The Violin Maker Read online

  “Sam and I discussed making a copy of my Strad briefly,” Gene told me, “and decided there really wasn’t much point in doing that.” Phil Setzer’s Zygmuntowicz was modeled on the Stradivari that belonged to one of the last great soloists-turned-teachers, Oscar Shumsky, who taught both Setzer and Drucker at Juilliard.

  “I love the way Phil sounds on his instrument, but when I pick it up and play it, it doesn’t feel right,” Gene said. “I knew Sam had made copies of other great Strads. Sam actually made measurements of my Strad. I think he could hear what it was I loved in the Strad. And he could also see some of the things that frustrate me too.” When Gene visited the shop in Brooklyn, he played several of Sam’s instruments and gravitated toward models that were based on the designs of Guarneri del Gesù.

  “I tried two Guarneri models that he had in the shop,” Gene said, “and I wanted a sort of fusion of the two. I took to those instruments very quickly. A few times I’ve had the good fortune to put my hands on a Guarneri del Gesù. Most of them were just amazing. There’s a reason that they’re the most expensive violins in existence. They are very powerful but they have this depth and a dark, robust sound. I have to say that my Strad has a darker sound than most Strads. So in that sense, maybe it reflects some of my preferences.

  “But all these words become rather limited when you really try to imagine the sound characteristics of different instruments. We only have a few words to describe the sound of an instrument, and the gradations are far more numerous than the words we have to describe them.”

  Listening to Gene made me realize the difficulty inherent in a successful transaction between a luthier and a violinist. There was goodwill on both sides, of course; both men wanted a great-sounding new violin. But there seemed to be huge potential for misunderstanding.

  “I don’t know exactly what effect the new violin is going to have on me individually or on the group,” Gene said. “I suppose it’s going to be similar to what happened when Sam’s other instruments came into the group. The sound will be more powerful and clearer.

  “I’m just going to wait and see. I don’t want to make Sam nervous. I’m sure it’s going to be a fine instrument. It’s just that it may be a little harder to please me than it was for Phil and David, because neither of them was playing a Stradivari. I have to say that no matter how much trouble I sometimes have with my Strad, the kind of up-and-down relationship I have with it, it’s still one of the best early Strads and Stradivari is still the greatest violin maker who ever lived.

  “It’s going to be harder for me to say, ‘I don’t need that anymore.’ The soul nourishment it has given me over the years is great. I’ve been playing it for nearly twenty years now and it is so very much a part of my identity.”

  Chapter 5

  THE SINGING TREE

  Given, a log of wood.

  Make a fiddle.

  Trouble is, there really are no givens in violin making.

  After we both returned to New York from Oberlin, I began to call Sam regularly and invite myself to Brooklyn for visits. He kept assuring me that he was going to get started on the fiddle for Gene Drucker anytime now. There were a few odds and ends to clear off his workbench. And it was summer, and, as might be expected of anyone who thinks of himself as only a demi-American, Sam was following the European ethos and planning a long vacation. In this case, off to Italy to visit his wife’s relatives in the northern lake region. And maybe a side trip to a wood dealer near Brescia, just about an hour’s train ride from Stradivari’s home, Cremona.

  Good-tone wood for a high-end fiddle doesn’t exactly fall from trees. And choosing the right wood is the crucial first step in building a new instrument. “There are decisions I have to make first that will predetermine the quality of the instrument,” Sam told me. “The character of the wood will definitely predispose the character of the sound. The nature of the fiddle is in its materials.”

  Two kinds of wood are used predominately—spruce for the belly, or sound board, and maple for the back. Both are quite common, but coming up with the perfect raw material is nearly as much of an art as the careful carving that will follow. In 1866, the top violin maker of the day, Jean-Baptiste Vuillame, wrote to a client, “If you could see the bother I have and the lengths I go through to find the right materials for my violins.” Times haven’t changed.

  One day I arrived at his studio and asked Sam to show me his wood supply. I’d seen one violin expert compare the experience to visiting the wine cellar of an oenophile. Sam put down a fiddle he was repairing and said to follow him. We headed out of the workshop and down the hall toward the kitchen.

  Past the big commercial stove was a short, dark hallway leading to a bathroom. One wall was lined with simple wood-framed shelves that climbed from the floor all the way to the high ceilings. On those shelves rested what appeared to be hundreds of pieces of wood, looking like a very large and eccentric collection of children’s blocks.

  Sam led me over to the shelves and gave them a proprietary look. With a small sweeping gesture he said, “I’ve spent thousands of dollars on this stuff. There’s forty or fifty thousand dollars here—probably more than that.” He reached into the stacks and moved a few pieces, in the way someone would shift books while searching on a library shelf. “Probably,” he said, “like many violin makers I will end my life with some of the best pieces of wood sitting here gathering dust. I’ve told my wife that after I’m gone a lot of handsome young violin makers would do almost anything to get their hands on this wood.”

  I asked Sam how he picks a piece from all these when he’s starting to build a violin.

  He reached up and pulled a thin triangle of wood from the shelf. Held between his hands, it looked like a very wide shingle of clapboard siding for a house, though it was less than two feet in length. Sam rubbed the wood.

  “You can tell a lot about the wood just by running your hands over it,” he said. “You hear that little hiss? This is tone wood, so it has to make a sound. It’s spruce, which is used in almost all stringed instruments as the soundboard. Pianos, guitars, mandolins, fiddles—it’s the universal choice. That’s because it happens to be the strongest wood per unit of weight. It’s very light but very strong. They also make masts for ships with it.”

  Sam pushed the piece of spruce toward me and into better light. Close up, I could see thin bands of dark wood alternating with broader bands of light wood, almost like a corduroy. “There’s an alternation between summer and winter growth in a conifer tree like spruce,” he told me. “It grows fast in the summer and then slows down in the fall and virtually stops in winter. Functionally, those broad bands of lighter wood are very light, but they’re reinforced by the very hard bands of darker wood. It’s kind of why corrugated cardboard is so strong, or the beams in a ceiling with air space in between, or the rebar in concrete. Spruce is naturally engineered to create the same structure.”

  The particular piece he has handed me was sawn on what is called a quarter cut, taken out of the spruce log like a piece of pie. Usually, two of these pieces would be joined together at the thick ends to make a violin belly, which, in finished form, is no more than ten inches wide, fourteen inches long, and only four centimeters at its thickest—half that in many places. A pie cut of wood like this could cost anywhere from fifty dollars well into the hundreds. Factors that affect the cost include age, quality of the cut, pedigree, and what the violin maker is willing to pay.

  “This stuff is really old,” Sam told me. “It came from a shop in Paris that was run by Jacques Français’s father, Emile. So I know it’s at least eighty years old, and probably older. I spent a bloody fortune for it, and some of it has been disappointing. But you look at a piece like this and you just say, WOW! It’s as old as the hills and it’s split well. I’m pretty sure the belly of the fiddle I’ll make for Gene will come from this stock.”

  For the violin’s back, maple is the standard. The back is not quite so vital to sound production as the belly, b
ut it is very important for the look of the fiddle. The natural flamelike design in maple can be hypnotically beautiful. “Imagine a woman with curly hair,” Sam said, “and imagine setting her hair with epoxy and then grinding off the ends, cutting across all those layers of fibers. Great-looking maple, when you turn it, catches the light in different ways. Some grains absorb the light, some reflect it. And when you turn it again it shifts.”

  It seems that from the very beginning of violin making, luthiers have been looking for a piece of wood to make them say WOW! Making a magical box requires at least a little sorcery. Among the many tangled tales that have been told about the “secrets” of the great makers of Cremona, the nature and handling of the wood ranks second as a subject of speculation. Only the varnish on that wood has inspired more conjecture, suspicion, and downright superstition. Perhaps it’s coincidental that picking the wood is the first job in building a fiddle, and varnishing is the last.

  Almost any kind of wood could be used to make a violin. A captured American flier fashioned a fiddle from beech bed slats in a World War II German prison camp. Pinchas Zukerman played that instrument once and claimed it sounded pretty good. But spruce and maple are by far the most common. Of course almost nothing is commonplace in lutherie, or without history and mystique.

  Some think that the spruce must be from a high altitude and a bad soil—a tree that had to fight hard for its life is somehow better equipped to stand up to the stresses of music making. Some go as far as to recommend that one must only use the wood from the south side of trees that have grown on the south side of a hill. There is a whole school of speculation that Stradivari and Guarneri somehow “treated” their wood, and that is why their instruments are so glorious.

  This speculation has a long history. I had found a copy of Edward Heron-Allen’s strange little book, Violin-Making as it was, and is, and it had become my bedside table companion. He devoted a chapter to tone wood. It is characteristic of the book as a whole: peppered with Latin phrases, containing a thicket of footnotes that support an argument that is detailed and certain in its judgments. “The best maple to be had for our purpose,” Heron-Allen wrote, “is that which grows on the southern slopes of the Carpathians.” Elsewhere, he decided, “There is no proof in existence that the old Italians used any artificial means for drying or preparing their wood.”

  It wasn’t long after Heron-Allen published his treatise that the Hills released their definitive study of Stradivari. Their combined expertise dwarfed that of the obsessive amateur, but they had to deal with the same wild theories of woodcutting and wood treatment. The Hills’ sober and studied conclusion on the quality of Stradivari’s wood was that he used better stuff when he was being paid more for an instrument, and that some years there was simply higher-quality wood to be had than others.

  “The height of absurdity is reached,” the Hills wrote, “when we are gravely informed by…a German professor of violin…that the secret of the unrivalled tone of Stradivari and of other fine instruments may be found in the fact that the bellies were made of ‘Balsam Pine,’ a wood which grew in Northern Italy at the period when those makers flourished, but has since gradually become extinct.”

  But the height of absurdity hadn’t been fully reached back in the 1800s, at least not according to the violin makers I met in Oberlin. During one workshop I attended, the name Nagyvary came up, and there was a collective snicker. Joseph Nagyvary is a Hungarian who fled the Communist regime in that country when he was a student in the 1950s. He dreamed of becoming a professional violinist but ended up with degrees in chemistry and has been teaching biochemistry and biophysics for several decades at Texas A&M University in Waco. On the side, he makes his own fiddles and regularly posits new theories on what makes the great fiddles great.

  In 1977 Nagyvary gave a presentation at the annual convention of the Violin Society of America, in which he said that his scientific studies led him to believe that the chemistry of the classic Cremonese instruments was as important as their design and workmanship. His theories dated back to his days as a student in Switzerland. Every summer he would take a vacation in Italy. When poking around the museums and old palaces of Lombardi, the province containing Cremona and Milan, he noticed that anything old and wooden had been riddled by wood-worm. But not fiddles. He speculated that Stradivari and his contemporaries treated their wood with antipest chemicals. Studying tiny chips of old instruments under powerful microscopes, he found traces of borax (which served as an insecticide and made the wood harder and more brilliant sounding), gums from fruit trees (which helped to prevent mold), and crystal powders, which would be inedible to pests.

  Nagyvary tried to convince modern violin makers to use these substances on their new violins to re-create the sound of Stradiviari, an achievement he continues to attempt himself.

  Sam Zygmuntowicz confessed to me that he has tried wood treatments over the years but has come to the conclusion that they are not worth the trouble. He sticks to the principle that all good quality wood of a certain age will make a good violin, leaning away from the modern science of Nagyvary (whom Sam considers an eccentric who has some good ideas and would be better off if he didn’t keep announcing he’d discovered “the secret”) and toward the more commonsense approach of the Hill brothers.

  That day, shuffling through the dusty stacks of his wood collection, I asked Sam if he had ever come across any extinct wood on his buying trips. He just shook his head and laughed. “Once wood is fifty years old it gets a little difficult to even say the exact age,” he said. “That’s because wood ages a little bit like a cheese, from the outside in. There’s a stage where it’s curing all the way through and you’re getting real oxidation. It really changes something about the wood. If you look at a violin top that’s been made with wood that’s less than fifty years old you can see a little bit of light through it, like a lampshade. But really old wood—like Strads—all those fiddles are opaque. And it’s not because they’re thicker; they’re often thinner than newer fiddles. Something has oxidized within the wood and changed its nature in some way. It feels different. It smells different.”

  Sam let me feel and smell the spruce from Emile Français that he was planning to use for the Drucker violin. The smell was mild and dusty, and the feel was almost sandy and much lighter than I expected. What about the maple back?

  “When I was first starting out,” Sam said, “there was this catalog put out by a wood dealer. He had all these categories—slightly flamed to very nicely flamed aged maple. There were eight categories, and each was more expensive than the last. And then there was a final category that you couldn’t even buy through the catalog that was called ‘Exhibition Piece Indeed!’

  “I’d go to his place in Vermont and spend two days going through every piece of wood in his place. One day I saw that in the back there were these boxes that had some of these pieces in them and they were just gorgeous. And I asked him to sell me some, and he’d say, ‘Oh, I’m saving those to pay for my kids’ college education.’

  “And then on one trip I bought four grand’s worth of wood and I convinced him to sell me one of those maple pieces that was Exhibition Piece Indeed! So for Gene, the back will be Exhibition Piece Indeed!”

  Sam began to place back the pieces of wood he’d drawn from the shelves. “I can make just as good fiddles out of really top-quality newish wood,” he said. “Meaning ten years old. I’ve had fiddles that turned out really smashing with wood that was eight years old. It’s the intrinsic quality of the wood that’s important.” He was slipping the old piece of spruce back into its slot. “I don’t want to make a fetish out of old wood,” he said. “You can really get seduced by really old wood. And you can make a bad fiddle with old wood if you’re not careful.

  “But, all other things being equal, older is better.”

  That idea would dog the rest of my days in the world of violins.

  Chapter 6

  TRADITION AND THE INDIVIDUAL TALENT

&nb
sp; The design of the violin—those sensuous, feminine curves of shoulders, waist, and hips (Man Ray famously superimposed the instrument onto the back of a shapely woman)—is the result of a long-simmering stew of intellect, practicality, and even some mysticism. It has been thought that the violin’s shape and workings were influenced by such varied forces as the geometries of Pythagoras, the transcendent theories of Plato, and the workbench savvy of Stradivari and his forbears. But the real reason a fiddle looks the way it does is simply because that’s what works best—though no one really knows why.

  “To many people a violin is a beautiful object,” writes the Cambridge don Sir James Beament in his wonderful and witty treatise called The Violin Explained. “To a physicist it is a hideously complex shape.”

  A hundred years ago, Edward Heron-Allen, in his typical way, gave detailed and explicit instructions on how to design a violin outline using a ruler and compass (he admitted to borrowing the technique from an earlier work by Jacob Augustus Otto). The process involves starting with a perpendicular line as long as the violin will be, usually around fourteen inches. Then that line must be divided extremely carefully into seventy-two equal parts. Next, scribe twenty-four horizontal lines using certain of those seventy-two reference points. After that, the compass comes out and a series of arches must be drawn and it gets even more complicated. I tried one day to design a violin using Heron-Allen’s technique and after a few hours had a piece of paper covered with straight lines and curved lines that looked like the plan for the worst highway interchange ever devised. Heron-Allen was operating in a day before the adjective anal-retentive was in the vocabulary, but it would be hard to imagine accomplishing this feat of draftsmanship without a prodigious gift for patience. Even the fussy author described the design technique as “terribly complicated” and conceded that it was practically unnecessary. Even in his day, perfectly good fiddle outlines based on the masterworks were readily available to him. It was pointless to start from scratch.