[44] In the preface to the violoncello tutor already mentioned, by Corrette, the untenable assertion is made that the violoncello was discovered by Bonocin (Buononcini), “preséntement Maître de Chapelle du Roi de Portugal.” A Bononcini, with the Christian name of Domenico, actually lived in 1737 at the Lisbon Court. At that period, according to Fétis, he must have been eighty-five years old. He must therefore have been born in 1652. He could not have invented the violoncello (if one could call it an invention), as it evidently existed before his birth. It is not even certain that Domenico Bononcini was a cellist. Possibly Corrette confounded him with Giov. Battista Bononcini mentioned later. [45] Another inaccuracy in Fétis’s “Stradivari,” p. 46, is that the name of violino “had already appeared in Lanfranco’s work ‘Scintille’ of 1533.” This announcement has caused some confusion. Before Lanfranco’s work was accessible to me, I also in _bonâ fide_ had made the same assertion in my “History of Instrumental Music of the Sixteenth Century” (p. 73), and I now correct it. The word “Violino” is not mentioned by Lanfranco, but in every case only the termination “Violone,” which is bass viol. [46] See monthly _Magazine for the History of Music_, Year XVI., No. 3. [47] The well-known violin maker, Aug. Riechers, in Berlin, possesses a violoncello by Gaspard da Salò (small size). [48] The French call this kind of recitative accompaniment “le recitatif italien.” [49] Accompanying the recitative with the cello was customary far into our century. I heard it in Italy at the representation of the old operas up to the year 1873. I am unable to say if the practice is continued. It has been abolished in Germany for the last ten years. [50] The widespread opinion that Gius. Guarneri of the Gesù did not make violoncellos is unfounded. Aug. Riecher informs me that Major H----r, in Berlin, is in possession of a cello which is undoubtedly genuine. Yet it seems as if this member of the Guarneri family had only made a limited number. [51] The above sketch is taken from Corrette’s Violoncello Tutor, which was published in 1741. [52] In my paper “The Violin and its Masters,” second edition (Breitkopf and Härtel), I have given a more detailed account of it as well as of the productions of the Italian, German, and French masters, which it is unnecessary to repeat here. See also the fabrication of musical instruments in Saxon Voigtland, by Fürstenau and Berthold, 1876. THE ART OF VIOLONCELLO PLAYING IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY. Violoncello. In the seventeenth century the violoncello still occupied a very subordinate and modest position; during the period mentioned, with very few exceptions, it was employed only as a bass instrument in the orchestra. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, however, there was already a great change; for Mattheson says in his “Neu eröffneten Orchestre,” which appeared in 1713:--