Non­fic­tion

The Vio­lin

  • From the Publisher
May 13, 2013

To say that the vio­lin has always been a Jew­ish instru­ment, as Russ­ian Israeli vio­lin­ist Vadim Gluz­man declared, might be a stretch. But there has cer­tain­ly been an affin­i­ty — from the Jew­ish refugees, many of them musi­cians, flee­ing Spain in the late fif­teenth cen­tu­ry to those twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry titans, Heifetz, Menuhin, Mil­stein, Ois­trakh and Stern. From the ear­li­est days, when vio­lin mak­ers acquired their craft from box mak­ers to the eigh­teenth-cen­tu­ry mak­ers and nine­teenth-cen­tu­ry deal­ers who turned it into a glob­al col­lectible, David Schoen­baum has com­bined the busi­ness, pol­i­tics, and art of the world’s most ver­sa­tile instru­ment into a glob­al his­to­ry of the past five centuries.

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