Antonio Stradivari
A beautiful book on the master of masters, co-written with Peter Biddulph on the occasion of the Stradivarius exhibition at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier in 2008. The exhibition brought together an orchestra of Stradivarius instruments, on which the opening concert of the Radio France Festival was performed – a world first.
A baroque animal if ever there was one, the violin affords itself the luxury of having a soul. In today’s great instrumental menagerie, it has managed to defy the grinding of the centuries to make its way to us. Its persistence, and the symbolic functions it has taken on beyond its primary purpose, have ended up making this fragile assemblage of cellulose an anchor point of our civilisation. An icon whose importance far exceeds the sum of its attributions.
“For the uninitiated, Stradivarius is to musical instruments what Leonardo da Vinci is to painting or Rolls-Royce to automobiles: a synonym for excellence, fortune and rarity. But while nearly all of us can identify the Mona Lisa or the radiator grille of a limousine, only a few insiders know who is behind Stradivarius. As for recognising one of his instruments among the millions of ordinary violins bearing a label with his name …” (F. Chaudière)
The ambition of this book, of the Musée Fabre exhibition and of the concerts of the Radio France and Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon Festival is to shed some light on the obscure and fascinating world in which the violins of the master of Cremona revolve, by presenting to readers, the public and music lovers, for the first time, fifteen of the most important Stradivarius instruments in the world.
