Johann Baptist Schweitzer

Violin maker
(1790 – 1865)

For years Johann Baptist Schweitzer's own birthplace was disputed — some sources placed him in Vienna, others in Pécs, a confusion not helped by the two Hungarian place names involved (Vienna is "Bécs," Pécs is also called "Fünfkirchen") and by a long history of the letters B and P being mixed up in older records. The city archives of Pécs eventually settled the question: a baptismal register ...Read More records his baptism there on 10 April 1790, the day of or day after birth being standard practice at the time. He trained under Franz Geissenhof in Vienna — the same master who taught his own older contemporaries Peter Teufelstorfer and Josef Schmied of Pressburg — before returning to Pécs around 1820–21, and later working in Pest, where he died in 1865.

His output varied: some flatter, more experimental violins fell short tonally, but his best work — beautifully figured wood, outstanding tone — earned him recognition as the first Hungarian maker to be taken seriously on an international stage. He tended to leave his plates on the thick side, which meant many of his instruments were later thinned down by restorers. His violas are cleanly made and well-proportioned; his cellos, some built on the Santo Serafin model, are considered especially fine, closer in character to the old Italian masters than to anything else being made in Hungary at the time. A surviving 1834 double bass is held in the Hungarian National Museum. His success in demonstrating that the Stradivari model offered more tonal range than Stainer's high arching made his own violins a frequent target for copying and outright forgery, particularly out of Mittenwald and Markneukirchen.

He was, above all, an important teacher: Gabriel Lemböck, Anton Sitt, Johann Baptist Dvořák, Samuel Nemessányi, and Thomas Zach — who took over his workshop outright in 1856 — all trained or worked under him, making Schweitzer's shop the real root of the 19th-century Hungarian school. Read Less