The Violin Maker

by John Marchese

  “I do believe what I’m doing here was inspired by René,” Sam said as he reached around the table for his own sauce, pushing jars back and forth with increasing frustration. Finally, he found it. “Here it was right in front of me the whole time,” he said, picking up a jar. I chose that moment to interrupt his disquisition and ask what was in the sauce. And in keeping with Morel’s tradition—what by now was a centuries-old tradition—Sam refused to tell me.

  I felt I didn’t need to remind him that he’d written an article for the trade magazine called Strings in which he had described attending a gathering of violin makers in Puerto Rico that was dedicated to the idea of sharing varnishing “secrets,” and creating a new world where, as Sam wrote, the “closed door atmosphere is starting to yield.” For a few minutes I tried gently to get the closed-door atmosphere in our little closed-door room to yield, to no avail.

  “It’s just one of those things,” Sam said finally, letting me know that the discussion would go no further. “A good magician never tells all his tricks.”

  I can report this: the jar of sauce he used was labeled 13B MEDIUM DARK.

  Sam rubbed 13B Medium Dark onto the unfinished Drucker violin with a cloth, at first using very light strokes and putting on just a fine layer of color.

  “This wood is quite interesting,” he said at one point. “It was soft when I was working with it and I was worried I could overstain it. But that’s not happening at all. I could whack this thing even harder. It’s not particularly absorbent.” Eventually he switched to using a brush. It was a small brush with short dark bristles made from the hair of a squirrel. It looked as if it had seen a lot of fiddles.

  “I’ve had this for about twenty years,” Sam said. “Which shows you how cheap I am.”

  Soon he cast aside the squirrel-hair brush and started smearing 13B Medium Dark onto the fiddle with his fingers. “I’m not sure OSHA would approve of my material-handling techniques,” he told me, “but I’m a ravening beast when I varnish.” He switched on the architect’s lamp, revealing that it contained not a normal lightbulb but a heat lamp. It quickly got so hot being near it that I had to move my stool back from the worktable. Sam put on a big pair of tinted safety glasses that looked as if OSHA would approve. He moved in closer to the lamp.

  “I’m kind of melting it into the violin,” he said. “This needs to happen with time, but you can get a little head start with this lamp. I’m almost cooking it in, really impregnating the wood.” As he worked, little wisps of smoke floated out of the violin through the f-holes. I wondered if he’d ever had a fiddle burst into flames but didn’t think it was the proper time to ask.

  I did ask Sam if he ever changed the nature or substance of what he used for the ground coat to try to achieve some different kind of sound from one of his violins. He kept stroking on “varnish” with his now completely stained fingers.

  “This particular operation I don’t vary much,” he said. “I don’t know if it’s true, but I started using this sauce and I have a belief that this in part has something to do with the tone that I achieve with my instruments and I’m kind of scared to change it.

  “I think I’ve tried to convey this to you in a lot of different ways,” he continued. “But one doesn’t always know why something works, and it’s spooky. You keep asking yourself, Shouldn’t I know? But you don’t know which ingredient is the active ingredient in all this. And without extensive testing of every little aspect on and on and on, keeping all other factors the same—which never happens—you never really do know.

  “So, I have a feeling for the way these instruments tend to vibrate. When I apply this ground I can squeeze the instrument, and there’s this little snap-crackle-pop. It just sounds crisp.

  “This material that I’m using, I feel like it just crawls into the wood and becomes one with the wood. This spruce was so soft and powdery when I worked on it—this ground is going to glue all those fibers together. It’s not glue per se, but it’ll have that effect. It’s going to make the surface of the wood feel stronger, and hopefully that will make the material even more responsive to the tiny little vibrations. It’ll have more of that sizzle-y kind of vibration when it’s played, which gives a more complex, shaped sound.”

  Sam stopped rubbing ground into the violin, wiped his hands on a rag and on his apron. A little over an hour had passed since he’d started, and sure enough, the fiddle had awakened, Frankenstein-like. There was a life and character to it. The surface was still a little wet, and as Sam cradled it in his hands again and rocked it back and forth the light bounced off its various surfaces, making the flamed maple of the back seem almost three-dimensional, showing a depth and texture in the parallel grain of the spruce belly. Sam hung the Drucker violin back in the light box.

  “All right,” he said. “Now you have gone where few have gone before you.”

  I felt both privileged and stymied. Going anywhere in this topsy-turvy world of violin making seemed so often like going down the proverbial rabbit hole. It wasn’t any different with “varnish.” Today I had learned that in this important process, as with so many other parts of building a fiddle, the real secret was that there was no secret. I was getting accustomed to that revelation. Yes, these varnish secrets were very curious indeed. All along this secret had been hiding in plain sight. What people had for centuries thought of as varnish was really just a kind of makeup that covered the skin underneath. And the important part of the beauty of a violin, both in sight and sound, really was skin deep, in the pores of the wood.

  I would go home that night and reread Sir James Beament’s chapter on varnish in The Violin Explained. He had become my clear-eyed, no-nonsense go-to guy. Beament’s analysis of varnish went all the way down to the chemical level, describing chains of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen molecules. But I always returned to the Cambridge don for a knowing, skeptical global view.

  The classical makers of Cremona, Beament wrote, “can have known no more about why varnish worked than why their wooden boxes did.” Varnish, Beament concluded, since it was the most cosmetic part of a fiddle, had provoked a phenomenon that is still being used by the cosmetics industry—convincing people that there must be a secret ingredient that enhanced physical beauty, or, in the case of the violin, created a beautiful sound.

  Before I left Sam’s shop that day, we talked about the end run toward finishing the Drucker fiddle. With the ground on, he would leave it in the light box to dry for a week or more. Then he would apply several layers of what he had called varnish proper, maybe three or four coats total. They would also need to dry. Then he’d go over the brand-new fiddle to make it look like it was a few hundred years old. Gene Drucker had ordered—and was willing to pay extra for—an “antiqued” violin. In the top echelons of the classical music world, no fiddle player wanted an instrument that looked new, even if a top living maker crafted it. Such was the strength of the cult of old age.

  “If I finish the varnishing and get it dry by Mother’s Day,” Sam said, “I’m prepared to be gonzo about it and do a marathon antiquing session. Really go at it. I could have the fiddle ready for Gene by his birthday party. It’s doable.”

  Chapter 12

  DELIVERY

  He did it.

  The next time I went to Brooklyn, as I trudged up the now-familiar four flights of stairs to Sam’s shop, I could hear the sound of a violin—beautifully played—get louder and louder. On the top landing, I stood behind the door for a moment before walking in, listening to a passage from one of the Bach partitas. I’d heard Sam test violins many times, and though he is a very competent fiddler, it certainly was not him playing. The music stopped and a voice inside said, “Wow. Wow! That’s really great.” I went in.

  Sam was leaning against the baby grand piano, where two violins rested on their backs. Wiltrud was perched on the arm of one of the worn sofas. In the middle of the room stood a neatly but casually dressed middle-aged Asian man, a violin in his hand. This was Cho-Liang Lin, whom
nearly everyone calls Jimmy. He is one of the top violin soloists in the world. Strings magazine described him as a “splendid Taiwan-born virtuoso, renowned for his soulful expression of emotion in classic, romantic, and modern music.” Like Gene Drucker, he was trained at Juilliard, where he worked with Dorothy DeLay, one of the most famous and respected violin teachers of this century.

  Early in his career, Lin had played on several Stradivari instruments. None of them completely satisfied his needs. Then, as he told Strings, “I saw the 1734 ‘Duc de Camposelice’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ in the Charles Beare shop in London and fell in love with it.” He managed to buy it. But the violinist was not so in love with his del Gesù that he didn’t realize that it, like many old fiddles, was prone to getting out of sorts when subjected to the demands of quick international travel. I had met Lin in Sam’s shop once before, and he’d told me of going from a concert in frigid and snowy Montreal to another in hot, humid San Antonio. After nursing his 250-year-old fiddle through the harsh changes, Lin decided to commission a modern instrument from Sam, and he began to entrust Sam with maintenance of his del Gesù.

  Sam had told Strings, “As a person he’s extremely gracious—when you meet him, you feel he’s an almost natural aristocrat, with an old-fashioned graciousness. The new violin he’s commissioned from me was designed in terms of his playing style, the personal way a player has of drawing out sound from a string. I don’t rely on recordings for that kind of thing. When he comes to my studio, he plays for me. I wouldn’t rely on electronic equipment for that.”

  Today, Jimmy Lin was in Brooklyn to pick up his Guarneri, which had been in the shop for some maintenance. Sam took the opportunity to have him test the just-finished Drucker fiddle. It was just a few days before Gene’s birthday party, where the violin would be ceremoniously delivered.

  The Drucker violin looked quite different from the last time I’d seen it, when Sam finished his brush-and-fingertip application of the ground coat and stuck it into the light box to dry. Before applying the “varnish proper,” he’d put on a coat of amber, which is a very tough resin. The purpose was to create what he called an “isolating layer” on the fiddle, so that subsequent coats of varnish could not impregnate the pores of the wood.

  Then, Sam reported, “I used an oil varnish with a resin component, and cooked it to make it dryer and more colorful.” The color was an orange-brown, with more of the golden brown color coming through. “I figured that would look nice,” Sam said.

  As he applied the varnish proper, Sam simultaneously started to “antique” the instrument, trying to make the brand-new fiddle appear to have hundreds of years of use and wear. It is not as controversial as the tension in a bass-bar, but luthiers argue over the propriety of antiquing a new violin. Some violin makers refuse to antique a new instrument, arguing that, at the least, it perpetuates the cult of old age that permeates their world; some go as far as to say it is dishonest to make a new instrument look old.

  Sam Zygmuntowicz is a very practical craftsman who realizes that his clients want instruments that appear old, and in the tradition of his father, the laundryman, he gives customers what they want. Besides, he told me, the antiqued instrument had more character and was more interesting to look at than a pristine, perfectly varnished new instrument. “Once you’ve worked with old fiddles,” Sam said, “it’s hard to get used to working with new, straight varnish. One of the things that makes old instruments look so interesting is the few little nicks and the added contrast.”

  To achieve the result of making new look old, Sam developed a technique of taking the pristine fiddle and giving it decades worth of wear in a day—sort of like time-lapse photography.

  “To the extent possible,” he told me, “I try to emulate the real wear that happens. While I’m varnishing it I start to wear it in realistic ways—hand abrasion, thumbnail chips, scratches, a lot of handling. Then I’ll put a film over it, a light wash of rosin that has a yellow, brown, and gray in it naturally.

  “I’ll add a little lampblack from a candle to that, a very thin wash that you’re almost not aware of. I used to just burn a candle on a hot plate and dip my brush in it. Because that’s where a lot of contrast in the old fiddles actually came from: being in houses lit by lamps and candles and heated with fireplaces. Soot was in the air.”

  Now, in the studio, Jimmy Lin held the Drucker fiddle against his neck and played a bit of a violin concerto. I could recognize the melody but couldn’t name it offhand. He put down the Drucker and picked up his Guarneri and played the same passage.

  “I don’t know,” Lin said.

  “Which one was that?” Wiltrud asked.

  “It was the Guarneri,” Sam told her.

  “Does it sound like it’s worth four million dollars more?” Jimmy Lin asked.

  Nobody in the room dared to answer the question.

  A few days later, I snuck into the upstairs club called Fez at a restaurant called Time Café on Broadway on the Upper West Side. Gene Drucker’s wife, Roberta, had planned a surprise party for her husband’s fiftieth birthday, and I knew that if Gene saw me, he’d really know something was up. The room was already crowded with people, and I recognized the other three players from the Emerson, and Sam and his wife, Liza, over in the corner.

  Gene arrived with Roberta a few moments later and seemed genuinely surprised. There was singing and applause and congratulations. And then Sam stood up and called for the room to hush. He walked with a violin case to the front of the room, near the bar, opened the case, and pulled out the new violin. Later, he would tell me that he was very nervous preparing to play a violin solo in front of a big group of top-level classical musicians.

  Sam tucked the violin under his chin, raised the bow, and performed a fiddle tune called “West Virginia Gals.” He received warm applause from the crowd while Gene strode to where Sam stood and received the fiddle. He turned the fiddle around to see it himself and show it to the crowd. He played a few short passages and then put it back in the case. Through the rest of the party many of his friends would take a chance at playing the new instrument. In fact, the violin moved around the room like a brilliant and attractive party guest, and every time I looked there was a small knot of people around it, giving the fiddle their undivided attention.

  Now the Drucker violin belonged to Drucker. Nobody, least of all the violinist or the violin maker, knew how he would react to it. As I was leaving the party, I stopped to look at the new fiddle one last time. It was momentarily alone, lying on a table near the door, and even in the murky light of the nightclub it was beautiful; its glowing brown varnish had a patina of age, and when I rocked it a bit, the light hit on the facets of tool work that Sam had left on the carved spiral of the scroll. How I wished I could pick up this violin and throw off a passage from the Bach partitas. I’d spent so many hours with the pieces of wood that made up this finished fiddle. Silly as it seemed, I couldn’t help feeling a pang of regret and nostalgia, now that it was finished, as if it were a child going off to college.

  The case sat nearby, and it was then that I noticed Sam had made a bumper sticker and stuck it onto the side. It read: MY OTHER FIDDLE IS A STRAD.

  Chapter 13

  WHAT YOU HEAR UNDER YOUR EAR

  After the birthday party I started playing the new violin,” Gene Drucker told me later. “I was working on a Mozart concerto that I was going to play that summer at a festival in upstate New York.

  “I liked the openness of the sound. My wife, Roberta, found it very big. But something started happening. The sound was so direct, so penetrating, that it was almost too much under my ear, without as much sweetness leavening the punch and the volume as I might desire.

  “About a week after that we went to Vienna. The quartet was doing that theater piece based on Shostakovich—The Noise of Time. Written by the British playwright Simon McBurney, The Noise of Time is a multimedia performance that examines the Russian composer’s life and work from the Nazi siege of Leningrad
to his complicated and controversial connection with Stalin and later Communist regimes. The Emerson Quartet is used to great effect. The musicians mix onstage with actors, and live music mixes with recorded sound and visual effects. Ultimately, the musicians play Shostakovich’s haunting and powerful fifteenth string quartet, his last, which many think he wrote as his own requiem.

  “I used the new violin for that performance in Vienna,” Drucker said. “It worked fine for that. And I kept preparing the Mozart concerto and was also working on a Bartók sonata and some other repertoire for the summer festival. I remember practicing in that hotel room in Vienna and liking some things about the new fiddle and not being totally convinced about other things and wondering, What I define as quality in my innermost set of definitions as a violinist—Does this violin really have it, or not?”

  When next I talked to Sam Zygmuntowicz after the birthday party, I asked him what he knew about Gene’s reaction to the new violin. “For Gene,” he told me, “he’s surprisingly all right with the whole thing.

  “For Gene,” he added.

  Sam talked for a while about his theory of psychoacoustics, and the important interface between the player and the instrument. “Strads have a way they like to be played,” he said. “Gene will have to adapt to the new fiddle. This is a Guarneri model and is a little different and you’ve got to play it that way. He’s got a fiddle now that will allow him to whack it. It will be able to bring out other aspects of his playing.”

  Drucker had visited Sam’s shop for what the violin maker described as part sound post adjustment, part pep talk. “He played all kinds of music while he was here,” Sam reported. “Excerpts from the quartet repertoire, concertos. He really played extended passages and it was very emotional. Sometimes I had to interrupt him. He just wants to crawl into the music.”