Dear Mr. Puppy,

Was there an April fools day in 18th century Paris?

I have never taken a liking to Pierre Nicolas Housset, he is too much of Parisian in his mannerisms for a South Italian’s sentiment. He is insufferable as a musician and believes that the time he spent with the great Tartini in Padua gave him carte blanche to be an expert on the subject of expression and harmony. Tartini predicted that he would become “The Terror of Violins”, which in these troubled times has certainly taken on a disagreeable meaning. last April, After Lent, Housset and some of the others in the orchestra cooked up something odious for me. During rehearsals for an Italian production with the director of the company. Monsieur Viotti as conductor, M. La Houssaye leader of the French band just ‘happened’ to present himself. Housset continually whined that he spent five years in Padua with Tartini at the “Scuola Delle Nazioni”. Actually, he took a few lessons from him in 1753 when he traveled in the entourage of his employer the Prince of Monaco, and repeated these a few years later. He was certainly an enthusiast of Tartini’s method of violin playing, but five years of continual study was an overstatement. Viotti, whom I now suspect was party to the whole enterprise, begged Housset, as a ‘favor’, to perform a specimen of the Master’s manner of playing for the edification of the whole group. When he had finished this charade, Viotti pronounced, in a voice loud enough to be heard by the whole orchestra. Now, Signor Puppo, now that you have listened to my friend, Monsieur La Houssaye, you will be able to form an idea as to how Tartini actually played!”I certainly regret the whole affair, which was initiated by my publisher Monsieur Porro, trying to pump up sales and inserting an advertisement into the Paris Gazette that cast me too grandly as an actual pupil of Tartini. I certainly did not need to become a Tartini acolyte to appreciate or be capable of the finesses of his style, and in any case, it is a style wholly unfit for the new compositions of an Italian Opera orchestra, that must play to the rowdy behavior of the whole house and needs collaboration and power to be effective.

*”Ask Mr. Puppy” aka Giuseppe Puppo, an 18th-century concert violinist, answers our questions about his career and times.

Dear Mr. Puppy,
I hear the 18th century was a very transitional time for bowmakers. Can you tell me what that was like? Part IV of IV:

The Tourte family you might recall invented the metal ferrell that holds the hair in a fine ribbon at the nose of the frog, this replaced the previous solution, a slip of card that was held in place by an ingenious binding of very thin gut cord held firm by a small extra little nose over the hair channel. The first experiment they made used a band of pewter, but that proved to be unreliable as it stretched in time, from thence they fixed on silver as the answer. Francois Xavier had served a part of an apprenticeship in mechanics and knew the delicate task of soldering the metal with a blow-pipe flame and charcoal. Their bows became the standard of excellence for all the best players; in the same way that the Neapolitan Angelucci brand chanterelle strings, for the violin, were the only strings that one could use to concertize. The cheap Mittenwald copies of the string would barely last through three pages of the score.

One thing that I still find extraordinary is that Old Tourte was a man without classical education and unable to read or to write to any extent, yet he was able, only by the power of intellect to perceive how to work up the forces of resistance and pliability in the bow stick by the capacity of his hand and eye, to such a fine degree that his work is superior to all other bow-makers. Why even the young citizen cellist Duport declares his Tourte bow to be equal in art and response to his Stradivari cello.

*“Ask Mr. Puppy” aka Giuseppe Puppo, an 18th-century concert violinist, answers our questions about his career and times.