Count Cozio and the Milanese Violin Makers

Duane Rosengard

2012 BGM, New Orleans

Transcriber’s notes in (bold)

Thank you very much. I want to thank the American Federation for the invite. This is my first time in Louisiana and New Orleans in particular, and I'd like to thank Jerry (Pasewicz, current President) and his staff for helping me get here.

Today I thought of talking to you all about Count Cozio for a wide number of reasons. The first one, but not the most important one, is that there’s very few people in our business, the violin business, who are the subject of more garbage and trash on the Internet; and therefore when you have younger customers, meaning probably anything below age 30, or people who might be scouring the internet for information things pertinent to their own instrument, that what you would probably get in the way of blowback is largely completely fictitious; and there's a lot of information about Count Cozio and his collecting, his dealing and so on and so forth in different Italian archives that I have explored with my colleague Carlo Chiesa, who’s here from Milan. The main body of work of course is in Cremona in the state library, as per the donation of Giuseppe Fiorini. But, what you’re going to see today: there are a few things that we found actually that were in Milan, and I’ll explain the circumstances of that in a moment; but most of you might know I wrote a book about a guy called Guadagnini a few years ago that Jim Warren helped publish, and in that there is as about as exhaustive treatment that I could come up with about the years between 1773 and 1780, roughly ‘81, when Cozio and G. B. Guadagnini had a great deal to do with each other.

If we remember that in 1780, when pretty much the Guadagnini chapter of Cozio’s life was dying down, he was only 25 years old. Gives you some idea of, or, I should say should reinforce the idea: usually with Cozio there is a great disparity

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. between where he’s at in his life and his enthusiasms and passions, and where the rest of the world is. In the first chapter you’ve got a very much older, very, very hardened and experienced violin maker. Guadagnini more than 40 years older than Cozio. And you have a little bit of tension between the two of them about notions about violin construction and I believe that that is one of the reasons that they may have had a parting of the ways between 80 and 81: because the young Cozio in his ingenuous enthusiasm suggested to Guadagnini that he make Strads. And Guadagnini didn’t like that. I don’t think there’s a lot of, you know, much more nuance than that.

However, then Cozio gets married; he starts to have a family at his seat in Salabue, near Casale Monferrato in Piedmont. Much of, virtually all of, his collecting, dealing, repairing -- all of the things that he kept notes on, that he kept in contact with people over, all of his activities -- seems to have come to a grinding halt. Right at the point where he’s done with Guadagnini, he gets married, starts a family. During those years I still don’t know much about him beyond that for a brief time he was the mayor Casale, and he was somewhere close in terms of the communal administration of Casale at the point that the French Republican Army invaded Piedmont in 1796. I don’t know why Count Cozio’s archive begins to pick up speed and substance again around 1800, but I personally suspect that a large part of that was economic: in other words, that he could deal violins, possibly even get advice about violins; and rather than concentrating that on activity in Turin, which would be the capital of Piedmont, he seems to have invested most of his energy in Milan. And, by horse or carriage, Milan is probably only a little bit farther away than Turin was. But, nonetheless, he had -- (Refers to PowerPoint portrait) by the way, this is the Count, on the left, the only known oil painting of him from late in life. And he began picking up where he left off in about 1800, 1801, mainly by rekindling his relationship with the Mantegazza brothers.

The elder one was, of course, Francesco Mantegazza whose business card is still preserved in Campo Tio Serpe (Sp?), and the younger one, and according to Cozio the more gifted one, was Carlo Mantegazza, who was born in 1772 in Milan. Now, those are both names well, well known to the violin trade. There doesn’t seem to be any, or, I

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. should say, there is very little evidence, rather, that they dedicated much towards building new instruments, and they principally were occupied modernizing old violins, violas, cellos and bases, and, to a certain extent, deal and trade.

When Count Cozio began to keep records and to keep notes again, around 1801, he started a little notebook, about that size (demonstrates with fingers), and he was quite capable of nearly microscopic size handwriting. And in his very first diary he opens with about 4, 5 or 6 pages that contain some observations about recently deceased makers like Carlo Landolfi and Pietro Mantegazza, father of Francesco and Carlo I just mentioned a minute ago, and he collects a little bit of information about then living violin makers. And in the very beginning you see that -- or I should say at the beginning of this diary, rather -- you see that Count Cozio is aware that in Cremona there is a violin maker called Ceruti, and in Milan there is a violin maker called Antonio Merighi, and Antonio Merighi to me is an absolutely fascinating character, because for concentrated period from roughly about 1805 to 1809 his name crops up as frequently as the Mantegazza name crops up in Count Cozio’s notes and writings.

According to Cozio, Merighi was brought to Milan from his native Parma by Alessandro Rolla; and if there’s one person you should never ever forget in this presentation today then that is Alessandro Rolla, violin player, pedagogue, composer, collector, you name it – he was, really, he was Ivan Galamian on steroids in Milan in the first 30 years of the 19th century (Laughter). The thing is, is that Alessandro Rolla had lost his job in Parma at the Bourbon court because the Bourbon court was, uh, basically it died out and Napoleon took over and abolished all of the court decreed privileges that musicians like Alessandro Rolla enjoyed. So he moved to be the concertmaster of La Scala opera house in Milan, and he seems to have encouraged Merighi and Antonio Merighi came to Milan somewhere around 1802 – 1803. Now Count Cozio, at the very beginning, seems to have become aware of Merighi through Rolla, and oftentimes in Cozio’s writings you see their names mentioned together. However, at a certain point, and I’m surmising now it’s about 1805 maybe 1804, the Count decides to give Merighi some jobs. These jobs are very particular (Referring to PowerPoint pictures of

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. Cozio’s diary). And they seem to be all modeled on this format: which is that a violin, its chest area carefully traced out, and somebody either the Count or the Merighi, I can’t say which, would go over it in ink. The inscriptions you see at the top of these drawings are all in Count Cozio’s handwriting. This one, for example, is for a violin of Niccolo Amati. And this sequence of drawings, this one is a rib structure of an Andrea Guarneri, and I just put it upside down so that I can see the inscription there. This next one is from 2nd October 1805 and the drawing is inscribed, “the chest of the violin Jacopo Stainer,” that would be Jacob Stainer of the year 1651, “that belonged to Cianni (Sp?)”, that later belonged to General Claridge. It looks quite possible as Stainer sound holes.

And the next one, also from 1805: this is an Andrea Guarneri chest, and this is an extremely detailed commentary by Cozio comparing it to a few other instruments of the same maker. One of the more interesting ones, and I think this is maybe talked about somewhere in in a publication by John Dilworth, Carlo? (Confirmation from Carlo Chiesa.) I believe... We copied this years ago and John Dilworth took about 90 seconds to figure out that’s the table of the Vieuxtemps Guarneri. And you can see that the drawing was made not just of the outline but of the purfling, the top ridge of the extreme outer edge of the border. At the bottom right he tries to make a facsimile of the gradation of the border and when you turn it over, this is a very clear tracing paper, there is a large number of measurements of the neck the rib heights, the C bout heights, the sound hole lengths, the diameters of the holes and practically everything having to do with that violin. I think it’s one of the great one of the great relics Cozio left behind. Oh, and by the way, he does call it a Guarneri del Gesù of 1741, which is what we know it as.

This is from July 1803, and this might be what is the earliest example of work between Merighi and Cozio. This is the chest of a 1709 Peter Guarneri of Mantua violin. This is a violin called Giuseppe Filius Andrea Guarneri of 1707 that Cozio traded from a violin player in La Scala Opera. This drawing is dated September 1805. And finally, this is the end of the series of drawings: this is from March 1804, and we see the bass

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. side sound hole of a Niccolo Amati cello that belongs to a parish priest in Milan; also, might be at least a very incredibly authentic looking drawing of an incredibly authentic Niccolo Amati cello.

After that initial period, he did something even more detailed and, many ways, more interesting. (Pause: Some adjusting of PowerPoint display size.) There we are. These are a set of arching templates that are positively by Antonio Merighi and made in the year 1805 in Milan. This is obviously a compressed scan that I made to illustrate all of the individual pieces, but obviously they are trying to do the longitudinal arches and the traversal arches, and the interesting thing is that Cozio had him make templates for the exterior surfaces and the interior surfaces. This would be from a Stradivari of 1710; these next pictures. And I included this picture because you can see when you measure the actual templates, the thicknesses of all of them are absolutely uniform, and you can see how neatly, for example, the wood was prepared before the guides were actually cut. Everything is very soft, and, I think, beautifully finished.

This is more of the same set, of the 1710 Strad. And you can see he also left, the left, all the borders there that fit exactly right, so there would be no mistake where the edges began and finished. This is the last set: I believe the top is the longitudinal table arch, the bottom one, for example, is the… it says ‘table’... I’m sorry. There is a second set of templates of an Amati violin of 1654 that belong to Alessandro Rollo. And I’ll quickly take you through those.

This one I included because there seems to be traces of him, of somebody, trying to copy the sound hole -- at least the top and lower sections of it. Again, these are more of the bottom one which would be of the interior arching. And this is an example of the kind of detail Cozio would apply after the fact: as the internal width of the back of the traverse arch and the B, that meets the second one, taken between the linings. And over here on the right: it reads, “1805, taken by Antonio Merighi.”

More templates, and this is the last set. The idea being apparently to, guides like this, to enable sophisticated copying or detailed copying. Now let me just jump ahead

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. one step and say that I do not know of a bowed instrument by Antonio Merighi that predates 1824. So, we’re at least 20 years before that. And I would encourage all Federation members to keep a lookout because one never knows where or under what rubric a Merighi instrument might be known.

This next document comes from what is known as the Lombard Institute we would say in English, and in Milan: formerly the Royal Imperial Institute that was founded by the Austrians upon the restoration in Milan in 1814. They, the Royal Imperial Institute, began a series of industrial exhibitions in Milan in 1816. I’ll come back to that again later in the talk. At the second exhibition in 1818, Antonio Merighi whose signature is here on the lower right, that’s his autograph: Antonio Merighi who, in this document, styles himself “maker of musical instruments,” submitted a sample set of bows for a violin and viola and cello into the prize-winning competition. The slightly humorous part of this is that he begins by saying that the bows he makes “are perhaps not dissimilar to those which come from France.” So, he’s not saying they’re equal; he’s not saying they’re better, but: maybe they’re not too different or too dissimilar than the ones that come from France. (Laughter) Another thing is that he asked the jury to consider that his bows sell for one third of what the bows from France sell for.

Now, Antonio Merighi, while still on his own, or I should say, more or less alone, left a very fine cello of 1824, which I hope, is that fairly legible? It’s about a 75.5 cm back length Strad cello two piece maple back, and this is the front. From this you can see that the back is pinned both top and bottom near the purfling, and I would say that though this possibly is based on Stradivari, to me it looked like a Merighi interpretation, above all from the relative height of the peg box and in relation to the widths. And this is a detail of the back C bout. There is another Merighi instrument, what appears to be a contralto Stradivari model viola of the same year. I don’t think he succeeded with his corners and perhaps and perhaps may have been copying one of the late Stradivari violas or basing his work on one of the late Stradivari violas that lived in Milan at the time, like the Gibson or something like that. And this is the back, which is not quite as straight in the centerline, but I think quite good symmetry. And by the way both

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. instruments seem to have a fairly light and, I would consider, quite blandly colored varnish, whether it’s oil or spirit I wouldn’t want to say. But, both coatings I would say are very light and very gently applied, and maybe they’ve lost color, or it’s been fugitive over time; maybe not, but they otherwise seem pretty close to the actual color of the wood.

Now, Merighi had one son or, excuse me, two sons, I’m sorry: the elder son was called Vincenzo was born in Parma in 1795. He is known to history as a famous cello player, whose star pupil was Alfredo Piatti at the Milan Conservatory. He had other fine and in some cases distinguished pupils but Piatti would be the star pupil. Antonio Merighi’s second son Pesco (Sp?) was born in Parma in 1799 and he however died in Milan in 1820. But even in his death record, he is called a violin maker. Now the cello and viola I just showed you are from 1824 and in the few years right after that Merighi was joined in Milan by his fellow citizen Antonio Gibertini whom some of you may have heard of, his violins have appeared on the auction market sporadically over the past 25 or 30 years. But, Antonio Gibertini is, perhaps like Merighi, a case where you really don’t know where it begins.

They both spent their entire early life in Parma but we’ve no idea if they, for example, attended drawing school, attended engineering school, what they did. I believe we have a colleague Giuseppe Martini who is one of the finest researchers in Italy, and he’s never been able to find out anything about either Merighi or Gibertini except where they lived and when they were christened. Now, Antonio Gibertini was from a long line of physicians and business people, and he was born in Parma in 1797 and certainly still living in 1822 when he was married. At his marriage -- this is somewhat slightly interesting-- the most famous organ maker of the day was a witness at his wedding and, apparently, by that time and according to his own statements, was experimenting with the varnishing of bowed instruments. In any event, in a small city like Parma one would be surprised that Merighi and Gibertini wouldn’t know one another, but you can probably guess from the chronology I’ve been laying out Gibertini would’ve been a child when the Merighi family moved off to Milan. So in any event, in the late

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. 1820s Antonio Gibertini left Parma with his wife and moved to Milan. And he moved into the Merighi home on the on the Contrada del Torino, and he -- unlike Merighi in later years -- Gibertini, began entering the industrial competition with violins.

Gibertini was a particularly verbose guy and I’m not going to continue to sit here reading the things he writes in his petitions, but in the figure of Gibertini you begin to see much of the same of the same type of obsessions that you see in French violin making: 1) dried and desiccated wood and 2) experimenting with different intensities of oil varnish. Gibertini seems to hardly miss a chance to mention those things in his early years in Milan. And in any event, in 1830 he did win an honorable mention, but his main competitor was a retired war commissar called Carlo Antonio Galbusera. And I am sorry to say have never even heard of an instrument by Galbusera. But Galbusera is mentioned in numerous dictionaries and he is cited in numerous references both in Italy and in France, and I hope someday someone can enlighten me on what his instruments look like; but, in any event, Gibertini and Galbusera were competitors in the exposition of 1830 and again in 1832.

I have one instrument to show you from the end of Gibertini’s time in Milan: a viola of a rather short 15 ¼ inch body length. And this is his label which mentions that he has won prizes more times in Milan with medals, etc., for the reestablishment of the celebrated Cremonese School, made in the year 1833, then handwritten “in Milan.” And these are the various views of the scroll.

So, Gibertini, from either 1833 or ‘34, hit the road. And by that, appears to have traversed the length and width of the Italian peninsula. A traveling violin maker, I’m sure, was an oddity. His first stop was Genoa. And in the hundreds and hundreds of letters to and from Paganini and his lawyer, Germi, I’ve been able to trace just three references, but interesting references, which the lawyer, Germi, cites Gibertini and it would seem that Gibertini was either evaluating and or taking care of instruments that belong to Germi and Paganini in Genoa, in the period between 1830 and 1840. 1840 is the year of course that Paganini died. I am aware of one violin of Gibertini of 1842 which has the five-part purfling which many years ago was taken as one of those Gibertini

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. mannerisms, but then someone else realized that, oh yeah, Eugenio and Giulio Degani does that too. I’m sorry I didn’t put it up, but in the viola I believe it’s a conventional three-part purfling. In any case, the ‘42 violin had a five-part purfling. In the mid-1840s Gibertini is in southern Italy, and just to give you some idea of how fast he moved, this Sicilian musicologist Carlo Pancaldi wrote an article saying that Gibertini was today in Naples, however in the last footnote of the article, Pancaldi writes, “Actually is now in Palermo.” So in the same article he’s in two different cities. That article is published in November 1845, and it reappeared in a literary journal in the following year, to add to the confusion.

So, in any event, I don’t know of any Sicilian work of Gibertini, but in 1844 to ‘45 he was in Naples. This is the label of a cello, where we have numerous new elements introduced including the monogram and his hat (Laughter). I’m sorry, I’m going backwards here. Here it is: now this is the front and back of the cello, and the most marked characteristic I would say about this is the Gibertini sound hole, which is slightly long and somewhat slender, the lower eyes not being terribly well bored out. This is a detail of the sound hole. For example: I have not been able to decide, is this just a pure creation of Gibertini, is it inspired by Stradivari, is it inspired by Stradivari as seen through the eyes of Gennaro Gagliano? I think that there’s any number of avenues that might have led to this cello. This is the head, however, and that is where we end with Gibertini’s instruments.

Gibertini is documented around the Italian peninsula. In the period after this cello, roughly 1846, he has been living in Florence for some unspecified amount of time, and he’s been making a cello on the commission of the Count Ustinov (Sp?) Does that sound familiar to anyone? Working for Russian nepotists? (Laughter). Gibertini was apparently doing that in Sicily and Naples as well as Florence according to contemporary newspaper accounts. Now, a number of years ago Phil Kass told me that he had found Gibertini in Turin in 1850. That still holds, right?

Phil Kass: I haven’t re-examined it in a while.

Phil Kass: What was always vague about it was that he was described as a “mechanico.”

Duane Rosengard: A “mechanico”…which is just like Paul Childs… his book, Persoit...

Phil Kass: Yeah, right.

Duane Rosengard: In any event, the two main music journals in Milan in November 1851 made extensive three paragraph articles about this new convention of Mr. Gibertini. And, let me find the name of it here… The English word would be “dynamometer.” And basically what it was, was: a female/male screw adjustable sound post that you would move with wrench inside the violin. That, unfortunately, is the last notice we have of the activity of Gibertini, although he does appear in the mid-and late 1850s in the commercial almanacs of Genoa again. We have not been able to determine where or when he died. One would think that in Parma he would have given property, accumulated property… So far we have not located anything about that. So the Gibertini story ends on a huge question mark.

I just wanted to show you that in the little shop of Antonio Merighi, in came Gibertini for a number of years they talked in the late 1820s and 1830s about establishing a school that would train pupils. But then Gibertini left to go to Genoa and Merighi died in 1833. The one person, or I should say, the one bona fide craftsman, who’s left some evidence that I was able to retrace, up to now from the Merighi and Gibertini “school”, and I use the word loosely, was Gaetano Rossi, who was born in Milan in 1812. Now, this is the one Hill certified Gaetano Rossi, and it’s a cello of 1845, which I think has pretty, how would you say, clear affinity with the cello of Merighi of 20 years earlier.

Gaetano Rossi, like I just said, was born in 1812 and not long after Merighi’s death in 1833, Rossi is listed in the city census in Milan as a “repairer.” Nonetheless, he seems to have had some kind of association with his brother Nicola, and Gaetano and

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. Nicola may have worked for a while together. I have only seen this cello and three double basses with Gaetano Rossi’s handwritten label. I have plenty of reason to believe there are lots of violins, however, because numerous collectors and journalists seem to have reviewed them, especially over the third quarter of the 19th century in northern Italy. I’d like to show you the rest of that Rossi cello if we could, if I might, just to close out the Gibertini/Merighi/Rossi School. Below you’ll see the label. It really says Gaetano Rossi, Milan, 1845. And: the back and trunk of the head: that’s the end of part A of my little presentation today.

Most of you have heard, if not all of you have heard, of Giacomo Rivolta, and, without making this presentation more complicated than it has to be, I wanted to go back to the beginning of the Count Cozio connection and talk about Giacomo Rivolta. He was born in 1770 in Ollegio, which is near Novara, Piedmont right on the border of Lombardi. If you’ve ever taken the airplane and done that south to north landing on Malpensa Airport right at the crack of dawn, Ollegio is a little village on the left, just over the river. And Rivolta seems to always have had a gift for music and singing in particular. He may have been a performer at La Scala as early as 1795 – 96. But in any event, he most certainly was a fixture of the vocal scene and taught voice lessons throughout his entire life. Now: the earliest instrument by Rivolta that I’m aware of is from a private collection in Italy that is dated 1807, and it is essentially a French model guitar and not terribly dissimilar from a Guadagnini guitar of the same period. Count Cozio on the other hand comes to Rivolta later. He seems to, Cozio seems to have become aware of Rivolta, through a violin deal the offing. And Rivolta was acting as the agent for family called La Croix (Sp?), who had a very good Amati, and another violin by unknown Ferrara maker, and Cozio was negotiating with Rivolta over that deal. Nothing ever became of it, but it would appear that Rivolta borrowed a form, or one of the Guadagnini forms, from Cozio. And then in the spring of 1816 Cozio had made a note to the effect that Rivolta had given him back the form.

The next thing we find out is really quite surprising. It comes from the Count’s own mouth. And what we find out is that, over the summer of 1816, Giacomo Rivolta

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. was lent, not copies, but the two original Stradivari alto viola forms. You know, the one that was used for the Mahler viola, right? And then, the one that’s used for the C being slightly Archinto and so on. He took both of those home and started to make a pair of violas. And when they were halfway finished, Rivolta brought them to Cozio to ask, “How am I doing, Count?” and the Count said, “You’re doing pretty good. I’m surprised.” And then, only a few days before the deadline for the 1816 industrial exhibition, Count Cozio was presented the violas by Rivolta; and the Count then wrote a three-page attestation or recommendation on Rivolta’s behalf. I wanted to bring this up so you can see it: because, even in Italian, and I hope Carlo agrees, Cozio’s language is a bit… rhetorical, thick, convoluted, or something like that. I wanted to just put this on the screen so you can see how Cozio used his own world, you know, the violin maker world. You know he’s a connoisseur. He’s the expert; he’s the person with some experience, remembering that this is written in October 1816, when Cozio was about 61 years old. He says, “I the undersigned faithfully affirm, in my capacity as the dilettante of string instruments and as possessor of the choice of musical collections of such instruments by Stradivari…” etc., – and he says that he had “…made Guadagnini work from 1773 onwards…” And it’s really quite interesting because he calls Guadagnini “the last maker of method.” And I don’t know if there’s a better way to say that, Drew Dipper, or Carlo Chiesa? But he calls him the “ultimo fabricatore di metodo.” Somebody who used rules, or some kind of objective criteria.

(To Carlo Chiesa) So, if you have any comment, just go ahead.

Carlo Chiesa: He is suggesting he used the Cremonese…

Rosengard: He is suggesting he is using, Carlo could be suggesting he’s using the Cremonese style. Okay?

In any event, he goes on to say, “…I was never able to find any person of talent who would want to commit the studied patience and means of substance to arrive at such an end, the end being to make violins based on the ancient Cremonese. Only since about three months was I able to induce Signor Giacomo Rivolta, resident of the

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. city, who already demonstrated his talents by building guitars, lutes, and other similar instruments, to commit himself to the undertaking…” And the undertaking being: to build a bowed instrument along the Cremonese lines; and Rivolta made the two violas, and he was given a silver medal. And Cozio duly noted that fact in his diary, but really, it’s only thanks to the archive of the Lombard Institute. This is the original document that I was just quoting from (Power Point picture), and it’s a black and white microfilm scan, but you can see at the bottom the count’s signature, and at the left, his red wax seal.

So, before 1816 Rivolta was making lutes, guitars, giving singing lessons, maybe performing in public once in a while, but was not a violin maker by all accounts. His career after 1816 -- there’s a few sharp turns. The first one was that in 1818 he submitted a cello to the same competition that Merighi had presented the bows to. And at that competition, Rivolta won a gold medal. One of the most interesting things revealed in that -- there are three really interesting things-- one is, that the commission assigning the prizes visited Rivolta’s workshop to verify that he made the instruments, and he had the tools, and they saw all of the things, and that commission report mentions specifically all of the help that count Cozio gave to Rivolta. It’s also mentioned that Rivolta was building a cello based on the Stradivari B form. And, in the prize winning, or I should say, when the award was conferred, there is a part of the report that says that between his first two instruments in 1816 and the present day, which is in October 1818, Rivolta made -- besides the two violas -- four violins, two other violas, four cellos, and a double bass.

So, you can see he went from zero to – I don’t know if you call it 0 to 60 or 0 to 90? But he rather quickly took up the craft violin making. At that point, I would defer to the real experts in the history of the making of the Italian guitar. I’m not sure if in the 18-teens there was a decline in the making of the time guitar or if Rivolta was simply trying to expand his product offerings. In any event, Rivolta appears a number of times in contemporary press, and he was also remembered for a long after the fact for kind of an awkward social thing that happened at the 1818 prize ceremony. The Austrian

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. viceroy of Lombardy was giving the prizes and apparently exchanged a few words with Rivolta. And Rivolta took away from that conversation the impression that the viceroy was looking to buy a string quartet of Rivolta’s. Years after the fact, the viceroy had no idea. Rivolta spent nearly 3 years harassing the Austrian bureaucracy in Milan over this misunderstanding and the price of the quartet, and going back and forth; and meanwhile he fell into abject poverty. But, at the end of the day, the viceroy’s chamberlain paid Rivolta for the quartet. So, learning that was an unexpected treat.

In 1822 Rivolta presented another violin and another viola. By the way, in the meantime, he seems to be in regular contact with Cozio. Cozio came to Milan less frequently as time went on. But, in 1822 Count Cozio made a long stay, and as you might read in Andrew Dipper’s transcript and translation of the Cozio Diary on restoration and repair, Rivolta made recommendations about varnish colorant, and again later Cozio borrowed Rivolta’s quote “inexact measuring gadget” to measure another 1741 Guarneri Del Gesù. Economically, Rivolta always seems to have struggled. He had a large family. In 1823 he applied to be admitted as a salaried chorus member at La Scala Opera House. And again, he shows up at almost every exposition. At one of them he claimed to have invented a set of pegs for violins violas and cellos pegs that would never go out of tune. (Laughter). Isn’t that every one’s dream? At another one, he presented a tailpiece that he said augmented the tone of every instrument by 30 percent (Laughter). That’s another dream, right? Anyway, how are we doing on time? We’re almost out of time.

One last thing I wanted to mention, which comes towards the end of Rivolta’s career, is a subject that Christophe Landon wrote about in The Strad a few years ago. One of the very lightest pieces of paper in the entire mountain of Cozio’s papers is a sheet roughly about this size (holds up sample) on which somebody not practiced with the pen wrote out the content of Pressenda’s visiting card. In other words, “Francesco Pressenda, via D’Ancienterino (Sp?), blah, blah blah…” – like that. And on the back of it Cozio made two sets of annotations. It says: “First of December 1823: Pressenda has a shop in Turin.” The second is from October 1828, and Cozio writes: “Rivolta tells me

Rivolta died in 1844. His son, Davide (Sp?), Is listed in all the contemporary records that I could find as a woodworker, and yet as you’ll see in a moment, crops up in a cello; and again, it might be like the Rossi’s: that in days or months or years when the violin and viola cello and bass making maybe didn’t pay anything, they would revert to woodworking; or maybe, it could just be an absent minded scribe writing these things. But, in any event, I just wanted to finish here by showing you a few Rivolta instruments. This is a Rivolta cello. Clearly based on Stradivari form B, typical opal-like, native Italian maple, and yes, wood worms. This is his label, and this is another one of the recurring themes in Rivolta’s life as a violin maker: he’s always claiming to have made research into the school of the celebrated Stradivari. This is a second cello, a few years later. For all intents and purposes, the exact same form. And, this is the interior of that cello, the second one I showed you. Here, you can see Rivolta’s 1844 label. However, the table has the inscription which reads, “This is the first table made by me, Davide (Sp?) Rivolta, son of the late Giacomo, 1846, February.” That would be approximately a year and a half after Giacomo Rivolta died.

I believe this is one of his earliest violas, if not at the beginning, it’s very near the beginning. I think I’ve seen two or three other ones that have that heavy brick red color, too. When the lights go on, Chris Reuning has kindly brought this Rivolta violin for anybody who would like to see it. But I can assure you, to finish this presentation, is a few shots of the inside. This of course is the identical label that we saw a moment ago with the exception that the additional ornamentation on the top right corner. Okay, we’ve done that. And this is the original lower block, with the “2.” I’m sorry, upper block. Sorry. It’s the upper block. The mortise of the C bout linings cuts into the block the lower linings abut the corner block, in Cremonese fashion. And that’s the top view of that same block. (Follows: some indistinct audience discussion of scribe lines on the upper block.)

Rosengard: Anyway, this is a man trying to make the school of Stradivari

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. re-surge. Rivolta, as far as we know, did not have a successor or pupil beyond his son, Davide (Sp?). Just to conclude, I would ask everyone just to keep a lookout for these makers, because, I could show you bass pictures, and it wouldn’t be boring, there’s a few basses that are interesting, a few Rivoltas, however I still think that for every bass player there are hundred violinists in 19th century Milan, and there’s probably a large number of these instruments waiting to be discovered. And I would encourage everybody to keep an open mind and keep looking, if you have the time and inclination. Thank you. Questions?

C. Landon: There is another maker that (inaudible) discovered, Bartolloti? Do you find him in Milan at that time?

Rosengard: No, I’ve never researched Bartolotti.

C. Landon: There is one violin with a Bartolloti label in Milano. But the funny thing is that all of those makers, except for Rivolta, there are very few instruments.

Rosengard: By the way, there is another maker in there too, besides Bartolloti. One called Rovetta, but I’ve only seen Rovetta’s repair label, in a violin or I should say, in a cello. But he is also documented as having made violins for the competitions I was referring to earlier. Yes, Carlo Chiesa?

C. Chiesa: Yes, I know of a viola by Galbusera. It’s a viola with a flat back. Doesn’t work, of course. But he was famous because he was a, something like a, policeman, who after retirement, he dedicated himself to violin making, apparently with retired years, but not very good results.

Rosengard: Yes. Actually, Galbusera, he seems to have friends in the press. By the way, if you didn’t hear that, in Milan he knows of a flat back Galbusera viola; it doesn’t work. There’s quite a few humorous excerpts from Galbusera’s own writings. For example, I think it’s at the 1832 competition, he says, “I’m happy to present these three instruments that I just finished a few days ago.” Like, you know, he just happened to be coming by the Institute and thought he would just drop them off. And there were

® Copyright 2012 AFVBM, Inc. two violins in the viola on that occasion. And, he, even more than Gibertini, dwells on his secret treatments to take oils and resins out of the wood. You know, essentially thinking that, you know, he’s going to get an improved tone out of the instrument. However when judges like Alessandro Rolla and Count Archinto, these various celebrities who are on these juries looked at these things, they were generally not pleased. Their reports are rather severe when it comes to Galbusera, who otherwise seems like a good-natured guy trying to have a good time. He’s just sharing, or whatever, right?

AFVBM member: Duane? I think the form of the cellos from the Rivolta and the Gibertini are probably the skinny Strad, forma B; at least the Rivolta, which we worked on, and it was the skinny Strad. It looked like the Feuermann, you know, the skinny late ones? And we know Gibertini also; it’s from ‘44, it’s a skinny one, in fact, those two are very similar instruments.

Rosengard: really? Because I thought the Rivolta would be less long.

AFVBM member: Yeah. Well, there’s a short, late Strad, and a skinny late Strad, and probably no more forma B left. Who knows? Might’ve been butchered to make these, narrow and short. I’m pretty sure those were skinny Strads.

Rosengard: Yeah, because, the Merighi one was a full 75.5, I mean in the body, the back length.

AFVBM member: Well, the one with the David (sic) inscription is shown in the Hamma book.

Rosengard: that’s right, the one with the Davide (Sp?) inscription is shown in the Walter Hamma book, right?

Chris Reuning: I was just going to say, that the violin was built on the PG form.

Rosengard: Chris adds that the Rivolta violin here was built on the PG form. It’s cocktail hour, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause.)