Euro­vi­sion, the flashy orig­i­nal song con­test that cap­ti­vates Euro­peans, tends to get round­ly mocked in the U.S., where we choose our stars by hav­ing them sing oth­er people’s songs on TV in ridicu­lous cos­tumes. Nonethe­less, Amer­i­cans have fall­en in love with many a con­test win­ner, and that’s no more true than in the case of ABBA, the Swedish pop-dis­co jug­ger­naut who broke through to inter­na­tion­al star­dom when they won in 1974 with “Water­loo,” cho­sen twice as the great­est song in the competition’s his­to­ry.

The two cou­ples — Agnetha Fält­skog and Björn Ulvaus; Ben­ny Ander­s­son and Anni-Frid Lyn­gstad — first formed as Fes­t­folket (“Par­ty Peo­ple”) in 1970, and Ulvaus and Ander­s­son began sub­mit­ting songs to Swedish nation­al con­test Melod­ifes­ti­valen. In 1973, they sub­mit­ted “Ring Ring,” final­ly placed third, then released an album called Ring Ring as Björn & Ben­ny, Agnetha & Fri­da. They had tak­en on a new glam rock look and sound, and the album was a hit in parts of Europe and South Africa, but didn’t break the UK and US charts.

It was time for anoth­er name change, an ana­gram formed from the first let­ters of their first names. (They were oblig­ed to ask per­mis­sion from a local fish can­nery called Abba, who agreed on con­di­tion the band didn’t make the can­ners “feel ashamed for what you’re doing.”) The name, pro­duc­er Stig Ander­son thought, would trans­late inter­na­tion­al­ly, and the band would sing in Eng­lish for their next sin­gle, the song that would launch their rapid ascent into seem­ing­ly eter­nal rel­e­vance.

How did “Water­loo” not only break ABBA into star­dom but also “rein­vent pop music” as we know it? As the Poly­phon­ic video at the top explains, it did far more than raise the bar for every Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance since. ABBA brought glam, glit­ter, and the­atri­cal bom­bast into pop, using Phil Spector’s “wall of sound” stu­dio tech­niques to coax an enor­mous, envelop­ing sound from their vocal har­monies, gui­tars, pianos, horns, drums, etc., and tak­ing heavy inspi­ra­tion from Eng­lish band Wizzard’s song “See My Baby Jive,” while “pulling back on the rock” and lean­ing into clean­er, more dance-floor-friend­ly pro­duc­tion.

ABBA wise­ly put Agnetha and Anni-Frid’s vocal har­monies in the cen­ter, and they took a decid­ed­ly quirky turn from glam rock’s love of sleazy come-ons and songs about aliens. Orig­i­nal­ly called “Hon­ey Pie,” the band’s break­out hit became “Water­loo” when Stig Ander­son turned it into an odd ref­er­ence to Napoleon’s sur­ren­der, “such a nov­el con­ceit for a song that it’s hard to for­get.” ABBA con­tin­ued this tra­di­tion in short sto­ry-songs like “Fer­nan­do,” first writ­ten with dif­fer­ent lyrics in Swedish for Lyn­gstad, then rewrit­ten in Eng­lish by Ulvaeus as a tale about two old cam­paign­ers from the Mex­i­can-Amer­i­can War.

Smart song­writ­ing, catchy hooks, impec­ca­ble vocal har­monies, and flashy beau­ty — once the world saw and heard ABBA, few could resist them. But it took their unique­ly the­atri­cal (at the time) Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance to break them out, as Ulvaeus says. “We knew that the Euro­vi­sion Song Con­test was the only route for a Swedish group to make it out­side Swe­den.” The win was huge, but the con­test was a means to an end. True val­i­da­tion came with hit after hit, as ABBA proved them­selves indis­pens­able to wed­ding dance floors every­where and “com­plete­ly trans­formed what it meant to be a pop star.” See their orig­i­nal Euro­vi­sion per­for­mance of “Water­loo” just above.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lis­ten to ABBA’s “Danc­ing Queen” Played on a 1914 Fair­ground Organ

When ABBA Wrote Music for the Cold War-Themed Musi­cal, Chess: “One of the Best Rock Scores Ever Pro­duced for the The­atre” (1984)

This Man Flew to Japan to Sing ABBA’s “Mam­ma Mia” in a Big Cold Riv­er

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Two fam­i­lies have been cred­it­ed with mak­ing the great­est vio­lins of the clas­si­cal peri­od: the Stradi­vari and the Guarneri. The first luthiers with those names were trained in the work­shops of the Amati fam­i­ly, whose patri­arch, Andrea, found­ed a lega­cy in Cre­mona in the mid 1500s when he gave the vio­lin the form we know today, invent­ing f‑holes and per­fect­ing the gen­er­al shape and size of the instru­ment and oth­ers in its fam­i­ly.

But there’s far more to the sto­ry of the vio­lin than its famous Ital­ian mak­er names sug­gest, though these still stand for the height of qual­i­ty and pres­tige. Vio­lin-mak­ing cen­ters arose else­where in Europe soon after the Stradi­vari and Guarneri set up shop. In France, the town of Mire­court became “syn­ony­mous with French vio­lins and the craft,” notes Corilon vio­lins.

From 1732 on, French Mire­court crafts­men fol­lowed the strict rules of their guild to uphold their high stan­dards, and appren­tices trained there were in demand far beyond the con­fines of the town. They fre­quent­ly went on to found their own stu­dios in oth­er cities, espe­cial­ly Paris. Some­times they lat­er returned to Mire­court after sev­er­al years of suc­cess else­where. As a result the local art of mak­ing French vio­lins had a strong effect on the out­side world, whilst at the same time incor­po­rat­ing oth­er influ­ences. 

Famous Mire­court mak­ers includ­ed Nico­las Lupot, called “the French Stradi­var­ius.” The pri­ma­ry influ­ence came from Cre­mona, but “impor­tant tech­ni­cal insights were adapt­ed from Ger­man vio­lin mak­ing.”

The city entered a new phase when Didi­er Nico­las became the first to man­u­fac­ture vio­lins seri­al­ly in Mire­court at the turn of the 19th cen­tu­ry. His fac­to­ry “employed some 600 peo­ple, mak­ing his busi­ness the first large-scale oper­a­tion of its kind in the tra­di­tion-rich town in north­ern Frances Vos­ges moun­tains,” and inau­gu­rat­ing an indus­tri­al peri­od that would last until the late 1960s.

The post-indus­tri­al late-20th cen­tu­ry saw the col­lapse of Mire­court’s great vio­lin-mak­ing com­pa­nies, but not the end of the city’s fame as France’s vio­lin-mak­ing cen­ter, thanks in great part to Nico­las’ found­ing of L’É­cole Nationale de Lutherie, “where excel­lent mas­ters and vio­lin mak­ers keep the time-hon­ored art alive and dynam­ic.” The city’s “guild her­itage” lives on in the work of con­tem­po­rary mak­ers like Dominique Nicosia.

A mas­ter luthi­er and instruc­tor at the school in Mire­court, Nicosia shows us in the video at the top the time-hon­ored tech­niques employed in the mak­ing of vio­lins in France for hun­dreds of years, using met­al tools he also makes him­self. Watch the tra­di­tion come alive, learn more about the famous vio­lin-mak­ing city, which remains the bow-mak­ing cap­i­tal of the world here, and see Nicosia pass his skills and knowl­edge to a new gen­er­a­tion in the video above from L’É­cole Nationale de Lutherie.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Watch the World’s Old­est Vio­lin in Action: Mar­co Rizzi Per­forms Schumann’s Sonata No. 2 on a 1566 Amati Vio­lin

Behold the “3Dvarius,” the World’s First 3‑D Print­ed Vio­lin

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.