of Paris. The thin, bent, elastic stick of the bow, with its greater
length of sweep, gives the modern player incalculable advantages over
those of an earlier age, enabling him to follow out the slightest
gradations of tone from the fullest _forte_ to the softest _piano_,
to mark all kinds of strong and gentle accents, to execute staccato,
legato, saltato, and arpeggio passages with the greatest ease and
certainty. The French school of violin-playing did not at first avail
itself of these advantages, and even Viotti and Spohr did not fully
grasp the new resources of execution. It was left for Paganini to open
a new era in the art. His daring and subtile genius perceived and seized
the wonderful resources of the modern bow at one bound. He used freely
every imaginable movement of the bow, and developed the movement of the
wrist to that high perfection which enabled him to practice all kinds
of bowing with celerity. Without the Tourté bow, Paganini and the modern
school of virtuosos, which has followed so splendidly from his example,
would have been impossible. To many of our readers an amplification of
this topic may be of interest. While the left hand of the violin-player
fixes the tone, and thereby does that which for the pianist is already
done by the mechanism of the instrument, and while the correctness of
his intonation depends on the proficiency of the left hand, it is the
action of the right hand, the bowing, which, analogous to the pianist's
touch, makes the sound spring into life. It is through the medium of
the bow that the player embodies his ideas and feelings. It is therefore
evident that herein rests one of the most important and difficult
elements of the art of violin-playing, and that the excellence of a
player, or even of a whole school of playing, depends to a great extent
on its method of bowing. It would have been even better for the art
of violin-playing as practiced to-day that the perfect instruments of
Stradiuarius and Guarnerius should not have been, than that the Tourté
bow should have been uninvented.