WHERE VIOLINS ARE MADE

Dunstan Times, 28 December 1900, Page 6

WHERE VIOLINS ARE MADE

A writer in the ' Leisure Hour ' gives some interesting particulars of the violin-making industry in the Bavarian Highlands. "In the village of Mittenwald," he says, "live the men who manufacture the greater part of the world's supply of viobns. Mittenwald has taken the "place of Cremona, although it may take another 200 years before its violins can be mentioned in the same breath with those of the famous Italian town. Of the 1,800 inhabitants of the village over 800 are exclusively occupied with the manufacture of violins, and the output reaches the incredible figure of 50,000 violins per annum.- They are exported to all countries in the world, the better instruments going to England and America. One organisation of makers alone exports 15,000. Each family of violin-makers has its own particular trade secret, a sort of trick of the trade, handed down from father to son. Outsiders—and, still more, rival makersare not permitted into a workshop that is not theirs. The old-looking violins seen in many a music shop window are not infrequently brand-new instruments from Mittenwald. The blackness and shabbiness, the rubs and scratches, the Italian names of makers inside, and the picturesque date, let us say of 1743, are often the work of the ingenious fiddle-makers of this remote idyllic village in Bavaria. 'We must supply the market,' they say in extenuation of this class of business; 'ifwe do not someone else will.' "