We said good-bye to all the Bissolattis and thanked them for their hospitality. We even said good-bye to the man who wasn’t there. Marco led us out through the formal reception room, and we got one more look at the Master of Cremona, portrayed in bronze. I was going back to the shop in Brooklyn, where I knew Sam would soon be reaching the stage in making the Drucker violin that had always been the most mysterious of all.
Chapter 11
VARNISHES AND VERY CURIOUS SECRETS
FOR VIOLIN MAKERS, VARNISH IS LIKE SEX OR MONEY: A DEFINING CHARACTERISTIC OF ONE’S PERSONALITY THAT IS NOBODY ELSE’S BUSINESS.
—Sam Zygmuntowicz
By April, with a little more than a month until Gene Drucker’s birthday and his promised delivery date, Sam had the Drucker violin nearly built. The “box”—ribs, belly, and back—was complete “in the white,” the violin making term for a fiddle that is fully carved and scraped and has the light colored hue of new wood in a lumber yard because no varnish has been applied yet. Some more woodwork needed to be done. As he prepared to carve the neck and fingerboard, Sam e-mailed Gene to see if the violinist would like the neck made to the same specifications of his Stradivari, or if he could carve his standard Zygmuntowicz neck, which was very similar, but not an exact match. “We can always reshape the neck later,” Sam wrote, “but I’d like to get it right the first time.”
Drucker was touring Europe with the Emerson Quartet when he got the message. He responded that he was comfortable with his Strad neck but that he didn’t normally pay a lot of attention to that detail. He did send Sam detailed information on what strings he was using, expressing a willingness to experiment with different strings on the new violin. Gene concluded his reply by writing, “I’m getting excited as the time approaches for a new violin-playing experience!”
So the violin maker got out his cutting tools and carved away everything that didn’t look like a neck and fingerboard for this fiddle. He attached the scroll and carved box that holds the pegs for string tuning to the top of the neck, and then put the whole apparatus onto the body of the violin. Now the new Drucker violin was ready to go through the process that has intrigued and confounded luthiers for centuries—varnishing.
The Hill brothers, in their grand treatise on Stradivari, begin the chapter on varnish like this: “It is with considerable diffidence that we approach the much discussed subject…. We hope to place the matter before our readers in a truer light than that in which it has hitherto appeared, and thus to dispel much of the mystery in which the subject has been involved by the ever-ready pens and fluent tongues of the many self-constituted authorities.”
I think what the brothers were trying to say in their polite Victorian diffidence was—Let’s cut the bull. Though the Hills tried to dispel the long-held notion of some secret varnish recipe used by Stradivari, they couldn’t stop themselves from intimating at its tantalizing possibility.
The Hills wrote of repeated discussions they’d had with a descendant of the master, one Giacomo Stradivari, who claimed that as a child he’d opened an old family Bible and found handwritten on a flyleaf a recipe for the perfect violin varnish and instructions on how to apply it. Giacomo said the date of the inscription was 1704, the beginning of Strad’s Golden Period. He had copied it out of that Bible, which was later lost. Though a number of people—including Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume—offered Giacomo a lot of money to share the transcribed recipe, he always demurred, saying that he would keep it to himself in case anyone in the Stradivari family decided to take up the craft again. It would give his kin an immediate competitive advantage. Giacomo Stradivari died before the Hills completed their book, and no recipe was ever found. Perhaps Giacomo had just been having fun and the story of the recipe was a hoax; perhaps it was a great loss for luthiers.
Brushing aside their tantalizing brush with “the secret,” the Hills concluded that Antonio Stradivari simply did with varnish what he did in all other aspects of his craft: practiced the traditional techniques that had been handed down to him, but did it with such single-minded devotion and skill that the final result was, as the Hills liked to say, ne plus ultra. Even for the cautious and conservative Englishmen, Strad’s varnish inspired some paroxysms of prototypical fiddle porn. Like this passage from their book describing the varnish of Stradivari’s best instruments: “Lightness of texture, and transparency combined with brilliant yet subdued coloring…picturesque and attractive in the highest degree.”
It was commonly accepted, though, that something was lost within a generation or so after Stradivari’s death. The Cremonese way of varnishing disappeared for several reasons. Primary was the fact that the master-apprentice chain was broken in the town where the trade had reached its apotheosis. The Hills believed that within that Cremonese tradition, each practitioner had his preferences and tricks. They could be called secrets, but they were open secrets. The real problem in matching the work of the masters was that “the spirit of artistic emulation which existed in Cremona…had died out.” To revive it would require historical detective work, retracing steps back to the original techniques.
That is exactly what Simone Sacconi did relentlessly for six decades of the twentieth century. When Sacconi was writing his treatise, the subject of varnish still attracted as many “ever-ready pens and fluent tongues.” Much had been written and discussed and guessed at in those hundred years that passed between the two great studies of Stradivari. The depth and complexity of the research was greatly expanded by modern chemical analyses, which yielded lots of data but no definitive answers. Lingering still was a sense that when it came to varnishing, there was a holy grail just waiting to be found.
Sacconi knew all this and seemed to understand the common human need to fill in blank spaces with elaborate doodling. “Since the luthiers and the antique traders of the last century were unable to explain the quality of the sound of Stradivari’s instruments,” Sacconi wrote, “they told stories of unknowable secrets.”
On the last day of April, which began as a gray spring morning with a strong damp wind, I showed up at Sam’s workshop to find the chair at his workbench empty. Wiltrud was working at her spot nearby with her usual concentration. When she finally noticed me she pointed toward the small room at the far left corner of the shop—the varnishing room. In my many days at the workshop, I’d only stuck my head inside that room once, on my initial tour of the place. As much as I’d studied the Hills’ and Sacconi’s books and accepted their debunking of the legends and mysteries surrounding Strad’s varnish, as I tapped on the closed door it was difficult not to feel that I was asking to be let into a chamber full of secrets.
Sam was wearing his usual cool weather outfit—flannel shirt, dark chinos, and sandals on top of heavy socks. He had on a shop apron, which I’d only seen him wear a few times before. The room was bright but cramped, with shelves and tables loaded with jars of different colored liquids. There was a small worktable with the requisite architect’s lamp clamped on the corner. Two large cabinets loomed on either side of where Sam was perched on a stool. One was an old mahogany armoire; the other a homemade beech-veneered plywood cabinet of similar size. The door of the old armoire was cracked open a few inches, and I could see that the cabinet was filled with long fluorescent light tubes and silver reflective Mylar. Violins hung from wires strung inside. These were light boxes, where Sam could speed along the natural aging and coloring and drying for which poor old Strad would have had to rely on low-tech sunlight. I thought back to that famous letter I’d looked at in the stultifying Museo di Stradivari in Cremona: “I beg you will forgive the delay with the violin, occasioned by the varnishing of the large cracks, that the sun may not re-open them.” Sam did not depend solely on the sunlight of the Lombardy plain, nor did he have a sacred napping cot with a polar bear blanky so that he could take an afternoon siesta and impart his spirit into the drying violins. Considering the weight of tradition in his craft, these light boxes seemed a bold move toward modernity. Sam had to push h
is stool back to get the door open wide enough to let me into the varnish room. He got right to the point.
“I think I got the whole thing together on Friday,” Sam told me. “Then I spent part of Saturday finishing the neck. I think I got it done done done in the white sometime on Saturday. Now it’s in the light box. I washed it with a very light wash of pigment to seal it a little bit.”
He opened the light box and pulled the Drucker fiddle down from where it hung. Sam held the violin out toward me, cradling the instrument like a baby, with one hand supporting the head of the scroll and another cupping the bottom. I’d seen a number of violins in the white around the shop. They were interesting and beautiful objects already, but there was a distinct blandness about them. An important character seemed to be missing. The violin, with just this early wash of pigment, had acquired a light cinnamon color, and a distinct shine. Sam rocked and turned the instrument.
“The wash put a texture right there in the channel,” he said. “The ribs have a wave in them as well. And the spruce has a little bit of a corduroy texture now. Look at the scroll. Now you can see little tool marks.”
He pointed to the twisting nautilus spirals cut into the wood, and sure enough, little stepped indentations were visible, giving evidence of how he’d worked his small wood chisel around the curve.
“These are not parts of the decoration,” Sam said. “They’re artifacts of the making process. I like to leave them. Some makers will sand them off or scrape them off. There’s different styles. This is not intended to be a copy-copy of a specific instrument, but it’s a Guarneri style, and I’m sort of letting myself go a little bit more in that direction. The scroll is a little more sculpted, and there’s a little more tool marking than I might do on a Strad model. Lately I like to work that way better. It’s a mix of highly finished surfaces and visible tool work.
“This is a cool moment to see a violin,” Sam told me. “In fact, this is my favorite moment to see it. It goes from inanimate and quite dull—a nice matte and creamy—and then it’s like when they turn the electricity on with Frankenstein. He jolts to life. With any luck this violin is going to wake up.”
He stuck the violin back on the wire in the light box and turned back to the worktable. “I’m just going to get my brushes and tools together and start picking out the different sauces.”
Before I’d left Cremona, while browsing in a bookstore dedicated to lutherie near the International Violin Making School, I’d found a little boxed paperback book called Varnishes and Very Curious Secrets: Cremona 1747. Even though it seemed absurdly expensive—forty euros—I bought it immediately. It turned out to be the translation of a text printed originally in Stradivari’s hometown ten years after the master died, consisting of a series of recipes for varnishes for general use, like preparing paintings, or carved church pews, or, perhaps, finishing a violin. In an introduction to the original material, the book’s twentieth-century editor, Vincenzo Gheroldi, describes a fact of eighteenth-century life of which I’d been completely unaware. People—for fun!—experimented with pigments and varnishes. The practice was a “cultural phenomenon,” Gheroldi explains, that one priest of the day described as “virtuous entertainment.”
How our notions of entertainment have changed. Maybe I’d gone a little native in the wilds of violin making, because it wasn’t difficult for me to understand how, without television, someone would put away the dinner dishes, retire to the study, and mix up a batch of, say, a concoction called bistre. The recipe is as follows:
Refine as much as possible chimney soot, adding to it the urine of a child; put it into a glass, fill it with clear water, carefully mix using a stick, then let it rest. When most of the sediment has settled on the bottom, gently pour this liquid into another glass and let it rest for four days; what settles on the bottom of the glass is the best bistre. Repeat this procedure three times to remove sediment from any colour to be used on paper.
Somehow, I could easily imagine Stradivari doing that. I asked Sam if he mixed his own varnishes, without mentioning the use of the urine of a child.
“It used to be that if you wanted decent varnish you had to make it yourself,” he said. “Now there are people who are making some very useable varnishes, which I’ve used occasionally, at least as a subingredient. I still cook my own. It’s kind of like making a caramel.” Sam was reaching around the table, pushing aside glass jars with different-colored stuff inside. Some of the jars had labels on them with dates.
“There’s different batches here made at different times with slightly different ingredients,” he said. “I’m not even sure where the chart is that is the key to what they are, so I don’t know anymore what the exact ingredients are. But it hasn’t varied much. Basically, the base of it is stuff that comes out of pine trees. That’s what they make turpentine from. That’s what they make rosin from. Between those two products you can make a lot of things.”
He picked up one jar with “93” written on it, then picked up another unmarked jar. Both held viscous stuff that looked a little like maple syrup. “These are from the same batch, but one was cooked for quite a while. One I call ‘medium’ and you can see that the one cooked longer is darker.” He held the jars up toward the weak gray light coming through the windows. “Even though the stuff is thick,” Sam said, “it’s still very transparent, very clear, very glow-ey.”
So, I asked Sam, is this the kind of varnish that all violin makers use? It turned out that what I was about to see was one of three steps in the varnishing process. What laymen thought of as the varnish on a violin actually consisted of a first coat that soaked into the wood, called the ground; a second layer of something that was impervious; then coats of actual varnish.
When Sam realized that, like most people, I was not aware of the stages of the process, he put the jars down and was quiet for a moment, like he was collecting his thoughts.
“We have to back up and go through the whole subject of ground,” he began. “The ground is the most disputed and, I think, the most critical aspect, both for appearance and sound. I’ve done a few things to the wood already in terms of getting a patina on it. There’s a little bit of natural oxidation on the surface. I washed on a little bit of natural pigment to get a little bit of color going. Now the fiddle is more or less like a prepared canvas. Whatever it is that goes on there first is what gets absorbed into the wood. So you kind of have one main go at getting it right.” I could tell that this was another of those times where I was going to speak little and listen a lot.
“The first thing to understand,” Sam continued, “is that if there is something to this whole mystery of the varnish thing, actually a lot of old fiddles—Strads as well as Guarneris and lots of others—have virtually none—none—of what we would normally call varnish left on them. Very, very often on old violins the varnish is just gone. It’s been worn off and thinned down.
“So, if the varnish proper had that much to do with the sound you would say that a more worn violin wouldn’t sound as good because it doesn’t have that much varnish. But that’s not the case. Even when the varnish wears off, what you would think you’d be looking at is bare wood. But what you’re looking at has quite a lot of depth and fire visually—and color. So there’s something on there that has penetrated the wood and doesn’t come off easily.
“That’s really the main thing I know about the ground. It penetrates into the wood. There’s a quality that good instruments have, of having a shine when you turn the instrument in the light. The wood is reflective and also very refractive. When it works really well you can look through the wood almost like you’ve got a magnifying glass and it’s like there’s a lightbulb inside of it. That’s a look I like.”
Sam reached across his table and grabbed a jar full of an amber, waxy-looking stuff. He twisted off the lid and pushed it toward my nose. I sniffed, and it smelled a little flowery.
“Isn’t that nice?” he asked. “That’s propylis. It’s something bees use to seal the
hive. When beekeepers clean the hive they throw it away. Sacconi popularized it. I used to use it. You’d get this crud and soak it in alcohol, and a lot of wax and crap sinks to the bottom and you decant off this very pure material. It is a lovely color. It made a lovely ground. But it’s actually very slow drying and I don’t think it ever gets really crisp. So I don’t use it anymore.
“Now, in Germany, in Mittenwald, they put pure linseed oil on the whole instrument and soak it on—quite a lot! And then you’re supposed to let the instrument hang, for like a year, supposedly, is what they recommend. It’s gorgeous, a very lovely finish. And it’s very protected.
“But one of the characteristics of linseed oil is that it dries kind of leathery. So from the point of view of use it’s good—you could sweat on the violin directly without hurting anything—but in terms of improving the vibration it actually does the opposite. It muffles things. The fiddle might sound very sweet, but it would lack a little of that sizzle.”
Sam kept talking as he reached back into the light box to retrieve the Drucker fiddle. He talked of his mentor René Morel, who told Sam tales of his early days in America, working under Sacconi in the restoration and repair shop at the famous House of Wurlitzer shop on Forty-second Street in Manhattan, and how the other craftsmen there would hide their varnishes at night to keep their coworkers from discovering any secrets. During Sam’s time with the Frenchman, he and Morel discussed varnishing a lot. Morel would talk about the best character of a ground and what it should do. He had cooked up what he considered a perfect “sauce.” And there the sharing stopped. Morel refused to tell Sam exactly what was in it.
The Violin Maker Page 14
