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70 free Violin trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Sixty-one violin trivia questions for players, parents at the back of the recital hall, and anyone who has wondered why a wooden box with four strings can sell for £10 million. The quiz covers how the instrument works (what the strings are tuned to, what the bow is made of, why the sound post is called the soul), the great makers of Cremona, and the people who made the violin famous, from Paganini and Heifetz to Perlman, Lindsey Stirling and Andre Rieu. There is a fiddle side too: the Hardanger fiddle in The Lord of the Rings, the golden fiddle in 'The Devil Went Down to Georgia', Fiddler on the Roof and the Titanic bandleader's violin. Questions start easy enough for a beginner and climb to the details only a conservatoire student would know, and each one is marked with a difficulty score. Every answer has been checked against a Wikipedia article or another primary source, and every question links to the page it came from, so if you think we are wrong you can see the evidence for yourself.
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Q 01From lowest to highest, what are the standard notes of a violin's four strings?
G, D, A, E
The lowest string sits at G3, just below middle C, and the top E string is the one that snaps most often.
Q 02Adjacent strings on a violin are tuned what interval apart?
A perfect fifth
Guitars use fourths, but the whole violin family (except the double bass) stacks fifths, which is why one finger pattern repeats across every string.
Q 03The violin in its present form first emerged in the early 16th century in which region?
Northern Italy
Brescia and Cremona became the first great centres, and the word itself is Italian: violino, the little viola.
Q 04Which French king ordered 24 violins from Andrea Amati in 1560?
Charles IX
Amati's royal set is among the earliest surviving violins anywhere; a handful of the instruments still exist in museums.
Q 05Which wood is traditionally used for the top plate (soundboard) of a violin?
Spruce
The back, ribs and neck are usually maple, while ebony is saved for the fingerboard and pegs.
Q 06The small wooden dowel wedged inside a violin is also known by what evocative name?
The soul post
Its position, a few millimetres one way or the other, changes the whole voice of the instrument, which is why luthiers borrowed the French word ame, soul.
Q 07Bow hair for a violin traditionally comes from the tail of which animal?
A horse
Grey male horses are preferred, and cold-climate hair from places like Mongolia grips the string best.
Q 08What do violinists rub onto their bow hair so it grips the strings?
Rosin
Rosin is refined pine resin; without it a bow slides silently across the string.
Q 09The word 'violin' comes from the Italian violino, a diminutive of which word?
Viola
So a violin is literally a 'little viola', even though the viola is the one most people struggle to name.
Q 10In which Italian city did Antonio Stradivari build his instruments?
Cremona
He is thought to have made around 1,116 instruments there, and roughly 650 survive, including some 500 violins.
Q 11Roughly how many Stradivari violins are estimated to survive?
About 500
Estimates run from 450 to 512 violins, plus cellos, violas and even a few guitars and harps.
Q 12Proceeds from the £10 million sale of the 1721 Lady Blunt Stradivarius went to victims of which disaster?
The Tohoku earthquake and tsunami
The Nippon Music Foundation sold it through Tarisio; the buyer has never been named.
Q 13The pristine 1716 'Messiah' Stradivarius is kept in which museum?
The Ashmolean, Oxford
It is almost never played, which is exactly why it still looks close to the day it left the workshop.
Q 21Joshua Bell's 1713 Stradivarius was stolen twice from an earlier owner; who was that violinist?
Bronislaw Huberman
The second thief confessed on his deathbed, and the instrument is now known as the Gibson ex Huberman.
Q 22Wallace Hartley's violin, played as the Titanic sank, sold at auction in 2013 for how much?
£900,000
It was found in an attic decades later, has two large cracks and can no longer be played; it now sits in Titanic Belfast.
Q 23Which hymn is popularly said to be the last piece Titanic bandleader Wallace Hartley played?
Nearer, My God, to Thee
Q 14The maker nicknamed 'del Gesu' earned the name because his labels always carried what?
The IHS Christogram
Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesu is now rated by many as Stradivari's equal, and his instruments have a darker, stronger sound.
Q 15Paganini's beloved 'Il Cannone' was made by which family of luthiers?
Guarneri
A Livorno merchant lent it to the teenage Paganini and was so impressed he refused to take it back.
Q 16Niccolo Paganini was born in 1782 in which city?
Genoa
His 24 Caprices remain the Everest of solo violin writing and inspired variations by Brahms, Rachmaninoff and Lutoslawski.
Q 17How many years after his 1840 death was Paganini finally interred, having been denied a Catholic burial?
36
Rumours of a pact with the devil and dying without last rites kept his body out of consecrated ground until 1876 in Parma.
Q 18At which Washington, D.C. Metro station did Joshua Bell busk incognito for a 2007 newspaper experiment?
L'Enfant Plaza
He played for about 45 minutes on a Stradivarius; of 1,097 passers-by, seven stopped and one recognised him.
Q 19How much money did Joshua Bell collect from passers-by during his 45-minute subway performance?
$32.17
That excludes a $20 note from the one person who recognised him; his concert tickets that week were going for around $100.
Q 20Which Washington Post writer won a Pulitzer Prize for the article about Joshua Bell's subway experiment?
Gene Weingarten
'Pearls Before Breakfast' won the 2008 Pulitzer for Feature Writing.
Survivors' accounts disagree, and some remembered a waltz called 'Songe d'Automne' instead.
Q 24Vivaldi's Four Seasons were published in 1725 in which city?
Amsterdam
They appeared as the first four of twelve concertos in Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione, each paired with a sonnet.
Q 25Unusually for the time, Vivaldi published each Four Seasons concerto together with what?
A sonnet
The poems, possibly Vivaldi's own, spell out the barking dogs, drunkards and icy winds that the music depicts.
Q 26Nigel Kennedy's 1989 recording of The Four Seasons sold roughly how many copies?
Over 3 million
It made the spiky-haired Kennedy a household name in Britain and remains one of the best-selling classical records ever.
Q 27Fine violin bows have traditionally been made from which Brazilian wood?
Pernambuco
The tree is now endangered and its export is regulated by treaty, so makers are turning to carbon fibre.
Q 28Roughly how many hairs are in a violin bow?
150 to 200
Turning the screw at the frog tightens the whole ribbon of hair; players loosen it again after every session.
Q 29Which French maker is credited with bringing the bow into its modern form?
Francois Tourte
Tourte's concave stick, longer and heavier at the tip, is why Romantic composers could ask for a singing sustained legato.
Q 30Who was the soloist at the unsuccessful 1806 premiere of Beethoven's Violin Concerto?
Franz Clement
The piece languished until 1844, when the 12-year-old Joseph Joachim played it in London with Mendelssohn conducting.