Hannibal Fagnola

By the 1920s, he was internationally renowned; his commissions came not only from all over Italy, but also from the United States and England. In the violin maker Guerra, he found a like-minded colleague who was willing to help him meet the demand for his instruments.

In addition to his own magnificent instruments, he also had others make instruments for him, sometimes including simpler, commercial violins and cellos. Around 1930, there were many instruments that bore his name but no longer possessed his original quality.

Fagnola died in late 1939, bringing to a close the last great era in modern violin making in Turin.

Life and Career

Montiglio Monferrato was an unremarkable village, situated on the slopes of the hill of the same name, just east of Turin. There, Hannibal Fagnola’s father grew grain on the land surrounding the hill and baked bread for the village. Hannibal was born in 1865, the eldest of eight children, and began helping his father at a young age. He made a career out of baking bread in the village, which he did until he was 29. As a boy, he learned to play the guitar from his uncle and built his first instrument. He was nearly thirty when his ambitions outgrew what he could achieve in his hometown.

In 1894, he went to Turin to start his own business there. The city’s prosperity stood in stark contrast to the impoverished conditions in the rural villages. Thanks to the success of its economy—which was based on a booming industrial sector—Turin had grown from 300,000 to 400,000 residents over the previous decade and offered him more than enough opportunities to advance in his profession.

It was not until 1899 that his name appeared in the city archives—not as a baker, but as a violin maker. For reasons that remain unclear, he disappeared from the records after two years, only to reappear in 1903. He had set up shop on Vicolo Scuderie Reali, very close to the “Marengo-Rinaldi” violin-making workshop, a business that, after Rinaldi’s death, was run by the violin maker Romano Marengo. It was a thriving business that employed a number of outstanding violin makers. Enrico and Eduardo Marchetti, Carlo Giuseppe Oddone, and Evasio Emilio Guerra were just a few of them. They built violins in the style of their great Turin predecessors—primarily Giovanni Francesco Pressenda and Giuseppe Antonio Rocca, makers who had left their mark throughout Italy.

Tradition has it that Hannibal Fagnola met not only the violin makers of Marengo there, but also Dr. Orazio Roggiero. This collector of stringed instruments and leading expert in violin making helped Fagnola develop his knowledge of violin making in northern Italy, Piedmont, and Turin in particular. Fagnola visited Orazio Roggiero regularly, which gave him the opportunity to study the instruments of important violin makers from the past.

The Turin school of violin making dates back to the seventeenth century. Around that time, violin makers from Tyrol came to northern Italy as refugees from the Thirty Years’ War. At the same time, a second, French school of violin making emerged in Turin, brought by violin makers from Paris who, attracted by the French rulers in Northern Italy, were able to find work easily in Turin. This French influence remained clearly visible in the work of the Turin makers—whom Hannibal Fagnola encountered upon his arrival—even after the two movements had merged to form the main lineage of the later Turin school of violin making.

There is no document proving that Hannibal Fagnola received training from any of these luthiers in the traditional sense of the word. He described himself as self-taught, but according to Blot, the influence of the Marengo workshop is unmistakably present in his instruments. It took five years before Hannibal Fagnola felt skilled enough to start his own business in 1899. At first, he still sold his violins under the “Marengo-Rinaldi” name, but he soon built up his own clientele.

Gradually, he earned a reputation as a skilled copyist of the great violin makers: Guadagnini, Pressenda, and Rocca. He built these instruments so well that he became famous far beyond Turin. Newspapers in Rome wrote favorably about the “Rising Star of Turin.”

Encouraged by this recognition, he submitted several instruments to exhibitions in Turin in 1902 and, in 1911, even sent a quartet to the major world’s fair in that city, for which he received a gold medal. In 1915, he participated in Genoa, and four years later in Milan. By participating in these exhibitions—which were highly valued by violin makers, collectors, and musicians—he strengthened his reputation in the city. This was certainly necessary, as a number of very skilled violin makers had established themselves in Turin in a short period of time.

By the midpoint of his career, Hannibal Fagnola’s reputation was solid enough that he was able to develop his own model and expand his business to include the trade in antique instruments. Hannibal Fagnola was so successful in both endeavors that he became a wealthy man. In 1909, he moved to Via San Tommaso, very close to the former Royal Palace.

Under French rule, Turin had been a city with a thriving musical life. But after Italy gained independence, that had completely disappeared. It had only a few concert halls left, a single opera house, and only wealthy citizens organized concerts in their large, often modern homes. Turin had fallen under the spell of industrialization and had developed into a commercial city.

It was only after prosperity increased in the early twentieth century that music flourished throughout northern Italy. Turin was not at the forefront, but the demand for old and new instruments led an unprecedented number of skilled craftsmen there to become violin makers as well. As a result, a concentration of outstanding young violin makers emerged in Turin. The city once again became an important center for violin making.

As early as 1912, Fagnola had established connections in the United States and England, which allowed his instruments to find their way to those countries. World War I virtually brought trade in Turin to a standstill, but Fagnola was able to continue exporting his instruments.

After the war, demand for his instruments continued to grow; he even received orders from Japan. He took on apprentices who later became his employees: Riccardo Genovese, Stefano Vittorio Fasciolo, his own brother Marcello, his nephew Annibalotto Fagnola, and perhaps most importantly, Evasio Guerra.

Hannibal Fagnola did not marry until he was 52, in 1918. His marriage to Catharina Risso was short-lived; it ended a year later with the tragic death of his wife. Immediately after her funeral, he returned to Montiglio Monferrato. There he later met Elvira Carolina Marietta Danzena, whom he married in 1921. Once back in Turin, he had his first and only child. The period that followed turned out to be his best; he moved his business twice and proved to have a knack for everything he did. In the 1920s, he built his finest instruments.

He moved for the last time around 1931. His house was on Via Exilles in a beautiful neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. He died there in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of World War II.

Hannibal Fagnola built a large number of exceptionally fine instruments, some of which are considered true masterpieces. After his death, the tradition of violin making in Turin disappeared for good.

Work and Influence

His early instruments were often strongly influenced by Emilio Guerra and Carlo Oddone, skilled luthiers from the region. They generally still bore the label of the firm for which he worked: Marengo Rinaldi. A cello from 1904 has been studied by a number of experts and assessed as an almost perfectly crafted instrument in the Piedmont style. Even in those early years, he was already making a great impression on the musicians, dealers, and violin makers who visited Turin.

That same year, he built a number of violas based on Emilio Guerra’s designs. He finished the instruments with a varnish that resembled Pressenda’s in both color and crackle pattern.

Between 1905 and 1909, he moved away from his earlier work. He focused on the Cremonese style, without imitating any particular violin maker, with the exception of Guarneri del Gesù, for whom he built several violins during that time. His work was not perfect, but it had a strong personal character.

In the accompanying catalog for the instruments he sent to the 1911 World’s Fair in Turin, he wrote that “the models of the great Cremonese violin makers were his source of inspiration.”

After the war, he returned to his original sources of inspiration: Pressenda, Guadagnini, and Rocca. Due to high demand, he began using a varnish that dried faster and hardened more quickly. That didn’t always benefit the sound.

Influenced by the antique instruments he dealt in, he began giving his instruments a somewhat old-fashioned look around 1915.

In the 1920s, he seemed to feel most at home with Pressenda, for whom he built countless instruments. Many of these were later affixed with a fake Pressenda label by others and sold as genuine. Until his death, he made few further changes to his style.

He usually affixed two labels to the copies he made of other instruments: a facsimile of the original and his own label. Only his Rocca copy was stamped with a mark that was a meticulous imitation of the original. Starting in 1922, he also wrote his name in ink at the top of the ribs.

Not long after that, he returned to his trusted models by Guadagnini, Pressenda, and Rocca.

The instrument in the collection of the Musical Instrument Fund is a magnificent example of what he built during his prime.

Fagnola's key associates were Riccardo Genovese, Stefano Vittorio Fasciolo, his brother Marcello, his nephew Annibalotto Fagnola, and Evasio Guerra.

He used two different printed labels and, occasionally, a handwritten one: “Hannibal Fagnola fecit Taurini Anno Domini 19..” and “Annibale Fagnola fece Torino 190..”

Sources

Blot, E., 2003, A Century of Italian Stringed Instrument Making, 1860–1960, Cremona.

Miyasaka T., 2017, J. F. Pressenda－Italian passion hidden behind consistency of form, zp.

Kass P., 2009, Guadagnini-re-evaluated, Turijn

Landon Ch., 2007, The Strad Magazine

Tarisio, Cozio Archive, accessed 2021

Thöne, J, 2003, Italian & French Violin Makers, Grottamarre.

Cozio Archive; Violin making in Turin, geraadpleegd in 2021