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Antony Posch was born on 19th February 1677 in Vils. Vils is 8 kilometres upstream from Füssen, on the Austrian side of the boarder in Tirol, so I suppose we have a Tirolean violin maker for once. Normally it is frustrating that one cannot find out who worked with or for whom in the 18thC. In this case the entire payroll of the Viennese Hof, from 1711 to 1765 has been published. It was an unimaginably colossal bureaucracy, with every imaginable profession, down to “Sesselträger” (chair carrier) I suppose the Uber driver of the period. The Lautenmacher are listed; Anton Posch, Anton Stephan Posch (his son) and Joseph Stadlmann, the Lautenmacher Adjunkt: Johann Lazarus Fux (Posch’s step son) and Anton Stephan Posch, as well as the “Instrumentdiener”; Johann Baptist Schnautz, Johann Lazarus Fux, Valerius Pacher and the “Instrumentdiener Adjunkt” Franz Peter Schnautz, Johann Lazarus Fux, Martin Arnold Vorlender, Valerius Pacher, and Johann Franz Xaver Zeiss. Before the Viennese Hoflautenmacher Mathias Fux passed away in 1700 he had been ill, and his wife asked to assume the responsibilities of Hoflautenmacher, which she had been doing for some time with the help of a journeyman, also that she had 7 under aged children to look after, and was currently pregnant. One may assume that this journeyman was Posch. By 1702 Posch is recorded as having married the widow Fux, and is described as “Lautenmacher”. Due to the growing number of violinists at the Hof, he even got a 100 Gulden higher wage than Fux. From his salary of 400 Gulden he was required to provide the necessary strings, as well as care for the 7 half-orphaned children of his new wife. This provision of strings from the salary of the Hof Lautenmacher was a constant bone of contention, as many original documents from the Hof archives show, which have been published by Beatrix Darmstädter on the home page of the Kunsthistorische Museum https://repository.khm.at/viewer/fulltext/0061521/105/ . Posch complained for instance in 1724 that the orchestra had grown to three times the size, and that he couldn’t possibly string 30 instruments from his 400 Gulden annual salary. His request was declined however, since they didn’t believe him that there were only 4 violinists when he started in 1702, and further that the 7 orphans he was obliged to look after back then were all now grown up. When he tried again in 1725, Posch corrected his figures in so far as he said that the orchestra had “at most” a dozen violinists when he started in 1702. His successor, Stadlmann was even more vehement complaining about string costs. It is difficult to know how literally to take all of these complaints, since grumbling that one is hard up has been a favourite hobby of violin makers for hundreds of years, and he was free to make and sell a violin etc. to someone who had nothing to do with the Hof for cash as often as he could manage, hardly an option for a Sesselträger (chair carrier). Further I have no knowledge of how string supply was in the 18th C. Today one sends an Email to the Petz firm, and a Turkish gentleman in a white van brings a cardboard box full of strings the very next day. Perhaps a Maestronetter with knowledge of the subject can tell me if there were string suppliers back then, or if Posch had to go out and mug somebody's cat The post as Hoflautenmacher was more wide ranging than one might think, since the orchestra also had appearances in places like Pressburg, Prague, Triest, Karlsbad, Linz, and Graz, where they would require assistance from one of the Hoflautenmacher team. From Vienna to Graz today is about a 2 ½ hours drive on a modern motorway, much of which goes on stilts through a mountain range. Quite how long Posch would have needed, cross country in a horse driven carriage I dread to think. Triest is even further. Anton Stephan Posch had an accident in 1749 near Gollitsch (N. Niederösterrich, near the Czech boarder), where his carriage rolled over, and he died 14 days later of his injuries. An Anton Stephan Posch violin can be seen on the web site of my colleague Gerlinde Reuterer https://reutterer.at/01violin.html Posch was also one of the marriage witnesses for Martin Mathias Fichtl in 1725 along with Leidolff as I mentioned here https://maestronet.com/forum/index.php?/topic/340459-martin-mathias-fichtl-vienna-large-cello/
