“MY VIOLIN’S LIFE STORY”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 5 July 1941, Page 6

“MY VIOLIN’S LIFE STORY”

KREISLER’S GUARNERIUS. FOUND IN A HOTEL. For sweetness of lone, Straclivarius is still king, wrote Fritz Kreisler. world-famous violinist (recently injured in an accident), in the "Christian Science Monitor.” He made about 200 violins, of which perhaps 160 still exist. Some 20 or 30 of these are really very good and five or six, better preserved, are supreme instruments. If they seem timeless, it is because of their destiny. To crush a Strad would be to kill an immortal. Yet violins are frail and there must be good fairies at their birth if they are to survive for 200 years. They are full of adventure. Here is my Guarnerius. It was brought from Spain by an English sailor, who had taken it in some raid of the Napoleonic Spanish War. The sailor sold it for a guinea, though it was worth many thousands. But to the sailor it was just a fiddle, /ike any other. He might have destroyed it in a waterfront bout. Already it had come through one war. | and perhaps others. My Guarnerius took plenty of chances of destruction in those wandering and eventful years, but it escaped everything. The buyers sold it to a man named Twombley, the owner of a London pub. Quite by chance a good violinist took it down and discovered its tone. After that Twombley grew famous for his fiddle. The Guarnerius knew how to make its own way in life.

Word went round: “This is one of the world’s great fiddles, and a publican refuses to sell it.” And .so in time I heard of it. I was very young, but then I had been playing on a fiddle since the age of four when my father gave me a cigar box with four strings across it. I played this Guarnerius mellowed by centuries. I loved its voice, but Twombley wouldn’t sell it. “Come,” I said to him, “this fiddle speaks for me. I am its fate. Sell it

to me.” “There are other good men who come here and play it,” Twombley said. “How can I deprive them of the happiness? But come again. Come often.” I I came often enough, and the fiddle knew its master, but still in the end it went back on its peg. There were nights when I woke in a bad dream of some fellow —like the sailor who had stolen it out of Spain—taking it from its peg behind that publican’s

bar. Well, I do not have such dreams now. I have the fiddle. Old Twombley passed on at 90, and his two daughters sold it, perhaps to be rid of the need of running a pub. And so I have my Guarnerius. It is robust. It has been to the wars, and so, for that matter, have I. We are companions. When we play together it is as if I am in the Austrian cavalry again. I see the charge, I receive again that thrust of a Don Cossack lance. I am unhorsed. But I go on playing. I think to myself, “Today is the day of the Guarnerius.” It is superb and pathetic, with its clouded destiny. There is no end to the music in it if it is well kept. To whom will it finally appeal? But I.know less of its future than of its past. I know only that for the present wo are joined.