A year and a half later Stradivari married a girl fifteen years his junior; Antonia Zambelli was, indeed, born the very year Francesca’s first husband had been assassinated.  Antonia bore Stradivari five children:  a daughter, who died at the age of twenty; a son, who died in infancy; a son, who died at twenty-four; a son, who became a priest and lasted seventy-seven years, and, finally, a son, Paolo, the only child of Stradivari that seems to have married, and certainly the only one who handed down the family name.  How happy Antonia was with her husband, we do not know.  “As rich as Stradivari,” became a proverb.  She died at the age of seventy-three, and Stradivari survived her less than one year; this may have been because he was overcome with grief; or because he was already nearly ninety years of age.

In the workshop of Stradivari was a fiddle-maker named Andreas Guarnieri, who had two sons, Pietro and Giuseppe, who had a son named Pietro, and a more famous cousin named Giuseppe, who was a dissipated genius, and blasphemously gave himself the nickname, “del Gesu.”  Of him there is a pretty fable, that once being sent to prison for debt, he won over the jailer’s daughter, and she brought him stealthily wood and implements with which he made the so-called “prison fiddles,” of whose curious shape Charles Reade said:  “Such is the force of genius that I believe in our secret hearts we love these impudent fiddles best; they are so full of chic.”  As Giuseppe called himself “Gesu,” so there was a member of the famous violin-making family of Guadagnini who was called “John the Baptist,” and of whom I only know that he belonged to a large family.

TARTINI

But to turn from these unsatisfactory violin makers to violin players:  I know nothing of the great Corelli’s personal history; his pupil Geminiani is said to have led a life full of romance.  Philidor spent his years chiefly in the intrigues of chess-playing.  The great Tartini, whom the devil visited in the dream he immortalised in his famous Sonata del Diavolo, had a checkerboard career.  As a young university student he fell in love with a niece of Cardinal Cornaro, and married her in secret.  Like Romeo, his romance brought him separation and exile.  His parents cast him off; the cardinal made his life unsafe.  He fled from Padua, and took up the violin to save him from starvation.  “And some have greatness thrust upon them.”

One day, as he was playing at the monastery where he was in retirement, the wind blew aside a curtain just as a fellow townsman was passing.  He took home the news, and by this time resentment had died out so much, that Tartini and his young wife were permitted to resume their romance.  They went to Venice.  Later his ambition for the violin caused them to separate, but finally they returned to Padua to live.  Burney says that his wife was “of the Xantippe sort.”  His love story somewhat suggests that of Desmarets, who also had to flee for his life in consequence of a secret marriage, and who was twenty-two years appeasing the wrath of the aristocratic family.