Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Vittorio Salvi, King of Harp, was Toscanini's 'First Harp'. The 'Heavenly' Insturment.

The ANNOTICO Report

Vittorio Salvi is an 85 year old Italian-American, born (1920) in Chicago of Italians emigrated to the USA in 1909, and is considered the King of the Harp, and was appointed as Toscanini "First Harp".

The harp is one of the oldest musical instruments in the world, dating from as early as 3000 B.C, developed from the hunting bow,
and range from perhaps about 10 strings to 25, 34, and 47 string versions, and many in between.

See the History and Development of the Harp, from the hunting bow, the angled harp, through the lyre, with the addition of the pillar,
levers, pedals, and the pianoforte device, in the References following the following article translated by Dr. Giorgio Iraci of Perugia Italy.

THE KING OF HARP WHO PLAYED WITH TOSCANINI
from "Il Giornale" (Milano, Italy), Nov 5, 2005, page 25
by Alberto Mazzuca
(Translated summary, G. Iraci, Perugia, Italy)

Vittorio Salvi is an 85 year old Italian-American, born (1920) in Chicago of Italians emigrated to the USA in 1909. Music was a built-in feature in the Salvi family. His father Rodolfo, a maker of pianos, was from Venezia; his mother Apollonia from Viggiano, a small town in Basilicata, almost all inhabitants of which worked at harp-making. Vittorio, still a child, was introduced to the study of the harp by the most loving possible teacher, his sister Aida; his brother Alberto, senior to him by 20 years, has also been a harpist of talent and renown.

Vittorio has played the instrument in American symphony orchestras, including the NBC's directed by Arturo Toscanini, who selected and appointed him as "first harp". [He's quoted in musical encyclopedias as an excellent player, G.I.].

He made his own first prototype of the instrument in New York, in 1954. To be closer to the European market, in 1955 he moved to London where he established a laboratory and a shop. The following year he came to Italy, to live near Rapallo and to work in Genova. "A harp" - he used to tell his collaborators - "must have a sound as sweet as a murmur, but also the power and the nuances of a full orchestra".

His first factory was established near Alessandria (Piemonte), a second one in Switzerland but, in 1974, he closed both and established his factory in Piasco, near Saluzzo, in an area the inhabitants of which are famous for the quality of their work on wood, a very common and favourite trade among its. The factory (called "NSM", for "Nuovi Strumenti Musicali" [New Musical Instruments]).uses many kinds of wood, from the white maple of upper Michigan to the red deal of the Valle di Fiemme, the same one used by Stradivari for his violins; for the inlay work, valuable woods, from ebony to rosewood, walnut and olive tree: "We'll never use synthetic materials", says Marco Ghibaudo, the firm's present CEO..

Salvi's firm, during its development, has taken over a historical American harp-producing firm, Lyon & Healy of Chicago, .
About 1,000 harps are produced each year; ninety percent of them for export. Seventy percent of professional harp players, and all great orchestras (the Scala Theater in Milano; Metropolitan in New York, Covent Garden in London, Op?ra in Paris and Bolshoi in Moscow), use them.

Vittorio Salvi has retired from the activity and lives now on the French Cote d'Azur, between Cannes and Grasse; and has delegated the management of the firm (to Marco Ghibaudo, 37 year old).

A recording label, Egan Records, and a publishing house, Salvi Publications, have been established in London. Both of them deal mainly with music for harp.

There is ten stores all over the world; the one most recently opened is in Los Angeles. Three of Vittorio Salvi's children already work for the firm and the fourth one, now studying in New York, will probably do so, too. Vittorio's wife, Colombian-born Ana, is the president of the Vittorio Salvi Foundation.

In the last years, Vittorio Salvi has collected seventy old harps (mostly from the '700's and '800's) from all over the world, has had them restored at his factory and has now opened a Museum of the Harp. This is a beautiful way for a son of immigrants to give tribute to the "Made in Italy" expression.

The harp is one of the oldest musical instruments in the world. The earliest harps were developed from the hunting bow. The wall paintings of ancient Egyptian tombs dating from as early as 3000 B.C. show an instrument that closely resembles the hunter's bow, without the pillar that we find in modern harps.
The angled harp came to Egypt from Asia in about 1500 B.C. It was built from a hollow sound-box joined to a straight string-arm at an angle. The strings, possibly made of hair or plant fibre, were attached to the sound-box at one end and tied to the string-arm at the other. The strings were tuned by rotating the knots that held them.
The lyre was the favored instrument of classical Greece and Rome. It goes back to the very beginning of human civilization and is mentioned in Genesis 4:21... It was the type of harp the biblical King David played as a shepherd sitting in the fields composing his first melodies. Lyres are played with one hand only and have a limited number of strings.
During the Middle Ages the pillar was added to support the tension of extra strings. Stiffer string materials like copper and brass were used and these changes enabled the instrument to produce greater volume and a longer-sustaining tone. Paintings of these harps appear in many early manuscripts and their shapes hardly differ from those of the Celtic harps that are still played today.
As the early harps had no mechanical devices for providing the player with different keys, harpists would be quick to retune those strings they required for each piece. Modern non-pedal harps, however, are built with separate levers for each string. These sharping levers are designed to shorten the length of a string, enabling the tuning of that string to be raised by half a tone. Levers have to be moved with the left hand and a skilled player can achieve very quick changes of key.
The earliest known depiction of a frame harp in the British Isles is on an eighth century stone cross. Music was an important part of life in ancient Ireland and the harp was an aristocratic instrument, played in the courts of kings and before the chiefs of clans. Harpers were required to be able to evoke three different emotions in their audience by their music: Laughter, tears and sleep. With the Anglicisation of the Irish nobility, the traditional harpers became minstrels and street musicians reciting poetry and singing folk songs to the accompaniment of their harps.
There have been many famous men who played the harp, amongst whom are King Alfred the Great and King Henry the VII and it was only towards the end of the eighteenth century when sumptuous gilded instruments became an essential decoration in elegant salons, that the harp was exclusively played by women. Because of the enormous demands for harps. Revolutionary changes in the pianoforte mechanism, a modulating system which has remained basically unchanged until the present day, consisted of an ingenious system of seven pedals, that left the hands completely free for playing. On the harp, one reads off two staves as on the piano; however as the harp is tuned diatonically, fingering is the same in every single key for both hands, an unusual advantage over any other musical instrument.
http://web.singnet.com.sg/~harpist/history.htm

A harp is a musical instrument with multiple strings normally tuned to form a scale of some sort. To be a harp the strings must be fixed to a soundboard and exert tension upward or away from the board. All other stringed instruments press down or against the soundboard, usually by passing over a bridge. Actual "early harps" are those that were built before the later 20th century. Relatively few such early harps survive, so replicas or reconstructions of early types of harps are referred to as early harps.

http://www.historicalharps.com