Customer Reviews

An Incomplete History of the Art of Funerary Violin

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Put this one on the shelf next to your old Borges paperbacks and Pavic's Dictionary of the Khazars. It is a wonderfully written and illustrated (both with pictures and scores) scholarly history of a wholly imaginary historical episode: the rise, flourishing, and ruthless suppression of a tradition of violin music played at funerals. Kriwaczek tells of his discovery of the almost forgotten tradition of funerary violin, the guild that carried on its tradition, and the lives of its eccentric geniuses. We learn about funerary violins with their characteristic death's head scrolls, the duels at funerals between rival violinists with whitened faces and beauty marks, the great Hieonymous Gratchenfleiss, who proudly rejected his proper title of "Kurfürstentrauerviolistenmeister" in favor of the simple "Herr." The fact that this is all a product of Mr. Kriwaczek's fertile imagination is beside the point; it should have been real. It's wonderful reading and not to be missed.

This is the imagined history of an imagined art form: solo violin playing at funerals. Written in an academic style, it is a brilliant pastiche and as such is bound to make one smile: the writing itself is mostly dead-pan and does not attempt to be overtly humorous, except perhaps in the invention of the delicious name - Herr Hieronymous (sic) Gratchenfleiss - given to one particular practitioner of the art and in an odd phrase like the one describing a lady as having `married well and widowed better'. The author fits his story into real events in the political, social and musical history from the 16th to the 19th century, which adds an air of verisimilitude to this tongue-in-cheek work. The book is handsomely produced, and is complete with period illustrations (some must surely have been specially concocted for it) and musical scores.

In the 1830s and 1840s the Catholic Church is said to have launched the Great Funerary Purges to eradicate both the art and, wherever it could, the records relating to it: hence the purported incompleteness of the history. As part of the Purge, in 1841 a fire is said to have destroyed the headquarters of the Guild of Funerary Violinists in Cadogan Square, together with most of its archives.

A fine chapter near the end has some heartfelt reflections about the nature of funerals today from which the spirit embodied in the art of the funerary violin is sadly absent.

A book of fabulously rich invention and ingenuity.

We, particularly the more artistically or melancholically inclined, all have that feeling sometimes: a deep regret that history seems to have omitted what we know in our heart of hearts should have been the case. Rohan Kriwaczek, a 38 year old Brighton busker, has happily done his part to remedy the historical lack of a gloomy tradition that those darker regions of our hearts know is sorely needed: the guilds and the corpus of work for the solo funerary violin. Readers of this richly imaginative work, well documented with appropriate phony photographs and centuries-old letters and diary entries, as well as the frequently expressed desire that other evidence should be discovered to supplant these "tantalising" (a favorite word of the author) fragments, will likely apprehend the fiction of this history based upon the brilliantly macabre anecdotes, or the gothic eccentricity of its characters. For instance the celebrated funeral violinist Babcotte who, it is said, refused a king's invitation to play, "Does your king not know that I play only for the dead!" only to end up soon thereafter buried in an unmarked grave with a stake through his heart.
The reason that the publisher's comments for this book do not indicate that it is a fiction, is apparently because the publisher was duped. See the articles at www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article600440.ece, or the one at www.nytimes.com/2006/10/04/books/04viol.html. The last article is entitled "British author espies a funerary violin vacuum and so fills it." How the publisher's editors managed not to miss the cues of the deadpan humor throughout, one wonders, but they thought they were publishing a real esoteric history.

A couple of weeks ago, a violinist friend had me play some melody on her violin impromptu at a jam party and then she, another violinist and I played a kind of continuous round and took turns improvising. It sounded surprisingly good to me. Then, she introduced me for the first time to funerary music as described in this book. And she mentioned Paganini in relationship to this music, especially playing free to people in a cemetery.

My dad has spent about 40 years seriously researching Paganini, so I mentioned this to him to see if it rang any bells. He emailed me a passage from a letter sent from someone traveling from Dalmatia mentioning Paganini playing in a cemetery for free and a Dominican monk in a gondola saying things about the Bishop had said Paganini could no longer play there and people threw the monk in the water in response. The same letter is mentioned in Kriwaczek's book which I have now on an interlibrary loan. I don't think this information was previously available (my dad got it doing research in Europe many years ago and has not published this passage).

So, now I'm curious about the other quotes of other sources, such as a direct reference to the "Guild of Funerary Violinists" in the London Evening Post 17 March 1802. This paper existed at least approximately in that time frame, so maybe there's a copy in archives somewhere, or maybe it's a frabrication (Wikipedia claims the paper was published from 1727 until 1797, though online U.K. archives show mention of publication in 1802, so I'm not sure what to think at this point). Though I have a strong impression that there is pretty funny tongue and cheek invention in the book, at least the Paganini related letter referenced is authentic, so I wander what other authentic quotes are included...I'm now intrigued & a bit motivated to search for more evidence either way regarding his other quotes.

What's even funnier is that the "product description" above, apparently submitted by the publisher, doesn't even give a hint that the book is a spoof!