About this episode
In this episode we will be looking at Francesco’s most productive period of making instruments with a busy workshop and 4 sons helping him out. Jason Price from Tarisio fine violins and bows talks to us about Rugeris distinctive making style and his prolific production at this time in his life but things do not run as smoothly as Rugeri would like as he finds himself in hot water with court cases and grumpy children. Thankyou to the Australian Chamber Orchestra for permission to play their music. Hello and welcome to the Violin Chronicles, a podcast in which I, Linda Lespets, will attempt to bring to life the story surrounding famous, infamous, or just not very well known, but interesting violin makers of history. I'm a violin maker and restorer. I graduated from the French Violin Making School some years ago now, and I currently live and work in Sydney with my husband Antoine, who is also a violin maker and graduate of the French school, l'Ecole Nationale de Luthierie in Mircourt. As well as being a luthier, I've always been intrigued with the history of instruments I work with, and in particular, the lives of those who made them. So often when we look back at history, I know that I have a tendency to look at just one aspect, but here my aim is to join up the puzzle pieces and have a look at an altogether fascinating picture. So join me as I wade through tales not only of fame, famine and war, but also of love, artistic genius, revolutionary craftsmanship, determination, cunning and bravery that all have their part to play in the history of the violin. This show is sponsored by Tarisio Fine Instruments and Bows. And right now, I would like to talk about a formidable database you can access today, if you wish, called the COSIO Archive. For people who listen to this podcast, something that you might be thinking when you're listening to me telling the stories of violin makers is you would really love to see pictures of the instruments that they make. And for that, you have the perfect resource. Here is Jason Price, Director of Tarisio, to tell you about it. Jason Price Yes, the Cosio Archive. We now own it, maintain it, and are continually adding to it. Over a hundred thousand instruments in the database, over four thousand makers, which we are following and tracking, two hundred thousand auction prices. It's really quite cool. If I pull up the stats for, you know, a maker like Ruggeri, I get 336 instruments by Francesco Ruggieri. It's a unique resource and we hope it's really useful. Linda Lespets And so what I love is that often in some databases, you just get one, photo per maker, but in the Cosio archive, for example, for Ruggeri, you're able to look at the maker's whole career in photos and you see influences from other makers. You can see the dates where his sons are working for him and you can see examples of that work and the style. They're similar. For example, you can look up Vincenzo Ruggeri and see how his style is similar to his father. Yeah. Yeah. There's a violin in your archive, uh, 1680 called the Milanolo, which is really beautiful. Yeah. Which is a small violin. So that would be an example of his work when he's working with his sons in when the workshop was very successful. And then there's a violin from 1650, which was his earlier work. I think maybe my favorite name for an instrument is the Admiral Buckle. Admiral Buckle. That's wonderful. His life and his, it kind of reads like something out of a Jane Austen, book. Wonderful. And then, uh, there's a 1673 cello, which is really beautiful, and the, the quality of the photo is amazing. You can zoom right in and see the texture of the varnish. You can see the purfling. You can tell that the purfling's been tinted. Yep. There are examples of from 1692, so his later work, and 1695, right to the, the end of his making career, which is extraordinary. Jason Price Yeah, good. I'm really, really happy that you find it useful. Linda Lespets To have access to all these photos, what's the process to subscribe? Jason Price The annual subscription is $100 And allows you unlimited access to as many makers and as many instruments as you want to look at. Linda Lespets Yeah. And I find the auction results quite helpful as well as a violin maker, because we're often having to research different prices and you have to look at a lot of different resources to get an idea of a market value of an instrument. And so that's just one of our, Tools that we use in that process. Yes. And so you have your auctions, the photos, the auction results, and there's also the Cartegio. We get the emails every, every week. Jason Price Good. The Cartegio, I love the Cartegio project. It's, it's something I really, I really enjoy. We try to make it long form discussions on things that are interesting, interesting corners of our world. And we invite some of the, uh, some really distinguished people who write for it and have frankly, very, uh, I think, inspiring and fascinating things to say. You don't have to be a subscriber to the archive to have access to the Cartegio articles. You can sign up for them and that is absolutely free. So there you have it. Linda Lespets If you would like to subscribe to the Cosio archive, read a Cartegio article, or browse the auction catalog, go to tarisio.com. Now back to the show. Welcome back to the Life and Times of Francesco Ruggeri. As we have seen in the last episodes, Ruggeri is living in an exciting time for musicians. There are advances in string technology, and Francesco's smaller model of cellos are selling like hotcakes. Over in Venice, opera is taking off and it's just the best thing ever to go and see the latest arias. Ruggeri's boys are growing up now and can start helping out with all the orders. Or are they sick of hanging around outside the walls of Cremona, where more interesting things are happening in town? Starting from the late 1660s, the Ruggeri family is referenced in church and civil records with the nickname of Il Père or Detto Il Père. He also puts it on his labels. No one really knows how he got this nickname or what it means. Perhaps it was to distinguish him from other Ruggeris in the area. In their parish of San Bernardo alone, there were five other Ruggeri families and two of them were Francesco's brothers. Duane Rosengard My name is Duane Rosengard. And I'm a double bass player in the Philadelphia Orchestra. One interesting document, I think we found, actually, I think it's actually in that parish church of San Bernardo, is A document of 1669 that pertains to a brother and nephew of Francesco Ruggeri. So it may or may not have anything to do with violins, but this document calls Francesco's brother Ruggeri detto il per, which means called the pair, P E R, right? And that document is from August of 1669 and that, up till now is the earliest written record of this, call it a nickname, call it a suffix, whatever you prefer. But that suffix or moniker or nickname was used to identify Francesco Ruggeri and his siblings. and their descendants. Why is that important? Nobody, even if they spent a lifetime, could count how many Ruggieri families lived in and around Cremona. I wouldn't say it's as common as, not nearly as common as Smith or Jones, but it maybe is almost as common as a name like Brown or Green. You know what I'm saying? It was, The amount of, um, material, just when I think back to the 1990s, that Carlo Chiesa and I sifted through, both in churches and in the legal records of notaries. There's many Ruggeri's, and some could read, and some could write, and some were illiterate. And sometimes they spelled it with R. Two Gs, one other times with one G, sometimes with one G and an I before the ERI. And, you know, it could drive you mad. Linda Lesepets At this time, another maker with a very similar name of Rogeri was apprenticed in the Amati workshop for a few years. He was in his late teens, but soon over the next five years, he would move to Brescia. Get married and start a workshop in that city of his own. In the 1680s, Francesco's eldest son, Giovanni Battista, was a witness at a wedding, and the priest writes his name as G. B. Per, with Per replacing his last name, Ruggeri, so that was the nickname that they put on the labels, remember? So we can see that the family was well known by this name. It could also have been, to stop confusion, with Rogeri over in Brescia, but we will probably never know. The fact is that this name, Il Per, is on his labels and records from now on. Before the Great Plague 30 years ago, Cremona was a city of about 30 to 40, 000 people. Now, in the 1660s, its population is just 10, 000, and yet the violin makers, or lutei, were doing well. The reputation of a Cremona violin meant that four industrious workshops were trading in town. And as the years passed, Francesco's children grew up and the boys started helping their father in the workshop, making it a hive of activity. And the Ruggieri workshop, under the guidance of Francesco Rugeri, was distinguishable with its own style and way of making instruments. Jason Price. I was just going to say stylistically, that there really are some, uh, you know, you look at them from 10 feet away and there's some obvious similarities. They're both an Amati model but when you start looking up close, you see some things that are different. The head of a Ruggieri is really distinctive, a tiny eye, very, very small chamfer, the body of a Ruggieri. Um, tends to be a little bit more pinched in arching. The sound holes tend to be a little bit more sinewy and wiry. Um, they don't, they don't tend to have the classical poise that an Amati does. And then they're missing some things like obviously the central pin, which is all the Amati makers, uh, and disciples had. Ruggeri, Ruggeri's do not have those. So they are, they're similar from 10 feet away, but quite distinct once you get up close. Linda Lespets When you say, they made a lot of instruments, is that, violins, cellos? What, are there a lot of? It's certainly not violas. That's for sure. And that's a, that's a separate topic all on its own, but. You know, why weren't people making real Unfortunately for you. In 1677, Giovanni Battista Ruggeri, the eldest of the Ruggeri boys, married and moved out of home into another parish of Cremona with his wife briefly, but soon they would move back and continue to work with his father. Giovanni Battista was good friends with Niccolò Amati's son, Girolamo II, Who was only four years older than him. And when Giovanni and his young wife had a child of their own, they asked him to be godfather. During this time in the 1670s and 80s, the Ruggeri workshop was at its most productive. Francesco had his four sons working with him, making many instruments. In 1685, a year after Niccolò Amati died, the 56 year old Francesco Ruggeri found himself involved in a court case. Rugeri was sort of got himself. He got himself sort of mixed up in a situation, with a fake label in his instrument, Jason Price. That's right. So this was, um, in Modena. So a musician appealed to the Duke of Modena for relief or for some sort of, uh, you know, injunction against the person who had sold him a violin that was supposed to be an Amati because it had an Amati label, but turns out it had a Ruggeri label underneath that. Yeah, underneath. It's crazy, huh? It's crazy. I mean, these old tricks, they never, uh, they've been there from the very beginning. Yeah. And the cool thing about this is it happened, like, just a couple years after Niccolò Amati had died that this was, that this came out, I think. I think it was, he died in 84. And I think it was like in the 80s that that this happened. And, you know, the price difference between an Rugeri is what was at stake. I think that he asked for some sort of, um, either compensation or, or relief or something because, you know, the idea was an Amati is worth five times what a Rugeri is worth. I don't remember the actual numbers, but it's some, it's a ratio like that. I think, I think it was, um, Pistoles, but in different, uh, accounts, they give different currencies. So, but then I, I was looking up to see how much a Pistole was worth and in one account, one Pistole could buy you a cow. Oh, wow. Right. And an Amati violin could buy like four cows, which sounds expensive to me. Which is, that's amazing. It really tells you everything, doesn't it? Yeah. That one, Amati was commercially that much more valuable and two, there was enough demand for Amati that people were either making counterfeits or selling counterfeits one way or another. Yeah, and he got in trouble for it and I'm like, it couldn't have been him. He would have like ripped, he would have taken out the label or like not put, even put his label in and like, you wouldn't stick a label on top of your own label. I mean, if you're going to be fraudulent, you do it properly. Jason Price I think that there are some examples in the 20th century where we're happy to put in whatever label you want them to put in there. Linda Lespets So, um, so you, for example, you're an expert. Yes. Absolutely. That's the, yeah. Um, so say, hypothetically speaking, someone comes to you, um, and they give you, they give you a violin. And I say, look, I bought this. It's a, it’s a Vuillaume. And you can see from across the room that it's not a Vuillaume. What happens today in this setting, uh, in that situation? Jason Price In that situation, you, um, you make sure they're seated. Uh, so that they're, uh, you know, not wobbly. Um, and then you, you try to see what they want you to tell them. And if most of the time they're coming to you because they want you to corroborate something they already know. And for me, I think you have to be super direct in these. Matters. You have to tell people what it is, but how you get there certainly requires some finesse that you don't want to, uh, you don't want to offend someone. You don't want to make them feel like they've made a bad purchase. You don't want to, you know, make them faint and fall over, but nine times out of 10, when they come to you with something that isn't something, this isn't going to be news that you're giving them. Yeah. You have to be gentle with these things, but super direct and super truthful. Linda Lespets There's this example I have of a story that, um, the, the vice chancellor of Sydney uni told me the first time I met him. And so, uh, so the story was that, well, it's a true story. This happened to him the first year he was, uh, the vice chancellor of Sydney uni, uh, an old, an elderly lady died, and she, she In her will, the university received two paintings and one of them was a Picasso and the other one was a Miro. So the Picasso, he said, first of all, they, they got someone to look at them and they said, well, yeah, this is a Picasso. These are Picasso. Um, you know, it's this and the university just, they, they couldn't pay the insurance to keep them for even a few months. So they, there were experts from two big auction houses in London. You could imagine who they were and they, they did like a Vuillaume, they, they jumped on the first plane. They came out to Sydney. They looked and it was a, his blue period. It was incredible. They sort of had this big. Kind of battle for who was going to sell it. Um, it was taken back to England. It was, it made the cover of the, of the auction catalogue. It sold for a record price. It was huge record price. So the university is like fantastic, uh, like universities in Australia, they need sort of a lot of private funding. So heaps of millions, millions of dollars. Uh, the second painting was a Miro. They're like, cool, we got the, the Picasso, we've got millions, and they said, well, actually, no, the Miro, we have to take that to Paris, because you have to have the right expert to, to be sold, it has to have the right expertise. So they're like, sure, sure, take it to Paris, but they said, but we have to tell you that if it's a fake, it's going to be destroyed. And so this is how it happens. Jason Price This is, I mean, this is absolutely, it's a, um, it's a movement in especially the contemporary art world. The Warhol Commission won't even look at something until you, uh, give them permission to destroy it if it's a counterfeit. Linda Lespets So either you get the certificate to say what it is, or you've agreed for its destruction. And they were like, well, if this is, this is okay. It’s, we’ve got the Picasso was real, right? Like the Miro, they send the Miro and it was a fake. And so it was destroyed. Uh, but their argument is, well, how, how can we know that someone isn't going to take this painting and sell it, uh, as a fraudulent thing? And I was just wondering what would, what would the violin world look like today? If that's what happened. Jason Price That's a very good question. Very good question. What do you think about it? I mean, how would you, how would you see that? Linda Lespets I think we don't often say, well, I don't know if it's some, if it was sold as that and it was very, and I know there has been cases where things have accidentally been sold as something and they haven't seen a little iron mark in it saying it's something else and that's put the violin maker into a lot of trouble. Uh, but I can, I mean, at the same time I can understand the art. The, laws surrounding it because they're like, this is copyright. This is infringement of copyright. You can't do this to a song. Um, you're selling this as someone else's work. They did that painting. And normally copyright is, I think it's 70 years after the death of the person, but then some people own the copyright. I mean, like we, nobody owns the copyright to the Strad model. So, yeah, I don't know, I was just a bit shocked by it. I was like, Oh, we're sort of, sort of in the same world. I find it fascinating and shocking at the same time. Jason Price I think if you applied that to the violin business, there would be some things that would, um, well, it would miss all the subtleties of, you know, Völler copies from the late, uh, 19th century, um, Vuillaume copies, uh, of a Guarneri that, um, You know, that had a Guarneri label in it when they left his workshop. But these are, these are not, they're not forgeries. They're not counterfeits. They're things that are made as, well, they're traded now with full knowledge of what they are. And it sort of would be a sad erasure of history if you had to do that, wouldn't it? Yeah. Linda Lespets And I don't know, and there's always a part of you that might be saying, you know, maybe with the paintings, like maybe it was a real, Here's what happened. There was a virtuoso court violinist and composer working for the Duke of Modena. That's about 100 kilometres, or 62 miles, from Cremona. His name was Tommaso Antonio Vitale, and being a well-known musician and composer, he thought he would buy himself a violin worthy of his station, and that could only mean an Amati would do. They weren't cheap, but he had important things to play on this instrument, so he managed to find himself one of these famous Amati violins. Presumably he didn't go to the workshop himself, but acquired it in some other fashion. A travelling salesman or another violinist dealer, perhaps? So anyway, he gets his violin and pays nine pistoli for it. Now in one source I found you could buy a cow for one pistoli, which gives you an idea of the value of an Amati at the time. So whether it was nine cows or a herd of goats, we don't quite know. It was expensive in any case, and everything was going just fine until he saw the label inside his instrument peeling at the corner, and as the Niccolo Amati label was slowly peeled away, it exposed a Francesco Ruggeri Detto Il Per label. Shock horror! He had been scammed. This was bad news for Tommaso, who had just forked over a considerable amount of money for this instrument to find out that it was Okay, a violin from Cremona but a Ruggeri instrument. A Ruggeri instrument was only worth a third of that of an Amati. Vitali, finding himself in a pickle, petitioned the Duke, his employer, to see if he could help get his money back, in this case a fraud. This story tells us a few things. 1. Niccolo Amati's violins were considered the cream of the crop, even during his lifetime, or in this case, shortly after. Rugeri's instruments were considerably less expensive, but also well made enough to be passed off as an Amati to the unsuspecting. 3. You can't always trust what is on the label. And 4. That unscrupulous people wanting to make a quick buck have been around since the dawn of time. Jason Price. Have you heard of an author called Malcolm Gladwell? Yes, absolutely. And he wrote a really, uh, a book I love is called Blink. I don't know if you've read that. And he talks about, um, Blink, yep. Linda Lespets Yeah, I feel like he talks about a thing called the adaptive unconscious. Which is, it's everything that happens in a few seconds when you first see something that you can't explain. He often talks about people, uh, he takes an example of art experts having, they can't explain it. It's a feeling that they have when they see an instrument, uh, not an instrument, when they see a painting. And do you, do you have the feeling when you see an instrument? Jason Price I think that sort of uncategorizable, um, experience of seeing something is, uh, is incredibly important. The instinct you have when you see something is incredibly important, but it's also equally important to corroborate that and to challenge that. That when you see something, when someone flashes a violin in front of you and you just, you know, Say, oh yeah, it's a Vuillaume. That's great. It's great that you have that instinct. It's great that you've seen, you know, 700 Vuillaume that you can recognize the 701st. But the better expert is the The one that then unpacks that and says, hang on a second, let me just sit with this a little bit and make sure that all the parts check out and that it corroborates that, that I'm not, I'm not doing it out of posturing. I'm doing it out of actual, um, intellectual rigor of looking at the instrument, not just my instinct. And then it's also important to challenge that, to say, you know what, hang on a second. I saw the, um, Six months ago that didn't have this thing here. And why does this have that? Those two things are super important. You have to have the instinct, but you also have to challenge it. Linda Lespets Yeah. And that, that adaptive unconscious, it's kind of like, it's, it's a lifetime experience. Cause he'll talk about people, uh, reading, reading people as well. And it's because you've spent your life. doing it. It's not, it just doesn't, you're not sort of born with it, or I mean, maybe someone is, but normally it's, it's thousands of connections being made from, from seeing thousands of instruments and which I think AI could never really, AI can maybe categorize things and help with elimination, but they could never synthesize completely the, the entirety of The object, because for, he gives this example, um, in the, I think it's the Getty museum. They were, they wanted to buy a statue and it was 10 million. And they did, I'm not sure if it was Getty, it was a big museum in America. Um, and they, they did all this scientific testing on it for the materials, where it came from, the, they did every scientific test you could do, but then when they put it in front of an art expert. They, they just said, I hope you haven't bought this. I have a really bad feeling. And they couldn't, they couldn't say why. And they, they couldn't go back to the museum and say, well, this guy felt a feeling. In the end, it was a fake, but every, it was so well done, uh, that it, it ticked all the scientific boxes. And that's, and that would be your, your human, Using their sort of little supercomputer, um, synthesizing it all together. Jason Price No, you're absolutely right. It's that human judgment is irreplaceable and you certainly don't replace that with scientific evaluation for sure. Yeah, yeah. And it's, and it's something that's hard to quantify or explain because people say to you, how do you know? Like, how can you tell it's this? Uh, I, I, for me, I think it actually is almost more athletic than anything else. I think it's just because you've done the work that you've seen the previous, uh, 400 examples of that maker and you've actually studied them. You've, uh, made binders or you've made folders and you've, uh, compared one to another. You know, the early period, you know, the late period, you know, the problematic ones. You know, the ones that, um, are accepted by some people, but not by others. That's, that's just doing the work. It's, that's like a, an athletic experience, not like voodoo. Part of our business, not our, not violin business, but in general, but the arts business that I find a little bit dangerous is the sort of, um, you know, posing as expert. Uh, I am as I am expert because I beat my chest and say that I am. That doesn't work. You know, experts aren't fancy suits. Um, experts are people who can, you know, proclaim something, um, as a work of magic. They're doing it because they've studied it. Linda Lespets And it's hard to measure that. Um, depth of knowledge. So the next time you buy yourself a Niccolo Amati, be sure to go to a trusted source, and this is where an expert can help you. And as in the art world, there are different experts who have expert knowledge on specific makers. So there you have it. At the end of this episode, we leave Francesco Rugeri in a pickle with his instruments and his workshop is in full swing with his sons, the Ruggeri brothers. I'm sure they were well known about town, strapping lads that they would have been. And next week we will see the shenanigans the boys get up to and some big moves for the workshop. And that will be the final episode on Ruggeri before we move into the wonderful life and career of Giovanni Battista Rogeri. Thank you to my fantastic guests, Dr. Emily Brayshaw and Jason Price. And Dwayne Rosengard. And to end, here is some viola music for Jason. Well, viola and cello, actually. This is Liisa Pallandi and Timo- Veikko Valve from the Australian Chamber Orchestra playing the Sonata Representiva. You will hear how the composer is playing with the capabilities of the instruments, imitating bird songs. It's quite lovely. It was composed around 1669. So, so it's around about now in Francesco's life. To support the podcast, you can leave a rating and review on your listening app, and I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles.