by Paul Adam
‘“I feel the loss very deeply. His Excellency entrusted to me the safe despatch of the instrument and in this task I have most manifestly failed to be worthy of his trust. As it was through my negligence that this unfortunate loss occurred, I feel honour bound to make due recompense to you. I am therefore enclosing a banker’s order for the full amount of the debt owed to you by His Excellency. Knowing you as I do, I must override the objections I know you will make to this arrangement and insist that you present the order for payment. I value your good esteem too much to allow these events to mar our friendship. It is my fervent wish that this debt should be honourably discharged, for only then will my conscience rest easy. I remain, as ever, your most faithful servant, Gio Michele Anselmi di Briata.”’
I put the letter down with the others. For a moment neither of us spoke.
Then Guastafeste said morosely: ‘So that’s it then. It’s gone. Stolen two hundred years ago. What chance do we have of tracing it?’
His dejection was manifest but, strangely, I felt myself untouched by his dark mood.
‘At least it confirms that there was such a violin,’ I said.
‘What use is that?’ Guastafeste retorted tetchily. ‘Who knows where it went? It might have resurfaced years ago and is now in someone’s collection. Maybe some soloist is playing it and no one knows where it came from.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Not if it really was a Stradivari. Every surviving Stradivari instrument has its provenance pretty well documented. If there was one that originated from Cozio’s collection, but was stolen in transit through France, we would know about it.’
‘So what are you saying?’ Guastafeste asked. ‘That it’s still out there somewhere waiting to be discovered?’
‘Either that or it’s been destroyed.’
The contents of the letters were dispiriting in many ways, but I wasn’t going to allow that fact to discourage me. They provided no simple route to the goal we were seeking, but they seemed to indicate that the goal existed – or had existed once – and that was important to me. I wanted to believe in it. I had to believe in it. Was I deluding myself? It was possible. The violin might well have been lost for ever, been chopped up for firewood or left to rot, but I would not let myself believe it. In some way, some powerful, inexplicable way that went to the very core of what I was, I needed this search. Not just for Tomaso, but for me too.
I looked out of the window. It was damp and overcast outside, but the mist of the previous evening had lifted. I could see sheep grazing on the moors, the silhouette of a strange weathered rock formation on the skyline.
‘And this is all Tomaso had?’ Guastafeste said. ‘These are the letters he showed Forlani? He had nothing more?’
‘These would have been enough for Forlani,’ I said. ‘He wanted to believe there was another Messiah out there. It was his dream. Tomaso offered him a way of making that dream come true.’
‘But how? These letters are a dead end. The violin has gone missing on its way to England. No one knows where it is. In all likelihood it was never recovered.’
‘That’s possible.’
‘So how could Tomaso have taken it further? Where could he have gone next in his search?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe Tomaso didn’t know either. But what does a hunter do when his hounds have lost the scent?’
‘He retraces his steps,’ Guastafeste said. ‘Tries to pick it up again somewhere.’
‘And if he doesn’t know where along the route to look, what does he do?’ I said. ‘He goes back to the beginning. He starts again at the source of the scent and follows it anew.’
I paused. ‘We have to start with Cozio di Salabue and Michele Anselmi di Briata. And that means we have to go to Casale Monferrato.’
11
The Randolph Hotel, in Oxford, was the kind of place I could imagine Tomaso staying. Exclusive, expensive, discreetly luxurious, it would have appealed to his weakness for extravagance.
As we arrived, a coach was coming to a halt outside the hotel, disgorging a party of American tourists and their guide. We waited for the group to go inside and disperse to their rooms before we approached the reception desk and asked to see the manager. Guastafeste and I were not planning on staying there. Guastafeste’s police expenses did not run to such an opulent establishment, and I have always been disinclined to waste money on ostentatious hotels when all I need for a night away is a comfortable bed and a washbasin.
The hotel manager, a soft-spoken, smiling man with the conciliatory manner of someone accustomed to dealing with wealthy – and demanding – customers, examined Guastafeste’s police identity card carefully before handing it back and explaining – with the utmost regret – that it wasn’t company policy to give out information about guests.
‘This is important,’ I said, interpreting for Guastafeste. ‘Signor Rainaldi has been murdered. We are not asking for much. We are just trying to establish what he did while he was in Oxford.’
‘Murdered?’ The manager looked horrified, then reconsidered his earlier reluctance to help us. ‘What was the date he stayed here again?’
The hotel records divulged very little we didn’t already know. Tomaso had stayed for one night, had had dinner alone in the hotel dining room, the cost of the meal being added to his accommodation bill. The manager didn’t remember him. One of the receptionists did – ‘The large Italian gentleman with the beard’ – but that was as far as it went. She didn’t know where – if anywhere – Tomaso had gone during his stay. She certainly couldn’t recall him asking for directions or information about any particular location.
We thanked the manager and the receptionist and left the hotel. On the pavement outside I paused, looking across the road at the impressive classical frontage of the Ashmolean Museum.
‘I wonder,’ I said.
‘Wonder what?’ Guastafeste asked.
‘Maybe that’s all Tomaso came here for. A stopover on his way back from Highfield Hall to London. An opportunity to see it.’
‘See what? Oxford, you mean?’
‘I’ll show you,’ I said.
I took him across the road into the museum, then upstairs to the Hill Music Room. There was nothing special about the room. It was unremarkable, scruffy even. My sitting room at home is bigger. The walls were a dirty off-white, the plaster cornice chipped in places. On the floor were polished cork tiles. Frosted-glass windows obscured by blinds kept out the sunlight so the room was illuminated by lights on a rail around the ceiling. In the midst of these drab surroundings, the violin in the centre of the room shone out like a beacon.
‘Le Messie,’ I said. ‘The Messiah.’
It was on its own in a glass case, hanging at an angle from a brass bar, its lower bouts resting on a mat of light green felt. I have seen it many times before. On my infrequent trips to England I try to make a point of coming here to look at it – like a pilgrim on a holy trail. And never yet has it failed to move me. This is what violin-making is all about.
‘The Messiah?’ Guastafeste said. ‘This is the Messiah?’
I wonder sometimes what others see when they gaze at the violin. Perhaps they simply regard it as an old fiddle – a piece of varnished timber, well made, aesthetically pleasing, but no more impressive than any other old violin. If so, I pity them their blindness, for Le Messie is one of the world’s great works of art and like all masterpieces, though it can be appreciated by the layman, it takes a practitioner to fully understand its qualities. I know how hard it is to make an instrument like this. I can see the craftsmanship in the contours of the belly and back, in the purfling, the ribs, the scroll; and every time the perfection leaves me breathless.
I walked slowly around the case, my face almost touching the glass. The two-piece maple back had a distinctive curl in the wood, a pattern of light and dark stripes that reminded me of sunlight on a forest floor. The varnish had a lustre, a velvety sheen like oiled skin. Vaguely, as distant as a voice in
another room, I heard Guastafeste – prosaic as ever – saying, ‘That’s worth ten million dollars?’ But the words barely registered on my consciousness, I was so absorbed in my study.
The instrument is not as Stradivari left it, of course. Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume lengthened the neck and changed the bass bar and fingerboard. The pegs and tailpiece – ornately carved with a relief of the Virgin Mary and a baby Christ with a halo around his head, two cherubs above them playing the harp and trumpet – are also Vuillaume’s work. But they are merely icing, decorations which, rather than detract from the rest of the instrument, seem to highlight the astonishing simplicity of Stradivari’s genius.
‘So this is the violin that was heard about, but never seen,’ Guastafeste said. ‘It seems a shame to shut it away in a glass case. Shouldn’t it be out in a concert hall somewhere being played?’
‘It should,’ I agreed. ‘Though I’m glad it’s here. Just to be able to see it is a privilege.’
‘What’s all this?’ Guastafeste asked. He was reading the printed notice on a stand next to the glass case.
‘“The youngest ring on the front of the Messiah is 1682. If we allow for the removal of sapwood and ten years or so to season, this is perfectly consistent with the attributed date of manufacture by Stradivari in 1716.” What’s that all about?’
‘The dendrochronological analysis of the wood,’ I said. ‘The case for the defence.’
‘The defence?’ Guastafeste said.
‘Yes. You see, some people think the Messiah is a fake.’
* * *
In the silence, I heard the custodian sitting on a chair by the exit turn a page of the book he was reading. The rustle of paper seemed abnormally loud, reverberating disquietingly around the confines of the room.
‘A fake?’ Guastafeste said. ‘The Messiah is a fake?’
‘There are doubts as to its authenticity, yes,’ I said carefully.
‘Don’t they know? Can’t they be sure?’
‘In the violin world, there is no such thing as absolute certainty,’ I said.
‘But isn’t its provenance established?’
‘To some extent. But not all the way back to Stradivari. We know for certain that this is the violin Vuillaume said was the Messiah. Its history since that moment can be proved beyond doubt. But what happened before that point is less clear.’
‘Less clear?’ Guastafeste said impatiently. ‘What do you mean?’
‘It’s complicated,’ I said. ‘To explain it we need to go back in time, to early January 1855.’ I paused. Guastafeste’s gaze was fixed on my face. ‘Have you ever played a party game called Fly on the Wall, when you have to choose a moment in history at which you would like to have been present? You know, to have witnessed the end of the dinosaurs, Vesuvius burying Pompeii, the birth – or Resurrection – of Christ, Hitler’s last days in the Berlin bunker, to have stood at the window of the Texas Book Depository when Kennedy was assassinated. The list is endless. If you asked me, I would choose a moment only a handful of people have ever heard about, concerning two individuals who will never be more than footnotes in history.
‘In late 1854, the great violin collector, Luigi Tarisio, died. The news of his death took a while to reach Paris, but the instant it did, Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume leapt on a coach and headed straight for Milan. He went to Tarisio’s apartment in the Via Legnano, a small, squalid attic room Tarisio used for storing his treasures. I would love to have been there, watching from the wall as Vuillaume walked in and found Tarisio’s violins – piled high on the floor, strung from ropes suspended across the room. Close on a hundred and fifty of them, including twenty-five Stradivaris.’
‘The Messiah among them?’ Guastafeste said.
‘To be strictly accurate, no,’ I replied. ‘Vuillaume actually found Le Messie at Tarisio’s family farm at Fontanetto. But we’re talking myths here. It makes a better story if it was in the attic with all the other violins. Vuillaume bought the entire collection from Tarisio’s relatives and took it back to Paris with him. The Messiah then passed through various hands before the Hill family acquired it and donated it to the Ashmolean.’
‘So what’s the problem?’ Guastafeste said.
‘The problem is the people who owned it before Vuillaume: Tarisio, Cozio di Salabue and Paolo Stradivari. Cozio is beyond reproach, but both Tarisio and Paolo had dodgy reputations. Vuillaume too is not entirely above suspicion. We have only his word for it that the violin he claimed was the Messiah was found at the Tarisio family farm.’
‘But I thought Tarisio boasted for years about owning a perfect, unplayed Stradivari,’ Guastafeste said. ‘That’s what you told me.’
‘I know. But Tarisio is not the most reliable witness in this story. He was a dealer, a somewhat shady character who wandered northern Italy picking up old fiddles, no doubt not always honestly. He kept no records of any of his transactions, left no inventory of his collection. We know he acquired a number of Cremonese instruments from Count Cozio in 1827, but exactly which instruments is unclear. And we know Cozio bought some dozen or so Stradivari violins from Stradivari’s youngest son, Paolo, in 1775, thirty-eight years after the Master died – and one of those was undoubtedly a magnificent violin of 1716 because Cozio kept detailed notes of his collection.’
‘So we know Cozio owned the Messiah,’ Guastafeste said.
‘Yes, but was that 1716 violin he documented the same Stradivari he later sold to Tarisio? And was it the same one Vuillaume found at Fontanetto?’
‘You’re losing me here,’ Guastafeste said. ‘There are too many names, too many owners.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘It’s not easy to follow.’
‘Are you saying the violin here, in the case, isn’t the Messiah?’
‘It may not be. In fact, it may not be a Stradivari violin at all.’
‘What?’ Guastafeste was frowning at me. ‘If it’s not a Stradivari, what is it?’
I glanced at the custodian by the door, but he was too engrossed in his book to be taking any notice of us.
‘Stradivari supposedly made the Messiah in 1716, and never parted with it. That in itself is a little problematic. According to legend it was so perfect he couldn’t bear to sell it. That doesn’t fit with what we know of Stradivari. By 1716 he was a rich and successful luthier. He had far more commissions for instruments than he could possibly handle. Every minute of his time was taken up with making violins that someone had ordered. So why did he make a violin that he didn’t sell? He wasn’t a sentimental man. As far as we know, he didn’t play the violin himself. Why did he make that violin and hang on to it for the next twenty-one years, until his death in 1737?
‘In any case, this instrument here in the Ashmolean isn’t perfect.’ I turned to the glass cabinet and pointed at the belly of the violin. ‘Up here, to the right of the fingerboard – it’s difficult to see, but it’s there – is a blemish in the wood, a sap pocket. That too is suspicious. Stradivari didn’t use wood with defects in it. He was too much of a perfectionist and, besides, he didn’t need to. He could afford the very best timber and his customers were prepared to pay for the very best.
‘Now we move on a little. Stradivari dies, leaving behind a number of complete and incomplete instruments. His sons, Francesco and Omobono, finish the uncompleted violins and when they die the remaining instruments pass to Paolo who gradually disposes of them. But are the instruments he sells all his father’s? Some are probably more Francesco and Omobono than Antonio. There are doubts about Paolo’s probity, so much so that when Cozio di Salabue buys the final dozen violins he makes Paolo swear an affidavit that the instruments are truly all his father’s work.
‘Included in that dozen instruments is the violin of 1716. Cozio describes it in his records. Only there’s another problem. There are inconsistencies between Cozio’s records and the violin we know as the Messiah – inconsistencies that put a question mark over the authenticity of the instrument.’
‘So if Str
adivari didn’t make this violin,’ Guastafeste said, ‘who did?’
‘The finger points at Vuillaume,’ I said.
‘But it’s been analysed.’ Guastafeste pointed at the notice next to the glass case. ‘It says it’s consistent with the date of 1716.’
‘That proves the age of the wood,’ I replied. ‘Not the age of the violin. In 1855 it was only a little over a hundred years since Stradivari had died. Vuillaume – if he did fake the violin – would have had no trouble in finding old wood, though not necessarily of the right quality. Maybe that’s why the sap pocket is there on the belly. Because that was the only wood Vuillaume could lay his hands on.’
‘Why would Vuillaume fake it?’
‘Who knows? To fulfil his dreams, perhaps. He’d heard so much from Tarisio about this fabulous, perfect Stradivari. But Tarisio was a braggart, an embroiderer. What if when Vuillaume went to Milan after Tarisio’s death he found that the violin wasn’t there? That perhaps Tarisio had been lying and the Messiah had never existed at all. Or that it had disappeared from his collection. Can you imagine Vuillaume’s disappointment? So he decided to make a Messiah himself.’
‘One good enough to fool all these experts since?’ Guastafeste said sceptically.
‘It was well within his powers. Vuillaume was a master copyist. On one famous occasion, Paganini took his Guarneri “del Gesù”, Il Cannone, to Vuillaume’s atelier in Paris and left it there. When he returned, Vuillaume had made not one, but two, copies of the instrument and Paganini couldn’t tell which one of the three was the original – and this is the amazing part – from either the appearance or the sound of the instrument.’
‘So how come Vuillaume isn’t one of the great luthiers like Guarneri?’
‘Because copying and original creation are two different things. There are artists who can take an Old Master and copy – or fake – it perfectly, but they couldn’t have produced anything original of a similar quality themselves. Vuillaume was the same with violins. His own instruments are very fine, but his copies – and he made several of the Messiah – are in a class of their own.’
