<<  -- 2 --  Tess Crebbin    THE MIGHTY VENETIAN

Tess Crebbin: First off, like everyone else in the string instrument world, we are eagerly waiting for your book. Can you tell us a little more of its history? It is really a forty year project?

Charles Beare: I started doing it when the researcher died in 1966, and I was left with a whole lot of photographs that he had already collected in the Venetian archives in the previous fourteen years. His name was Paul Rosenbaum. I actually wrote the book initially in 1979 and it was very clear when skipping through it that there were too many gaps and things we didn't know at the time. He had done a huge amount of work but he hadn't really started on lawyers' files. So I realized I was going to have to do this as a semi-retirement project. I am now doing it with the aid of a great archivist called Duane Rosengard. He is a bass player in the Philadelphian orchestra but his hobby is Italian archives. He was part of the team that found Stradivari's will, and he's written a book on Guadagnini. He's really been leading the research project for the past five years now. We feel that we have found out all we need now. But, as you know, one can go on forever, so there will still be a lot left to be discovered even after the book comes out. I am now completing the text of the book and there are about three and a half chapters to go. There will be a big chapter on Montagnana and all his family.

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