François Tourte

François Tourte 1818
engraving by J. Frey

François Xavier Tourte (* 1747 or 1748 in Paris ; † April 25, 1835 there ), called le jeune (the younger), was a French bow maker . He is often referred to as the " Stradivarius of the bow" because he shaped the construction of the modern bowed string instrument as strongly as the Italian master did the construction of the actual instruments. Its innovations have essentially endured to this day. The physical laws followed by the dimensions of Tourte bows could only be demonstrated by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in the middle of the 19th century and are puzzling to research insofar as they presuppose mathematical knowledge and a precision of measurement accuracy, about which themselves highly specialized craftsmen of the late 18th century can hardly have had.

“Bowmaking was without question raised by Tourte to the status of a fine art. His genius lay in crafting tools that not only made an invaluable contribution to string musicians and their music but were in themselves works of art, veritable sculptures in pernambuco. ”

- Paul Childs : New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

According to François-Joseph Fétis , the younger of the Tourte brothers completed an eight-year training course as a watchmaker before returning to his father's craft. His father Nicolas , who had already achieved a certain reputation as a bow maker through high-quality, innovative work, initially handed the workshop over to his older brother Léonard . Since François usually did not “sign” his own pieces with a separate brand stamp, it is not clear how many and which sheets with the Léonard mark were actually made by his brother; it is likely that both worked closely together and therefore a clear assignment can be ruled out at all.

In the first years of the 19th century, François' reputation as the best bow maker of his time was so solid that the Abbé Sibire (1757–1827) in his book La chélonomie, ou Le parfait luthier (Brussels, 1806) gave him the perfection of the bow making trade attributed. Tourte now had his own workshop in house number 10, quai de l'École, near the Louvre . His career thus documents, among other things, the increased social mobility of post-revolutionary France: Under the conditions of the Ancien Régime , he was unable to join a guild and was therefore officially only allowed in the Quinze-Vingts district (in east Paris, now part of the 12th arrondissement ) Pursue activity. It was only the social impact of the French Revolution that allowed him to settle in a prestigious location in the center of Paris according to his reputation and prosperity - he asked for at least 14 Louis d'or for an arch.

Research differentiates between two or three phases in Tourte's work, whereby both approaches ignore his early work, about which hardly any reliable statements can be made:

• The transition phase , which still shows the influence of baroque arch construction, but which already uses only the highest quality pernambuco wood for the production of the arch pole.
• The early modern arches perfect the design and balance of the frog and the arch tip and already use the octagonal, concave arch pole.
• The last 25 to 30 years of his life are considered Tourte's actual “maturation period”. The properties of pernambuco wood enabled him to make his bows in the same dimensions once he found them. These values ​​(for example, on the violin bow 74–75 cm length of the bow, 62 cm playable bow hair, center of gravity 19 cm above the frog and a number of about 200 hairs in a nearly 1 cm wide cover) have remained practically unchanged to this day .

A particular achievement of Tourte is the constant tapering of the arc radius in a logarithmic ratio. Vuillaume assumes that Tourte set ten points on the arch rod, between which the radius decreases by 0.3 mm. Around 1800 the optimization of these dimensions would have been a complex task even for a mathematician; the exact measurement of the values ​​was certainly beyond the practical possibilities of a workshop at the time. It can therefore be assumed that Tourte found the measurements partly experimental, partly intuitive, whereby an above-average - possibly even more sharpened in watchmaking training - precision mechanical instinct and an extraordinary sense of proportion are ascribed to him. Since the watchmaking trade also teaches practical applications of mathematical and physical knowledge in a special way, Tourte's exceptional position can be explained at least in part by his unconventional educational background.

In addition to the future-oriented innovations that dramatically improved the playing characteristics, Tourte bows, especially of the mature style, are characterized by an artistically demanding handling of valuable materials ( precious metals , mother-of-pearl , ivory , etc.), which gives his work in terms of functionality and visual effect Almost unrivaled in life. It is precisely because of Tourte's special position that he did not consider it necessary to mark his work - he is said to have made around 5000 sheets - in any way. Only on two relatively late pieces did he stick a tiny piece of paper in an almost inaccessible place in the frog slot, the inscription reads: Cet archet a été fait par François Tourte en 1824, age de soixante-dis-sept ans. (This bow was made by François Tourte in 1824, at the age of seventy-seven.)

literature

• Paul Childs: Art. François Xavier Tourte [le jeune] . In: L. Macy (Ed.): Grove Music Online ( online here ; accessed April 27, 2008)
• Hans-Heinz Dräger : Art. Tourte (family) . In: Friedrich Blume (Ed.): The music in past and present . Directmedia, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89853-460-X , Volume 13, pp. 596 f.
• Balthasar Planta: Elements for choosing a violin bow . In: Das Musikinstrument (Volume 23 of the series of publications), Frankfurt am Main 1980, ISBN 3-920112-05-9
  Treats in an exact but very condensed form the mathematical, physical and material-technical principles described by Vuillaume, which Tourte realized in his arcs.