essentially modern editorial development.  Modern instructive works by such masters as Sevcik, Eberhardt and others have made technical problems more clearly and concisely get-at-able than did the older methods.  Yet some of these older works are by no means negligible, though of course, in all classic violin literature, from Tartini on, Kreutzer, Spohr, Paganini, Ernst, each individual artist represents his own school, his own method to the exclusion of any other.  Spohr was one of the first to devote editorial attention to his own method, one which, despite its age, is a valuable work, though most students do not know how to use it.  It is really a method for the advanced player, since it presupposes a good deal of preliminary technical knowledge, and begins at once with the higher positions.  It is rather a series of study pieces for the special development of certain difficult phases, musical and technical, of the violinist’s art, than a method.  I have translated and edited the American edition of this work, and the many explanatory notes with which Spohr has provided* it—­as in his own 9th, and the Rode concerto (included as representative of what violin concertos really should be), the measures being provided with group numbers for convenience in reference—­are not obsolete.  They are still valid, and any one who can appreciate the ideals of the Gesangsscene, its beautiful cantilene and pure serenity, may profit by them.  I enjoyed editing this work because I myself had studied with Carl Richter, a Spohr pupil, who had all his master’s traditions.

    Transcriber’s note:  Original text read “provied”.

THE MASTER VIOLINIST AS AN EDITOR

“That the editorial revisions of a number of our greatest living violinists and teachers have passed through my editorial rooms, on their way to press, is a fact of which I am decidedly proud.  Leopold Auer, for instance, is one of the most careful, exact and practical of editors, and the fact is worth dwelling on since sometimes the great artist or teacher quite naturally forgets that those for whom he is editing a composition have neither his knowledge nor resources.  Auer never loses sight of the composer’s own ideas.

“And when I mention great violinists with whom I have been associated as an editor, Mischa Elman must not be forgotten.  I found it at first a difficult matter to induce an artist like Elman, for whom no technical difficulties exist, to seriously consider the limitations of the average player in his fingerings and interpretative demands.  Elman, like every great virtuoso of his caliber, is influenced in his revisions by the manner in which he himself does things.  I remember in one instance I could see no reason why he should mark the third finger for a cantilena passage where a certain effect was desired, and questioned it.  Catching up his violin he played the note preceding it with his second finger, then instead of slipping the second