The Violin Maker Read online

  There is another line in Eliot’s essay that seems to apply more directly to violin makers. The artist, he wrote, “must be quite aware of the obvious fact that art never improves, but that the material of art is never quite the same.”

  One day in 1987, Sam Zygmuntowicz took on the challenge of taking new material and trying to duplicate the unimprovable. It was a major moment in his career.

  When Sam first struck out on his own, after his apprenticeship with Morel, he initially gained notice in the violin world for his ability to copy old instruments. Stewart Pollens, a violin historian who curates the stringed instrument department of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, had seen a couple of Sam’s copies at violin conferences. He convinced the most prestigious journal of the string instrument world, The Strad, to commission Zygmuntowicz to copy a Guarneri del Gesù fiddle built in 1733, the one that had come to be known as the Kreisler. Pollens documented the process for the magazine.

  In a way, copying a great fiddle is like studying with the master himself. “It’s a little bit like taking coaching from someone—very detailed coaching,” Sam says. “Not from a person, but from the instrument that person created. Studying a violin from the outside is like learning French in high school. Making a copy is like going to France and living there for a couple years.”

  For this project, Sam only needed to travel to Washington, D.C., where the Kreisler is kept at the Library of Congress’s Music Division. There, he performed two parallel feats of learning. The first was to take the violin and, as he says, “turn it into information.”

  The features most of us notice about a violin are gross characteristics, the kind of things we might use to describe a suspect to a police sketch artist—high forehead, brown eyes, weak chin. In fiddle terms the features a layman would be able to describe are the color of the varnish, the width and curves of the shoulders and hips, the depth of the “waist,” which is technically known as the C bout. With a little training and experience, an observer might be able to pick out the way the tricolor outline of purfling is laid into the circumference of the instrument, and maybe the flare of the corners or the distinctive wood carving on the nautilus-shaped scroll on top of the neck.

  But to Sam Zygmuntowicz that level of observation is like discerning that the leaves of a tree are green. Using precise rulers and calipers, he measured the Kreisler to tenths of a millimeter. Years before, when the instrument was taken apart for repair in Morel’s shop, he’d gotten measurements of the graduated thicknesses of belly and back. He had a chart that analyzed the varying thicknesses of the belly in such detail that it resembled a topographical map. In the Library of Congress, he traced all the outlines and the shape and placement of the distinctive f-shaped holes that are cut into the violin’s belly on either side of the bridge. He took photographs in different kinds of light, trying to understand the real nature of the varnish. He even played the fiddle himself to get a sense of its sound.

  Sam later wrote his own article on the copying process for The Strad. “To a luthier,” he wrote, “copying is a window back to a golden age. Makers often study the minutiae of these instruments with a zeal that borders on fanaticism, and with a reverence that is almost religious. The process of copying lies somewhere between detective work and a spiritual quest. You try to push away the veil of time and see not only the finished product, but how the old makers achieved their results.”

  Years later, he would talk about copying Guarneri to a gathering of the Violin Society of America. “Making a copy of an old instrument seems like a clear-cut objective,” Sam told his colleagues. “It is a technical challenge, but conceptually it shouldn’t be so bad: measure the original, find some matching hunks of wood, and carve away anything that doesn’t look like a Guarneri.”

  Even then, his goal was to make more and more instruments that looked and sounded like a Zygmuntowicz. Not only did his prowess as a copyist give him insight into the minute techniques of the masters, it also advanced his reputation—as a copyist. A cover story in The Strad was a piece of advertising that no violin maker could buy. The magazine quoted Jacques Français calling Sam’s finished Kreisler copy “probably the finest copy of a Guarneri I have ever seen.” Another violinist who dealt with Français ordered his own copy of the Kreisler from Sam. Not long after that, Sam got that call from Isaac Stern. The Stern commissions only added to Sam’s reputation in the wider world (he ended up on what was then called Public Television’s MacNeil-Lehrer NewsHour) and in the more hermetic society of string players. With this success, though, came the danger that he would be not freed by the tradition, but hobbled. Violin makers can charge more for faithful “antiqued” copies than they can for modern instruments that actually look new. It could have been a lucrative course to make copies all his life.

  By the end of his speech to the Violin Society of America, Sam promised that he would soon give up making copies. “Copies are a kind of sport,” he said, “but if you see a lot of Guarneri copies together it is like watching a convention of Elvis impersonators.”

  Sam then pushed increasingly to convince violinists that he could build them a fiddle that looked quite similar to the old masters, but what he really hoped to do was create a new sound they were looking for, conceiving the fiddle not so much as a re-creation of a museum piece, but as a living, working machine for making music. The higher the level of the client, the more important it became to make not a copy, but a Zygmuntowicz.

  “It is almost unfortunate that through putting too much stress on each project I have transformed what would normally be a more relaxed craft into a higher stress one,” Sam told me. “It doesn’t have to be that way. I could just make one violin after another in my style and I think I would do all right—someone would buy them.

  “Many of the projects have a little story in my mind—who it’s going to, how it’s going to work, if it’s going to work.”

  Gene Drucker became a kind of test case for this new process.

  It remains the constant, enduring paradox of violin making. No matter how much modern makers learn of the traditions, no matter how much scientific analysis they apply to the materials and techniques, no matter how careful their measurements and analysis of the old instruments, they are still confronted by fiddle players yearning for something that is incredibly hard to describe: a sound.

  “Different violinists are known for very distinctive types of playing and sound,” Sam Zygmuntowicz says. “Of course, a musician almost never knows enough about it technically to come to me and tell me how to achieve that sound.”

  Gene Drucker, though an exceptionally articulate man, was no exception. As he had told me, “There’s a problem when it comes down to describing sound. The words we have available to us simply don’t work very well.”

  It was time for me to enter the unnameable realm of sound.

  Chapter 7

  BACH AND THE PROBLEM WITH WORDS

  After our vegetarian lunch, on that fine sunny day when I met Gene Drucker, we walked back to his apartment building. In the cool stone-lined lobby four somewhat nervous-looking young people waited with instrument cases. It was a student string quartet from a college in upstate New York, and Gene had promised to give them a coaching session. “You’re welcome to sit and watch,” he told me. “If you think that would be enjoyable.” I thought it would, so we all squeezed into the elevator—six people, four instruments—and unloaded on the thirteenth floor.

  There, Gene unlocked the door to a small one-bedroom unit, a little dark and furnished sparely, with a bit of a ragtag feel. He and his family occupied a larger apartment in the same building, but he’d grabbed this place years ago and kept it as a rehearsal studio. Lately, now that he and his wife had a child, they offered the apartment to a music student who was willing to trade rent for childcare chores.

  As the young musicians broke out their instruments and tuned up, Gene chatted with them about his friend, who taught at their college and sent them to the city for this coaching. The
group was just a school ensemble; it didn’t have a name. The players were working on one of the Beethoven quartets and had brought that to play for Drucker.

  Of course, the Beethoven quartets are standards of the string quartet repertory and are constantly performed and frequently recorded. The Emerson often placed them in their programs and had made a recording of the full Beethoven quartet cycle for Deutsche Grammophon. It won a Grammy Award and was called “a spectacular achievement” by one reviewer. Gene Drucker knew this music inside and out.

  The students did not. But they were talented players, and for the next hour or so they plowed into the music with a mix of verve and ineptitude that was charming and inspiring. Even bunched into a plain little living room with the dead acoustics of a closet, it was hard for the four string players to not occasionally create beautiful music with the soaring sonorities of the master. Drucker was intense, yet also patient and kind. He only stopped the group a few times to correct some rhythmic interpretations by the cellist, a tall young man with an Eastern European accent and a ready willingness to laugh at himself. This was a fun way to spend a late afternoon. Watching Drucker coach these kids made me think of a phrase from an essay by Oliver Wendell Holmes, father of the famous supreme court justice, about a great old violin: as Holmes said of the fiddle, Gene’s pores were filled with music. As the rehearsal ended, the de facto leader of the quartet asked Gene how much they should pay him; he told them to keep their money.

  After the students packed up and left, Gene and I got back on the elevator and went up a floor to his real apartment, which was bright and clean and tastefully furnished, with a small grand piano dominating the living room. Gene opened a cabinet and pulled out two compact discs and handed one to me.

  It contained the music of Béla Bartók, his favorite modern composer, including the Hungarian composer’s solo violin sonata and a collection of violin duets, where Gene teamed with his Emerson colleague Phil Setzer. “That might be interesting to you,” he said, a little shyly. “If you like Bartók.” I told him I did.

  “I always enjoyed playing the solo repertoire,” Gene told me. “At one time I had an appetite to try to build an auxiliary career in that direction, but that’s really diminished in me over the last ten years. Because of my family. First it was losing my father.” The violinist Ernest Drucker had died in 1993 from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis—Lou Gehrig’s disease.

  “At the time that sort of knocked the wind out of me,” Gene said. “Looking back on that time I can’t believe all the things I was doing in the half year before he died. Constantly running out to Queens to see him in a nursing home. Going there, coming back, doing concerts with the quartet, making two Bartók recordings. I can’t even remember what the quartet was recording then, but I remember we did a series of radio recordings in St. Paul.

  “Then nine months after my father died my son Julian was born, and that transformed my life. Of course I’ve been very active with the quartet and have played concertos with orchestras a number of times. But recording is a much different investment of time. You have to decide that you really, really want to do that, and then you have to ask…well, why?”

  He handed me the other CD. Inside the jewel case was a jacket that featured a picture of Gene, wearing a tuxedo and a very serious look, posed playing the fiddle. The photo seemed classic and old-fashioned, as if it had been taken decades ago. His looks are simply from a different era. This recording was Drucker’s solo climb up one of the great peaks of the violin repertory, the unaccompanied sonatas and partitas by Johann Sebastian Bach.

  “This was reissued recently,” he said. “It’s gotten some nice reviews, but it hasn’t really been a career-building thing for me. It’s just really nice to have this record to show what I can do.”

  I have an old vinyl record on which Pablo Casals talks about music and particularly about J. S. Bach. I haven’t listened to it for years—like many people I’ve let my turntable fall into disrepair—but I vividly remember one thing the cellist says: Bach is all I dream about in music. I feel the same way. There are periods in my life where I listen to Bach every day. And it is a near certainty that on those days I practice the trumpet, I will play something by Bach. So I gratefully took this musical offering from Gene Drucker and played it as soon as I got home.

  Bach wrote this music in the second decade of the eighteenth century, while he was employed by Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Cöthen. The composer famously said that all of his voluminous musical output was designed for the greater glory of God. But Prince Leopold demanded that his kapellmeister write secular instrumental music, so these six pieces for solo violin are part of the relatively small segment of his work that is strictly secular. They were written fairly early in the history of the modern violin—Stradivari was still making instruments—yet they stretch the technical demands on the performer to a breaking point. Nearly three hundred years have passed and they remain a high technical hurdle and an enduring musical monument.

  I did my best to drop out of music school (several different schools, in fact) before I was forced to take the courses in formal musical analysis. Consequently, when I sliced open the plastic wrapping on Drucker’s Bach recording, started reading the liner notes, and encountered this—“The first two movements are coupled together in the manner of an improvisatory prelude and extended fugue, the latter continually alternating between strict polyphony and single-line passage work. The third movements release the tension and provide welcome tonal relief, while the finales share the symmetrical plan of a typical binary suite movement.”—I was ready to throw the booklet across the room. But lower on that first page I came to a section of analysis written by Drucker himself. In the second paragraph he began, “The quickest route into Bach’s mind…” I closed the liner notes and slipped the booklet back into the CD case. In my view, the quickest way into Bach’s mind would be to stop reading and start listening.

  The scientist James Q. Wilson once wrote of Bach’s Mass in B Minor that it was the sound of the entire world thinking at once. In comparison, the solo violin works seem more the musings of a single solitary genius. And at first they are strange. Most of the violin playing most of us know is the sectional work of an orchestra—fifty or so fiddlers playing single-note lines simultaneously. With all these players working together, the edges get rounded off. The result is that one of the most frequent descriptions of an orchestral string section’s sound is lush. In contrast, a violinist playing alone can sound surprisingly edgy and intense.

  For his solo works, Bach usually allowed the violin to play a single line, but often he exploited the ability of the instrument to play several notes at the same time. This is accomplished by running the bow over two or three strings at once. (Getting the hair of the bow to touch all four strings is impossible on the modern violin and bow, which has led some to speculate that there was a specially curved bow during Bach’s day. Centuries later, someone invented a highly curved “Bach bow,” but it never caught on.) In the solo sonatas and partitas there are many passages that do present polyphony: two or more notes at once, but the bulk of the compositions consists of single-note passages of such supremely logical complexity that there needs to be no other sound.

  This was not always obvious. Despite his widely recognized mastery, Bach’s work went out of fashion for a time after his death. When it was being rediscovered during the late Classical age, at least two great composers—namely Schumann and Mendelssohn—suspected that there was no way Bach expected a violinist to play this music alone. There must have been keyboard accompaniment that was lost in the mists of time. Each wrote his own version of keyboard support for the violin. They are musical curiosities but largely wasted effort.

  To look at this music on the page, one understands the enormous complexity of the compositions. There are masses of notes, page after page of music manuscript just filled top to bottom with black ink. It would seem that among all that music there would be room for a few flubs, an improvisation or tw
o. But I have played bits of the partitas on the trumpet, and one changed note sounds immediately like a crime against nature. And indeed, Gene Drucker would write that this music had the quality of a natural phenomenon, as if it has always existed and always would.

  As much as I marveled at Bach’s music, and was captivated by Drucker’s interpretation, after getting through the pieces once, I knew I really needed to listen at a different level, to tunnel into this great musical edifice and explore the inner recesses, the nooks and crannies of the sound. I would try to use this violin masterpiece to understand better what all the fuss was about with fiddles. Turning the listening experience into interpretation would prove difficult. After all, Drucker himself, that most articulate of men, had warned me that words are often lacking when it comes to describing sound. “It’s kind of like that idea that Eskimos have many different words to describe snow,” he’d said. “In this case there aren’t that many words that really have the right meaning and describe sound accurately. I love words, but they often fail me in this context.”

  The man who taught Sam Zygmuntowicz violin making in school, Peter Paul Prier, once wrote an article for the Journal of the Violin Society of America, in which he listed some essential words that could be employed to describe the sound of a fiddle. Here they are: hard, mellow, even, nasal, open, ringing, muted, round, full, hollow.