7/7 viola d’amore by j.u. eberle, prague, 1740

This beautiful instrument, which is on display at the Royal College of Music Museum in London, is a wonderful example of a late baroque 7/7 viola d’amore because it retains all original parts, perhaps even including the bridge.

This instrument was made in Prague in 1740 by the prolific maker Johannes Udalricus Eberle, who was and is probably the most well known of all the Viola d’amore makers.

This one has a body length of 38.5cm and a string length of 36.5cm making it a well proportioned size for comfortable playing and stringing. The instrument has a ‘flat’ and canted back made from flamed Maple, with Maple ribs, neck and a spruce soundboard.

Inside, the instrument displays the usual pattern of cross braces and soundpost plate that one would expect to see in a flat backed instrument such as this, and there are also Spruce corner and end blocks, linings and a central re-inforcement strip. There are no signs of nails or a wooden pin on the inside of the top block so the style of neck attachment is unclear.

The bass bar looks to be original and, interestingly, there are wooden cleats glued onto the insides of the ribs to keep the ends of the cross braces secured down, as these can have a tendency to pop off, especially when there is some curve in the back.

The fingerboard is made up from a soft wood core stained black, and has ebony veneers of the top and sides. It also has a decoratively cut end, typical of Eberle.

There is an intricately made four-fold geometric Rosette cut into the soundboard, built up of layers of parchment.

The head is beautifully carved and stylised and the boxwood pegs also appear to be original. The pegbox has some decorative carving running own the back and the whole design has been well thought-out as the sympathetic strings are diverted through a route that brings them to the front of the peg box. This makes tuning easier because if all strings (playing and sympathetic) are fed into the pegbox from the front, then all of the pegs will turn in the same direction to tune. (It is common with other violas d’amore that the sympathetic strings enter the peg box from the reverse and so these pegs need to be tuned by turning in the opposite direction.)

This instrument has a wooden pin/ post tailpiece type attachment, where the tailpiece hooks over a notch in the bar, something commonly seen on viola da gamba family instruments. This makes the tuning more stable as the tailpiece can’t be stretched in the same way as when tail chord or gut is used. The sympathetic strings are held by iron or steel pins which have been hammered through the rib into the bottom block.

The bridge could possibly be original and I suspect that the bone strip along the top may have been to raise the string height at some point, or to reduce wear from the strings, thus making the bridge last longer. There is also a bone nut mid-way up the bridge to hold the sympathetic strings.