The Violin Maker

by John Marchese

  During one break in the recording session, I was sitting in the control room chatting with Phil Setzer. While he talked, he absentmindedly cradled and stroked the violin he was playing that day.

  Because he used his Zygmuntowicz violin almost exclusively, Setzer had to borrow an old fiddle for this project, and he’d been able to use one belonging to David Fulton, who is a computer software millionaire and in recent years has amassed one of the best collections of violins in the world, many of which he lends to top performers. Fulton had lent Setzer the favorite fiddle of the late Isaac Stern, the 1737 Guarneri del Gesù known as the Panette.

  There we were, sitting on folding chairs in a rather dingy basement room. Setzer pushed the fiddle in my direction and asked, “Have you ever held anything worth five million dollars?” He let my fingers grasp the del Gesù for a brief moment and then pulled the violin back with a comic flourish. I have listened to the sections of the finished Octet recording where I know Setzer is using the del Gesù, and, once again, I cannot pinpoint a real difference, let alone a $4.975 million difference.

  I understood Sam’s position that it was futile to keep questioning whether the old instruments really were better—accept the fact and keep working. But in the final analysis of what I’d learned about new fiddles and old fiddles and the violinists who played them, I once again found that Sir James Beament seemed to get it right. In the last chapter of The Violin Explained he concluded that it was simply the prime market force of supply and demand that determined the astronomical prices paid for the famous old guys’ violins. However, Beament wrote, “They do not make any different sound, and no audience can tell what instrument is being played. But if a player thinks he plays better on such an instrument, he will.” And, “audiences are even more susceptible to suggestion than players.” That’s not going to change anytime soon.

  In the year after he finished the violin for Gene Drucker, Sam went on filling his various commissions. Then, in May of 2003, the estate of Isaac Stern put up for sale the two del Gesù copies Sam had built for the Maestro. The sale was handled by a new online auction house named for the great hunter of violins, Tarisio. Sam’s copy of Stern’s Panette sold for $130,000, which was a record price for an instrument crafted by a living violin maker.

  In the weeks and months after that auction, Sam dealt nearly constantly with calls for new commissions. He raised his price for a new fiddle to more than $40,000. Despite that (or maybe because of that), his waiting list just kept getting longer. Soon, it would include two of the most heralded strings players of our time. One was superstar violinist Joshua Bell, who played on a Stradivari known as the Gibson ex Huberman, a fiddle whose history was picaresque, and included going missing for decades after being stolen from backstage at Carnegie Hall. The other was Yo-Yo Ma, who has lifetime possession (on loan from an anonymous owner) of one of the most revered instruments in the world, the cello known as the Davidov. It had previously been used by Jacqueline du Pré.

  “It happens that a number of my clients own Strads,” Sam told me. “They’re coming to me for something very specific. Unfortunately—though I’m not really complaining—that sets the bar a little higher.”

  Before finishing this book, I joined Sam for one last time in Oberlin. He’d stopped attending the workshop dedicated to violin making and had switched to a weeklong gathering of researchers in violin acoustics that included scientists and more technically minded violin makers. Sam said he felt he’d learned about as much as he could about building the box from his violin making colleagues; he was now most excited about understanding the science underlying how the boxes vibrated. “The key to innovation,” he told me, “is more knowledge.” But even the scientists were still trying to discover the “secrets” of Stradivari. Not long before this, a climatologist from Columbia University and a dendrochronologist from the University of Tennessee (one of the men who’d been part of the tree ring circus dispute over the authenticity of the Messiah) published a paper speculating that the wood Stradivari used in his violins was especially strong because it grew during a peculiar 70-year climatological period known as the Maunder Minimum, or “little Ice Age,” when colder weather would have made trees grow slower and denser.

  Nobody mentioned that discovery in the few days I spent sitting in on the acoustics workshops at Oberlin. Most of the information presented was rather opaque—PowerPoint presentations full of charts and equations. Luckily, like the violin makers I’d first met here in Ohio, the acoustics group held a friendly cocktail hour and dinner and then most people headed back to the workshop for more informal, at-ease evening sessions. I’d been in these workshop rooms before. It was the same building where on a hot night several years ago, a violin maker had introduced me to the notion of the magical box. This time, things were different. The centers of attention this night were acoustic testing machines that could record a spectrum of sound output from a fiddle that was carefully positioned before a microphone and tapped on the bridge with a little hammer. Compared to this, the violin making workshop had indeed seemed like a bunch of old Geppettos carving away. Now the rooms had the look and feel of a laboratory.

  Late that night Sam took me to his workbench and showed me an instrument he’d created for testing. “Here’s Gluey,” he said, holding up the violin. It was a cheap factory-made fiddle that he’d taken apart, scraping the belly and back as thin as he would ever dare. He put in a bass-bar, gave the fiddle some varnish, and set up the strings and sound post for a professional player. Then he made a bunch of veneerlike patches in various sizes that he could stick on and pull off the belly and back as he wished. The purpose was to test how changing thicknesses in various places affected the vibration of the top and back plates and how that altered the sound. Though much of the experimentation was recorded the old-fashioned way—using unreliable ears—Sam also had built his own contraption, which measured the sound spectrum created by plucking one of the strings. The results are recorded by special acoustics software on his laptop computer.

  Over the next few hours Sam talked and talked and tested and tested. Time seemed to stop for him, and I got more and more tired. He said things like: “We’ve gone from a static approach to a dynamic approach. Violins aren’t static; they’re changing all the time. Every part is moving.” At one point he pulled out his laptop and showed me a three-dimensional “movie” of a violin vibrating, complete with air being pushed out of the f-holes.

  “Isn’t this cool?” Sam asked. “What’s important is what’s invisible, but I think technology will help us see the invisible.”

  Whether he was right, or whether he would ever realize his notions, or whether that will help him make fiddles better than those of the old guys, I don’t know. But I finally understood then that I had been given a window into a room that few of us ever see in the modern world. What I’d witnessed in his workshop was craft; what I was seeing tonight seemed to be the true soul of craftsmanship. Sam was here, essentially, on vacation. He’d been in the workshops since early morning and it was approaching midnight. As the great sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in his study of work in the book White Collar, “The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living…. There is no split of work and play.” Not only was Sam Zygmuntowicz a very successful violin maker, but he was also a lucky guy.

  I had been playing the trumpet a lot around this time, and one job I got was to perform in the backup band for a variety show. This was not your run-of-the-mill variety show but one produced, directed, and largely starring priests from the diocese of Scranton, my hometown, where I’d played at the funeral of the governor and heard the young violinist play Irving Berlin, and, for all intents, started on this whole project.

  For this show, there was only one short and frighteningly disorganized rehearsal in the late afternoon before the first performance. In the run-through of one number, a priest with a very good voice sang Charlie Chaplin’s song “Smile,” accompanied by an accomplished piani
st, who happened also to be a monsignor. After the first time through the lyrics they asked me to play a short solo but said I wouldn’t have to play it during the actual show.

  The night of the performance, a young violinist showed up to play that solo—the same young violinist who’d played “How Deep Is the Ocean” in church and spun a web of sound that enveloped hundreds of mourners and made them hold their breath. He wasn’t quite so young now; he’d gone through a conservatory and was starting his career. He played beautifully, infusing Chaplin’s song with more sophistication and an even richer sound than he’d achieved with Irving Berlin’s tune. The odds were against him: the show was in a big, sterile auditorium, with such acts as a priest doing ethnic jokes and others lip-synching and dancing to the disco hit “YMCA,” but once again, the violinist reached the heights of poignancy.

  Backstage afterward, I introduced myself and told him how good he sounded. Naturally, I asked him what kind of fiddle he was playing. “It’s about a hundred years old,” the violinist said. “It belonged to my grandfather. It was made in Romania.” He mentioned the maker’s name, but I didn’t recognize it.

  As he wiped off the violin and placed it in the case, the violinist said to me, “I like to think that this fiddle has a gypsy soul.”

  After all I’d seen and heard in this strange and magical world of violins, I wasn’t going to argue with him.

  Source Notes

  The bulk of what is presented here is based on many hours with Sam Zygmuntowicz in his workshop, taking notes, or, more often, running a tape recorder as he described what he was doing and the principles behind it. The result was hundreds of pages of transcripts from which I drew much of the narration. I did the same in my more limited time with Gene Drucker. In keeping with standard journalistic practice, neither Sam nor Gene was given any prior review or approval of the text.

  I also drew from articles by Zygmuntowicz and about him in the main journals of the trade. They included various issues of The Journal of the Violin Society of America, The Strad, and Strings. Those three journals were also helpful in informing me about various other subjects in the book as well as giving me a continuing understanding of issues in the world of fiddles.

  The first book that caught my attention was Edward Heron-Allen’s Violin-Making as it was, and is, and I find myself returning to it often because it is so strange and charming. Sam Zygmuntowicz told me that when he reads Heron-Allen now, the eccentric Englishman seems even more astute.

  James Beament’s The Violin Explained: Components, Mechanism and Sound really became my “go-to” source. It is a tad technical, but Beament’s scientific skepticism, combined with his intimacy with the subject—he plays the bass fiddle and is married to a violin maker—makes for a clear-eyed analysis of how violins, old and new, function on the player and listener.

  The Hills’ survey of Stradivari was invaluable. Antonio Stradivari: His Life and Work (1644–1737) has stayed in print so long for obvious reasons. I also used the Hills’ subsequent The Violin-Makers of the Guarneri Family (1626–1762). Simone Sacconi’s ‘Secrets’ of Stradivari is likewise indispensable for understanding Stradivari’s work. And, for my purposes, it gave great insight into Sacconi himself. That understanding was buttressed by a collection of reminiscences of Sacconi published in 1985 by the Cremonese Association of Professional Violin Makers, titled, From Violin Making to Music: The Life and Works of Simone Fernando Sacconi.

  A more circumscribed look at Stradivari’s work—Stradivari’s Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection—was written recently by Toby Faber and was quite helpful. An entertaining look at one Stradivari instrument and its restoration by Sam’s former boss, René Morel, is Nicholas Delbanco’s 2001 book The Countess of Stanlein Restored: A History of the Countess of Stanlein Ex Pananini Stradivarius Cello of 1707.

  Several more general looks at the violin and its world were very helpful. The most readable is one from the early 1970s by Joseph Wechsberg called The Glory of the Violin. More academic in tone, but no less helpful, were Alberto Bachmann’s An Encyclopedia of the Violin, first published in 1925, but still available; and The Violin Family (various authors) from the New Grove Musical Instrument Series.

  Several fictional works based on real people from the world of violin making were both entertaining and source material. William Alexander Silverman’s The Violin Hunter is one; John Hersey’s Antonietta is the other. And anyone interested in fiddles should try to see the movie The Red Violin. I’ve watched it half a dozen times and, while working on this book, told questioners many dozens of times that, no, I was not writing a book like The Red Violin.

  If one were to be inspired to try making a violin at home, then Joseph V. Reid’s You Can Make a Stradivarius Violin would be a decent place to start, though I can assure you that it’s not as easy as he makes it seem.

  Gene Drucker’s recording of J. S. Bach’s unaccompanied sonatas and partitas for violin has been reissued by Parnassas Records. I referred to enclosed liner notes written mostly by Drucker. I also used The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Documents.

  The recordings by the Emerson Quartet on Deutsche Grammophon are extensive, and all are worth listening to. Those I used most were Mendelssohn: The Complete String Quartets (2005), which includes a documentary video on the recording of the Octet; Bach: The Art of the Fugue (2003); Beethoven: The Late Quartets.

  Glossary

  THE MAIN PARTS OF A VIOLIN:

  Back. The underside of the sound box, usually made of maple, sometimes one piece, but most often two pieces joined lengthways. The back is slightly arched, and the pattern of the wood is a main visual feature of the fiddle.

  Bass-bar. A carefully carved rod of spruce that is glued to the inside of the violin top, on the bass side of the bridge.

  Belly. (also Front or Top) The upper side of the sound box. It is almost always made of spruce in one, or two, joined pieces, arched and carefully graduated in thickness. Two f-holes are cut into it.

  Block. Carved pieces of softwood—often spruce or willow—glued inside the sound box to support the ribs and hold them in place.

  Bridge. An elaborately carved, thin piece of wood with two feet that rest on the belly and four small slots on top that hold the strings, whose tension keeps the bridge in place.

  F-holes. Two holes cut into the violin belly on either side of the bridge in the shape of cursive Fs. They allow air carrying the violin’s sound to escape from the sound box.

  Fingerboard. A long piece of ebony that is attached to the neck, running most of the length of the strings. It supplies a surface against which the violinist’s fingers can press the strings to change pitch.

  Neck. A carved piece, usually maple, attached at its bottom to the violin sound box and at its top holding the pegbox for string tuning and the decorative scroll.

  Pegbox. A small carved wooden box at the top of the neck, into which are inserted four pegs that hold one end of the strings and allow for tuning the instrument.

  Purfling. A narrow inlaid band of three wood strips—the outer two dark and the inner light—that runs just inside the border edge of the belly and back. It is decorative but also serves to protect the edges and control cracks.

  Ribs. Usually six strips of thin maple that form the curving sides of the sound box, connecting the belly and back.

  Scroll. The ornamental carved piece at the top of the neck, traditionally done in a nautilus-like spiral.

  Sound box. The resonant chamber formed by the belly, back, and ribs.

  Sound post. A rod of wood, usually spruce, that is wedged into the sound box, under one foot of the bridge. Its function is to transfer vibration from the belly to the back, and its minute movement—called an adjustment—can significantly change the sound of the fiddle and its feel to the violinist.

  About the Author

  A musician and award-winning journalist, JOHN MARCHESE is the author of Renovations: A Fathe
r and Son Rebuild a House and Rediscover Each Other. He lives in New York City and in New York’s Catskill Mountain region.

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Praise for

  The Violin Maker

  “An impassioned account…shows what magic is secretly being practiced behind many nondescript doors.”

  —New York Times

  “Marchese is engaging and funny, and he uses his substantial skill to tell a story worthy of his subjects. They, in turn, are generous collaborators, allowing us a close look at the passion that drives their lives. As a reader, I’m satisfied. I’ve moved through a world of acoustic geeks and passionate artists, and I emerge feeling smarter and pleased to have been treated to a story so well told.”

  —Newsweek

  “A deeply descriptive and appreciative look at a slow, exacting craft. Marchese is a skilled writer.”

  —USA Today

  “This story of a gifted craftsman and a demanding client strikes a high note, with rich overtones on the themes of art, creation, and the power of music.

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A beguiling journalistic meditation on the links—and tensions—between art, craft, and connoisseurship.”