Pochette

The pochette or ‘pocket violin’ first appeared in the sixteenth century, as the smallest instrument in the violin family. Pochettes were made right up to the early nineteenth century, although their heyday was in the seventeenth century. Little data has so far been published about the French violin maker François Saraillac (1678-1712) and only a few of his instruments can be found in European and American museums. The pochette in the collection of the National Museum of Slovenia is therefore particularly valuable, the more so since it is the only one of its kind by him on record. These instruments were mainly played by dancing masters. Their shape and size meant that dancing masters could put them in jacket pockets (pochette is French for a small pocket) and take them when they gave lessons to their students. A pochette therefore also has great cultural and historical value. Dancing had been an integral part of the nobility’s education since the Middle Ages and, in the following centuries, also of the wealthier middle class. Dancing masters were in demand in Slovenia, too. According to archive sources, the Provincial Estates in Ljubljana employed a dancing master in 1650 in a newly built dancehall and another one, much later, in a ballroom opened in 1743 at Gradišče. There were dances in the following period in public dance halls and in the Provincial Theatre. That this pochette was actually used is also shown by the documented fact that it was restored in 1835 by Johann Schidan and again in 1989 by the violin maker Vilim Demšar.