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With Strings Attached

J. R. Patterson reviews Tom Wilder’s “A Cultural History of the Violin in Nineteenth-Century London,” about the violin’s cultural transition.

Tom Wilder looks for the answers through the wider cultural world that brought the violin to prominence after its development in the sixteenth century and laid the stage for it to become the most iconic instrument of Western music: a physical manifestation of “taste, refinement, and wealth.” The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. Spurred by the influx of higher-calibre musicians, Wilder explains, “the civilizing of industrial society — meaning its lower classes — was to be achieved through the suppression of traditionally popular (though barbarous) pastimes, and their replacement by ‘endless sources of rational amusement.’ ” There emerged two conjoined ideas: that music was a “respectablizing activity” and that it ought, therefore, to be morally uplifting. Across the upper social strata, salon concerts and music lessons became a decorous pastime, with well-to-dos (including Anne Blunt, Baroness Wentworth, who was not the original owner of the Stradivarius that bears her name, though she had it for three decades) relying upon the appraisals of luthiers, auctioneers, and firms like W. E. Hill & Sons to provide the best instruments they could afford.

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