Violin crafted to mark Brontë bicentenary
A RENOWNED violin maker has crafted a new instrument to mark the 200th anniversary of the birth of Emily Brontë, using wood from a tree which grew close to where she wrote.
Steve Burnett said he thinks the sycamore, which was felled close to the Brontë Parsonage, in Haworth, West Yorkshire, may have been old enough to have been there during Emily’s life.
The Edinburgh-based craftsman spent three months making the “Emily Brontë Violin” and said in Haworth that “in an artistic sense, it has come back to the moors”.
He said a musical instrument can be seen as an extension of the literary world. “As Goethe said, ‘music begins where words end’,” Mr Burnett said. “What I do is give voice to the environment.”
Although Brontë did not play the violin herself, Mr Burnett pointed to the connection in her novel Wuthering Heights – when Mr Earnshaw brings a fiddle back over the moors with Heathcliff but finds it in pieces after his arduous journey.
Mr Burnett said he is reviving the lost art of violin-making from the Italian golden age of the craft when Stradivarius worked.
“Hopefully it will be played in the Parsonage itself as time goes on, hopefully sooner rather than later,” he said.
The Brontë Parsonage is holding a series of events this weekend to mark the bicentenary, culminating in Emily Brontë’s 200th birthday on Monday. The anniversary is also being marked in Thornton, Bradford, where a postbox has been unveiled featuring quotations from her work.