The Violin Maker Page 3

  The more I thought about Sam’s situation, the more remarkable it seemed. His occupation appeared to refute one of the very basic rules of our culture: that science and technology keep making things better. In a world of billion-dollar search engines, phones that play movies, bioengineering and string theory, a shop in Brooklyn can still strive to produce a product that matched a tool more than three hundred years old. Was it craftsmanship or alchemy?

  By lunchtime that day—a European-style snack of cheeses, dense dark bread, and fruits shared with Dietmar and Wiltrud on a worn wooden table in the big, bright loft kitchen—Sam and I were settling on one project I could follow.

  A few years before, he’d promised a new fiddle to Eugene Drucker, one of the founders of the Emerson String Quartet, a New York–based chamber group that a lot of critics and many classical music fans would argue was the best of the current generation.

  Two members of the Emerson, cellist David Finckel and violinist Philip Setzer, were currently playing Zygmuntowicz instruments. They had learned of Sam’s abilities a decade earlier when Drucker had purchased another Zygmuntowicz violin. The violinist never really warmed to that fiddle and eventually sold it. Drucker was now playing exclusively on a Stradivari made in Cremona in 1686. This was before Strad’s so-called Golden Period, which began around 1700 (when the master was pushing sixty!), but still, it was a Stradivari.

  Gene Drucker had admitted to Sam that his violin could be temperamental, particularly under the rigorous international touring schedule the Emerson maintained and the consequent climate variations. Plus, the instruments that Sam had built for Finckel and Setzer just seemed more powerful, and the trend in all music, even classical chamber music, was toward more volume and force.

  “That might be a good instrument for you to watch me build,” Sam told me. “Gene is a very, very good player. And he’s really sensitive to sound. And he plays on a Strad now. So my ultimate goal is to make him give up the Strad and play my instrument. The other two guys in the Emerson gave up their old instruments almost immediately. But they weren’t playing Strads.

  “Gene’s Strad is an early—almost Amati-like—Strad,” Sam explained. The young Antonio Stradivari was an apprentice in Nicolò Amati’s workshop. “When it’s playing well it’s really something. The first time he ever came out here and played it for me I just said, ‘What do you want from me? You sound absolutely fabulous.’

  “But then he came out again and for whatever reason the Strad was not in good mettle and I could see what was bothering him. It wasn’t like he told me anything specific, like he needed a dark sound or a light sound. It was more like a feel—what he needed the violin to do for him and what his musical struggles are. From that feeling I’m trying to surmise what to do. I wouldn’t mind more information, but I think I have a free hand to just make a really good fiddle. And if I think it’s really good, then he’ll probably think it’s really good, too.”

  Yes, this did seem like a perfect case study for building the magical box.

  We finished lunch and cleared the table, and I told Sam I’d get out of his way so he could get some work done that day. On a last look around the workshop before I headed back to Manhattan, I noticed a button that Sam had stuck near the corner of his workbench. He’d had it made as a joke—but not completely a joke—to bring to a gathering of violin makers a few years before. It read:

  STRAD MADE NEW FIDDLES.

  Chapter 3

  THE OLD GUY

  Did I tell you about Strad’s will?” Sam asked me. We were in his studio on a gray early fall afternoon, and he was seated on the rolling office chair at his workbench. Just back from a long vacation in Italy, he was cleaning up the odds and ends of his work schedule, getting ready to begin the Drucker violin. He’d been carving the arching of the spruce belly of another fiddle before I’d arrived, and there was a half-moon ridge of curly wood shavings around him, and the room smelled of dusty pine.

  “It’s kind of a riot. Strad’s like some old man trying to fix everyone’s wagon. He was a controlling patriarch his whole life. His children never really moved out. His good son, Francesco—he leaves everything to him. His bad son, Omobono, who Strad once tried to set up in business in Naples and who blew some money down there—his legacy is that his father forgives the debt that Omobono owes him. I mean, it would probably be hard to say that he was a nice person.

  “But it stands to reason,” Sam said, brushing a pile of shavings onto the floor. “Someone who is too nice of a person would not maintain that standard of quality and output for so many years. Stradivari was an analytic and controlling personality in everything he did. There’s very little that’s accidental in Strad’s work. I know one of his violins—it’s got a handwritten label in it that says ‘Made by me at age 91.’ Like he was saying: I can still do it!”

  It is no wonder that so many myths have grown around Stradivari, for so little is actually known of his life.

  The historians have pinned down some facts, but not without pushing through a thicket of misapprehensions, and searching in vain over the centuries for documents and certitude. Stradivari’s last will and testament was a recent discovery, stumbled upon in 1990 by a patient Italian violin expert named Carlo Chiesa while paging through musty church records in Cremona. Prior to that, all the documentation anyone had to go on was a bill for his first wife’s funeral (the amount of which implied that the old guy had achieved a comfortable life; it is believed that there was a saying around Cremona at the time: “As rich as Stradivari”) and a few letters to clients, one apologizing for being late in delivery. But if he was the greatest violin maker of all time, Stradivari never wrote down any of his secrets (judging from the misspellings in the few documents available, he wasn’t very well educated), and nobody who knew him bothered to either. His last apprentice, Carlo Bergonzi, might have been an important link, but he died two years after the master. Stradivari’s last surviving son, Paolo, didn’t take up the trade and sold off the entire contents of his father’s workshop—fiddles, forms, tools, templates—more than two hundred years ago. Some of the stuff has been brought back to a small museum dedicated to Stradivari in Cremona.

  The standard study of Stradivari was published in 1902 in London, the work of three brothers—William Henry, Arthur, and Alfred Hill—from a long-established and respected family of luthiers and musicians. It is still in print. It is a sober, reasoned, and totally informed treatise, in many ways the opposite of Heron-Allen’s amateur musings. By the time the Hills were putting together their magisterial study in the late 1800s they had seen and sometimes worked on many of the six hundred Stradivari instruments known at the time. But while the instruments survived, such seemingly simple documentation—like Stradivari’s birth certificate—have been lost (or stolen as the Hills suspect), and even the great master’s remains have been desecrated and scattered.

  Antonio Stradivari (he often Latinized his name to Antonius Stradivarius, which was the style at the time) was probably born in 1644. Even that small fact is tentative and has been established by reverse reasoning, because the crotchety old patriarch insisted on writing his age on the labels of his later violins. This seemingly simple deduction has been challenged by at least one expert, who said those late labels were tampered with after Stradivari died. Renzo Bachetta edited the diary of Count Cozio di Salabue, perhaps the greatest violin collector of all time and the man who’d bought all of the master’s workshop materials from his last surviving son. Bachetta discovered that the count admitted to adding age notations to some Stradivari fiddles he owned. Bachetta went as far as to publish an essay entitled “Stradivari Was Not Born in 1644.” He thought that Antonio was born in 1648. Whatever the facts, the tenacious quality of the debate gives us clear clues to the passion people have about the Maestro of Cremona.

  There is plenty of historical evidence that the Po Valley of Lombardy was not then the pleasant, fertile farm region it is now. In the early decades of the seventeenth century there
was widespread famine, plague, and war. The Hills speculate that while the Stradivari family had been established in Cremona for hundreds of years, Antonio was actually born outside Cremona because his parents had fled the town, chased by either impending starvation, disease, or an encroaching army. The region spent much of that century under control of the Spanish crown, whose occupation was succeeded by the French and later Austrians.

  Antonio returned to Cremona sometime in his boyhood; at some point between the ages of twelve and fourteen he became an apprentice in the shop of Nicolò Amati, son of one of the widely acknowledged inventors of the art of violin making and the most esteemed luthier of that century. Or, young Antonio might have been an apprentice wood-carver in the shop of an architect named Francesco Pescaroli, and switched to violin making as an adult. That’s another debate among the experts.

  Whichever is true, nobody knows why Stradivari was drawn to violin making, or even why, if it were not his decision, his family would force him into it. Less is known about his family, but it is nearly certain that none of his forebears had made violins, and primogeniture would be the obvious and natural reason for choosing the career in those days. There has been speculation that Amati was Antonio’s godfather, but it has never been proven.

  Could it be that the young Antonio was somehow compelled to construct the means of music? That he found himself, say, pulling reeds from the riverbank and carving flutes, as Sam Zygmuntowicz did centuries later as a boy in Philadelphia? Or was it a practical matter of his family not needing another mouth to feed? Or, if you believe the theory that he came to the craft relatively late—after learning to handle wood tools and inlay cabinetry—was the career switch because he longed to build objects that would be the tools of art rather than the mere repositories of coats and blankets?

  Once you get started down this road to conjecture, it’s easy to understand why lack of fact has spawned a bookshelf worth of fanciful speculation. We like to think of genius as directly linked with a colorful personality, and there’s something unsatisfying in the thought that such exalted talent could reside in a dull and seemingly compulsive worker. In the town where he lived, Stradivari was actually fairly well known during his lifetime. There are notes of a Cremonese monk named Arisi that testify to that fact. His fame spread in the narrow world of music, and he was commissioned by foreign kings to make instruments for the court. But after Stradivari died, his reputation faded quickly. It took nearly a century after his death for his mastery to be rediscovered, and buoyed by the tendencies of the Romantic movement, his reputation reached its apogee, it seems, in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

  The library I use, the New York Public, holds fifty-five volumes devoted to Antonio Stradivari. Five are categorized as novels and eight are listed as fiction for young people. The rest broadly fall into either technical analyses of the master’s craft or richly illustrated portfolios of instruments that survive. Every writer is constrained by the same paucity of fact, and the more recent have to distill what little verifiable truth there is from a cauldron of sentimental myth. “Over time a vast hagiography dedicated to the master Cremonese violin maker was introduced,” writes the contemporary Cremonese violin maker Carlo Bissolotti, “which caused even further confusion and enveloped the craftsman in a thick fog of obscurity.”

  Maybe, as the Hills concluded, Stradivari simply had a quiet and happy life, evidenced by his long and fruitful productivity. Certainly what little biographical interpretation the Hill brothers offered in their study approached the level of hagiography. But it seems there just was something in the Victorian air that made Stradivari irresistible as a Romantic icon. In 1873, George Eliot was compelled to write a poem called “Stradivarius.” It includes this stanza.

  That plain white-aproned man who stood at work

  Patient and accurate full fourscore years,

  Cherished his sight and touch by temperance,

  And since keen sense is love of perfectness

  Made perfect violins, the needed paths

  For inspiration and high mastery.

  Only a few years later, when Edward Heron-Allen was publishing his examination of violin making, he chose as the book’s frontispiece that poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

  The Instrument on which he played

  Was in Cremona’s workshops made

  …Perfect in each minutest part,

  A marvel of the lutist’s art;

  And in the hollow chamber, thus

  The maker from whose hands it came

  Had written his unrivalled name—

  “Antonius Stradivarius.”

  Among a certain class on the island of the Virgin Queen, an Italian workman more than a hundred years dead was developing something of a cult. It continues still with surprising strength.

  Nowadays we’ll see advertisements in which an old fiddle is placed next to an overpriced watch or an aged bottle of booze and we’re expected to make the association of quality. There’s a line of crystal and silver named for Stradivari. When a young trumpeter decides to buy a serious instrument that could carry him into professional status, chances are good it will be called a “Stradivarius,” though it was stamped out in a factory in the decidedly unromantic town of Elkhart, Indiana. I own three. The top journal of the string playing world is simply called The Strad.

  Many people know just enough of Stradivari’s reputation that when they find an old fiddle in the attic with a Stradivari label inside they think he is going to make them suddenly rich. Not long after I started learning about violin making, I met a former network newsman at a party. He was a smart and sober-seeming fellow, but when he told me of the violin a dead relative had left him I could almost see the cartoon dollar signs appear in his eyes. I had to break it to him that so many thousands of cheap, mass-produced fiddles have been made over the years and had a label with the name Antonius Stradivarius stuck inside that most violin dealers have a firmly discouraging form letter to send would-be millionaires who have found a dusty violin case in an attic.

  But Strad’s reputation, both real and imagined, has enormous staying power. As recently as 1991, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist John Hersey was bitten by the Stradivari bug and published a novel called Antonietta, in which he takes the basic facts available and builds a sentimental portrait of a love-struck craftsman, a widower, who woos his second wife by building her one of those perfect fiddles that George Eliot rhapsodized about. Hersey was the clear-eyed and meticulous writer who gave us the masterpiece of reporting called Hiroshima, yet when he encountered the legend of Stradivari it was the myth that captivated his imagination.

  In this century there have been two biographical films devoted to Stradivari, one made in Germany in 1935 and another produced for Italian television in 1989 starring Anthony Quinn. How many late Renaissance craftsmen have one movie made about their life? Since Hersey’s book was published, a Canadian filmmaker named François Girard became even more besotted with the Stradivari of legend. The 1998 movie The Red Violin follows an instrument through centuries as it is passed from owner to owner and from continent to continent. In the first segment of the film, the violin is made by a Cremonese master, who uses the blood of his dead wife to color the varnish of a fiddle that is fated to become famous. The violin maker character is called Bussotti, but could this be anybody other than Stradivari?

  There is at least one other great designer and craftsman whose name is as well known as Stradivari’s, a man who also took wood and made art. But no casting director has ever had to wonder what actor to get to play the part of Thomas Chippendale.

  Sam Zygmuntowicz brings a set of interests beyond biography to his studies of Stradivari. While he is amused by something like the discovery of the old man’s will and the unavoidable glimpse into the craftsman’s character, Sam would rather that the master had bequeathed to posterity some technical treatise. “What I want,” he says, “and I suppose what most violin makers would want, is a little handbook that
would say, for instance, ‘If you want to make your instrument more powerful in the upper register, try making it thicker here, here, and here.’” If Antonio Stradivari had left behind his shop notes, as the neophyte Edward Heron-Allen did, he might have explained some things that still perplex people. For example, why, one day in middle age, when his technical skills were at their height, did he change the size of the form on which he built his fiddles?

  Working in the shop of Nicolò Amati, Stradivari no doubt assumed the normal duties of an apprentice, duties that grew in complexity and importance as his skill increased. By tradition, an apprentice could at a certain point begin making violins that bore his own label. The earliest Stradivari label ever discovered is dated 1666, when he would have been either twenty-two or eighteen, depending on which set of speculations you believe on his birth date. Though he set up his own shop in 1670, Stradivari spent the next two decades producing instruments very much like those of Amati—so much so that experts call this his “Amatise” period. It was obvious that Antonio possessed a prodigious talent. As the Hills say, the finish work on his instruments “marks him as having been one of the most dexterous craftsmen the world has ever known.” But to that point he played it safe as a designer. The forms were virtually the same as those he’d used in his master’s shop, the details were similar, the varnish retained Amati’s characteristic yellow tint.

  Then, in 1690, Stradivari changed the length of his fiddles. The change was—about a quarter of an inch! In the world of violins, that amount is huge. But to the rest of us…well. For comparison, the case that holds a compact disc is much thicker—about three-eighths of an inch. I pulled the contents of my wallet—two credit cards, a driver’s license, and another card with a magnetic strip that gets me on the subway—and stacked them. That was almost a quarter of an inch. When I added a business card it was too much. For violin experts, this alteration by Stradivari ranks in the same category as the day Picasso decided, What the hell, I’ll put the two eyes on the same side of the nose.