Cremona consolidated its leadership in the creation of musical instruments based on Andrea Amati’s legacy. Then, suddenly, everything seemed to come to an end. The date was 1750. A few years earlier, Antonio Stradivarius and his sons had died, and Guarneri del Gesù and Carlo Bergonzi had passed away as well. In a letter written by Paolo Stradivarius in 1775 we learn that Carlo had borrowed the models from the Stradivarius workshop and it is common knowledge how they were then taken away from Cremona and ended up gracing the collection of Count Cozio di Salabue. Today this incident appears profoundly meaningful. Stradivarius’s templates and models were gone, and Cremona was on the brink of losing its legacy of knowledge and expertise. All signs pointed to a break in the continuity of that material culture that had ensured the leadership of the Cremona artisans. The Stradivarius, Amati and Guarneri instruments were used as models by European violin makers, thus confirming their excellence and absolute supremacy. But in the city of Cremona something had changed. Why? Personal vicissitudes, historical events, changing times, revolutions. What distinguished these years? When can one discern the first signs of the loss of prestige, of a standing that the city had maintained over such a long period? Above all, was it really so, or were the violin makers victims of historical events, regardless of the quality of their work? These are the questions we should ask ourselves. After three years of work focusing on the development of the violin, which of course coincided with the history of the first violin makers in Cremona, a new and challenging three-year project presents itself to the international violin making community, a research effort utilising the methodology applied in the past few years, which has proven successful both in terms of the results achieved and the acknowledgements received from the academic world. In this new three-year period workshops as well as exhibitions will be organised, beginning next year with an exhibition dedicated to the last years of the grand classical violin making school, from 1730 to 1750, the apparent decline of Cremona violin making art, the swan song, including a legendary Antonio Stradivarius violin, developed in the year when he died. In 2009, the spotlight will be shifted to the Bergonzi family. Not much is known about them, but the events regarding this family seem to confirm the decline of the city’s violin making genius. We have a duty to Carlo Bergonzi, too frequently forgotten and this will be a chance to study his magnificent instruments. In the following year, 2010, the three-year study will conclude with a special focus on the Cremona violin makers of the 19th century, a period when the loss of leadership was confirmed, and great transformations occurred. Universal changes, epochal revolutions compared to which violin making meant little or nothing. However, in this respect, Cremona was irreparably changed. This will be the last stage, illustrating how historical events and the destinies of individuals contributed to the decline of that supremacy in the arts that Cremona’s master craftsmen once enjoyed. And in writing these lines, those magnificent decorated instruments of the first master violin maker come irresistibly to mind.

Fausto Cacciatori
Member of the Ente Triennale Board of Directors