The Violin Maker Read online

  Of course, there can only be speculation—and plenty of it—about what he was after. Maybe he was impressed by the bigger fiddles of a maker from the nearby town of Brescia, Giovanni Maggini. Perhaps Stradivari had a premonition that the sonic requirements of violins would change and followed the simple notion that a bigger size would mean a bigger sound. (Which is not really the case, it turns out.) Or, could it be that he finally had to throw off the yoke of Amati for good and produce a violin that would be obviously his own?

  Stradivari produced the longer fiddle almost exclusively for about eight years. Then, just as mysteriously, he went back to the old, smaller forms. As the seventeenth century was about to end, he was a middle-aged man (by today’s standards) who’d been working at his craft for forty years. Did men have midlife crises then? Was it, as John Hersey imagined, that his first wife was gone (Signora Francesca Feraboschi Stradivari was buried on May 25, 1698, and it cost her bereaved husband 182 lira to pay for various clergy and professional mourners) and the old guy had found someone new and was in love again?

  Whatever caused the change, Antonio Stradivari, as the century changed, was about to go from making extraordinary violins to making perfect violins.

  Chapter 4

  THE VIOLINIST

  I only started to play the violin when I was eight and a half,” says Eugene Drucker. “Compared to some people, it was late.

  “I played the piano a little bit when I was five. My mother played the piano, though she wasn’t really a professional. Music was certainly held in high esteem in my family.

  “My father was a violinist for the Metropolitan Opera for many years. He had played with the Busch Quartet, which was a famous quartet, for a few years after World War II. I think that in the late 1950s, before I started to play the violin, it was a tough life for most orchestral musicians. The pay wasn’t as good as it is now. The musicians didn’t get much time off. I think the general idea amongst musicians was, ‘Don’t make your kids become musicians.’ So I think that’s why my father didn’t push me. But once I started and he realized I had some talent, then he became very interested.

  “My father was my teacher at the very beginning. And I had another teacher, a Viennese woman named Renée Hurtig, who was the sister of Felix Galimir, who had a famous quartet, the Galimir Quartet. Renée was a very good teacher—a very caring person with a lot of integrity—and gave me a solid foundation.

  “I wouldn’t say that I knew right away that I was going to be a professional musician. I was very affected by the Kennedy assassination when I was around eleven or twelve. I had this notion that I would go into law and politics. It certainly wasn’t serious; it was a fantasy, really. Then in the tenth grade I got into the High School of Music and Art, and after that it was pretty clear to me—I was thirteen—that I was going to become a musician.”

  More than thirty-five years have gone by since Gene Drucker chose the course of his life. In that time, he’d graduated from the nation’s most prestigious music conservatory, Juilliard, and a premier Ivy League school, Columbia, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in literature. He’d been a founding member of the Emerson String Quartet and with that group had already won six Grammy Awards. He’d traveled all over the world and performed at the most famous concert halls. And still, from everything I’d heard about him, as I approached his apartment building on West End Avenue in upper Manhattan, I expected to meet someone who was a classic Upper West Side type. I’m not big on puns, but there was no avoiding this one: Drucker, I assumed, would be high-strung.

  Before I contacted Gene to see if he’d be willing to let me follow the process of building the new violin he’d commissioned, I was cautioned with a warning from Sam Zygmuntowicz: “He’s very sensitive.”

  When I first talked with him on the phone, Drucker said that he’d be willing to discuss why he wanted a new violin, even though he owned a Stradivari, and he’d be happy to let me follow the process as he tried to adopt a new fiddle. “There’s just one request I’d like to make,” Drucker said jokingly. “That you’ll try not to make me seem as neurotic as I really am.”

  At our first meeting, Drucker seemed a little wary, but relaxed and awfully smart, with a quick and subtle sense of humor. He is very slim and handsome in a way that seems old-fashioned, like someone out of the Roaring Twenties, with curly black hair and soulful dark eyes. He met me in the lobby of the huge brick-and-stone apartment building where he lives with his wife, Roberta, a professional cellist he’d met on a chamber orchestra gig; and their son, Julian.

  “There’s a Tibetan restaurant near here that I like,” Drucker said. “Would that be all right with you? I’m a vegetarian and they have good vegetarian dishes. I try to go there when I can. My son doesn’t like that kind of food.” We strolled a few blocks on a bright, perfect summer day and got a table. I set up a tape recorder to capture the conversation as we both ate, something I’ve done dozens of times over the years with all sorts of people, including some well-known writers and broadcasters, folks who make their living with words. Often, when I listen to a tape later, both my guest and myself are so in-articulate that it seems English is not our first language. With Gene Drucker well-chosen words formed sentences and those became logical paragraphs. He was perhaps the most articulate person I’ve ever interviewed. I asked him why he’d ordered a violin from Sam Zygmuntowicz, started into my tofu, and didn’t say another word for quite a while.

  “There’s an incentive for me to get a Zygmuntowicz instrument,” Gene began, “because there are already two members of my quartet who play Sam’s instruments who are so happy with them, and I can see and hear what it has done for their playing. My wife also has one of his cellos and likes it very much.

  “Our cellist, David Finckel, had a Guadagnini1 cello. His had a very beautiful sound, but it was not in particularly good condition. He got a really soulful sound out of it, but it didn’t have the really big, bassy quality. I think when he got the new instrument from Sam it gave him certain dynamics that he wasn’t getting from the Guadagnini. Of course, instruments change as you play them. Sometimes David’s new cello sounded more like an old Italian instrument; sometimes it sounded more like a modern instrument. When the Zygmuntowicz is sounding its best it’s extraordinary.

  “But I had a theory. It seemed to me that some of the pitfalls of modern instruments would be less for cellos than violins. There’s a characteristic of modern violins I haven’t been able to take to, which is a certain shrillness. Maybe that’s even the way Stradivari’s instruments sounded when they were first made. When they mellow over the years, if they’re fine instruments, they develop depth and roundness but retain some brilliance as well. I hadn’t seen that yet in a modern violin. So I figured that it was easier to do that with a cello than with a violin.

  “But then Phil Setzer, our other violinist, got his violin from Sam. He had played a Lupot2 before that and the new instrument was a big improvement for him. It belied my stereotype—it wasn’t shrill.”

  The violin and viola are unique among musical instruments in the way the player hears them. For instance, when I play the trumpet, the sound emanates from the bell, which is about two feet in front of my face, and projects outward. Woodwinds aren’t quite so projecting. Their players are more enveloped in the sound, but usually it emanates at some distance from their ears. Even cellos and bass fiddles have a center of sound that starts at the musician’s midsection.

  But with the violin, the first wave of the sound, from the bow scraping across the string to the burst of melody out of the wooden box, is a few inches below the player’s left ear. The degree of immediacy and intimacy is very high. All musicians operate constantly in a complicated feedback loop, their trained muscles making a sound, their ears hearing that sound and their brain analyzing the quality—fullness, pitch, timing, emotion—and then telling the muscles to make minute adjustments to keep it up, or change it a little. With violinists, this process is exaggerated by the output being
so close to the input. There’s a phrase for the phenomenon: what you hear under your ear. “I am very finicky about what I hear under my ear,” Gene Drucker said. “It could be that I’m more focused on what I hear there than most players.” He told me that as he has aged, his hearing has changed and made matters even more complicated.

  “I’ve gotten more sensitive—even hypersensitive—to certain frequencies. Anything that sounds metallic under my ears—to me that’s a negative word. I can’t stand too much surface noise, anything that doesn’t sound like the deep core of the tone. I want power and beauty, and I’m very reactive to anything that I don’t consider beautiful.”

  What he talked about for the next half hour made me understand why Gene was worried that he might seem neurotic. He ate slowly and fitfully, moving food around the plate with his chopsticks, and told me in great detail how he’d come to decide what type of strings to use on his fiddle. And how, while other members of the Emerson Quartet liked to play on new strings, he had trouble dealing with the breaking-in period and preferred old strings. He analyzed why he was never able to use a shoulder rest on the violin, as many players do. Then he explored the subject of why he’d never adopted the habit of using at least a handkerchief or cloth to cover the chin rest of the violin for some cushioning and to counteract the wear on the neck from hours and hours of playing. He dissected the process by which he achieves proper vibrato on his instrument, taking into account the size and springiness of his fingertips and the moisture content of his skin.

  “The other guys in the quartet think I’m crazy,” Drucker said. “And I probably am. For example, I don’t want to get my fingers dirty right before I play, because that means I have to wash my hands, and if I wash my hands I feel like my fingers on the strings don’t have any traction.

  “Phil Setzer, for example—his skin is much oilier than mine, so he has to wash his hands. He’s always washing his hands before we play. But, of course, I’m the one who comes off looking like he’s crazy, because if it’s right before a performance or during a lunch break in a recording session, sometimes I’ll put my left hand under my leg while I eat so it won’t get dirty.

  “They laugh at me and I know it’s funny and ridiculous. I can say to myself that these are small and silly things, yet time and time again I have to deal with consequences if I don’t do things according to the prescribed rituals that I have.”

  Those of us who play brass instruments often suspect that fiddle players regard us as the Neanderthals of the orchestra. And, in response, we dismiss violinists as being rather effete. I remember a teacher of mine once saying rather scornfully, “Those fiddle players think they can hear the grass grow.” As I listened to Gene Drucker I began to realize that the level of intimacy he had with his instrument was simply deeper than I had experienced, perhaps deeper than I could imagine. But the detail of his concerns also made me empathize with the other members of the Emerson Quartet. And I remembered something Sam had told me. “I’ve never had a lot of trouble with my clients,” he’d said. “But Gene could be tricky.”

  To bring the talk back more squarely on the actual violin, I asked Drucker to tell me how he’d come to own a Stradivari and how important it was to play on a good instrument. I picked up my chopsticks and figured I could finish lunch without needing to say another word.

  “I always wanted a fine Italian violin,” Gene began. “I never felt that it had to be a Strad just because he was the most famous Italian violin maker.

  “My first instrument was a Fawick—Thomas Fawick. He was an industrialist of some kind and a music lover who actually commissioned makers in France—I think in Mirecourt—to build instruments, and then he would put his label in them. My father was playing a Guadagnini. It was in pristine condition, just amazing condition. He was frustrated with it because it had a bright soprano sound but not enough depth. So he sold it and bought a Guarneri—not a del Gesù, a Joseph filius Andreae.3

  “By then we were starting to overlap. I was sixteen and getting pretty advanced. But when my father bought the Italian violin I didn’t want to play it at first. I felt, ‘Let me take another year and hone my skills more on the Fawick.’ Which is what I did. Only rarely did I allow myself the privilege of playing on that Guarneri. I was very good at deferment of gratification—much more then than I am now. But after a while I was playing the Guarneri more than my father was.”

  Whatever the teenage Drucker was doing, it was working. He was made assistant concertmaster of the top Juilliard orchestra when he was seventeen and served as sole concertmaster in the two years before he graduated. During the summer breaks from Juilliard and Columbia, he studied on a fellowship at the Tanglewood Institute in Massachusetts. He was certainly on a track to land a job with a top orchestra after graduation, but he began to gravitate toward chamber music and the solo repertoire. After five years of college, at age twenty-one, he received a diploma from Juilliard and a BA from Columbia and started entering solo violin competitions. He was a prizewinner in several. He also began performing at the Marlboro Festival, one of the country’s top chamber music programs. In 1976, Gene and some friends from Juilliard started a string quartet. It was the year of the Bicentennial, and looking for a quintessentially American name, they called it the Emerson, after the writer and Transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson. Within a decade the Emerson had become, arguably, the most successful young quartet in the world.

  “I was fairly happy in those days with the Guarneri,” Drucker remembered. “I knew that it was not necessarily the instrument for the rest of my life. It wasn’t the most powerful instrument, but it had a penetrating sound. Frankly, I didn’t attach as much importance to sound then. I was more involved in other elements of playing. I was probably more concerned with clarity, clean playing, playing well in tune, articulation. The Guarneri gave me all that. Maybe I should have paid more attention to sound.

  “Anyway, eventually I came under a lot of pressure from the other guys in the group to lose the Guarneri. They didn’t like it. They knew I had a very good trade-in value with that instrument and they pressured me to sell it. It was sort of a sore spot between me and them.

  “I never thought I could own a Strad. Partly, because my father bought the Guarneri privately, instead of through a dealer, the value had increased by ten times in fifteen years. Over the years, Jacques Français4 always had commented how much he liked the Guarneri, and he was true to his word and gave me a good trade-in. I still had to come up with a considerable amount of cash in addition to that.”

  It was in 1983 that Drucker traded in his Joseph filius Andrea Guarneri and bought a 1686 Stradivari called the Rosgonyl, after a Hungarian violinist who’d owned it early in the twentieth century. Not long before Gene got the fiddle, it had belonged to an assistant concertmaster in the New York Philharmonic named Frank Gullino. There is a story that one night while playing a concerto with the Philharmonic, Isaac Stern broke a string on his famous Guarneri del Gesù and Gullino quickly handed over the Rosgonyl so the star could complete the performance. The Rosgonyl sounded just as good as the Panette, according to the tale Drucker heard.

  Drucker paid about $250,000 for the Rosgonyl. On the day we met, he wasn’t sure of its current market value, though he was paying insurance premiums on a policy for $1.5 million.

  You would think that an object worth that much might come with some sort of guarantee that it would be trouble-free, but Gene had learned in the twenty years he’d owned the Stradivari that what the Hill brothers called “ne plus ultra” was hardly no-hassle.

  “I loved the Strad,” Gene said. “It took me a while to find the right bow for it. Over a few years I think I tried sixty or seventy different bows. After about four years I finally found the right one. When it was sounding right, the instrument had an amazing vocal quality.”

  The problem was, the instrument wasn’t always sounding right, and, ironically, its problems were magnified as the Emerson and Drucker achieved greater and greater s
uccess. Stradivari somehow built instruments that have set the level of quality for the ages, but he could never have imagined the demands a modern musician would make on an instrument. As the Emerson began recording for the Deutsche Grammophon label, its players were put under the microscopic scrutiny of sophisticated microphones and advanced digital recorders, where every flaw was magnified. And as the quartet’s reputation increased, so did their complicated and busy touring schedule; the strains of international travel taxed the old instrument even more.

  “I had some real trouble in Aspen,” Gene said. The Emerson had been longtime participants in the Aspen Music Festival, one of the great summer classical music festivals in America. In 1994, the group began recording the complete string quartets of Dimitry Shostakovich during their residency in Colorado. (It later earned the group two Grammys.) There was a pause in the project for several years and then it picked up again in 1998, by which time the recording equipment had gotten almost exponentially more sophisticated. At the same time, Gene’s Stradivari got temperamental, reacting to the quick trip from the humid New York City summer to the dry western mountains.

  “It was a real struggle,” Gene remembered. “The fiddle went from sounding fantastic to sounding a way I couldn’t deal with too well emotionally. It was choking up. This kind of inconsistency made me very frustrated.” He made an emergency visit to a violin repair shop in Aspen and had the instrument adjusted, a process where a small wooden peg, called the sound post, which is wedged inside the violin box, is moved by minute degrees. That move affects the tension of the strings and alters the entire feedback loop of the way the instrument feels to play and, consequently, how it sounds. All violinists must have their instruments adjusted regularly, but it is a standing joke in the Emerson Quartet and among the small coterie of New York chamber music players that Gene Drucker has more adjustments than anyone. He swears that is a myth. Whatever the case, Drucker would usually entrust the process only to René Morel. The emergency adjustment in Colorado got him through the recording session but may have been the first glimmer that he needed to commission a new instrument from Sam Zygmuntowicz.