Although most of the great or near great at the turn of the century are no more than names to us, it is nonetheless possible to piece together from evidence gathered here and there a composite picture of players like Henri Petri, Adolf Brodsky, Arnold Rosé, César Thompson, Hugo Heermann, and Franz Ondříček, in which the sensuous beauty, coloristic finesse, and dramatic contrasts, the vibrant and scintilating quality and streamlined smoothness that we have come to expect from modern violin-playing would be conspiculously lacking. I had sensed that a new quality had been added to violin-playing ever since that first visit to Berlin in 1905. << less