The viola is a descendant of the _viola d’amore_. These and the later violas, used in the string quartets, orchestras, and as solo instruments, were made by a Tyrolese named Gaspard Duiffaprugcar in the 16th century. His instruments are marvelous works of art. In the back of one is a riddle in Latin: can you guess the answer? “I was living in the forest; the cruel axe killed me. Living, I was mute; dead, I sing sweetly.” When madrigals and motets were first played on stringed instruments, the principal melody was given to the tenor viol, the ancestor of the viola, even today called the alto or the tenor, but after the violin came into general use, the viola was treated like a step-child, for it is too large for a violin and too small for a violoncello. We have Mozart to thank for discovering that the viola had something beautiful and important to say as a solo instrument especially in passages where he needed a tender, sad or melancholy voice. You will read later that Beethoven, too, loved the poor neglected viola. He, Berlioz and Wagner used the instrument to great advantage. In 1572 Pope Pius V sent Charles IX, King of France, a present of thirty-eight bowed instruments made by the first Amati. During the French Revolution, the mob broke into the palace at Versailles, and all but two violins and a ’cello were destroyed! What a loss to art such destruction was! SHOWING OFF THE NEW INSTRUMENTS With this development of exquisite instruments, came the desire to use them and to write new compositions to show them off. These instruments gave unlimited possibilities for technic and tone, and created the school of Italian violinists and composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. If polyphonic music had still been in the lead, the development of solo instruments would have been impossible, but in trying to find new forms, the first opera inventors had broken the backbone of polyphony, and had replaced it with monody, or single line melody. Then, too, folk dances had taken the public fancy and had been made into suites, which could be played on solo bowed instruments with accompaniments, on spinets and organs, or on groups of instruments. The _sonata da camera_ was really a suite of dances and was the first form used by these new composers for violin. About the middle of the 17th century, instrumental performances without any vocal music came to be a part of the services of the Catholic Church for the priests were quick to see in the violin playing, a refining influence. Here the _sonata da camera_ or “room sonata” was turned into the more serious _sonata da chiesa_ or “church sonata” gradually losing its dance character, and thus became the seed of the sonata form of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven.