Dragonetti's 3-Stringed Bass
Written by: Matthew Hart
On a summer evening in July, I arrived for dinner at a grey house on a cliff in the Thirty Thousand Islands of Georgian Bay, and there, on a stand before the windows, in silhouette against the far horizon, stood a cello.
It made a bewitching sight, its voluptuous civility poised against a squall that passed just then across the long sheet of water. More bewitching still was the saga that unfolded that night, and captivated me, devouring my summer as I pursued it.
The cello and the island and the view belonged to Bob Williams, the descendant of a family of Toronto instrument makers who had risen to prominence at the turn of the century. They had made the cello.
Williams bought it from a dealer, was learning to play it, and was, in what spare time he had, trying to discover the fate of a collection of instruments given by his family to the Royal Ontario Museum. This is the story of one of those instruments, a double bass of such renown in its own enchanted world that that the mere mention of it excites a kind of longing.
Every bass is properly called a double bass, but this one has perhaps a firmer claim to that resounding name.It exerts from its entombment a powerful spell upon a small fraternity of devotees, whose hope is to restore it to the light and to the human ear. Larger than the basses of today, its cavernous voice has not enraptured concert halls for 160 years, since the divine Dragonetti last raked his bow across its pencil-thick, catgut strings.
Domenico Dragonetti was born in Venice in 1763, the son of a barber who was also an amateur musician. At an early age the boy began to play his father’s guitar and double bass, soon attracting the attention of a local impresario who put him on the stage.
He was a prodigy. At the age of 12, after only 11 lessons from the leading Venetian master of the double bass, Berini, Dragonetti was cast loose from tutelage when the maestro decided he had nothing more to teach his pupil.
The youth soared into the firmament of Venetian music. At 13 he became a principal player at the Opera Buffa; at 14, principal bassist of the Grand Opera Seria. By 23 he had joined the exalted Chapel of St. Mark, becoming its principal bassist and brushing aside, along the way, an invitation to the court of the Tsar.
Dragonetti’s fame was unmatched by bassists of the day; unusually, he gave solo concerts. His talent mesmerized his audience. The Venetian republic appointed him one of the directors of a lavish festival to mark the visit of 14 sovereigns to the island state. Once more the Tsar invited him to St. Petersburg, an invitation he again refused, although he used it to extort from the procurators of St. Mark a boost in salary to the heady sum of 50 ducats a year.
Finally, in 1794, at the age of 31, he accepted an invitation from the King’s Theatre in London. His employers in Venice granted him a year’s leave, salary to be paid throughout, and Dragonetti headed north. Except for a single visit home he stayed in England for the rest of his life, dying there at his house in Leicester Square at the age of 83. Lionized by London concertgoers, Dragonetti spent more than 50 years at the musical summit of the capital.
He became an intimate of the Prince Consort and the friend of noblemen. He dazzled this glittering beau monde with a volcanic style of play and superlative natural gifts.
“The physical quality is his huge hand,” wrote the scholar Francesco Caffi, “endowed, first of all, with prodigious strength so that its grip on the strings of the instrument is the equivalent of the grip of a blacksmith’s vice… A hand endowed with five fingers so long, big and agile, that all five, including the bent thumb, go up and down the fingerboard each playing a note.”
This was electrifying technique at a time when most bassists played a single note with the index finger, and one more note with the other three fingers together.
His strength and stamina were legendary, and the story is told that once, while staying at a hotel, Dragonetti emerged on his balcony in the dead of night and began to play his titanic bass with customary force. In the morning, guests of the hotel were heard discussing a sudden gale that had risen in the night and moaned a while at the windows.
Dragonetti had no family, but kept a menage of life-sized mannequins, one of which he sometimes introduced as his wife. He took them with him to concerts, parading them into the theatre and awarding them prime seats. Another companion was his dog, Carlo, who slumbered beneath his master’s stool until, as it moved him, he would jump up and extemporize a solo howl.
Dragonetti’s opulent persona expressed itself in collecting too, and on his death he left art and artefacts, an archive of rare scores and a collection of fine instruments. He had some 30 violins, including a Stradivarius, a Stradivarius copy, two Amatis, and one by the great 16th-century Brescian luthier, Gasparo da Salo. He had a da Salo viola, an Amati viola, five unnamed violas, six cellos, a large cello, three guitars, two bassoons and three French horns.
But what lies at the heart of our story were Dragonetti’s basses. He had an Amati double bass and a Maggini double bass. He had a giant Gasparo da Salo – a tyrannosaurus of an instrument that hangs today in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. A second da Salo was bequeathed to the Chapel of St. Mark, where musical historians make pilgrimages just to gaze at it. And a third da Salo, or possibly a third, he left to his friend the Duke of Leinster, himself a fervent bassist.This is the instrument, once a living thing in the hands of the greatest double bassist who ever lived, that sleeps today on a Toronto shelf.
The story of how this masterpiece came to Canada is like a myth of Canada itself – the fairytale story of a young immigrant, of the business he established, his rise to wealth and station, and finally of an act of great philanthropy.
Richard Sugden Williams was born in London in 1834, the son of a confectioner. When the child was four, his parents packed up their belongings and sailed to Canada, ultimately settling in Toronto.
“The boy received a common school education,” according to a later document, “chiefly under the tuition of the late Mr. Darby, a master of the olden time, not easily forgotten by the schoolboys of that day.”
At the age of 12, young Williams stepped out of the John Street School and into an apprenticeship with William Townsend. Townsend repaired instruments and made melodeons, a type of small organ popular in the 19th century.
According to his biographer, Ladislav Cselenyi, Williams would have learned a broad range of skills, “from repairing a cracked violin, to replacing the broken hammer of a pianoforte, to restoring the watchkey screw mechanism of a 100-year-old English guitar.”
Cselenyi, an art historian, musicologist, and until his retirement, a curator at the ROM, describes a vanished world, in which the apprentice had to master many tasks, not only repairing whatever came into the shop, but also manufacturing by hand every constituent part of the instruments constructed there.
He learned to build the case and bellows. He sawed rosewood logs to make veneer. He cut out hinges from sheets of brass. He mastered tools made of ebony, four different types of plane, a watchmaker’s hammer, rack upon rack of special files. In 1853, his seven-year apprenticeship complete, Williams became a journeyman instrument-maker.
That year, to escape a shrinking market, Townsend moved his business to Hamilton. Two years later it collapsed.His 21-year-old employee, newly married, must have convinced the bankers that he knew more than how to hold a file: they asked him to run the firm. After a year of scouting Toronto, and judging that a city bursting with 40,000 people was where he ought to be, Williams rented space on Yonge Street and hung out his sign – a big, tin fiddle.
He imported, made, and repaired instruments. He was a man, Cselenyi asserts, of furious energy. His instruments won prizes at exhibitions. Six years after setting up he produced an illustrated catalogue. It did so well he decided to repeat it.
“The success attending the first Catalogue that I issued some two years ago,” he wrote, “leads to the necessity of another issue, in which I shall endeavour to show to the public of Canada, particularly those of Upper Canada, that I am now manufacturing Melodeons not only equal, but superior to any made in the United States.”
The public of Canada was apparently convinced: the Williams family went on to establish the largest instrument business in the country. They made or imported violins, cellos, banjos, mandolins, guitars and pipe organs. At its peak the company’s Oshawa factory turned out 60 pianos a week, making it the largest piano-maker in the empire. Queen Victoria ordered a pair of Williams pianos for Windsor Castle.
By 1929 Williams instrument serial numbers had reached 67,000. Here, alas, the soaring rocket of commerce must splutter its last few feet. The company, already sold by the Williamses, did not survive the depression of the 1930s.But the Williams family left behind more than the memory of a thriving enterprise. They left a panctar, a pandora, and an English flute, some harps and harpsichords, a spinet, a theorbo, a bassoon. They left the Dragonetti double bass. For R.S. Williams, Jr., had become Canada’s foremost collector of musical instruments, all of which he gave to the ROM. The problem is to see them.
The 1971 catalogue, Musical Instruments in the Royal Ontario Museum, calls the Williams collection “one of the most generous gifts any individual has made” to the institution.
“The collection consists of almost 400 items, 166 of them instruments, about 70 music sheets and books, and about 160 letters and autographs of famous musicians and personalities of the world of music.”
When the catalogue appeared 35 years ago, the Williams collection was still one of the glories of the museum. Visitors met the first of the instruments not far past the entrance hall.
“I remember going in there with my father,” said Bob Wiiliams. “He would point out all these amazing harpsichords, violas, violins, cellos and weird horns, like one called ‘the serpent.’ Some of them dated from the 16th century, and he’d say, ‘Your grandfather was very proud of his collection of instruments and music and documents. And he decided to give them all to the museum so that everyone can come and see them.’”
Today you will search for them in vain. In the evolving priorities of the ROM the Williams instruments have drifted off the plot.
“Unfortunately,” wrote Brian Musselwhite, a curator at the museum, in an email, “we don’t have a staff member for the wonderful collection of musical instruments and only a few of the instruments are in the gallery. And we haven’t had a wood conservator for about five years now.
“As you may know, we are going through a large building program and all of the energies of the Museum have been geared to that. As of yet, there are no plans unfortunately for a gallery of musical instruments as the dinosaurs, textiles, and Canadiana galleries take priority.”
Among those who long to see the Dragonetti restored to the public gaze is a tall man with curly hair and a shrewd, evaluating gaze. When I met him on the second floor of his Toronto shop, on Church Street, Ric Heinl was wearing a long blue apron. Around him rose the comfortable smells of glue, wood shavings and varnish.
Four men stood at benches performing tasks in ways that have not changed for centuries. Heinl is the third-generation proprietor of one of the best-known stringed-instrument restorers in the world – Geo. Heinl & Company Ltd. His grandfather, an Austrian instrument maker, came to Toronto from Vienna in 1912, his passage paid by R.S. Williams, Jr.
When George Heinl arrived to take up his duties, he was alarmed to find the Dragonetti lying casually against a wall in Williams’s office, where a drunken caretaker had already put his foot through it once. Not long after, Williams gave the bass to the ROM. A photograph of Heinl’s shows a dark patch of wood on the side of the instrument, where someone had mended it.
“Was that your grandfather’s work?” I asked.
“No,” said Heinl, shaking his head. “If my grandfather had fixed it you wouldn’t be able to see where.”
Today, instruments from every corner of the globe come to Church Street to receive that kind of care. From a photographic archive I tugged a snapshot of a blackened instrument.
“Yes,” said Heinl, “a nice, 1813 English viola. It was in a house fire in Honolulu in 1987. As soon as the firemen let her back in, the owner grabbed it and got on a plane. She still had soot on her face when she came in the door.”
Another image showed the gleaming instrument that returned to Hawaii. Heinl’s fervent wish is to do the same for the Dragonetti. It needs it.
“When I pressed my finger on it, it gave like a sponge,” said Joel Quarrington, former principal bassist at the Toronto Symphony and now with the National Arts Centre Orchestra. Quarrington has had a love affair with the Dragonetti since he saw it as a boy, and longs to play it.
“I’d like to recreate a historically accurate concert of the kind that Dragonetti used to give,” he says.
“They were crazy programs, and went on for hours.
“Dragonetti was a huge figure, and people accepted what he said as fact. In Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, just before the Ode to Joy, there’s this thundering, ominous, judgemental recitativo for cello and bass, and Dragonetti told everyone that Beethoven had written it just for him. It was nonsense, but Dragonetti could get people to swallow whatever he said.”
Did he also get people to swallow that the instrument he gave to the Duke of Leinster was a da Salo, when in fact it might have been something else?
“Italian, about 1600,” says the ROM catalogue, “attributed to Gasparo Bertolotti da Salo, and the handwritten label inside reading Gasparo da Salo in Brescia is in two lines, which is rare.”
“The only way to know for sure who made that bass is to bring it in here,” says Ric Heinl. “We’ll open it, and then we’ll know. There are things to look for, and we know what they are.”
One scholar insists that the Dragonetti bass at the ROM, no matter who made it, is one of the rarest instruments in the world.
“It’s only relatively recently that there’s been this focus on whether an old bass is a da Salo or a Maggini,” says Duane Rosengard, a bassist with the Philadelphia Orchestra and author of the book Cremonese Double Basses. For the last 10 years Rosengard has been working on an inventory of basses made in Brescia before 1630.
“There were many excellent instrument-makers working in Brescia at the time,” he says, “some of them just as famous as da Salo. This year I had the chance to study a very famous old bass in Frankfurt. What I found convinces me that the Toronto instrument is a very early Brescian double bass. There are not more than 10 instruments like it in the world, and many of those are in pieces.”
On a humid day in late August, Ric Heinl, Bob Williams, Joel Quarrington and I met at the staff entrance of the ROM, signed in for security passes and trooped upstairs to a fourth-floor storage vault. From floor to ceiling rose painted-metal shelves crammed with plates and chairs, a clavichord, a harpsichord, and scores of mysterious, tantalizing artefacts – the tidal wrack of a museum whose galleries can never hold all it owns.
In an aisle between the shelves lay the majestic form, positioned on its back on foam supports on a kind of gurney. A plastic sheet covered the great body. Even shrouded in polyethelene in a storeroom, the bass exuded an immense and stately gravity.
“Wow,” said Quarrington, breaking the silence. He moved to the table and gazed down at the enormous, swelling shape. “This is one of the great basses of the world,” he said, raising a corner of the polyethelene. Heinl stood at the bottom of the table, and together they lifted off the sheet.
“Well, sweetheart,” murmured Heinl when the instrument lay clearly before us.
Catherine Wyss, a collections technician, handed out white-cotton gloves, and in a moment Quarrington and Williams were running their hands over the glowing surface. Quarrington removed some strips of acid-free tissue protecting the strings.
“Look at these,” he said, touching a gloved finger to the thick catgut. “They’re brutal. They’d tear your fingers. Some musicians needed special gloves to play on strings like that.” Suddenly he wrapped his hand around the neck, at the place where a bassist would hold it. “Ric,” he exclaimed, “just come and feel this. It’s perfect!”
For a few minutes the three clustered around the supine instrument, plainly moved by it. Quarrington plucked at a string. The ancient bass replied with a deep, resonant sound. Quarrington picked out a few notes, beaming at the rest of us. Finally Heinl unwrapped a small package of instruments and began to conduct a more clinical examination.
He poked a tiny light mounted on a probe through the f-hole – the carved opening on the top of the bass – and peered around inside. Next he inserted a round mirror on a handle – like a dentist’s mirror but bigger. He aimed a small flashlight at the glass to reveal, clearly reflected there, the short trails, like scraps of thread, left by worms that had burrowed along inside.
Inspecting the exterior, Heinl pointed to a minute lesion in the dark surface on the bottom of the bass, where a minuscule trickle of bright wood, the ancient flesh of the instrument, was leaking through the varnish. “That’s all worm too,” he said. “Worms tend to follow the glue. There’s protein in glue and they like that. They probably did that 200 years ago, or even 300. Now it’s all just falling out. It worries me.”
What is amazing is not that instruments decay, but that some of them last as long as they do.
“In stringed instruments,” wrote Susan Wilson, a former conservator at the ROM, “the wood of the body is very thin, shaped in complex curves, and put under great stress by the tension of the strings.”
Wilson performed a conservation of the Dragonetti bass 24 years ago, when, as she said in an article, it was “in a very frail state. Although the neck and head were in good condition and the belly, apart from some losses at the corners, was structurally sound, the softwood back was another matter. It was marred by 24 large splits, opening as wide as 0.35 cm. The sides of the body (ribs) also had many gaping cracks.”
Wilson placed the bass in a polyethelene humidity chamber and re-hydrated it over a number of weeks. She made thin cedar shims to match the cracks and glued them into place. Photographs show the glossy, refurbished bass that returned to the instrument gallery, a gallery that no longer exists.
Sixteen years ago the ROM decided that the Canadiana collection needed a higher profile among visitors, and the decision was made to create a larger gallery. The space they chose was that of the musical instruments gallery, which was dismantled. The Dragonetti and most of its companions moved into the vaults where they now reside.
“It’s rather sad,” said Brian Musselwhite. “When I started here 30 years ago we had the instruments near the front door. Now we have no knowledgeable staff [specializing in instruments]. An instrument that isn’t played can actually shrink. It loses something. It’s basically dead.”
But it could return to life.
“She’s the Sleeping Beauty,” says Ric Heinl of the Dragonetti, and plainly the awakening kiss could be bestowed in Heinl’s workroom. “This is where that bass should be. I imagine those shims the ROM put in have fallen out, because I didn’t see them. And anyway, conservation is not restoration. I don’t just want to make it nice to look at, I want to make it live.”
Heinl has offered to examine the bass in his shop for free, conducting an exhaustive assessment of its condition. Bob Williams hopes the museum will accept.
“We’d like to know how much it would cost to make it playable,” he says, “and ultimately to have Joel [Quarrington] play it. My grandfather gave his whole collection to the ROM, and a lot of money to help display it. It’s a shame no one can see it. Maybe if people could see and hear this magnificent instrument, they’d want to know what else is there. And there’s a lot.”
