Ep 25. Giovanni Battista Rogeri Part 2

The Violin Chronicles Podcast

In this second episode on Giovanni Battista Rogeri we look at his family and children. Living in Brescia also meant that Rogeri was in the heart of an Opera loving people close to Venice and an exciting time musically and instrumentally.

Transcript

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.

Welcome back to part two of The Life of Giovanni Battista Rogeri. In the last episode of the Violin Chronicles, we looked at Rogeri's early life. His apprenticeship with the master Niccolo Amati himself in Cremona. He's moved to Brescia seeking out greener pastures. And now he is in Brescia where we will see his style really come into its own and take a look at this thing Opera, that was really changing the musical landscape for musicians and instrument makers alike.

So stay with me as we take a dive into the life and career of Giovanni Battista Ruggieri. Not Ruggeri, Rogeri. Before we move on, I would like to say that I am an independent podcaster and really appreciate the support people have been showing in helping this show happen. If you would like to be one of those people helping me make more content for you to enjoy, consider going to patreon.com forward slash the violin chronicles, where you can have access to extra episode and help make things happen.

We now find ourselves in the home of Laura and Giovanni Rugeri. The year after this young couple married in 1665, they had their first child called Pietro Giacomo and would go on to have at least six more children. Two years after Pietro's birth, they had another son called Gio Paolo. These two sons would be the only surviving boys of the Rogeri's five sons and would go on to become violin makers as well. In these early years, there is not much we know about Giovanni Battista Rogeri's work, but five years on, into the 1670s, we see an active workshop Giovanni definitely had his own style. When working for Niccolò Amati, his hand can be seen in that cremonese workshop as his instruments differed to those of Niccolò. His bolder style even influenced the young Girolamo II Amati in the development of his own characteristic instruments.

Now, if you can cast your minds back to the first few episodes of the Violin Chronicles, where we spoke about the city of Brescia, we looked at its close connection with Venice. And now that Venice is embracing this exciting new art form called opera, it's no surprise that Brescia is not far behind. And the year before Rogeri married, in 1664, Brescia opened its very own commercial opera house. And this first theatre was called the Teatro degli Erranti. Cremona would never embrace opera to the extent that the Venetian state did. And here we find Giovanni Battista Rogeri setting up his workshop in the midst of this exciting time for the city of Brescia. Here I talk to Stephen Mould about how opera was so different to anything people had ever seen how it was pulling on human emotion and the impact music would have had on people at this time in this part of Italy.

Linda Lespets

And, and also I've, the, with the history of opera, we're sort of going from this Renaissance style. And we sort of move through to the Baroque, which is more, so we're going from the, you know, the Pythagorean theory of music was sort of God's omnipotence and to music being this source of bringing out human emotion. It's sort of the, the idea of music and the sort of thinking behind music was changing during this time of opera developing as well. Yeah. And can we see that in the operas?

Stephen Mould

Look, what you're talking about is absolutely valid. I tend to think of all of those kinds of ideas, they were sort of in the air.

Linda Lespets

Yeah. In the same way that Yeah, because I feel like opera really was, it's all about drama. It is. And human emotion. Like love and jealousy and revenge.

Stephen Mould

Yes. And so the interesting thing is how those things are expressed on the stage, how those things are played out. Again, I come to this idea of the stratas of society in that, let's say, people from the lower classes or peasants or whatever, who had oral traditions of passing on poems or stories and things, and have this very immediate form of street theatre where people, they're actually looking into people's eyes and gazing to get a connection with their audience.

Now, If you look at the way people behaved in the aristocratic circles, they didn't do that too. You might've had an arranged marriage to somebody and never actually been alone in a room with them or looked them in the eyes that it's all, it's all done according to certain social conventions. So although these Pythagorean ideas and everything else were present, I feel that that was a bit more of a background thing. And that, that was. material that was really available to the more aristocratic classes who had time to sit and read and Think about these things. Think about things. I feel particularly in Venice that this emergent middle class was much more much more volatile. It was a time of extraordinary change, but what were interesting was the interactions between the classes. And what I would say then is, if you think of Mozart's the three Don Giovanni, Così Fan Tutte, and the Marriage of Figaro, these are also about different classes of people. And you see all the music, So, for example, in the, in the Marriage of Figaro, you've got Figaro and Susanna who are the servant class and the kind of music that Mozart uses for that are peasant dances, other musical forms that come from their class. When the Count and Countess are talking or singing, they have a different realm of music. In Don Giovanni, you've got The scenario of the Don, who is an aristocrat, and his servant Leporello, who's from the servant class. And I mean, the opera opens with Leporello going, I'm sick of being a servant, I want to be the master. So there's this class conflict, and at a certain point in the second act, they actually disguise one another as, so Leporello disguises himself as Don Giovanni, Don Giovanni disguises himself as Leporello, so there's this weird sort of change. And it then occurs in the music as well. So it's this idea of having different musics from different places. So, to map out all these stations. And the music really was part of the storytelling. Absolutely. And, and the, so the, the, see, we don't, we, we don't sit in a Mozart opera and go, Oh, there's a gavotte. That's this class or that, but they, they didn't even have to have that conversation with themselves. They just knew it. And, and I mean, to bring it back to history, when Louis and Mary Antoinette had to escape from Versailles because of the, all the, it was the revolt coming from Paris. They went out the servant's door of Versailles disguised as their servants. So you see all of this switching around. So I see that as probably the. Dominant thing, which animated opera. This sort of connection with people and their, their class.

Linda Lespets

Right. Yeah. And, and in, with the violin makers, it was a little bit, there's a bit of that story as well, where you've, the violin maker was an artisan, but had to, was making for the aristocracy, but also dealing with, you know it was very, there was sort of a bridge between classes as well, that were working with tradespeople and yeah, the music in general, we seemed to have this like bridge of

Stephen Mould

Yeah. Sort of eng globed a lot of classes. It, it was a way I mean if, if you think of when, when you said that, I think of Hayden for example, who was basically a servant all his life and Mozart who was determined not to be, and only in Vienna.He, could he really do that.

Linda Lespets

But now in Brescia, Rogeri was making instruments using fine wood for his wealthy clients. And for those with a more modest budget, he would use plainer pieces. And to save time, simply draw on the purfling on the backs, for example, of some of his instruments by scratching in the lines with a tracer and filling the grooves in with black. I talked to Florian Leonard about G.B. Rogeri instruments that have historically been confused with Maggini’s and the characteristics of Rogeri instruments that distinguish them from other makers.

Florian Leonhard

Before dendrochronology was established, the Maggini’s were going around and they were actually GB Rogeri’s.

Linda Lespets

Right, yeah, we did a we did a condition report on a Giovanni Paolo Maggini and It had an old certificate and then we did the dendocrinology and so I had to change the title to attributed to.

Florian Leonhard

Yeah. And it might've been, you know, I mean, I have seen about three, three Rogeris that used to be G. P. Maggini’s Okay. Yeah. Very nicely made. But you can see that the construction behind it doesn't have that more loose idea of creating that shape, but it was a constructed shape. Of course it had the linings, it had the corner blocks in the right way, it had but another feature I found always that was a dead giveaway is the volute. So the scroll, Rogeri had a very strong character of, of how he constructed the scroll in an Amati style. So obviously it was influenced by Amati, but it is his own idea. And you can see right away when he makes his own style, not, not, not a Maggini style, that he has quite a flat cutting out of the, of the back of the scroll and also the front of the scroll.

So that's very flat, incredibly flat. And the similar thing is also from the side. So it comes from, it arrives from the peg box and then runs up into the first turning. And that hardly goes into depth. And he manages to still have the chamfer relatively sharp without having a round cut. He has a very flat cut into the volute. And then he arrives in the eye in the almost Amati school way. And he does, when he cuts the, the Maggini scroll, it just looks as if he just had a different model, but it's the same attitude. It's incredible to see that. So he could not hide that. And I don't think he tried to fake anyway. He just built that model, but it was totally him.

It's like the Maggini copy by Vuillaume I mean, it does totally not look like Maggini, so it looks like a Vuillaume so the Vuillaume couldn't hide his character behind it. Even though Vuillaume’s intention was more to be quite real, he did for his time, do quite nice copies, but of course the copy wasn't intellectually analysed as detailed as somebody would think.

Linda Lespets

The labels Rogeri printed to insert into his instruments are peculiar in that they are printed in red ink. Okay, so not all of his labels are in red ink, but quite a few are. We don't really know why, but what we do know is that red ink was the most popular colour after black. And in legal and notarial documents, red ink was used. It was used for important headings and quotes. Think of red letter Bibles, for example. Fun fact, accountants would enter in black ink, positive figures on business financial records and the negative figures in red, hence to be in the red or the black. That aside, it could have just been that it was an aesthetic choice or a mistake by the printer. Although he had worked in the Amati workshop in his formative years, and one of their signature moves was an almost imperceptible dot in the centre back of instruments, thought to be from a compass in the measurement process in making the instrument, Giovanni Battista Rogeri did not have this on his instruments. We have today many fine violins and cellos by Giovanni Battista Rogeri, but there is, and this is interesting for Brescia, not many violas coming out of his workshop. And this was not because he had a personal problem with viola players, but simply a question of compositional style. Things had changed by the end of the 17th century and the fashion was for trio sonatas that consisted of two treble instruments, such as two violins and a bass, and often a keyboard instrument playing the continuo parts. That confusingly makes four people playing the trio. But in any case, the viola was no longer needed, for now, and this could explain the fact that there is a dip in viola making after 1700 in both Cremona and Brescia. Never fear, the violas do come back in, the later Baroque and Classical periods, but our violin maker will no longer be with us.

Giovanni Battista Rogeri's business in Brescia is a success and he will live with his family in San Giorgio for the next 20 years. His children will grow up and the boys, Pietro Giacomo and Gio Paolo, will eventually be apprenticed with their father. Rogeri, as we have mentioned earlier, had an influence on Girolamo II Amati's style, But Niccolò Amati definitely had a huge influence on Rogeri and his style. He modelled many of his instruments on Niccolò Amati's grand pattern. And although we see this strong influence, Rogeri cannot help but have his own particular style, a type of Cremonese/Brescian fusion. It is sweepingly bold and finely executed, drawing on Cremonese and Brescian influences. He uses local maple for his instruments, backs, ribs, and scrolls. Some of his instruments are remarkably like Niccolo Amati's, and the next could be a Maggini copy with short corners, double purfling around the contours of the instrument, and decorative motifs on the back. Depending on the client's demand, he could do it all, one day Cremonese and Brescia the next, and yet with his own distinct style that you can see, in the sweep of the sound holes of his instruments, that is quite distinctive.

I asked Florian Leonhard what he thought about the influence Brescian makers such as Maggini and Rogeri could have had on Stradivari in his phases of experimentation.

Florian Leonhard

Antonio Stradivari went through a period of making longer violins. These are called his long pattern instrument, and his arching became fuller and evolved. He would keep experimenting until he culminated in his golden period. But could the Brescian school and G.B. Rogeri have played a part in this thought process at that time? Brescia was plodding along with their style on their own. and creating something that, yeah, they just were confident because the musicians wanted to have those instruments.

They were busy, They got rich from it, You know, nobody was poor making those instruments and they, which we can see in the archives today. So you can, you can see that they were successful. They had constantly musicians from all over the country because the musicians were the ones driving what was in demand, you know, in parallel, in the parallel universe, Cremona supplied some other chords with their instruments, and they were successful within that and that system worked very well, but I don't see much cross pollination there going on between those cities. So Cremona will have noticed that Musicians like sometimes to have this kind of Maggini like instruments, and Rogeri was already making such instruments as well. Maybe visible for Cremonese, violin makers, because they, the musicians would travel, because Brescia and Cremona is not that far apart.

But Obviously, the link wasn't so established culturally, as you can tell from the violin making history. So, but Stradivari who totally deserves his name as the genius of our profession, he was constantly, from day one, from the earliest instruments, when we analyse him, you can see from the earliest instruments, his strong character and drive to find out how to make it better. So I think from day one, he tried to see how can I improve this thing. And by 1690, he arrived by saying, let's radically change the design of the arching, because, because the musicians talking about the sonority and warmth and depth of Maggini instruments. And so he, he felt that's lacking.

Let's try to find this out. And then he saw something and he said, let’s try it. And he did it. And it created some effect and he continued this. And so he did it for, for just under a decade, building those long pattern instruments, because long machines were longer and they were fuller arched. And you see that in, in Stradivari's design. But Stradivari still was bound by the very strong, incredible principles that the Amati’s have created in Cremona. So he had the discipline to build it beautifully, with long, slender corners, with a choice of wood that looks magnificent. And it's very, It's aristocratic in the way. So the Amati model by Stradivari doesn't look like Amati you know, so it's, it's a much more graceful in design, in my view.

He combined in the, in the golden period, the two things, so his arching became fuller, which is the major change in study varius designs. For the sound.

Linda Lespets

Yeah, there's less of that there's the scooped, like, towards the edges, It's less, although, Yes, I mean, the Amati brothers, I don't, yeah. The brothers Amati were already quite full.

Florian Leonhard

Yeah. Yes. There's a, yeah, yeah, it's, yeah, it's hard to tell. Since you mentioned the Amati brothers, the Amati brothers were more advanced in the arching from our modern perspective of, of ideal arching than Niccolo, because Niccolo exaggerated that deep, long, wide, wide channel, and therefore has nearly a slightly pinched arching, which you see in some Ruggieris as well.

Linda Lespets

In the 1670s, Rogeri, now in his 30s, his workshop is a busy place. Business is good, and he has a young family with many children. As was the case with many other families, infant death was sadly a common thing, and three of his boys were killed. The two sons that did make it to adulthood were Pietro Giacomo and Gio Paolo.

As they grew up, they would help their father more and more in the workshop. And in the year 1688, when Giovanni was in his late 40s, the family would move house. Perhaps his father in law had died and the house they had been living in for the last 20 years had to be sold. But now Ruggieri, his wife and their five children, the two boys and three daughters, moved into a rented house nearby to the Cortell del Polini.

Giovanni Battista Ruggieri's workshop was busy. He was making instruments in his own bold style, based on the techniques he had learnt as an apprentice from his master Niccolò Amati. His work definitely showed the style of the great Cremonese maker, in the shape of the scroll and the outline of his violins. But the sound holes, they were his own thing. Their shape showed his unique stamp on the instrument, and as he was now settled in to life in Brescia, he also embraced some of the local models such as Maggini. Although he wouldn't construct the instrument as Maggini had done, he would copy the model The double purfling, the short corners with open sea bouts, and that distinctive Brescian scroll.

But the making process was indeed Cremonese. This is what he had learnt, and it had worked for him. He used an inside mould with blocks and side linings for those instruments that had to be made quickly. He would sometimes not even do the purfling on the back. It would be drawn on. Time is money, hey? For his instruments, Rogeri had a good stock of fine spruce and beautifully figured maple.

Like Rugeri, Rogeri also made smaller cellos. It is the late 1660s and overwound gut strings are starting to appear. This means that bass instruments could be made smaller. They didn't need room for gigantic gut strings on the lower strings. Composers in Bologna, Naples and Rome also started to write music with the cello in mind.

And it is around now we find cellos by Rogeri. He is using his own model and it is small and powerful. We can imagine that some of Rogeri's instruments would have been played by the local musicians in orchestras, religious processions and the opera house that was in full swing in downtown Brescia. The players in this city would have needed Rogeri and other instrument makers to maintain their instruments and repair them if any mishap occurred, and occur they would in these lively orchestras at the time.

This was the world of the theatre at its best. Now, Venice at this time was the first place to create a commercial opera house. And what this meant was that it was a business. So you pay for your ticket, you went, and this meant that there was a mixture of classes crossing over in the theatre. Move to France and the other royal courts of the time, opera was a court entertainment and a very different experience.

Stephen Mould

So in the 17th century, a woman who came from a family without money and so forth and wanted to remain independent in society and life to some extent and to, and to do well. They had three Possibilities. Become a courtesan, a high class prostitute. This is assuming they didn't want to become a street walker or an opera singer. Those three professions were seen as being intertwined. And just they, they were the social climbing options.

Linda Lespets

Right. And was it like was there as much drama off the stage as on the stage?

Stephen Mould

Oh, I'm sure. In these like milieus, in this like, yeah. You mean amongst all the operas?

Linda Lespets

Yeah, amongst them, yeah.

Stephen Mould

Well, Don Giovanni was premiered in Prague and the, I think it was the Donna Elvira, her name was Saporito. So she's an Italian singer. Saporito means a tasty dish. And she was evidently so promiscuous during the whole production period of Don Giovanni that she was nearly expelled from the city. And so in the score of Don Giovanni in the last act you know, they're having dinner and Don Giovanni refers to Saporito, a tasty dish. There are all these in jokes. You can imagine all of what went on behind the scenes.

Linda Lespets

So in, in Italy, yeah. So I'm imagining the violin makers In Cremona, their, their clients are maybe in the church or in you know, entertainment, opera And amateurs amongst the Yes, the, yeah, they're great clients, yeah even for us. And so, yeah, so in Italy you've got that happening and you could suppose that it would be the same thing happening in Paris. But what was happening in Paris at this time?

Stephen Mould

Well, I think the centre of the world at that time was Versailles, and that's where the king tended to hang out. So this is, this is a really interesting one because it shows how opera tends to reinvent itself according to circumstances. So Lully was born in, he was born somewhere in Italy. I think he did come from Florence. And he was a really, really, really good dancer. And he turned up, I'm not quite sure how, in, in France and was introduced to the king, who was also a very good dancer. And Lully effectively used his position with the King of Influence to create French opera. And it's just, it's a bit like making a minestrone, I have to say. What was popular then, obviously, ballet. Dance. That was the main art form, the most popular. So the, you know, all the ballet operas that have got extensive amounts of ballet in them that he realized that that ingredient was going to be a big ingredient in the soup. It was more than a bay leaf. Then there was the, the spoken drama, which there was a great tradition of. And so he created the specific French style of recitative, which is rather different to the Italian. The Italian. And secco recitative is just in the rhythm of the words. What you see on the paper is not what you do.

It's very conversational in that. Whereas the French the way the French actors delivered their lines was very, very declamatory. Even into the 19th century, when you hear actresses like Sarah Bernhardt, there's, there's recordings of her speaking and it's, it, it almost sounds comical. So French recitative is much more in time and it's got this sense of declaimed rather than spontaneous speech. The other thing that Lully did was he invented the French overture. He just thought, well, we'll need a style of overture and he kind of like dotted rhythms and so forth. Yeah. which paradoxically are called scotch snaps. So he created a product. Then it becomes interesting. All of the other operas were about, they in a way had the life of pop, pop songs that there would be a few performances would be over. And then everybody just wanted the next opera. Nobody said, Oh, you remember that really good opera we heard five years ago. Let's revive that. No idea of revival, no idea of anything that it was all just the next, the next, the next. Now I have a funny feeling that Louis didn't. I'm not sure that he had the best musical ear. He certainly wasn't in, didn't have an inquiring ear, and I rather suspect that he saw opera as being a kind of cool thing that he could go and a bit like watching a sitcom on the television at night, but he happened to have a little opera house in his, his palace, but he could talk during it and, you know, do what he wanted to do while, while the opera was going. That wasn't so unusual in those days.

So It so happens that in Lully's time, this was the beginnings of the so called opera repertoire. There was a repertoire of operas that Lully wrote, and you can see here a work like Thésée. It was first performed in 1675. Last performed in 1779, and it was in the repertoire for 104 years. Now this only happened in the rarefied world of Versailles. That these, these operas, so it was, it was like, you know, having a certain number of television channels. Probably Louis would say, Oh, let's have Prosperine. You know, remember that one? And so they then did it and then clocked up a few more years. It was in being performed for 78 years. So instead of constant. So in that sense, Lully was also kind of a good strategist and businessman. I imagine he wanted to be out there dancing, not sitting at his desk writing operas all the time. So he had this little. You know, library of operas, if you will, or repertoire of operas. So this idea of sort of leads into the institutionalized opera house and the idea of an opera repertoire of pieces that you vibe. Right. And so in Italy, was it more just one after the other? Yes, it was much more haphazard as it still is in Italy. And now we're like. We're really stuck in the Versailles, we're doing the Versailles method.

And so he, he, you know, he was, he seemed to me to have been a terrific strategist, businessman, very good at dealing with kings of that hand. He only really made one mistake, which was putting his baton through his foot and dying of gangrene. And he, they were going to amputate the foot because he wouldn't be able to dance.

Linda Lespets

I mean, that's how important it was. It's like, if I can't dance, I'm going to die.

He was a very. So it kind of makes sense that Louis had to sort of recycle the operas.

Stephen Mould

Recycling's a great word.

Linda Lespets

Because, I mean, he had a lot more on his plate. There was, Louis XIV, he just loved to dance. So there was so much dancing. And I imagine that's why ballet was more a thing in France, whereas Italy was, it was all about opera. But Louis was like, oh, yeah. Like he really wanted more ballet as well. So Lully had to do the ballets The the opera as well. He's like look, I don't have time to come up with new operas We're just gonna do these again But then in doing that like each time you redo an opera people will always compare it to another one the one before And they'd have to refine it.

Stephen Mould

I suppose and so you'd So again, coming back to what you were saying about the changes in thought between the Renaissance and the Baroque and so forth, it was probably more about, I mean, if you think of an opera as being like a variety show, and I'm, I'm being a little silly in saying it, but it was, whatever were the customs of that period. Place, the call for opera, and it was, it was always answering a demand was for something that fulfilled the needs of a court or a ruler in terms of providing a suitable entertainment and I kind of, I guess the advantage of opera was that it was one, a one stop entertainment, that you got a bit of music, you got, you got a bit of recited TV kind of spoken drama, you got a fun overture, people got up and danced in, in the, in the ballet bits. So in a, in a sense it was a kind of something for everyone. So the primary function of opera, as far as I can see, is that it has always answered a social need and in doing that it's sometimes been a social, delivered a social critique as well.

Linda Lespets

And so in, in Venice, when it was like, you were saying it's all the mixture of classes in France, that was not the case, was it? Because it was in Versailles?

Stphen Mould

No, this was, this was much more. So, so all of the themes of the of the Lully operas are, I believe, classical. Yeah. Because they're catered for the, noble class. Yes. And, and so this is like, you know, if you go into the Louvre today and see all those big historical paintings of ancient times, it's like the current Monarch is in this sort of very European thinking that there's this line of this lineage and that these great ancient battles that were fought that's what Napoleon thought he was fighting in in the 19th century he had that he was this Roman Emperor yeah he had that that mental sense of that was his that was his world you know he'd read about it and everything and Probably lived it a little bit too much in his head, if you know what I mean. So, all of those things, and then this distant classical world that was somehow they were able to recreate it. It wasn't lost, it was something that they could re find in their everyday life. If only they shut that down. the rest of the world out. And we all know where that ended up. But that's, so this is, these types of pieces are a kind of escapism. Maybe even you know, something like a 17th or 18th century painting come to life with music with it, of this sort of Arcadian sort of aspirations and, and this, this idea that civilization began with the Greeks, which I mean, today we know that that is utter rubbish. But people have clung on to it as a nice idea for a very, very, very long time. So your experience, say you were a French nobleman and you'd seen an opera in Versailles and then you go to Venice, it would be a totally different experience. Completely different. And there was a lot of travel amongst the aristocracy. Yes, so it was constantly being reinvented. With the public opera, you've got maybe not the absolute, you know, penniless lowest of lowest classes, but you've got a mixture of classes, so I would say a whole lot of people in a room for an opera performance, the smell, the amount of noise, the whole thing would be probably Yeah. I mean, I prefer It probably was like a The lighting, I mean there was no electricity right? So it was all candles and It was very, it was very dim lighting compared to Until it caught fire. Until it caught fire, yes.

You know, in music history, if you're an instrumentalist, you say that the most natural and beautiful instrument is the violin. I happen to work in the world of opera, so it's the human voice. And there is probably, in the philosophies, More this idea that the instruments imitate the human voice, which is the God given or natural voice so the violin's beautiful because it sounds like the human voice. So this rise of public opera, I'm sure, I mean, don't know so many examples from the, let's say, the 16th or the 17th, sorry, the 17th or the early 18th century, but you did get to a point where there would be arias that had a solo violin obbligato.

There are some in Mozart.

Linda Lespets

Ah, yeah. And oh I have written here, was opera political?

Stephen Mould

Always. Yes. So that, yeah, so not only was it this amazing spectacle, but it was like it was political as well. Which made it even more, that's an extra level of drama. And look, when everything was going well that was okay, but then it was constantly subject to censorship. Censorship. Verdi could not write an opera without having the libretto past the censors. He wanted La Traviata, which was written in 1851 or 1853, I can't remember which, but the Victor Hugo novella was written at that time. So it was an opera about a courtesan at that time. Verdi was fascinated by it because he was never married to his final, or did they get married? But she was his mistress for years and years and years and years and years and had kind of been an opera singer slash courtesan. So he was fascinated by the subject, since it wasn't having any of that, it had to be set back in the 17th century. Which makes it a lot safer. There was a whole thing with the marriage of Figaro about not having dancing in it. Because, was it Charles II? I always get these people confused, but in Vienna, somebody had died. Maybe Charles I died, I can't remember, but the court, or the king was kind of in mourning, so he said there's to be no dancing on the stage. But also, the marriage of Figaro with all the thing about the, the classes that, that Figaro and Susanna are smarter than the count and the Countess. And the count, having to beg for the Countess’s forgiveness and all this stuff. The play of Behe was setting off. It was like it did not start the French Revolution, but it, it was one of those things that was in the air. It was revolutionary in its ideas, in, its in its ideas, and that was more than just putting on an opera. That was, that was, playing with the politics at the time in a slightly dangerous way. Yeah.

Linda Lespets

With his two sons helping him in the workshop, Giovanni Battista Rogeri is making instruments to order with Pietro and Gio Paolo. This is seen in the workmanship of the instruments. The sons style was slightly different, but this did not stop the father and son from making instruments together. Elements of several people on the one instrument are evident. Giovanni would work with his two sons who over the years grew up. Gio-Paolo in 1667 is thought to have died sometime in his 30s. There is no death certificate for him but at some point he died. Instruments from him just stop. Now, Giovanni's older brother, Pietro Giacomo, married, but over the years it became evident that they would have no children. Pietro worked with his father on orders, taking more and more responsibility in the workshop as his father aged. For now, he would finish the outline of the instrument with his distinctive long hooked corners that were quite different to his father's work. But his father, Giovanni, always insisted on cutting the sound holes. Later, as time went on and his father stopped spending so much time in the workshop, we can see instruments with the same Pietro outline and his own, not his father's, hand in cutting the sound holes. Into the instruments they would glue their label that gave the name of Rogeri, not Rugeri. Even then, people would confuse them. After his name, he added that he was a student of Niccolo Amati, and in the city of Brescia. This is all in Latin, and there's the date. Something his Brescian predecessors did not do.

So now we know just when he made his instruments. Sometime around the late 1690s, when Rogeri was in his mid to late 50s, it looks as though he took on a young apprentice called Gaetano Pasta. Giovanni knew Gaetano's father Bartolomeo Pasta from his days in Cremona when he was working in the Amati workshop in the early 1660s. When Giovanni Rogeri had arrived as a young man, Bartolomeo Pasta was only two years older than him, was finishing up his apprenticeship and about to move to Milan. There was less competition there as Cremona was now bursting at the seams with luthiers. But over the years, being in trade, Giovanni Rogeri and Bartolomeo Pasta may have stayed in contact. His workshop in Milan was going well and he had three sons who had followed their father in the trade. Perhaps three brothers in the one workshop was a bit too much testosterone, especially with sharp tools at hand and delicate instruments to smash. In any case, Gaetano Pasta was in his late teens and out of there. He left for Brescia to work for Rogeri and the strong influence of Rogeri can be seen in his work. His labels are written Milanese, Alevio del Amati di Cremona. But this may have been because it sounded better to be from Cremona and the Amati workshop. Giovanni Rogeri sons were at least 10 years older than Gaetano Pasta, and by this time, a new set of hands in the workshop were welcome. Pasta's move to Brescia may have been to be apprenticed in another workshop, see the world and learn from his dad's friend, who had just happened to have the most successful shop in Brescia at the time, but very soon he met the lovely Caterina Pavarino, or perhaps it was her lovely dowry, being the widow of a late colleague, Stefano Lassigne, who was a violin maker. So at the age of 22, Gaetano Pasta was married to a local girl. Probably inherited a bunch of useful stuff from his wife's first husband, and so, he stays. As time goes on, Pietro Giacomo Rogeri will take over the workshop from his father, making more and more instruments, continuing in his father's style, but exaggerating it with extended trumpeting corners to the instruments and not quite matching the elegance of his father. Giovanni Battista Rogeri would die in 1710 at the age of 68. Over in Cremona, Stradivari was well into his golden period of making. And then 14 years after Giovanni's death, his son Pietro Giacomo would die, bringing an end to the Rogeri workshop in Brescia.

And this brings us to an end of the series on Rogeri and Rugeri. I hope now you can tell the difference between these two makers. They both worked in one of the most exciting and industrious times of instrument making in this part of the world and have drawn influencers and influenced other great makers of this age.

A big thank you to my guests. Stephen Mould and Florian Leonhard for joining me in this episode. And if you have enjoyed these episodes, please tell a friend about it or write a review on the app you have listened to. This does in fact help. And this piece of music you're listening to right now is a live recording of Boccherini by the Australian Chamber Orchestra.

Finally, thank you for listening. And I hope to catch you next time on the Violin Chronicles.