The Violin Maker

by John Marchese

  I sat in on one session of What Do We Really Know? at Oberlin, and there was a lot of banter and good-natured bluster as the makers debated arching and graduation and design. (Luckily, no one threw in the loaded-grenade question about bass-bar tension.) Afterward, walking from the dining hall to the workshop in the muggy Ohio night, I asked Sam what had been concluded—What did they really know?

  “Actually, very little,” he said.

  Well then, what did Stradivari really know? Though there is all that debate about exactly when and how he came to the workshop of Amati, there is no doubt that Antonio Stradivari learned his craft in the old guild tradition. Guilds kept secrets, and craftsmen trained in the system considered themselves only that—craftsmen—and not artists. In the flowering of the Renaissance, many artisans began to see themselves as individuals, as artists. With the development of printing in the sixteenth century, many of these artists produced treatises. The first was the Italian sculptor Ghiberti, says Jacques Barzun in his magisterial history of Europe. And, Barzun writes, “After Ghiberti’s the deluge.” Alberti, one of the architects of St. Peter’s in Rome, left treatises on architecture, perspective, computation, and bookkeeping. Palladio wrote his famous works on building. Dürer wrote on painting and human proportions. Da Vinci compiled his notebooks. Violin making developed and reached its apotheosis in an age where all these ideas were still in the air. Yet no violin maker from the Golden Age of Cremona left behind a manual. The rules were built into the objects themselves.

  The Hills also note that for a lengthy period after his death, Stradivari’s instruments were not considered the epitome of sound. That distinction belonged to people like Jakob Stainer, an Austrian luthier who worked around the same time as Stradivari, or later makers who thought they had surpassed all the guys from Cremona. But somehow, as time passed, a different standard developed. It was back to the future. Though there would be a small, cultish group of players who preferred the Guarneri sound (a group founded by the great Paganini), they remained a subset. For a long time now, what everyone has wanted from a violin maker, no matter what they did to achieve it, was the sound of Stradivari.

  But how do we really know that sound?

  Despite being exceptionally difficult to talk (and write) about, sound, in a fundamental sense, is quite simple. It is air vibrating. Yet the complicated way those vibrations are produced—especially in a bowed string instrument—and the equally complicated ways those vibrations are perceived by humans give scientists from a variety of fields lifetimes’ worth of work and, so far, few definitive answers. And no amount of empirical research has made hearing less personal. Sound, Sir James Beament concluded, in The Violin Explained, is “subjective and susceptible to suggestion, belief and myth.”

  So now, when listeners think they are hearing a Stradivari, they think it is an unmatchable example of great sound. But there are plenty of examples of times when listeners, even trained experts, are just plain wrong. Such stories that I came across ranged from the most theatrical (and perhaps apocryphal) tale of how Fritz Kreisler once played an entire concert on a cheap manufactured fiddle. Of course, he was known for playing the great Guarneri that would later be named for him. As he basked in the warm applause this night, the story goes, Kreisler lifted the fiddle in the air, smashed it to pieces, and enjoyed the shocked gasps of the audience before summoning his del Gesù from the wings. You have to wonder if the audience really got what must have been the point of his theatrics. Many can recognize the sound of Kreisler, but almost no one can actually spot the sound of a great Cremonese fiddle.

  More recently, David Finckel, the cellist of the Emerson Quartet, has been playing on a Zygmuntowicz copy of the famous Duport cello long played by Finckel’s teacher, Mstislav Rostropovich. When the cello was finished, Finckel convinced Sam to put a fake Stradivari label inside the instrument. After concerts, when admirers came backstage to congratulate him and marvel at his instrument, Finckel would show them the Strad label. “Oh, of course,” more than one music fan told him, “with that sound it had to be a Stradivari.”

  “I got more than a few laughs out of that,” Finckel told me.

  In 1963, violin maker and acoustics researcher Carleen Hutchins (one of the founders of a group of violin researchers called the Catgut Acoustical Society) wrote an article for Scientific American in which she reported that she had taken a five-dollar violin that was used by Harvard physicist George Saunders as “his ‘standard’ of badness” on his many acoustical experiments. Hutchins took the bad fiddle apart, did some adjustments, and then used it in a test with a college music department audience. Players behind a screen alternated between playing the revamped five-dollar fiddle and an “excellent Cremona violin.” (Hutchins did not report its maker.) The two were judged equal in tone by the trained listeners.

  Tests like this have been undertaken for a long time. Perhaps the earliest was done in 1817 by the French National Academy. The results, according to Sir James Beament, are remarkably similar and tend to support what I began to call the Zygmuntowicz Uncertainty Principle. These tests, Beament writes, “have all produced results which one would expect from pure chance.”

  My favorite episode in the game of What Do We Really Know? comes from a BBC radio program from 1977, when music critic John Amos gathered together three formidable experts: violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman, and Charles Beare, then (and now) one of the most respected and successful violin experts and dealers in the world. Stern and Zukerman entertained millions (and made millions) playing the fiddle. On Beare’s word, millions could be spent obtaining one.

  For the test, the BBC had gathered four instruments. One was a later-period Stradivari, the 1725 instrument dubbed the Chaconne. One was a 1739 Guarneri del Gesù. Another was a violin made in 1846 by Vuillaume, the most respected maker of his day, and a brilliant copyist. The fourth fiddle was a little over a year old, produced by a British luthier who was actually still alive. All four would be played in the London Broadcasting House studio by a noted British soloist. He would play parts of the same two pieces on each. First, the Bruch violin concerto in G minor, whose opening allowed the player to work on all four strings of the instrument. Second, the iconic Bach Chaconne. The violins would be played behind a screen so the judges could not pick up any visual clues.

  From the start they complained. Isaac Stern said the recording studio was the wrong place to perform such a test. Charles Beare said it didn’t matter what people heard in the audience, “the difference between great and good is what [the violin] does for a great player under the ear with an orchestra.” Zukerman didn’t have a chance to protest before John Amos gave them all a figurative pat on the hand and promised, “It’s not an examination of you. We’re just wondering whether one can tell immediately the tone differences.”

  In this case, it turns out, these two great virtuosos and one renowned expert might as well have flipped a coin to determine their opinions. No one got more than two out of four correct. And the correct guesses and wrong guesses were completely different among the three men.

  The talk continued for a little while after the results. Isaac Stern strongly advised young players to work with a new instrument until they knew enough and had enough money to buy an old one. (Twenty-five years later, after he commissioned Sam Zygmuntowicz to copy each of his famous old Guarneris, Stern often lent the copies to up-and-coming young players.) John Amos tried to elicit some final lessons learned from his panel of experts. Zukerman said his Guarneri made him feel better when he was nervous. Beare, the dealer in old instruments, stuck to his guns that older was better.

  Finally, as the program was running out of time, Maestro Stern said, “We hope your listeners are as pleasantly confused as we are.”

  Confused, to say the least. That’s what I was. The world of violins began to seem like a variation of the famous tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Or a strange little society where there was some form of mass hypnosis at work. Stradivaris are the g
reatest violins ever made because…everybody says so. They’re better because…no one knows. They sound better…except when they don’t, or when it’s not a Stradivari that you think you’re hearing.

  I was in the midst of all this uncertainty, trying to understand what it said about violin making that no one really knew what made great great, when a curator in New York threw the proverbial hand grenade into the figurative room full of violin experts. He said that he’d scientifically determined that the most famous Stradivari violin of all couldn’t have been made by Stradivari.

  The story of the violin known as the Messiah is perhaps the epitome of the Stradivari mystique—though mythos might be a better word.

  The Messiah was made in 1716 but was still on a shelf in Stradivari’s workshop when he died in 1737. As with almost everything connected to Stradivari, the reason it was never sold led to much speculation. The most romantic conclusion—and perhaps the correct one—is that the old guy knew that this was his most perfect creation in a long and distinguished career and he simply could not part with it. As the Stradivari-owning violinist and writer Joseph Wechsberg said in his entertaining and generally clear-eyed book The Glory of the Violin, before and after the Messiah “no better violin was ever made.”

  Antonio’s youngest son, Paolo Stradivari, who shunned the family business and became a merchant, didn’t seem to have such reverence for the fiddle. After his father’s death, he agreed to sell the violin to Count Cozio di Salabue in 1755. Though Paolo died before the transaction was complete, the count made it part of his great collection for about fifty years, until he sold it to Luigi Tarisio, the man who had become the premier collector and rescuer of Stradivari’s instruments as the master’s reputation faded in the decades after his death.

  From there, the story gets nearly comical. Tarisio often brought his Cremona discoveries to Paris, where J. B. Vuillaume would act as a broker for resale. (And who, while the Strads were in his possession, often made copies so frighteningly exact that there are plenty of rumors that a number of instruments considered Stradivari are actually Vuillaume.) While in Paris, Tarisio spoke often of this perfect violin he had obtained—it was then named for the count who’d originally bought it: the Salabue. In fact, Tarisio mentioned this fiddle so often that one day Vuillaume’s son-in-law Delphin Alard, a great violin soloist himself, had finally heard enough. “Monsieur Tarisio,” Alard reportedly said, “your Stradivari is like the Messiah—he never comes.”

  Tarisio emulated the master maker; he died before selling the perfect violin. A solitary and miserly obsessive, he was reportedly found in a dingy Milan garret, clutching two violins (can we imagine the identity of one of them?), his cold body lying on a mattress stuffed with money he’d made over the years selling the old Cremonese masterpieces. Vuillaume was the first dealer to learn of Tarisio’s death and made a quick trip to Lombardy, where he bought everything from Tarisio’s survivors, including the perfect Stradivari violin, which he now named the Messiah.

  Back in Paris with his find, Vuillaume did some of that Cuban mechanical work on the fiddle, lengthening the neck to put it into modern playing shape, changing the bass-bar. He probably made many copies based on its form. And though he set a price on Stradivari’s masterpiece, it was always too high for a taker. The Messiah stayed in a glass case in his shop. Whether that was purposeful or not, Vuillaume, like Tarisio before him, like the great Stradivari before that, died before parting with the Messiah. Of such coincidences are legends made.

  Finally, after Vuillaume’s estate was settled, the Messiah became the possession of the man who’d inspired its memorable name, Delphin Alard. He already owned a Strad and didn’t much care to play his new one.

  The Hills bought it in 1890 for 50,000 francs, about 2,000 British pounds. After a series of sales to people who were more collectors than performers, the Messiah ended up back in the possession of the Hills. Though it had hardly been played throughout its life, the violin was perhaps the best-known instrument in England, having arrived for a show in antique instruments in 1872 and been the subject of a series of articles in the British press on the majesty of the Cremonese masters.

  The two surviving Hill brothers decided that the Messiah should be kept pristine and agreed to donate the violin to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. (Once again, the “curse” of this fiddle appeared; both brothers died before the legal work was done.) But eventually, after World War II ended, the Messiah went on display at the Ashmolean, destined to be studied and revered for ages as the most perfectly preserved example of Antonio Stradivari’s genius.

  Then, in 1997, Stewart Pollens, a New Yorker who worked preserving the violin collection at the city’s Metropolitan Museum, got permission from the Messiah’s keepers in Oxford to take some high-quality photographs of the violin. It is a rare person who actually gets to touch the instrument.

  As Pollens later recounted it, he’d long had some suspicions about the authenticity of the Messiah. There was so much legend and myth mixed into the provenance of this fiddle that some discrepancies in the documentation were ignored. For instance, a few of the descriptions that Count Cozio made while he owned it didn’t match those of the Hills. Two patches inside the instrument noted by Count Cozio were not mentioned by the Hills, who wrote an entire monograph about the Messiah in 1882. Pollens was not the first to question the authenticity of the Messiah. One story had it that Simone Sacconi, the legendary twentieth-century restorer and copyist, who’d devoted his life to studying Stradivari, had been given an audience with the violin and declared it a copy by Vuillaume. But decades had passed since there’d been any serious public discussion of the Messiah and its authenticity.

  That changed when Pollens sent some of those high-resolution photos he’d taken to a German scientist, Dr. Peter Klein, who analyzed the violin’s spruce belly using the technique of dendrochronology. The growth of a tree is unique to the climatic conditions of each year it is alive, evidenced by its internal rings. Dendrochronology can compare the growth rings of a certain tree with a collected database of trees from the same region and give a surprisingly accurate date for the last year that tree lived.

  Klein told Stewart Pollens that the spruce of the Messiah front had been alive in 1738. Since Stradivari died in 1737, this finding started a new—and incredibly two-fisted—game of What Do We Really Know?

  While it may be true that violin makers will fight vociferously over the tension in a bass-bar, that kind of argument really is a function of caring more and more about less and less. Pollen’s claim directly pointed to the validity and expertise of violin experts and dealers, a very small coterie who operated as gatekeepers to a rarefied place where top fiddles were reaching prices of nearly $5 million. There was more and more money involved, and these people cared quite a bit. If the most famous fiddle in the world had fooled all the experts, who would fully trust a dealer’s appraisal again?

  “When you try to move in on the world of dealers,” I was told by a well-known violin maker who’d tried it once, “they’ll kill you. Not literally kill you. But almost.”

  The charge against Pollens was led by Charles Beare, the London expert who’d so confidently told the BBC audience (after not identifying correctly half of the violins played for him) that modern makers needed to just keep trying to make them as good as the old guys. Along with the remaining heirs of the Hill family and officials at the Ashmolean, Beare enlisted two different dendrochronolgists to date the Messiah. Unsurprisingly, they were given greater access to the instrument and came back with a finding that the wood could be last dated in the 1680s, and furthermore, it matched well with the wood of other acknowledged Strads from his Golden Period in the early 1700s.

  That didn’t end the argument so much as kick it to a higher and more shrill level. There were intimations of a cover-up, broad intimations of incompetence from both sides, and some good old-fashioned mudslinging. Pollens, writing to an online violin Web site called Sound-post, complained about ad hominem att
acks against him. The editor of the site collected all postings on the Messiah controversy under the rubric “Tree Ring Circus.”

  The circus, mostly, had struck its tent and moved on by the time I asked Sam about the Messiah brouhaha one day while I sat in his studio and watched him scrape away at the belly of the Drucker fiddle. Sam knew Pollens. Years before, Pollens had written a long article about Sam for The Strad, documenting his re-creation of a Guarneri violin. “I can’t understand why he got into all this,” Sam told me. “I really can’t see what he had to gain from it all.”

  But what an exciting session it was of the ongoing game of What Do We Really Know?

  “I guess,” Sam said. He pushed his glasses up on his forehead and peered intently at the spot he’d been scraping. “I know that this wood is some of the lightest I’ve ever worked with. It’s really incredible stuff. And that’s all that matters to me right now.” With that Zygmuntowicz went back to his work.

  Chapter 10

  WE GO TO CREMONA

  Topping over the Swiss and Italian Alps on an early morning flight from Zurich to Milan in an uncrowded plane with a very friendly crew will easily be one of my best travel memories ever. I was on my way to Cremona. My pilgrim’s progress in the violin world seemed incomplete without this pilgrimage.

  When I told my fiancée that I thought it necessary to run off to Italy for research we came very close to recreating that scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where young Jem Finch decides to accompany his father on the grim trip to inform his client’s wife that her husband is dead.

  “You want me to go with you?” Jana asked me.

  “No, I think I’d better go out there alone,” I told her, as Atticus Finch had told his son.

  “I’m goin’ with you.”

  And that was that. Now, Jana sat beside me, sipping a rich, foamy cappuccino and marveling at the way the sun sparkled off the snow of the Alpine peaks, which were so close it seemed we could lean out of the plane and scoop up a snowball.