The Violin Maker

by John Marchese

  In 1958, Simone Sacconi came back to Cremona for the first time since the exhibition he’d helped organize twenty years before. He was now an eminence in the violin trade. He met Francesco Bissolatti, and the two luthiers became quick friends. When Sacconi saw the Stradivari workshop relics he lamented the haphazard way they were kept—“Everything denoted negligence and disinterest,” according to Bissolatti, who wrote a remembrance of his mentor after Sacconi died. Sacconi convinced his young Cremonese violin maker friend to help him put the collection into better shape.

  Sacconi had an intuition that in these dusty workshop materials lay the key to fully understanding Stradivari’s methods. “Those molds and designs,” Bissolatti remembered later, “were for [Sacconi] living testimony of the sublime art of that insuperable master.” Starting in 1962, Sacconi came to Cremona nearly every year during his vacation from the House of Wurlitzer in New York. He once gave a course in restoration at the International School. He visited the local churches, following a hunch he had that the artisans who made the elaborate wood-carvings in the churches were linked somehow to the artisans who built fiddles. Bissolatti, who’d given Sacconi keys to his shop, would arrive for work at 7 A.M. to find that his friend had already been working for two hours, perhaps on an experiment with the raw materials of varnish, trying to rediscover Stradivari’s technique.

  The tall, cultured, and gentle Sacconi had begun to build what would be the capstone of his career, of his whole life really, since he had almost totally devoted it to violins. He was writing a book that would decode and decipher the techniques of the great Maestro of Cremona. As much as anyone could, Sacconi would create that longed-for treatise that Stradivari never left behind. He finished it just before he died, after his last visit to Cremona, in 1972, and called the book I “Segreti” di Stradivari—The “Secrets” of Stradivari.

  “I ‘Segreti’ di Stradivari was Simone Sacconi’s final gift to his profession,” wrote the London dealer Charles Beare, who had worked with Sacconi as an apprentice in the House of Wurlitzer workshop. “It has become almost a bible.”

  I had a bootlegged copy of The “Secrets” that Sam Zygmuntowicz had obtained while in violin making school. Though it is possible to get a little stuck when Sacconi’s writing starts to care more and more about less and less, there is still more life in those pages than in that room full of artifacts in Cremona. As might be expected from the life work of a craftsman who had unusual concentration, Sacconi’s book ranges widely in explaining something very specific. He devotes much space to analyzing the mathematical principles that guided Stradivari’s design of his forms and the more decorative scroll. (The scroll design, he said, combines two early mathematical discoveries: the Archimedian spiral and the spiral of Vignola.) Sacconi gives over page after page to analysis of the various archings and thicknesses in Strad’s instruments. He includes a detailed discussion of the master’s varnishing technique, which had become subject to the most fanciful speculation of “secret” techniques and recipes.

  Sacconi’s conclusion is either surprising, or perfectly obvious, depending on how much stock you put into the various Stradivari myths. The tip might have come from those quote marks around the word Segreti in the title. It turns out that Sacconi had labored all those years, studied all those instruments as carefully as anyone ever could, tested recipes, built impeccable copies, and in the end decided…there were no secrets. Yes, some of the techniques had been “lost” over time. The continuity of tradition stopped when the long chain of master-to-apprentice teaching broke within a generation of Stradivari’s death. But, Sacconi decided, Stradivari was no more—or less—than the best that ever was.

  “Stradivari was not the trustee or the discoverer of any particular secret,” Sacconi wrote in the last paragraph of The “Secrets.” “To insist in such a superficial or closed vision of his personality or his work means, more than anything else, to destroy its value and to reduce him to the level of an empirical though lucky practitioner or quack. He was Stradivari because his creations were [sic] united the knowledge of mathematics and nature, together with a deep spirit of reflection and research, artistic sensibility, exceptional technical ability, experience and tradition.”

  I got out of the Museo di Stradivari about as quick as I could. Just an hour later I found myself peering into yet another glass case in Cremona. It had begun to seem that everything was in a glass case in this town. I began to imagine that, sooner or later, if I just kept looking, I’d come across a case with the spirit of Stradivari inside because it certainly was not in the air. The latest glass case was on the second floor of the Civic Museum, a beautiful salon with real and highly polished marble, located in Cremona’s twelfth-century city hall. Inside was a gorgeous yellow-hued fiddle that Stradivari had built in 1715. It had been named the Joachim, for its former owner, Joseph Joachim, one of the greatest virtuosos of all time. Now, since it was the only violin owned by his hometown, it was dubbed the Cremonese. I walked around the case to examine the highly flamed maple of the back and ribs, the distinctive and expertly carved scroll, the sweeping curves of the outline. It was a beautiful fiddle. Perhaps this was as close as I would come to finding the spirit of the master.

  Two guards armed with automatic weapons watched carefully as I pointed to the case and tried to explain to Jana how the old guy had joined the purfling corners into the classic “bumblebee stingerette.”

  “Oh yeah,” she said, “I see that. That’s really cool.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “Nothing.”

  We moved slowly again around the glass box. Displayed this way, the Cremonese was more a work of art than a tool. It finally registered with me why so many violinists are upset when yet another old Italian instrument is purchased by a collector or museum and becomes less and less heard and more and more simply seen. The Cremonese had six companions in identical glass cases throughout the room. There was a highly decorated fiddle that the original Cremonese master, Andrea Amati, made for Charles IX of France in 1566. There was a later Amati viola, and a violin by Nicolò Amati (who taught young Antonio Stradivari). There were two Guarneri fiddles, one by the Giuseppe known as “Giuseppe son of Andrea,” and another by his more famous son Giuseppe, known as del Gesù. And last was an elaborately inlaid fiddle that looked remarkably like it had been built by Stradivari, because it was actually an impeccable copy of Strad’s 1687 violin known as the Hellier, crafted by Simone Sacconi. Sacconi built it here in Cremona, right around the time he was being named an honorary citizen of the town.

  Each violin was beautiful in its own way, but each, locked in its case, seemed suspended in time and somehow lifeless. I realized that I had struck up an odd and somewhat privileged relationship with violins, particularly for someone who didn’t actually play. Lurking around Sam’s studio, I’d been able to see and touch and hear a Stradivari and a Guarneri del Gesù. Though I was careful and reverent—always aware of how valuable they were—I’d developed a sense that they were tools made to be used. Like those classic cars rolling through the streets of Havana, they’d been ministered to all these decades to keep them alive, so that they could be driven. “I’d love to hear what these fiddles sound like,” I told Jana.

  Soon our guide Patricia caught up with us. She had been here so many times that the guards who’d been so stern with us (we were the only visitors) relaxed visibly, greeted her warmly, and began to chat and chuckle.

  “It’s too bad we weren’t here earlier,” Patricia told me. “They tell me that Maestro Mosconi was in today. He comes and plays the violins to keep them in shape.” Toby Faber, in the process of researching his delightful book Stradivari’s Genius, had stumbled into this museum just in time for one of Maestro Mosconi’s routine concerts. Mosconi is employed by the city to keep its fiddle collection in playing condition. He generally plays one violin each day, meeting the responsibilities of what might just be the cushiest government job in the history of government
jobs. Though Faber heard wrong notes and thought the playing “faintly plodding,” it was also the first time he’d been so near a Stradivari being played.

  “There really is something about its tone,” Faber wrote later. “Warm and vibrant, it seems to inhabit the room.” I remembered that Sam Zygmuntowicz had recounted a similar experience, when the soloist Daniel Heifetz visited the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City during Sam’s first year there and played some of Bach’s Chaconne on his Strad in a small room filled with prospective luthiers. It was Sam’s first time hearing one of the old guy’s instruments close up. “I’ll never forget that sound,” Sam told me.

  These violins in the Palazzo Communale were beautiful. They were well treated and well guarded. But mostly they were mute, and that seemed kind of sad.

  It was late afternoon by the time we left the town hall, and Jana and I both craved coffee and some gelato from a shop we’d discovered across the square. Patricia had other errands to run. Before she left us, she handed me a business card of a restaurant named Alfredo’s. “You’re invited to a party there tonight.”

  When we arrived at Alfredo’s it was nearing the end of what had obviously been a boisterous aperitivo time. The place was packed, and we had to shoulder our way to the bar. The party was celebrating the fifth anniversary of the restaurant, and dinner would be on the house. The owner, Mario, was bartending right then, and when I asked him for Scotch on the rocks he shouted out, “Ah, the Americans are here!” Jana tried to fool him by using her most useful three words of Italian—Prosecco, per favore—but her Texas accent gave her away.

  Soon we were seated at a bunch of small tables that had been pushed together, and Jana ended up next to the violin maker named Marco, who had seemed so cool the other night at Bar Bolero. I tried to get her attention and discreetly suggest she change seats, but it didn’t work. Of course, I needn’t have worried, because by the time the main course arrived—the most delicious roast pork I have ever eaten—Jana and Marco were new best friends, and he was laughing loudly and dispensing wine in copious amounts.

  Patricia brought along a young French woman named Silvie, who had recently arrived from Paris and enrolled in Cremona’s violin making school. Silvie had just finished carving her first scroll, and she pulled it from her bag with a mixture of pride and trepidation. She obviously was a long way from thinking, as Sam Zygmuntowicz did, that this task was simply “whacking away at wood.” The scroll was unvarnished and seemed very light as it passed through my hands for a quick inspection on its way around the table. It was clear that the final judge would be Marco.

  The maestro held the scroll up to the lights, turned it several times, brought it back close to his face, and peered at it down the length of his long, classic Italian nose. He had reverted to looking stern and serious. Jana glanced nervously between him and Silvie, who, when I looked at her, seemed to be deciding whether to laugh or cry.

  Finally, Marco declared, “Bene!” and laughed, sparking an eruption of laughter at the table, which had become a small silent spot in the noisy room. Then he switched to English and said, “Everybody has to carve their first scroll.” That brought a spontaneous toast at the table. This seemed like a typical moment in Cremona, which made me realize how untypical it would be anywhere else on earth. Yes indeed, everybody has to carve their first scroll. “C’ent Anni!” Marco passed the scroll back to Silvie and set out to refill everyone’s wine-glass.

  I started talking to Silvie about Cremona’s violin making school. We’d visited one morning—or tried to visit—but found there was nobody around who could give us permission to go in, but by the same token, there was nobody who cared to stop us either. I had found a young Italian student who spoke about as much French as I did, and he invited us to visit a classroom workshop. There was no sign of any teachers; a handful of students carved away at fiddles, listened to rock and roll, and smoked cigarettes. Silvie told me she was learning a lot.

  When next I looked over at Jana, she and Marco were each wearing those things you clip on your head with springs that stick up like antennae. These had shiny red hearts that wiggled and bobbed as they moved their heads. By the time we got up to leave, everyone had taken a turn wearing the bobbing hearts. Before we began to try to weave our way back to what we’d taken to calling “our palazzo,” I remembered to ask how much we owed for the wine. Marco shouted, “Niente. Nothing. Va bene.”

  “That means, ‘Go well,’” he added. Marco stood and raised his glass toward us. “Come to our workshop tomorrow. Patricia will bring you.”

  The workshop where we went to meet Marco the next morning could have been created by a set designer. Occupying the ground-floor corner of an old stone building on the via Millazo, it had wood-paneled walls and tall, shuttered windows that looked out on a street scene which, except for the cars, seemed to be a view shared by Stradivari himself. Worktables lined three of the walls, each with an architect’s lamp like the one Sam used for illumination and sounding a pitch. The standard tools—planes, gougers, scrapers, calipers—were arranged neatly, either lined up near the worktable or hung on the paneled walls. Some wood shavings dotted the tile floors. The place smelled of freshly cut spruce and varnish.

  When Patricia had picked us up at our palazzo she told us, “You should be very honored that you are getting an appointment with Maestro Bissolatti.” It turned out that Marco was the son of Francesco Bissolatti, who decades before had befriended Simone Sacconi. When we arrived, Marco got up from his workbench and stepped past two other workers to greet us. It was hard not to imagine him wearing two bouncy heart-shaped antennae. He took us over to a bench across the room where a gray-haired man with thick glasses and a beard was working in a blue shop apron. This was his father. Francesco welcomed us with a friendly formality and went back to work. Marco took us back across the room to his bench and introduced us to the other workers, who were his younger brothers, Maurizio and Vincenzo. Before we would leave the shop that day Marco would give me a handsome book he had written about the tradition of Cremonese craftsmanship called The Genius of Violin Making in Cremona. It includes chapters devoted to the Amatis, the Guarneris, the Stradivaris, the often overlooked Ruggeris and Bergonzis, and, yes, the Bissolattis. It seems Francesco has set himself up as the modern patriarch of Cremonese violin making, a new old guy, with his sons laboring nearby, the start of a new tradition. “Finally,” Marco writes in the chapter devoted to his own family, “people have begun to understand that string instruments worthy of the great Cremonese tradition are once again being made in Cremona.”

  We went from bench to bench and checked the instruments under construction. Maurizio, working on a viola, seemed a bit distracted and annoyed by our being there. Vincenzo was quite shy, but held up an unfinished fiddle for us to admire. In another corner an older man with a full head of gray hair worked with his back to us, and we were not brought to his bench.

  “Who’s that?” Jana asked.

  “He is not here,” Marco said. We both looked to Patricia to see if we’d missed something that she could translate for us. She stepped closer and whispered to us, “That is Maestro Mosconi, the man who plays the city’s violins. But he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here.” I didn’t quite understand what the big deal was, but I promised I would keep I Segreti di Mosconi just as long as I could.

  We turned in the other direction and entered a smaller varnishing room, where a number of fiddles hung by their scrolls on wires stretched horizontally at a height that kept them just within reach, drying in the muted sunlight. Against one wall was a table nearly covered by jars and bottles filled with viscous varnishes, their colors ranging from deep burgundy to nearly lemony yellow. Jana pointed to a small cot in the corner, covered with a blanket that pictured a polar bear, a blanket for a child. “Who uses that?” she asked. Marco spoke Italian.

  “Maestro Bissolatti,” Patricia translated, “has a sacred nap each afternoon here with the drying violins.” I’d read som
ewhere of a legend that Stradivari had done the same thing, and some thought he meant to impart his spirit into the fiddles.

  Marco shepherded us from the varnish room and through a door into a large and ornate reception area. He went to get a copy of his book, and Jana and I both gasped when we noticed a huge bronze statue looming behind us. It was Stradivari and the apprentice boy, almost the same statue I’d seen in the Piazza Stradivari, except that the figures were rendered more realistically. They actually looked like people.

  “How did you get this?” I asked Marco, a little incredulous.

  “It was secondi—runner-up in the contest. My father bought it. This one is better. The one they put in the piazza—it looks like people from another planet.”

  It occurred to me later: that’s about the only theory that hasn’t been launched to explain Stradivari’s greatness.

  Finally we came back to Papa Francesco’s bench, and he put aside his work to talk for a few minutes. He didn’t seem comfortable trying to interpret my English, so Patricia would put my questions into Italian. But then he would answer in English. It seemed a lot was getting lost in that process. For instance, when I asked what it had been like growing up around Cremona and wanting to be a violin maker, he responded in English: “Parma has cheese, we have violins!”

  “How about your friend Sacconi, did he get it right?”

  “A great man. A genius. Not Stradivari, but as good as anyone else.”

  “So,” I said, “you agree with Sacconi, that there was no secret.”

  Francesco Bissolatti required no translation for that. “One secret,” he responded immediately, holding up a finger. “The secret,” he said, “is being able to do it.”

  This was as close as I would get to finding the spirit of Stradivari in Cremona. It was a spirit of practicality and practice. It was the spirit that propelled a man to labor for seven or eight decades at the same craft, every working day constricted by that craft’s traditions, which, paradoxically, also meant being utterly free to experiment. Simone Sacconi wrote that “this craftsmanship had become a myth because it was not understood.” But he hoped that his life’s work, his book, would help violin makers to understand “the simple truth of a daily routine of work and of the use of techniques which contained nothing mysterious.”