Violino arpa

This curious violin with its elongated shape appears to have escaped from a Salvador Dali painting! It is illustrative of nineteenth-century inventiveness in the search for perfection in instrument-building.

Its designer, Thomas Zach, had as convoluted a life as the form of his instrument. He began as a miller’s assistant in Bohemia, later becoming an apprentice violin maker in Prague. Thereafter, he worked in Budapest for a few years and then spent an itinerant period in Hungary and Romania. In 1865, he met Prince Sturdza in Bucharest, who boasted of having come up with a concept for the ideal violin, one based on elliptical shapes. According to him, the sound volume of the instrument would be enhanced by increasing the capacity of the sound-box. Zach put the prince’s theory into practice by building a series of instruments with bizarre shapes, but the results were, alas, disappointing, the violins producing only a nasal and unclear sound.

However, Zach did not confine himself exclusively to innovative and avant-garde designs. He spent the final years of his life in Vienna, where he made violins of fine quality and trained various Hungarian violin makers.