The Violin Maker (11 page)

Finally, as the program was running out of time, Maestro Stern said, “We hope your listeners are as pleasantly confused as we are.”

Confused, to say the least. That’s what I was. The world of violins began to seem like a variation of the famous tale
of the emperor’s new clothes. Or a strange little society where there was some form of mass hypnosis at work. Stradivaris are the greatest violins ever made because…everybody says so. They’re better because…no one knows. They sound better…except when they don’t, or when it’s not a Stradivari that you think you’re hearing.

I was in the midst of all this uncertainty, trying to understand what it said about violin making that no one really knew what made great
great
, when a curator in New York threw the proverbial hand grenade into the figurative room full of violin experts. He said that he’d scientifically determined that the most famous Stradivari violin of all couldn’t have been made by Stradivari.

The story of the violin known as the Messiah is perhaps the epitome of the Stradivari mystique—though mythos might be a better word.

The Messiah was made in 1716 but was still on a shelf in Stradivari’s workshop when he died in 1737. As with almost everything connected to Stradivari, the reason it was never sold led to much speculation. The most romantic conclusion—and perhaps the correct one—is that the old guy knew that this was his most perfect creation in a long and distinguished career and he simply could not part with it. As the Stradivari-owning violinist and writer Joseph Wechsberg said in his entertaining and generally clear-eyed book
The Glory of the Violin
, before and after the Messiah “no better violin was ever made.”

Antonio’s youngest son, Paolo Stradivari, who shunned
the family business and became a merchant, didn’t seem to have such reverence for the fiddle. After his father’s death, he agreed to sell the violin to Count Cozio di Salabue in 1755. Though Paolo died before the transaction was complete, the count made it part of his great collection for about fifty years, until he sold it to Luigi Tarisio, the man who had become the premier collector and rescuer of Stradivari’s instruments as the master’s reputation faded in the decades after his death.

From there, the story gets nearly comical. Tarisio often brought his Cremona discoveries to Paris, where J. B. Vuillaume would act as a broker for resale. (And who, while the Strads were in his possession, often made copies so frighteningly exact that there are plenty of rumors that a number of instruments considered Stradivari are actually Vuillaume.) While in Paris, Tarisio spoke often of this perfect violin he had obtained—it was then named for the count who’d originally bought it: the Salabue. In fact, Tarisio mentioned this fiddle so often that one day Vuillaume’s son-in-law Delphin Alard, a great violin soloist himself, had finally heard enough. “Monsieur Tarisio,” Alard reportedly said, “your Stradivari is like the Messiah—he never comes.”

Tarisio emulated the master maker; he died before selling the perfect violin. A solitary and miserly obsessive, he was reportedly found in a dingy Milan garret, clutching two violins (can we imagine the identity of one of them?), his cold body lying on a mattress stuffed with money he’d made over the years selling the old Cremonese masterpieces. Vuillaume was the first dealer
to learn of Tarisio’s death and made a quick trip to Lombardy, where he bought everything from Tarisio’s survivors, including the perfect Stradivari violin, which he now named the Messiah.

Back in Paris with his find, Vuillaume did some of that Cuban mechanical work on the fiddle, lengthening the neck to put it into modern playing shape, changing the bass-bar. He probably made many copies based on its form. And though he set a price on Stradivari’s masterpiece, it was always too high for a taker. The Messiah stayed in a glass case in his shop. Whether that was purposeful or not, Vuillaume, like Tarisio before him, like the great Stradivari before that, died before parting with the Messiah. Of such coincidences are legends made.

Finally, after Vuillaume’s estate was settled, the Messiah became the possession of the man who’d inspired its memorable name, Delphin Alard. He already owned a Strad and didn’t much care to play his new one.

The Hills bought it in 1890 for 50,000 francs, about 2,000 British pounds. After a series of sales to people who were more collectors than performers, the Messiah ended up back in the possession of the Hills. Though it had hardly been played throughout its life, the violin was perhaps the best-known instrument in England, having arrived for a show in antique instruments in 1872 and been the subject of a series of articles in the British press on the majesty of the Cremonese masters.

The two surviving Hill brothers decided that the Messiah should be kept pristine and agreed to donate the violin to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. (Once
again, the “curse” of this fiddle appeared; both brothers died before the legal work was done.) But eventually, after World War II ended, the Messiah went on display at the Ashmolean, destined to be studied and revered for ages as the most perfectly preserved example of Antonio Stradivari’s genius.

Then, in 1997, Stewart Pollens, a New Yorker who worked preserving the violin collection at the city’s Metropolitan Museum, got permission from the Messiah’s keepers in Oxford to take some high-quality photographs of the violin. It is a rare person who actually gets to touch the instrument.

As Pollens later recounted it, he’d long had some suspicions about the authenticity of the Messiah. There was so much legend and myth mixed into the provenance of this fiddle that some discrepancies in the documentation were ignored. For instance, a few of the descriptions that Count Cozio made while he owned it didn’t match those of the Hills. Two patches inside the instrument noted by Count Cozio were not mentioned by the Hills, who wrote an entire monograph about the Messiah in 1882. Pollens was not the first to question the authenticity of the Messiah. One story had it that Simone Sacconi, the legendary twentieth-century restorer and copyist, who’d devoted his life to studying Stradivari, had been given an audience with the violin and declared it a copy by Vuillaume. But decades had passed since there’d been any serious public discussion of the Messiah and its authenticity.

That changed when Pollens sent some of those high-resolution photos he’d taken to a German scientist,
Dr. Peter Klein, who analyzed the violin’s spruce belly using the technique of dendrochronology. The growth of a tree is unique to the climatic conditions of each year it is alive, evidenced by its internal rings. Dendrochronology can compare the growth rings of a certain tree with a collected database of trees from the same region and give a surprisingly accurate date for the last year that tree lived.

Klein told Stewart Pollens that the spruce of the Messiah front had been alive in 1738. Since Stradivari died in 1737, this finding started a new—and incredibly two-fisted—game of What Do We Really Know?

While it may be true that violin makers will fight vociferously over the tension in a bass-bar, that kind of argument really is a function of caring more and more about less and less. Pollen’s claim directly pointed to the validity and expertise of violin experts and dealers, a very small coterie who operated as gatekeepers to a rarefied place where top fiddles were reaching prices of nearly $5 million. There was more and more money involved, and these people cared quite a bit. If the most famous fiddle in the world had fooled all the experts, who would fully trust a dealer’s appraisal again?

“When you try to move in on the world of dealers,” I was told by a well-known violin maker who’d tried it once, “they’ll kill you. Not literally kill you. But almost.”

The charge against Pollens was led by Charles Beare, the London expert who’d so confidently told the BBC audience (after not identifying correctly half of the violins
played for him) that modern makers needed to just keep trying to make them as good as the old guys. Along with the remaining heirs of the Hill family and officials at the Ashmolean, Beare enlisted two different dendrochronolgists to date the Messiah. Unsurprisingly, they were given greater access to the instrument and came back with a finding that the wood could be last dated in the 1680s, and furthermore, it matched well with the wood of other acknowledged Strads from his Golden Period in the early 1700s.

That didn’t end the argument so much as kick it to a higher and more shrill level. There were intimations of a cover-up, broad intimations of incompetence from both sides, and some good old-fashioned mudslinging. Pollens, writing to an online violin Web site called Sound-post, complained about ad hominem attacks against him. The editor of the site collected all postings on the Messiah controversy under the rubric “Tree Ring Circus.”

The circus, mostly, had struck its tent and moved on by the time I asked Sam about the Messiah brouhaha one day while I sat in his studio and watched him scrape away at the belly of the Drucker fiddle. Sam knew Pollens. Years before, Pollens had written a long article about Sam for
The Strad,
documenting his re-creation of a Guarneri violin. “I can’t understand why he got into all this,” Sam told me. “I really can’t see what he had to gain from it all.”

But what an exciting session it was of the ongoing game of What Do We Really Know?

“I guess,” Sam said. He pushed his glasses up on his
forehead and peered intently at the spot he’d been scraping. “I know that this wood is some of the lightest I’ve ever worked with. It’s really incredible stuff. And that’s all that matters to me right now.” With that Zygmuntowicz went back to his work.

T
opping over the Swiss and Italian Alps on an early morning flight from Zurich to Milan in an uncrowded plane with a very friendly crew will easily be one of my best travel memories ever. I was on my way to Cremona. My pilgrim’s progress in the violin world seemed incomplete without this pilgrimage.

When I told my fiancée that I thought it necessary to run off to Italy for research we came very close to recreating that scene in
To Kill a Mockingbird
where young Jem Finch decides to accompany his father on the grim trip to inform his client’s wife that her husband is dead.

“You want me to go with you?” Jana asked me.

“No, I think I’d better go out there alone,” I told her, as Atticus Finch had told his son.

“I’m goin’ with you
.”

And that was that. Now, Jana sat beside me, sipping a rich, foamy cappuccino and marveling at the way the sun sparkled off the snow of the Alpine peaks, which were so close it seemed we could lean out of the plane and scoop up a snowball.

The next leg of our trip was a substantial comedown. Slogging our luggage through the dingy vault of the old Milan train station. Tripping through my hastily crammed traveler’s Italian to get us tickets on the Mantova line. Fighting through jet lag–laden fatigue to get something to eat, trade for some euros, and catch the right train. But we were going to Cremona! I was going to walk the same cobblestones that Stradivari walked, maybe sit in the same church pew, breathe the same air, and watch the same sunset.

Sam Zygmuntowicz was not especially encouraging when I told him of this trip. He’d been to Cremona and seemed resolutely unimpressed. “You might find something of interest,” he said stoically. “At least you’ll eat well.” But I ignored his lack of enthusiasm and sided with his colleague and rival Gregg Alf, whom I’d met at the violin makers’ workshop in Oberlin. When he was young, Alf had moved to Cremona to study violin making and stayed on for eight years. Alf had written, “I felt that the spirit of Stradivari would be in the air.”

After clattering through the dull industrial suburbs of Milan, the train took us eastward into countryside that turned increasingly rural and agricultural with each passing kilometer. We were in the rich, fertile floodplain of the Po River, mostly brown now in fall, but with a few brilliant patches of green here and there. Jana and I sat nervously, watching the countryside, letting the unintelligible and musical language of our fellow travelers wash over us, checking again and again with the conductor.

Cremona?

Not yet.

I decided to distract myself with the book I’d been rereading on the transatlantic flight. Just before I began this whole project I’d taken a short trip to New Orleans and met a doctor there who played violin seriously. When I told him that I was about to see how a violin is built, he told me forcefully: “You have to read
The Violin Hunter
.” It turned out to be a good prescription.

The book is a historical biographical novel by William Alexander Silverman, who wrote it in 1957. The violin hunter of the title is Luigi Tarisio, who had died owning the Messiah. Starting as a poor itinerant carpenter and dance fiddler, Tarisio dedicated his life to rediscovering and collecting the then-neglected violins of Cremona’s Golden Age.

Now locked in a shabby second-class train car, I retraced the journey Tarisio had made on foot in the mid-1820s, wandering from his home in Milan toward Cremona, doing odd jobs for his bed and supper, hoping to fiddle at a dance, shrewdly stopping at monasteries where
he knew he could find not only a charitable host, but also perhaps some dusty fiddles commissioned more than a hundred years before.

However he did it, wherever he found them, Luigi Tarisio appeared in Paris in 1827 with a sack full of old violins. Legend has it that he had walked all the way from Italy, carrying the trove of masterpieces on his back. He was rough around the edges, but Tarisio knew enough to search out the leading violin makers and dealers of the day—M. Aldric, Georges Chanot, and Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.

With the appearance of these previously unknown fiddles, word spread through Paris quickly. During his visit, Tarisio provided Paganini with the del Gesù that would become his lifelong love, an instrument so powerful it was called the Cannon. Leaving behind several Stradivaris, a Bergonzi, and a couple violins by lesser-known Cremonese, the violin hunter returned to Milan with a wallet stuffed with francs to finance and renew his search. Over the years he unearthed scores of Cremonese instruments and became a primary agent in rebuilding Stradivari’s reputation.

There has been plenty of revisionist work on the biography of Tarisio. It’s commonly accepted that he placed fake Stradivari labels in lesser instruments, though he hardly started that practice and would certainly not be the last culprit to do so. Tarisio took the credo “Buy low, sell high” very seriously, and probably cheated some unknowing Italians out of valuable pieces. But Silverman paints a warm-hued portrait of the man, lanky and plain,
unlucky at love, committed to the old violins with a nearly religious fervor. As our train finally pulled into Cremona, I looked up at the tall bell tower of the Torrazzo attached to the town’s main cathedral, the inevitable first view one gets of the town. You can’t miss it; Cremona is a low-built provincial place, and the Torrazzo is the tallest bell tower in Europe. I realized that I now shared one small experience with Tarisio and, come to think of it, many of the legends of the violin world.

We waited near the grim, dirty train station—it spoke of Mussolini more than Stradivari—for Patricia Kaden, whom I’d retained to guide us through the city and its cache of violin lore. A French Canadian by birth, she’d lived in Paris for a while, then landed in Cremona more than a decade before my visit with a husband who’d decided to become a violin maker and wanted to go to the source. He was no longer in Cremona, but Patricia had stayed on and used her affinity for fiddles and trilingual skills to help folks like me. She advertised her services in a few violin journals, so I’d heard of her, but it was a violin maker I’d met at Oberlin who had convinced me I should hire Patricia. “She knows the town,” he’d told me. “Not just the violins, but the restaurants and cafés.”

Patricia arrived pushing a big old bicycle. She was a small woman in latter middle age, friendly and attractive, with a propensity for walking. “No need for a cab,” she said, “follow me.” We wheeled and dragged our luggage through uneven streets and over stone sidewalks for what seemed like an hour until we finally reached the Palazzo Cattaneo, the ancestral home of Duke Cattaneo, a dashing
man (Patricia whispered that he’d enjoyed a reputation as a European playboy in his day) who’d turned the palazzo into something of an artists’ colony. We climbed four narrow, twisting flights of stairs to an attic suite with a giant wood beam just high enough to stand under in the parlor, a beautiful marble bath, and a small bedroom. “I love it,” Jana said. “It’s ancient.” That seemed worth the fifty euros a night we were being charged.

“You probably want to rest a little,” Patricia said. “But come tonight and join us for
aperitivo
at six or so. You’ll meet some people.”

It is estimated that there are now more violin makers working in Cremona than there were in all the years from the first Amati through Bergonzi, when the violin’s design and construction was being developed and perfected. That’s probably an estimation uttered with some sarcasm; but when Jana and I arrived for drinks that evening at a bustling little alley café called the Bar Bolero, Patricia handed me a printed list of luthiers in town. It went alphabetically from Katarina Abbuhl to Nicola Zurlini—ninety-eight listings. Many of the listings were firms where several partners worked. So there were well over a hundred violin makers plying their trade in Cremona at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

Even after just a few hours in town, it was easy to see what attracted them. Cremona was a charming place. When the sun went down and the mist rolled in from the Po, there seemed to be an otherworldly quality to the old
city. If you let your imagination run just a little, it was easy to feel that Stradivari’s spirit was indeed in the air.

There was also a very practical lure: the International School of Violin Making, the only school of its kind in Italy, which offers a five-year program that awards a diploma as a master of violin making. Italian kids could enter the school at the age of fourteen and earn their high school diploma and the technical degree. Over the years, the school has attracted a large number of foreign students, most of whom, like Gregg Alf, arrive in Italy as adults. Alf, I would learn, was still something of a legend in Cremona for driving around town in a Jaguar convertible. The local police would stop him all the time—not to arrest him, but just to marvel at the big engine.

The school was born, not coincidentally, in 1938, a year after the two-hundredth anniversary of Stradivari’s death. In 1937, the city of Cremona hosted a celebration and exhibition dedicated to the city’s most famous son. The popularity of the event convinced the Mussolini government (reportedly, Il Duce himself was fond of fiddles) that there was good public relations potential in reviving the Italian violin making tradition. The school’s founders offered the directorship to Simone Sacconi, the Roman-trained luthier who’d helped organize the Stradivari exhibition. He turned down the job. He had recently moved to New York, where it wasn’t long before he became the widely acknowledged master of violin restoration at the famed House of Wurlitzer, and fanatical devotee of Stradivari. But Sacconi would not forget Cremona.

No one interested in violins could forget Cremona. However, for many years Cremona had forgotten its illustrious cadre of luthiers. Most glaring was the town’s neglect of Stradivari.

In 1869 the church where Antonio and his second wife were buried, San Domenico, was torn down, and the bones from the burial vaults were mixed and unidentified and supposedly reburied by workmen somewhere outside of town. (There is some suspicion that they simply dumped the bones in the Po.) Stradivari’s house and workshop had survived into the 1920s, by which time the rooms that saw the supreme mastery of the luthier’s art had become a tailor shop and a pool hall. The government replaced it with an office building just before the great Depression.

In the accumulated literature devoted to Strad, nearly every violin fanatic who makes the trek to Cremona writes a sad report of neglect. In
The Glory of the Violin
, Joseph Wechsler, who arrived in 1948, wrote, “Like other pilgrims I found nothing at all. The houses where they lived had disappeared. No streets were named after them. There was not even a great Cremonese violin left in the city where they had been created.” Wechsler found a sixth-generation descendant of the master, a lawyer named Mario Stradivari, who complained that he hadn’t even been invited to the great exhibition of 1937. The city’s leading expert on Stradivari at the time, Renzo Bacchetta, explained to Wechsler that Cremona was simply a provincial town understandably fixated on what supported its citizens. “They cared only that the price of cheese should stay up,” Wechsler reported. “If Stradivari had invented
a new kind of cheese, they would have built him a monument.”

Somehow, Mussolini’s government had changed all that, and now Cremona held a significant number of people who revered Stradivari. I met about a dozen my first night there.

On our first visit to the Bar Bolero, Patricia introduced Jana to the charms of the dry sparkling wine called
prosecco
. I stayed stalwart to my crude American habit of drinking whiskey before dinner. A sample of some fresh local cheeses made me understand why someone might want to monumentalize the makers. Through the evening violin makers came and went. Over the years I have hung around a number of bars that catered to a particular clientele—cops, musicians, journalists, actors, people who worked in other bars—but I’d never even imagined there could be a watering hole where you could be sure to meet a violin maker. One, a small man named Toto who wore a jaunty hat and scarf, invited us to visit his workshop whenever we liked. Another, Marco, a solidly built guy with a high forehead and dark, piercing eyes, chatted formally with us for a few moments and then moved away. I glanced in his direction a little while later and found him staring at me, and not in a friendly way.

I talked mostly with Franz, a foppish thin man who’d worked as a violin maker in Cremona for many years. He was just back for a visit, since he’d recently moved to Zurich, where he was playing guitar with a band that performed the gypsy jazz music made popular by Django Reinhart. “As a violin maker I had to deal with these musi
cians all the time,” he told me. “They just drove me crazy. I got so sick of musicians that I decided to become one.”

As Sam Zygmuntowicz had predicted, that night we ate quite well.

The next morning I got out early with a map, trying to make a quick survey of sites that the town had created to counteract its reputation for neglecting Antonio Stradivari. Cremona on a weekday morning had a comfortable small-town feel, as shopkeepers performed their opening rituals, parents dropped their children at schools, workmen patched some of the old streets. I felt like the only tourist in the whole city.

I wandered through the labyrinth of the old town, where the streets crisscrossed each other in a grid-defying maze. Across the via Plasio, left on the via Cavollatti, then I realized I was lost. After backtracking on via Mazinni and a shortcut through the vaulted walk-ways of the Galleria—there I was at the Piazza Roma, a small park that contained the symbolic tomb of Antonio Stradivari. It was a slab of red-hued marble, about the size of a coffin, sitting off on the side of a walking path. On top of the red marble was a white marble re-creation of the carved plaque from Strad’s original crypt. The whole thing looked more like a resting bench than a monument. I stared at the “tomb” for a time, knowing that there was just about nothing there that was really connected to Stradivari. The monument looked forlorn and neglected. It seemed to embody an almost complete lack of significance. Then I unfolded my map and headed for the Piazza Stradivari.