The Violin Maker Read online

  It is now more than four centuries since a lot of trial and error produced this hideously complex, yet practically perfect, shape. A modern luthier like Sam Zygmuntowicz has any number of models to help him make that shape. Like almost all current makers, his favored exemplars are Stradivari and Guarneri. It is almost unheard of to mix models by the two dead Italians, though they worked contemporaneously in the same small town and followed a remarkably uniform tradition. Since the days when Sam worked to make nearly exact copies of some great old instruments, he has evolved more and more, always adding a little extra Zygmuntowicz into the mix. He is unafraid to broaden a shoulder slightly, say, or add some weight to a hip. But the changes remain slight. Sam is always performing his own balancing act between tradition and innovation.

  Following his standard procedure, Sam started the Drucker fiddle by building a rib structure around a wooden mold. The ribs are thin strips of wood, barely thicker than veneer. Usually, violin makers use maple for the ribs, often matching the maple that will be used for the back. The ribs are the connector between belly and back. If you lay a violin down on a table and think of it as a house, the back forms the floor, the belly is the roof, and the ribs are the walls—in this case undulating walls bent into shape by heating the thin wood, much as boat builders steam boards to make them bend into shape for the curved hull.

  Sam keeps a number of molds in the shop, some based on Stradivari instruments, some on Guarneri, and some of his own devising, though a casual observer could never tell the differences among them. The molds are the practical engineering behind the magical box, and they look the part. If the finished fiddle will look like a shapely woman, the molds more resemble manikins. Usually, the blocks are drilled through with a number of half-dollar-size holes, which allow clamps to be inserted to help hold the newly curved ribs to their shapes. The holes make the forms look like an outsize fiddle-shaped Swiss cheese.

  To choose which shape he would follow for the Drucker violin, Sam was forced to make an intuitive leap of faith. After their early discussions about simply making a modern copy of the Rosgonyl Strad, Gene’s input could only be musical, not technical.

  “Gene hasn’t given me a lot of guidance,” Sam said. “He just showed me what he does and the instrument he has now and what he doesn’t like about it and what he does. I let him play a couple of fiddles I had here in the shop and I could see what he was gravitating toward.” That was the sound of a Guarneri del Gesù.

  Giuseppe Guarneri was born in Cremona in 1698, and became the third generation of a violin-making family that included his grandfather Andrea (a somewhat older contemporary and lesser-known rival of the young Stradivari), and his father, who through some twist of fate became known mainly in relation to his father and signed his instruments “Giuseppe, son of Andrea.” Though he didn’t really need to, in order to separate his work from his father’s, young Joseph began labeling his instruments with a cross and the letters IHS, and thus became known as “del Gesù.”

  As a craftsman, Antonio Stradivari was the Laurence Olivier of luthiers, a technically skilled and disciplined workman who labored nobly through a long life, a professional whose normal working level was higher than most, and who regularly scaled peaks of genius. Guarneri was the James Dean of the craft. The Hill brothers also wrote a book on the Guarneri family. In the chapter on Giuseppe del Gesù they repeat the unproved theory that he may have been killed at the age of forty-six. There is some evidence that he quit making violins for a time to run a tavern. One theory claims that some of his fiddles were produced while he was serving a stint in jail. One thing is certain: the man had talent. Despite the turmoil of his personal life, the Hills concluded that Guarneri del Gesù “gave to the world, during fifteen to twenty brief years, violins…which will ever be acclaimed by the lover of our subject as instruments of unsurpassable charm and originality.”

  In broad strokes, the great instruments made by Guarneri—there are just dozens left today—are considered more powerful and darker sounding than Strads. The great solo violinists covet Guarneris for that reason. Over the years, Sam Zygmuntowicz designed a violin model that closely approximated a well-known Guarneri known as the Plowden. “It’s from 1735, and it’s my favorite,” Sam says. “It’s just right when he was at the peak of his craftsmanship and knowledge.”

  When Zygmuntowicz worked at René Morel’s restoration shop, the actual Plowden would arrive for repairs. “I didn’t even know who owned it,” Sam remembers. “I used to put it on my desk during lunch break and just look at it, like a book—just stare at it while I was eating my sandwich. And I would sort of surreptitiously take measurements and set up quick kamikaze photo sessions. So I got some basic information on it and I designed my Guarneri model from there.”

  Because the model morphed into something of his own, Sam, as a little inside joke, grafted the first letter of his name onto the title and began calling his model the Zowden. For Gene Drucker’s instrument, Sam would alter the Zowden shape a little by introducing some of the characteristics of a 1742 Guarneri that was once owned and played by Jascha Heifetz, the David. (Heifetz’s will left it to a museum in San Francisco.)

  It is yet another example of the tangled knot of tradition and whimsy in the violin world that gives the well-known, collector-quality Cremonese violins their names. For instance, the Plowden is named for a collector and amateur violinist, Lord Plowden, who owned the fiddle almost two hundred years ago. Sometimes, a famous violinist becomes inextricably linked with an instrument and it comes to be named for him, like the Kreisler. But that did not happen with the great Paganini’s favorite fiddle, an instrument that was so powerful that it was descriptively nicknamed the Cannon and is still called that. Perhaps the most legendary violin Stradivari ever made was one that was still in his workshop when he died and, according to one legend, had been played only once by the master himself. It is called the Messiah. It still is never played but sits in a glass case in the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University, a gift from the Hills of London, the family of dealers whose three siblings wrote the famous book on Stradivari.

  Sam Zygmuntowicz was able to get his hands on and study a fair number of the greatest violins during his time with René Morel and Jacques Français. The shop, on the eleventh floor of a nondescript building on 54th Street in Manhattan, is a sort of Lourdes for great string players traveling through New York. At any given time millions of dollars worth of Cremonese fiddles are in for repair and healing. Morel, who often schedules his time in fifteen-minute segments, spends much of each day adjusting violins for a continuous stream of glamorous soloists and workaday orchestral fiddlers, who feel their instrument is out of sorts.

  Sam speaks often of his apprentice years at the shop, sometimes describing it as a sort of postgraduate training, other times making it seem like a sentence at a prison work farm. In the days I spent with him at the violin-making workshop in Ohio, Sam several times made good-natured jokes that he and many of his peers were ex-hippies in various stages of reconstruction—men (and a few women) of a certain age who’d been drawn to the trade by a 1970s-vintage desire to avoid corporate life, get closer to nature, and learn a craft. Sure enough, quite a few of the other violin makers I met in Oberlin lived in small rural towns and gave off a faint whiff of patchouli.

  René Morel was no hippie looking for an alternative lifestyle. He’d been trained in Mirecourt to execute the various techniques of violin making—the many cuts—with skill and efficiency. Morel often told the story of arriving as a young man at the great Manhattan restoration shop of the day, the House of Wurlitzer, and amazing everyone with the speed and accuracy of his carving.

  “Guys like René were just expected to turn out fiddles,” Sam said. “It was all handwork and they were trained to be very good technically, very fast, consistent and uniform. It wasn’t all that inspiring-looking work, but each of those guys was expected to do a minimum of two violins a week, and the fast guys did three.

  “I never ha
ve practiced that particular brand of production. I don’t think I could do it. You don’t waste any unnecessary action. You don’t reflect on anything. It’s kind of the opposite of my personal process, which includes a lot of patient reflection. But the actual techniques of people like René Morel and Carl Becker—these old guys really know how to get it done.”

  Carl Becker is a Chicago-based violin maker, now in his nineties, and one of the most respected in the country. Sam stopped to visit Becker when he was on a cross-country tour as a teenager and showed the master a fiddle on which he’d done a complicated restoration. “He was the first real violin maker I’d ever met, and he was nice enough to talk to me,” Sam remembers. “He just looked at my violin and said, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as it could be.’” After Sam finished his first year at the violin school in Salt Lake City, he was offered a job in Becker’s shop. Sam went to work with Becker for a summer, when, following his own tradition, Becker moved out to a Wisconsin farm and focused on making violins.

  “It was a really intense experience for me,” Sam remembers. “In Wisconsin it was total immersion and human contact deprivation, except for the Becker family. I lived in a cabin in the woods without water or plumbing. Washed in a lake. Carried my water from the next piece of property.

  “It was great. Carl was a great teacher—a very clear, analytical mind. Quite a bit of what I still do is based on what I learned there.” Sam thought about leaving school and staying with Becker. “But,” he says, “it’s a family business, and I knew I would never be a Becker.” He returned to Salt Lake City to finish his degree. Though he is careful not to say anything bad about the school’s director, Peter Paul Prier, he makes it clear that they were not always on good terms. “It was kind of frustrating,” he says of his time in Salt Lake. “I never had anyone really engage me in a challenging way.” Another Salt Lake student remembers that on graduation day, Sam stood up and sang the song “My Way.”

  It was through the influence of Carl Becker and then René Morel that Zygmuntowicz became firmly convinced that before he could become himself, he would have to learn the skills required to uphold the tradition of his craft.

  One day, while we sat in his shop, Sam recalled something Carl Becker had told him during that summer more than twenty years ago, and he suddenly veered off the specific subject—which was the arching of a violin belly—and said, “There’s a great essay by T. S. Eliot called ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent.’ I think that’s a great essay. One of his points is that if you’re really an incredibly original thinker then it’s great that you make up totally new things. But the tradition is a guarantee that the average person doing average things is going to work at a good level. A certain level of knowledge has been accumulated, and the difference between us and our predecessors is that we have more to draw upon. And part of what we draw upon is them. Their experience is now part of our knowledge base.”

  The Hill brothers espoused this idea many years before Sam Zygmuntowicz—or Eliot for that matter. Stradivari, they wrote, “was in touch with the outcome of well-thought-out experiments, and the traditions which had been evolved and transmitted by the different makers during this long period…. Each generation added its link to the chain, and Stradivari finally welded the whole together.”

  In the many hours I would spend with Sam watching him work, there was plenty of time where the only sound in the room was the relentless raspy scratch as he scraped at tone wood with one of his tools. But this was one of the times when he was building a head of steam to talk.

  “There’s a beauty to traditional systems like violin making,” he said. “If you just take a beautiful fiddle as a model and try to make one like that, you will hit most of the important points—automatically. You don’t really need to understand it, if you stay within the established system.

  “To some extent that’s the way it was done by the old guys. Since they had been such a part of an ongoing tradition and had been working for a number of generations in a similar style and living in the same area where there was direct transmission from one craftsman to another, it was a reasonable assumption that the accumulated experience was onto something.

  “You could safely say that the violin has been resistant to innovation,” he said. “There’s a funny chapter in Heron-Allen’s book that I think is called ‘The Violin, Its Variants and Vulgarities.’ It lists all kinds of things, like a porcelain violin and a fiddle with a gramophone horn coming out of it, a trapezoid violin—things like that.

  “People often ask the question of why the violin hasn’t changed in hundreds of years. The implication is that it would somehow be better and more natural if it did. But why? If you look at natural forms they’re quite resistant to change. Most mutations die out. People often ask why there haven’t been improvements in violins. Well there have, but most people don’t know enough to understand. There have been huge changes, but the basic chassis looks the same.” He had stopped working on his fiddle. It turned out he was just getting started. “This brings me to a tirade,” he warned.

  “If I may be so obnoxious as to say so—violin making is a kind of un-American activity. It goes against one of our fundamental beliefs, which is that things always get better and the new replaces the old—Progress.

  “There is really no good answer to why people still play music from three hundred years ago. But to the people who do it and who like listening to it—they would ask, ‘Why would you play anything else?’

  “The other thing is that violin making has been immune to mechanization and standardization. There have always been a lot of articles that start something like this: ‘For three hundred years the secret of Stradivari had eluded violin makers. Now professor so and so at the university of so and so may have found the answer….’

  “The reason this is appealing as a story is that it’s the American way. There must be a trick. It’s like the secret of vulcanizing rubber is to add sulfur to the rubber and, Eureka! And the guy who patented the process became a millionaire. An enterprising guy without the wool pulled over his eyes sees to the heart of the matter and finds the trick, patents it, and cashes out.

  “It’s a very foreign idea that violin making is not all that mysterious, but it is one of those things where the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago. The requirements haven’t changed, and therefore the results haven’t changed and therefore it’s a very complex custom that is only learned through long application and a great deal of knowledge. It’s not arcane knowledge; it’s something any guy can learn—if you spend thirty years doing it.

  “At the heart of all those articles is the idea that someone is going to figure out the secret and then they’ll be able to make millions of violins that are affordable, instead of those really expensive violins that people pay lots of money for and—the implication is—are not really worth it. Once they find the trick they’ll be able to mass-produce them. That’s the unspoken thought behind that.” Then, Sam picked up his knife, started cutting the fiddle again, and was quiet for a long while.

  It seems that almost every aspect of violin making has its parallel in violin playing. Though there are always new prodigies popping up, no one who loves classical music would argue too strongly against the idea that, as Sam said about his craft, “the basic way it works best was stumbled onto a long time ago.”

  Gene Drucker had the advantage of growing up in a musical household and essentially followed his father into the same trade—a tradition that was quite common among the great violin makers. But Drucker will tell you that his strongest musical influence was not his father, but his private study with Oscar Shumsky. Shumsky was the last student of Leopold Aüer, a Hungarian born in the mid–nineteenth century, who had a brilliant musical career in czarist Russia. Tchaikovsky wrote his only violin concerto for Aüer and planned to dedicate it to him. In 1918, after the Bolshevik revolution, the violinist came to America and for the rest of his life primarily devoted himself to teaching. Before Shu
msky, Aüer had taught Efrem Zimbalist and Jascha Heifetz.

  In his own treatise on the subject, Violin Playing as I Teach It, published in 1921, Aüer attacked the notion of upholding traditions of performance practice, like copying an exact vibrato, or slavishly following a bowing technique. He thought it sucked the life out of new talent. Yet he was a living link in a great chain. One of his teachers was Joseph Joachim, another Hungarian who studied in Vienna, played for a time in Leipzig, and landed in Berlin. While Joachim lived in Vienna, according to the violin encyclopedist Alberto Bachman, he turned the Austrian city into “the Mecca for all violinists.” Bachman traces Joachim’s artistic family tree back to Joseph Böhm, from Böhm back to Pierre Rode (who has a famous Stradivari named for him), and from Rode back to Giovanni Battista Viotti, who is widely acknowledged to have invented violin playing as it has come down to us. “It is not too much to say,” Bachman writes, “that whenever we may have occasion to admire some violinist at the present time, we can go back to Viotti in order to discover the origin of his art.”

  So, from Gene Drucker to Giovanni Battista Viotti, two violinists born on different continents two hundred years apart, we essentially have only six degrees of separation. It’s impossible to quantify the influences, but there is a golden braid connecting the men who keep the tradition with those who invented it. This legacy is not willed like an antique breakfront. If you read T. S. Eliot on the subject, you would learn that Tradition “cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour.” Gene Drucker, in his understated self-estimation, says, “I was always a practicer.” Of the influence of Oscar Shumsky, Drucker says, “It would be impossible not to model one’s approach to violin playing and music in general after such a strong example.” When he hears some recordings from his early career, Drucker thinks, “I sound like the poor man’s Shumsky.”