The Violin Maker (12 page)

Though it was a few short blocks from the heart of Cremona—the bustling Piazza di Commune—the Piazza Stradivari was a barren field of stone blocks, bordered by some of Cremona’s more modern buildings, all of them giving off the strong scent of government bureaucracy. In the midst of the otherwise empty plaza stood a statue that, from a distance, looked like two vaguely human forms, man and boy. Unfortunately, from close up it looked nearly exactly the same—some form of man looking at some form of violinlike object held up to him by some form of child. Though one small detail of Stradivari’s daily life has been passed down through the generations—he always wore a white leather shop apron—the sculptor ignored that fact and clad the master in an elaborate cape. This was the town’s tribute to Stradivari. I couldn’t shake the following thought from my head: someone important in Cremona had a nephew who was a sculptor. I made my way back to the Palazzo Cattaneo to pick up Jana, hoping that our afternoon search to find the spirit of Stradivari would yield better results.

That afternoon, Patricia led us down the hushed halls of the Museo di Stradivari and into a big room filled with glass display cases and painted with a trompe l’oeil technique that made the simple flat walls seem like elaborately carved marble interiors of a palace. An ornate glass chandelier hung from the ceiling. The bizarre elegance seemed at odds with what the display cases held: stuff that had survived from Stradivari’s workshop and the
few little tidbits of documentation on his life. Astonishingly, the museum dedicated to the world’s greatest violin maker didn’t have one violin.

There was the bill for his first wife’s funeral. He’d gone all out, hiring more than a hundred priests and fathers of various denominations (heavy on the Franciscans and Dominicans) to celebrate the mass, procuring big and little bells to be rung, retaining a corps of gravediggers with capes. Maybe the old guy was truly heartbroken. Perhaps he just felt the need to maintain appearances in a town where people spoke of being “rich as Stradivari.” The historian who found these documents told the Hills that Francesca Feraboschi Stradivari’s funeral was “probably among the most conspicuous of the time.”

Across the room, another case held the famous letter Strad sent a client apologizing for the delay in delivering a violin—the varnish simply needed more time to dry. I had read the translation of this letter in any number of books and articles about Stradivari. Finally seeing the real item made me understand better why the profound lack of raw material had led to such extreme speculation about nearly everything connected with the man. In the wake of the masterpieces he created, there was a gaping void left by the scant and mundane stuff that has survived from his life. The experts and the acolytes could study his violins with the fervor of religious fanatics. But the only documentary evidence left from his life gave little more insight into the man than the fact that Antonio Stradivari was a lousy speller.

Delving deeper into this strangely static room, we stared into more cases that held faded drawings of f-holes,
scrolls, and necks—Strad’s templates for his work. There were calipers and cutting tools, several instrument molds that looked very similar to those I’d seen in Sam Zygmuntowicz’s workshop, except the unvarnished wood of the master’s forms was now aged and brown. The place reminded me, unfortunately, of the first museum I’d ever visited when I was a kid in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Everhart Museum had glass cases just like the ones I now viewed, filled with a carefully arrayed collection of dead moths. It was a cultural experience that stripped all the fun from getting out of school for an afternoon. The way the curators of Cremona presented the workshop materials of their genius native son had all the sweep and grandeur of a collection of dead moths. Months after I had returned from this trip to Italy, I read a sentence in another book that perfectly captured the essence of the Museo di Stradivari. Victoria Finlay, in her wonderful
Color: A Natural History of the Palette
, writes of visiting Cremona searching for Stradivari’s “secrets” with varnish pigments. Of the odd, stuffy, stultifying Museo dedicated to him, she decided, “It must qualify as one of the most boring museums about an interesting subject in the whole of Europe.”

All the artifacts in the collection had been sold in the mid-1700s by Stradivari’s last surviving son, the cloth merchant Paolo Stradivari, to Count Cozio di Salabue, who was building a collection of violins reputed to be the greatest ever assembled. When Count Cozio died, what was left of his collection ended up in the hands of his descendants. The Stradivari shop paraphernalia was sold in the early twentieth century to a Roman vio
lin maker named Giuseppe Fiorini. Fiorini donated the material to the city of Cremona in 1930, so it was available for the big exhibition in 1937. After that, the stuff ended up in what the town fathers named the Museum of Organology on the third floor of the Palazzo dell’Arte. “This was a most unhappy location,” according to Francesco Bissolatti, a Cremona native who became a violin maker by going through the town’s international school in the 1950s. Bissolatti set up a shop in town and taught at his alma mater for years.

In 1958, Simone Sacconi came back to Cremona for the first time since the exhibition he’d helped organize twenty years before. He was now an eminence in the violin trade. He met Francesco Bissolatti, and the two luthiers became quick friends. When Sacconi saw the Stradivari workshop relics he lamented the haphazard way they were kept—“Everything denoted negligence and disinterest,” according to Bissolatti, who wrote a remembrance of his mentor after Sacconi died. Sacconi convinced his young Cremonese violin maker friend to help him put the collection into better shape.

Sacconi had an intuition that in these dusty workshop materials lay the key to fully understanding Stradivari’s methods. “Those molds and designs,” Bissolatti remembered later, “were for [Sacconi] living testimony of the sublime art of that insuperable master.” Starting in 1962, Sacconi came to Cremona nearly every year during his vacation from the House of Wurlitzer in New York. He once gave a course in restoration at the International School. He visited the local churches, following a hunch
he had that the artisans who made the elaborate wood-carvings in the churches were linked somehow to the artisans who built fiddles. Bissolatti, who’d given Sacconi keys to his shop, would arrive for work at 7
A.M
. to find that his friend had already been working for two hours, perhaps on an experiment with the raw materials of varnish, trying to rediscover Stradivari’s technique.

The tall, cultured, and gentle Sacconi had begun to build what would be the capstone of his career, of his whole life really, since he had almost totally devoted it to violins. He was writing a book that would decode and decipher the techniques of the great Maestro of Cremona. As much as anyone could, Sacconi would create that longed-for treatise that Stradivari never left behind. He finished it just before he died, after his last visit to Cremona, in 1972, and called the book
I
“
Segreti” di Stradivari—The “Secrets” of Stradivari
.

“I ‘Segreti’ di Stradivari
was Simone Sacconi’s final gift to his profession,” wrote the London dealer Charles Beare, who had worked with Sacconi as an apprentice in the House of Wurlitzer workshop. “It has become almost a bible.”

I had a bootlegged copy of
The “Secrets”
that Sam Zygmuntowicz had obtained while in violin making school. Though it is possible to get a little stuck when Sacconi’s writing starts to care more and more about less and less, there is still more life in those pages than in that room full of artifacts in Cremona. As might be expected from the life work of a craftsman who had unusual concentration, Sacconi’s book ranges widely in explaining something
very specific. He devotes much space to analyzing the mathematical principles that guided Stradivari’s design of his forms and the more decorative scroll. (The scroll design, he said, combines two early mathematical discoveries: the Archimedian spiral and the spiral of Vignola.) Sacconi gives over page after page to analysis of the various archings and thicknesses in Strad’s instruments. He includes a detailed discussion of the master’s varnishing technique, which had become subject to the most fanciful speculation of “secret” techniques and recipes.

Sacconi’s conclusion is either surprising, or perfectly obvious, depending on how much stock you put into the various Stradivari myths. The tip might have come from those quote marks around the word
Segreti
in the title. It turns out that Sacconi had labored all those years, studied all those instruments as carefully as anyone ever could, tested recipes, built impeccable copies, and in the end decided…
there were no secrets
. Yes, some of the techniques had been “lost” over time. The continuity of tradition stopped when the long chain of master-to-apprentice teaching broke within a generation of Stradivari’s death. But, Sacconi decided, Stradivari was no more—or less—than the best that ever was.

“Stradivari was not the trustee or the discoverer of any particular secret,” Sacconi wrote in the last paragraph of
The “Secrets.”
“To insist in such a superficial or closed vision of his personality or his work means, more than anything else, to destroy its value and to reduce him to the level of an empirical though lucky practitioner or quack. He was Stradivari because his creations were
[
sic
] united the knowledge of mathematics and nature, together with a deep spirit of reflection and research, artistic sensibility, exceptional technical ability, experience and tradition.”

I got out of the Museo di Stradivari about as quick as I could. Just an hour later I found myself peering into yet another glass case in Cremona. It had begun to seem that
everything
was in a glass case in this town. I began to imagine that, sooner or later, if I just kept looking, I’d come across a case with the spirit of Stradivari inside because it certainly was not in the air. The latest glass case was on the second floor of the Civic Museum, a beautiful salon with real and highly polished marble, located in Cremona’s twelfth-century city hall. Inside was a gorgeous yellow-hued fiddle that Stradivari had built in 1715. It had been named the Joachim, for its former owner, Joseph Joachim, one of the greatest virtuosos of all time. Now, since it was the only violin owned by his hometown, it was dubbed the Cremonese. I walked around the case to examine the highly flamed maple of the back and ribs, the distinctive and expertly carved scroll, the sweeping curves of the outline. It was a beautiful fiddle. Perhaps this was as close as I would come to finding the spirit of the master.

Two guards armed with automatic weapons watched carefully as I pointed to the case and tried to explain to Jana how the old guy had joined the purfling corners into the classic “bumblebee stingerette.”

“Oh yeah,” she said, “I see that. That’s really cool.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Nothing.”

We moved slowly again around the glass box. Displayed this way, the Cremonese was more a work of art than a tool. It finally registered with me why so many violinists are upset when yet another old Italian instrument is purchased by a collector or museum and becomes less and less heard and more and more simply seen. The Cremonese had six companions in identical glass cases throughout the room. There was a highly decorated fiddle that the original Cremonese master, Andrea Amati, made for Charles IX of France in 1566. There was a later Amati viola, and a violin by Nicolò Amati (who taught young Antonio Stradivari). There were two Guarneri fiddles, one by the Giuseppe known as “Giuseppe son of Andrea,” and another by his more famous son Giuseppe, known as del Gesù. And last was an elaborately inlaid fiddle that looked remarkably like it had been built by Stradivari, because it was actually an impeccable copy of Strad’s 1687 violin known as the Hellier, crafted by Simone Sacconi. Sacconi built it here in Cremona, right around the time he was being named an honorary citizen of the town.

Each violin was beautiful in its own way, but each, locked in its case, seemed suspended in time and somehow lifeless. I realized that I had struck up an odd and somewhat privileged relationship with violins, particularly for someone who didn’t actually play. Lurking around Sam’s studio, I’d been able to see and touch and hear a Stradivari and a Guarneri del Gesù. Though I was careful and reverent—always aware of how valuable they
were—I’d developed a sense that they were tools made to be used. Like those classic cars rolling through the streets of Havana, they’d been ministered to all these decades to keep them alive, so that they could be driven. “I’d love to hear what these fiddles sound like,” I told Jana.

Soon our guide Patricia caught up with us. She had been here so many times that the guards who’d been so stern with us (we were the only visitors) relaxed visibly, greeted her warmly, and began to chat and chuckle.

“It’s too bad we weren’t here earlier,” Patricia told me. “They tell me that Maestro Mosconi was in today. He comes and plays the violins to keep them in shape.” Toby Faber, in the process of researching his delightful book
Stradivari’s Genius
, had stumbled into this museum just in time for one of Maestro Mosconi’s routine concerts. Mosconi is employed by the city to keep its fiddle collection in playing condition. He generally plays one violin each day, meeting the responsibilities of what might just be the cushiest government job in the history of government jobs. Though Faber heard wrong notes and thought the playing “faintly plodding,” it was also the first time he’d been so near a Stradivari being played.

“There really is something about its tone,” Faber wrote later. “Warm and vibrant, it seems to inhabit the room.” I remembered that Sam Zygmuntowicz had recounted a similar experience, when the soloist Daniel Heifetz visited the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City during Sam’s first year there and played some of Bach’s Chaconne on his Strad in a small room filled with prospective luthiers. It was Sam’s first time hearing one
of the old guy’s instruments close up. “I’ll never forget that sound,” Sam told me.