Efrem Zimbalist playing the violin. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The warm, undulating sound of strings, which for us is the very sound of the violin, did not exist for most of the history of music. Continuous vibrato, applied to every note as the baseline condition of the sound, is an achievement, or a vice, of the twentieth century. Before, it was an ornament: used on a special note, the way one uses a rare adjective, and the old masters warned against abusing it.
The sources are explicit and funny. Leopold Mozart, in his violin school of 1756, which we will discuss here tomorrow, describes the tremolo as an expressive effect and then notes, savagely, that there are players who tremble on every note as if they had a fever. Quantz says similar things about the flute, and for singing the rule was the same: a steady voice was the virtue, wobble a seasoning. To hear how that world sounded you do not need to imagine: the first recordings of the twentieth century will do. Joseph Joachim, Brahms’s violinist, recorded in 1903, vibrates little and only where needed; the orchestras of the early century play with a straight sound that today strikes us as naked.
The turning point even has a name and a decade: Fritz Kreisler, who was among the first to make continuous vibrato his signature, and the 1910s and 1920s, when the gramophone began to reward the sounds that cut through the recording horn. Constant vibrato rounds things off, covers small flaws of intonation, blends sections: the modern orchestra adopted it as standard within a generation, and by mid-century nobody remembered that it had been a choice. When in the 1970s the historical performance movement brought period instruments and straight sound back into the hall, many listeners cried sacrilege: they were defending as eternal a convention younger than their grandparents.
The lesson holds beyond the violin. Almost everything in music that seems natural to us has a birth date: the A at 440 dates from 1939, continuous vibrato from the early twentieth century, even silence in the hall is a recent invention. Knowing this does not take away the pleasure: it doubles it. You hear the sound, and at the same time you hear the history that made it possible.