The Violin Maker

by John Marchese

  “It just made violin making seem romantic.”

  There was one thing I’d written down after reading Heron-Allen, when the librarians gave me my pens back. His primary injunction as he begins the treatise is this: “Given: A log of wood. Make a violin.”

  That’s the process I wanted to pursue with Sam: watch him take a log and turn it into a fiddle, follow the instrument from its roughest stage to its first performance. If I were a romantic like Mr. Heron-Allen, I might quote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to describe what I was hoping to see.

  Fashioned of maple and of pine,

  That in Tyrolean forests vast

  Had rocked and wrestled with the blast;

  Exquisite was it in design,

  Perfect in each minutest part,

  A marvel of the lutist’s art

  But I was heading for Brooklyn and was more than willing to settle for a little less romance.

  It was a cool and sunny spring day when I first went to meet Sam. On the subway to Brooklyn, I tried to guess what he would look like. Was there some kind of badge or special outfit that a luthier could wear to give a signal of his status, like the way a white lab coat says doctor? Could he, like an auto mechanic, wake in the morning and slip into his trade by donning a stiff set of matching pants and shirt with his name stitched over the shirt pocket?

  Apparently not.

  My first glimpse of Sam Zygmuntowicz was through a chain-link fence. I was standing on a littered sidewalk on Dean Street in Brooklyn, across the street from the busy loading dock of a tile and flooring store whose front doors faced Flatbush Avenue, a main, wide artery of the borough, where I’d just fought my way across four lanes of angry traffic. Behind us was downtown Brooklyn, a mid-rise cluster of fancy stone structures from a more prosperous past, and a few glassy new buildings that promoters were pointing to as signs of Renaissance for the borough. A few blocks in the other direction was Park Slope, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and impressive brownstones, one of New York’s great gentrified enclaves, set on a rising hill that begins at the famously polluted Gowanus Canal and runs up to Frederick Law Olmsted’s Prospect Park. I knew that Zygmuntowicz lived in a row house in Park Slope and that he commuted to work (usually on foot) in this adjacent neighborhood that was still so nondescript and generally bereft of charm that on the day of my first visit the real estate people had still not invented a cute new name for it.

  The chain-link fence through which I spotted Sam surrounded a small, unpaved, and weedy driveway leading to the loading dock of a converted six-story factory building, where at one time workmen inside the brick walls and wired windows had manufactured stuff like sporting goods. Now, most of the space is residential and a lot of the residents work where they live, occupied doing new cottage industries like producing video, or art, or, in Sam’s case, violins, violas, and cellos. He’d lived in this building for a while, before he got married and started having children.

  To say that Sam Zygmuntowicz didn’t look like I expected a violin maker to look is absolutely true. But what difference does it make, since I didn’t know then what I was expecting? The image didn’t come to me until months after this first meeting, when Sam, a little frustrated by the simple-minded questions I was asking him, said testily, “I hope you’re not going to do what people have a tendency to do with violin makers: make me seem like a kindly old wood carver—like Geppetto.”

  Banish the thought, I told him at the time. But when I considered the question later, I realized that the old man who’d carved Pinocchio was kind of what I was hoping for.

  That first morning, Sam came across the parking lot to unlock the heavy Master lock on the swinging gate of the fence. He gave a small wave as he emerged from the building and walked slowly toward me. He was, like me, a middle-aged man of average height and medium build, who somehow looked shorter and heavier than he really was. And he was dressed nothing like Geppetto. No suspenders, no heavy leather apron, no knickers. He had a youthful and friendly face, a little mottled, and wore large glasses. His hair was thick and wiry, black with some touches of gray. He was wearing what I would learn is his characteristic outfit: comfortably cut dark cotton chinos and a plaid flannel shirt. On his feet he had leather sandals over dark socks.

  The gate between us opened, Sam stuck out his hand and said, “You found it all right?” Then he glanced around for a moment, a little shy and embarrassed by the banality of his question. I was standing in front of him, wasn’t I? “Of course you found it all right,” he said, and swung the gate open wide to let me through. He locked up behind me and led me across to the building. We trudged up four flights of wide stairs and arrived at a landing with a big steel door. Sam pushed it open, and we entered his studio.

  Inside was a scene similar to any number of lofts I’d visited around New York. The exterior walls were concrete and pocked in places. The wood floors showed some scars. Sun poured in through high windows that filled most of the south wall. Just inside the door sat an ebony baby grand piano on a well-worn carpet, a few plants flanking its keyboard, and a music stand tucked into the curve of the soundboard. To the right was a seating area with a broken-in maroon couch and mismatched chairs placed on another threadbare carpet. Every item of furniture seemed to come from the kind of store that some would call antique and others thrift.

  Beyond that there were some homemade cubicles that created a hallway leading to a kitchen where I could glimpse the corner of a giant old commercial stove and table. On a cabinet leading to the hall was a big marionette dressed in a tuxedo, holding a violin in one wired hand and a bow in the other. (This was long before his Geppetto complaint, but Sam would later assure me that he had no hand in carving this fiddle-playing puppet.)

  Across from the puppet was a glass-fronted barrister’s bookcase, and as we passed it I tried to catch the titles of a few of the books stuffed inside. Understanding Wood. The Violins of Antonio Stradivari. And, of course, Violin-Making as it was, and is.

  Although most of the loft had a thrown-together, do-it-yourself feel, this bookcase sat against a new wall that looked professionally built. To the left of it was a pair of polished doors in a buff rosewood finish. Just to the side of those doors hung a small black-and-white framed photo of Sam standing with Isaac Stern, the two of them holding a fiddle together and lifting it toward the camera. On the photo was an inscription from the legendary violinist that read “To Sam, thank you again for your wonderful craftsmanship.”

  I had read what I could about Sam before coming to visit, and I knew that this was one of the most prestigious commissions of his career, one that had generated a buzz about him in the relatively small and insular world of violins. Maestro Stern was among the faction of top soloists who preferred the fiddles of Giuseppe Guarneri, known in his time around Cremona, Italy, as del Gesù. If the violins of the older and more productive Antonio Stradivari were considered the Rolls-Royce of the trade, those made by Guarneri del Gesù were on the order of Jaguars—more erratically made, but powerful and distinctive. Stern had long played one of the most coveted of Guarneris, called the Panette (most top violins have been labeled at some point in their lifetime, usually by a dealer appropriating some cachet from a famous previous owner). The famous soloist had heard of this young, up-and-coming luthier named Zygmuntowicz who was gaining a reputation for his careful copying of famous instruments. Stern commissioned a copy of the Panette. After it was built, Stern brought the new instrument to a rehearsal with some of his friends, including Yo-Yo Ma, and played it without mentioning that it was a duplicate. Until the great old violinist said something himself nobody noticed he was not playing his regular great old violin. Soon, Maestro Stern asked Sam to copy his other great Guarneri, the Ysaye. Word spread quickly, and Sam’s reputation climbed.

  “Someday, maybe, I’ll tell you the story of that fiddle,” Sam told me. Then he pushed open those double doors and led me into the workshop of his studio, the inner sanctum of his professional life.

  Fro
m talking on the telephone with him, I had a basic understanding of how the business worked. Unlike some luthiers, who produced fiddles and then sold them through dealers, Sam took commissions from violinists themselves and then designed each fiddle for the particular player. He was able to make between six and eight violins in a year. (He also usually had one cello in the works at any given time.) When we met his price was $27,000 for a violin and $46,000 for a cello. Because he had more customers than hands, the wait from commission to delivery was about two years, and the larger cello could take five.

  “Usually,” Sam said, “when I talk to people about violin making I don’t get that technical. I talk about the business aspects, the people aspects—things that are understandable to people who have similar concerns in their own field.”

  I was interested in the business and personal aspects of his trade, of course, but entering Sam’s studio for the first time, looking around, I found myself focused on the technical part. The technical part seemed like a wonderful mystery made manifest all around me—a tableau of saws and chisels, files and brushes, stained jars filled with pigments and solvents. Everywhere—on tables, hanging from wires, tucked into storage slots—were the familiar parts of fiddles: the curved, feminine-shaped backs and bellies, the nautilus twist of the scrolls, the flat, dark wedge of the fingerboard.

  The workshop had a main room about twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, with a windowed wall lined with a workbench that was actually a jerry-rigged progression that began with an old wooden desk on one end and progressed through a series of grafts that included tabletops and built-in counters, supported by legs and drawers. Sam spends most of his workday seated in a padded modern office chair on the left. To his right sat a young woman with thick, light brown hair and an equally thick Austrian accent. Her name is Wiltrud Fauler, and she is one of two assistants that Sam has imported from Europe. The other, Dietmar, soon emerged from a small room in the far right side of the shop, looking like a factory worker in his blue apron smock, except he was barefoot. Both Wiltrud and Deitmar were friendly but had a pronounced shyness and reserve that seemed natural for folks who spend their workdays concentrating on things and not on people. After we were introduced and exchanged a few pleasantries, they quickly turned their attention back to their workbenches and over the next few hours said very little and that, mostly, to each other in German.

  Sam Zygmuntowicz didn’t miss the irony of a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors hiring two assistants who were German. He was a practical businessman.

  “In Germany,” Sam told me, “it’s quite different from here. They take pride in putting out things of very high quality. It’s a very honorable thing. It’s a career track much earlier. And it’s not like the kids with discipline problems get stuck in the vo-tech school.”

  Sam had his share of discipline problems while getting through school in Philadelphia. His mother kept many of his report cards, and they were full of complaints about a boy who kept a messy desk and didn’t always pay attention. When he began to focus on violin making as his future, his parents couldn’t fathom lutherie as an occupation for their son and tried to get him an apprenticeship with the local carpenter’s union. At fifteen he landed a job helping to repair school violins at a Philadelphia music store called Zapfs. When he was eighteen he enrolled in the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City. It was founded by a German immigrant named Peter Paul Prier, who’d learned the trade in Mittenwald, a Bavarian town with an intense tradesman culture that produced thousands of violins in the last century. The only equivalent to Mittenwald was Mirecourt, a town in France’s Vosges mountains, where violin making was an honored and prolific town trade. After college Sam worked for five years in the Manhattan restoration shop of René Morel, a Frenchman who’d trained in the workshops of Mirecourt.

  “I guess I consider myself only a demi-American in my work attitude,” Sam says. The route that took him from reading Heron-Allen as a teenager in the Philadelphia library to running his own thriving shop in Brooklyn is, he understands, not a journey that most people today want to travel.

  “Our society has gotten more materialistic,” he says. “People go into professions to make money. There’s nothing like the traditional craft that you do in your village, where you go into it when you’re twelve and seven years later your apprenticeship is done and for five years after that you’re a journeyman and by the time you’re twenty-five you can be a master, and maybe by the time you’re thirty you can open your own shop.

  “You can’t even legally hire a twelve-year-old in this country. It’s just not set up that way. And most people who go into violin making don’t go into it seeing it simply as an honorable craft—like being a drywall taper or a plumber. People consider it a kind of art, and they go into it with the expectations people bring to art. Or for a lot of people, being a violin maker is kind of like being a boat builder: something slightly romantic, an alternative lifestyle thing.

  “Because of that I don’t think people get the kind of training that they should get, because that’s not what they went into it for. They didn’t get into it to get yelled at by a Frenchman in very colorful ways.”

  The Frenchman he was referring to was his former boss, René Morel, whose craftsmanship is highly respected and whose mercurial nature is widely known. Many of the world’s top fiddle players come to Morel to maintain and repair their instruments. And many of the instruments they bring are among the most valuable on earth. In a small gem of a book called The Countess of Stanlein Restored, the writer Nicholas Delbanco follows the restoration of a Stradivari cello by that name, which belonged to his father-in-law, the eminent musician Bernard Greenhouse. Greenhouse had waited decades to have his beloved instrument given a major overhaul. And he would trust the job only to Morel.

  During his time at Morel’s shop on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, Sam told me, “I used to sit at lunch with a two-million-dollar violin open on my worktable, and just stare at it, trying to understand it, trying to take it in.” After he left the employ of Morel and opened his own shop, Sam’s reputation grew on his ability to make uncanny copies of old instruments, as he did for Isaac Stern. “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Sam wrote once, “it is also the most direct route to learning a complex and elusive aesthetic.”

  Sitting with him this first day, listening to him talk, catching glimpses of the work routine of Wiltrud and Dietmar, I began to get a feel for the workaday aesthetic of his shop. It seemed like a wonderful place to spend your time. A high-end sound system supplied a subdued soundtrack. I could see that many of the CD cases stacked near the stereo were classical recordings—a number were by clients he had mentioned—but what came out of the speakers this morning was an eclectic mix of folk and bluegrass and only a little classical. Sam is a self-taught fiddler who plays folk, country, klezmer, swing—everything but classical music. Wiltrud is a classically trained violinist who plays with a semiprofessional orchestra in New York. (Dietmar plays just enough to test fiddles in the shop.) “Wiltrud teases me,” Sam says, “that I like to listen to hillbilly music.”

  Surrounding Sam were tools. A series of gougers looked like elongated woodhandled spoons ranging in size from a few inches to a foot long, their tips ground to a sharp edge to rip through wood. My eye lighted on a set of wood planes. The largest was the same size I have used myself, the kind you buy in a hardware store to get rid of extra wood on doors that don’t close right. But in this shop the planes get increasingly smaller, and lined up they look like a set of unnested Russian dolls, shrinking down to a little shoe-shaped thing that is about the right size to jump around a Monopoly game board. To use it, you’d have to hold it between two fingers like the handle of a teacup.

  In my library trip before coming to Brooklyn, I’d read some of the articles Sam had written about his craft over the years, mostly for the top journal of the string world, the English magazine called The Strad. In one piece, Sam described his work as “mor
e than a complicated carpentry project.” But to someone like me, walking into his shop for the first time, it appeared that what he does is exactly a complicated carpentry project. Almost everything in the workshop seemed designed to fashion and transform wood. And, leaving out the small room with large band saws that Dietmar worked on sporadically through the morning, everything has a look of timeless tradition. A few tools look so weathered that it seems Stradivari himself could have handled them.

  “The fact is,” Sam said, “my shop in many ways could be any shop throughout history. Some of the tools are more sophisticated—clamps and things. We have electric lights and we heat glue in an electric pot. But I would say that Stradivari could walk into this shop and, after a few hours of looking around, could work here quite comfortably.”

  This was the first of many times that Sam would drop the famous name Stradivari into the conversation. Over the months that followed, I would come to realize that the influence of the Italian craftsman who died in 1737 is felt almost constantly by modern violin makers. His presence was consistent and powerful, like a moon pushing and pulling the oceans in an everyday way. In the many hours I would spend in his workshop, Sam’s nonchalant talk of “Strad”—or, for variation, “the old guy”—would sometimes make it seem that Stradivari was working still. In a way, Sam was Strad’s apprentice, and the old guy might as well have been there in the shop each day, scraping away at a fiddle and muttering to himself in Italian.