The Violin Maker (13 page)

These violins in the Palazzo Communale were beautiful. They were well treated and well guarded. But mostly they were mute, and that seemed kind of sad.

It was late afternoon by the time we left the town hall, and Jana and I both craved coffee and some gelato from a shop we’d discovered across the square. Patricia had other errands to run. Before she left us, she handed me a business card of a restaurant named Alfredo’s. “You’re invited to a party there tonight.”

When we arrived at Alfredo’s it was nearing the end of what had obviously been a boisterous
aperitivo
time. The place was packed, and we had to shoulder our way to the bar. The party was celebrating the fifth anniversary of the restaurant, and dinner would be on the house. The owner, Mario, was bartending right then, and when I asked him for Scotch on the rocks he shouted out, “Ah, the Americans are here!” Jana tried to fool him by using her most useful three words of Italian—
Prosecco, per favore
—but her Texas accent gave her away.

Soon we were seated at a bunch of small tables that had been pushed together, and Jana ended up next to the violin maker named Marco, who had seemed so cool the other night at Bar Bolero. I tried to get her attention and discreetly suggest she change seats, but it didn’t work. Of course, I needn’t have worried, because by the time the main course arrived—the most delicious roast pork I have ever eaten—Jana and Marco were new best friends, and
he was laughing loudly and dispensing wine in copious amounts.

Patricia brought along a young French woman named Silvie, who had recently arrived from Paris and enrolled in Cremona’s violin making school. Silvie had just finished carving her first scroll, and she pulled it from her bag with a mixture of pride and trepidation. She obviously was a long way from thinking, as Sam Zygmuntowicz did, that this task was simply “whacking away at wood.” The scroll was unvarnished and seemed very light as it passed through my hands for a quick inspection on its way around the table. It was clear that the final judge would be Marco.

The maestro held the scroll up to the lights, turned it several times, brought it back close to his face, and peered at it down the length of his long, classic Italian nose. He had reverted to looking stern and serious. Jana glanced nervously between him and Silvie, who, when I looked at her, seemed to be deciding whether to laugh or cry.

Finally, Marco declared,
“Bene!”
and laughed, sparking an eruption of laughter at the table, which had become a small silent spot in the noisy room. Then he switched to English and said, “Everybody has to carve their first scroll.” That brought a spontaneous toast at the table. This seemed like a typical moment in Cremona, which made me realize how untypical it would be anywhere else on earth. Yes indeed, everybody has to carve their first scroll.
“C’ent Anni!”
Marco passed the scroll back to Silvie and set out to refill everyone’s wine-glass.

I started talking to Silvie about Cremona’s violin mak
ing school. We’d visited one morning—or
tried
to visit—but found there was nobody around who could give us permission to go in, but by the same token, there was nobody who cared to stop us either. I had found a young Italian student who spoke about as much French as I did, and he invited us to visit a classroom workshop. There was no sign of any teachers; a handful of students carved away at fiddles, listened to rock and roll, and smoked cigarettes. Silvie told me she was learning a lot.

When next I looked over at Jana, she and Marco were each wearing those things you clip on your head with springs that stick up like antennae. These had shiny red hearts that wiggled and bobbed as they moved their heads. By the time we got up to leave, everyone had taken a turn wearing the bobbing hearts. Before we began to try to weave our way back to what we’d taken to calling “our palazzo,” I remembered to ask how much we owed for the wine. Marco shouted, “
Niente
. Nothing.
Va bene
.”

“That means, ‘Go well,’” he added. Marco stood and raised his glass toward us. “Come to our workshop tomorrow. Patricia will bring you.”

The workshop where we went to meet Marco the next morning could have been created by a set designer. Occupying the ground-floor corner of an old stone building on the via Millazo, it had wood-paneled walls and tall, shuttered windows that looked out on a street scene which, except for the cars, seemed to be a view shared by Stradivari himself. Worktables lined three of the walls,
each with an architect’s lamp like the one Sam used for illumination and sounding a pitch. The standard tools—planes, gougers, scrapers, calipers—were arranged neatly, either lined up near the worktable or hung on the paneled walls. Some wood shavings dotted the tile floors. The place smelled of freshly cut spruce and varnish.

When Patricia had picked us up at our palazzo she told us, “You should be very honored that you are getting an appointment with Maestro Bissolatti.” It turned out that Marco was the son of Francesco Bissolatti, who decades before had befriended Simone Sacconi. When we arrived, Marco got up from his workbench and stepped past two other workers to greet us. It was hard not to imagine him wearing two bouncy heart-shaped antennae. He took us over to a bench across the room where a gray-haired man with thick glasses and a beard was working in a blue shop apron. This was his father. Francesco welcomed us with a friendly formality and went back to work. Marco took us back across the room to his bench and introduced us to the other workers, who were his younger brothers, Maurizio and Vincenzo. Before we would leave the shop that day Marco would give me a handsome book he had written about the tradition of Cremonese craftsmanship called
The Genius of Violin Making in Cremona
. It includes chapters devoted to the Amatis, the Guarneris, the Stradivaris, the often overlooked Ruggeris and Bergonzis, and, yes, the Bissolattis. It seems Francesco has set himself up as the modern patriarch of Cremonese violin making, a new old guy, with his sons laboring nearby, the start of a new tradition. “Finally,” Marco writes in the chapter
devoted to his own family, “people have begun to understand that string instruments worthy of the great Cremonese tradition are once again being made in Cremona.”

We went from bench to bench and checked the instruments under construction. Maurizio, working on a viola, seemed a bit distracted and annoyed by our being there. Vincenzo was quite shy, but held up an unfinished fiddle for us to admire. In another corner an older man with a full head of gray hair worked with his back to us, and we were not brought to his bench.

“Who’s that?” Jana asked.

“He is not here,” Marco said. We both looked to Patricia to see if we’d missed something that she could translate for us. She stepped closer and whispered to us, “That is Maestro Mosconi, the man who plays the city’s violins. But he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s here.” I didn’t quite understand what the big deal was, but I promised I would keep
I Segreti di Mosconi
just as long as I could.

We turned in the other direction and entered a smaller varnishing room, where a number of fiddles hung by their scrolls on wires stretched horizontally at a height that kept them just within reach, drying in the muted sunlight. Against one wall was a table nearly covered by jars and bottles filled with viscous varnishes, their colors ranging from deep burgundy to nearly lemony yellow. Jana pointed to a small cot in the corner, covered with a blanket that pictured a polar bear, a blanket for a child. “Who uses that?” she asked. Marco spoke Italian.

“Maestro Bissolatti,” Patricia translated, “has a sacred
nap each afternoon here with the drying violins.” I’d read somewhere of a legend that Stradivari had done the same thing, and some thought he meant to impart his spirit into the fiddles.

Marco shepherded us from the varnish room and through a door into a large and ornate reception area. He went to get a copy of his book, and Jana and I both gasped when we noticed a huge bronze statue looming behind us. It was Stradivari and the apprentice boy, almost the same statue I’d seen in the Piazza Stradivari, except that the figures were rendered more realistically. They actually looked like people.

“How did you get this?” I asked Marco, a little incredulous.

“It was
secondi
—runner-up in the contest. My father bought it. This one is better. The one they put in the piazza—it looks like people from another planet.”

It occurred to me later: that’s about the only theory that hasn’t been launched to explain Stradivari’s greatness.

Finally we came back to Papa Francesco’s bench, and he put aside his work to talk for a few minutes. He didn’t seem comfortable trying to interpret my English, so Patricia would put my questions into Italian. But then he would answer in English. It seemed a lot was getting lost in that process. For instance, when I asked what it had been like growing up around Cremona and wanting to be a violin maker, he responded in English: “Parma has cheese, we have violins!”

“How about your friend Sacconi, did he get it right?”

“A great man. A genius. Not Stradivari, but as good as anyone else.”

“So,” I said, “you agree with Sacconi, that there was no secret.”

Francesco Bissolatti required no translation for that. “One secret,” he responded immediately, holding up a finger. “The secret,” he said, “is being able to do it.”

This was as close as I would get to finding the spirit of Stradivari in Cremona. It was a spirit of practicality and practice. It was the spirit that propelled a man to labor for seven or eight decades at the same craft, every working day constricted by that craft’s traditions, which, paradoxically, also meant being utterly free to experiment. Simone Sacconi wrote that “this craftsmanship had become a myth because it was not understood.” But he hoped that his life’s work, his book, would help violin makers to understand “the simple truth of a daily routine of work and of the use of techniques which contained nothing mysterious.”

We said good-bye to all the Bissolattis and thanked them for their hospitality. We even said good-bye to the man who wasn’t there. Marco led us out through the formal reception room, and we got one more look at the Master of Cremona, portrayed in bronze. I was going back to the shop in Brooklyn, where I knew Sam would soon be reaching the stage in making the Drucker violin that had always been the most mysterious of all.

B
y April, with a little more than a month until Gene Drucker’s birthday and his promised delivery date, Sam had the Drucker violin nearly built. The “box”—ribs, belly, and back—was complete “in the white,” the violin making term for a fiddle that is fully carved and scraped and has the light colored hue of new wood in a lumber yard because no varnish has been applied yet. Some more woodwork needed to be done. As he prepared to carve the neck and fingerboard, Sam e-mailed Gene to see if the violinist would like the neck made to the same specifications
of his Stradivari, or if he could carve his standard Zygmuntowicz neck, which was very similar, but not an exact match. “We can always reshape the neck later,” Sam wrote, “but I’d like to get it right the first time.”

Drucker was touring Europe with the Emerson Quartet when he got the message. He responded that he was comfortable with his Strad neck but that he didn’t normally pay a lot of attention to that detail. He did send Sam detailed information on what strings he was using, expressing a willingness to experiment with different strings on the new violin. Gene concluded his reply by writing, “I’m getting excited as the time approaches for a new violin-playing experience!”

So the violin maker got out his cutting tools and carved away everything that didn’t look like a neck and fingerboard for
this
fiddle. He attached the scroll and carved box that holds the pegs for string tuning to the top of the neck, and then put the whole apparatus onto the body of the violin. Now the new Drucker violin was ready to go through the process that has intrigued and confounded luthiers for centuries—varnishing.

The Hill brothers, in their grand treatise on Stradivari, begin the chapter on varnish like this: “It is with considerable diffidence that we approach the much discussed subject…. We hope to place the matter before our readers in a truer light than that in which it has hitherto appeared, and thus to dispel much of the mystery in which the subject has been involved by the ever-ready pens and fluent tongues of the many self-constituted authorities.”

I think what the brothers were trying to say in their po
lite Victorian diffidence was—Let’s cut the bull. Though the Hills tried to dispel the long-held notion of some secret varnish recipe used by Stradivari, they couldn’t stop themselves from intimating at its tantalizing possibility.

The Hills wrote of repeated discussions they’d had with a descendant of the master, one Giacomo Stradivari, who claimed that as a child he’d opened an old family Bible and found handwritten on a flyleaf a recipe for the perfect violin varnish and instructions on how to apply it. Giacomo said the date of the inscription was 1704, the beginning of Strad’s Golden Period. He had copied it out of that Bible, which was later lost. Though a number of people—including Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume—offered Giacomo a lot of money to share the transcribed recipe, he always demurred, saying that he would keep it to himself in case anyone in the Stradivari family decided to take up the craft again. It would give his kin an immediate competitive advantage. Giacomo Stradivari died before the Hills completed their book, and no recipe was ever found. Perhaps Giacomo had just been having fun and the story of the recipe was a hoax; perhaps it was a great loss for luthiers.

Brushing aside their tantalizing brush with “the secret,” the Hills concluded that Antonio Stradivari simply did with varnish what he did in all other aspects of his craft: practiced the traditional techniques that had been handed down to him, but did it with such single-minded devotion and skill that the final result was, as the Hills liked to say, ne plus ultra. Even for the cautious and conservative Englishmen, Strad’s varnish inspired some parox
ysms of prototypical fiddle porn. Like this passage from their book describing the varnish of Stradivari’s best instruments: “Lightness of texture, and transparency combined with brilliant yet subdued coloring…picturesque and attractive in the highest degree.”

It was commonly accepted, though, that
something
was lost within a generation or so after Stradivari’s death. The Cremonese way of varnishing disappeared for several reasons. Primary was the fact that the master-apprentice chain was broken in the town where the trade had reached its apotheosis. The Hills believed that within that Cremonese tradition, each practitioner had his preferences and tricks. They could be called secrets, but they were open secrets. The real problem in matching the work of the masters was that “the spirit of artistic emulation which existed in Cremona…had died out.” To revive it would require historical detective work, retracing steps back to the original techniques.

That is exactly what Simone Sacconi did relentlessly for six decades of the twentieth century. When Sacconi was writing
his
treatise, the subject of varnish still attracted as many “ever-ready pens and fluent tongues.” Much had been written and discussed and guessed at in those hundred years that passed between the two great studies of Stradivari. The depth and complexity of the research was greatly expanded by modern chemical analyses, which yielded lots of data but no definitive answers. Lingering still was a sense that when it came to varnishing, there was a holy grail just waiting to be found.

Sacconi knew all this and seemed to understand the
common human need to fill in blank spaces with elaborate doodling. “Since the luthiers and the antique traders of the last century were unable to explain the quality of the sound of Stradivari’s instruments,” Sacconi wrote, “they told stories of unknowable secrets.”

On the last day of April, which began as a gray spring morning with a strong damp wind, I showed up at Sam’s workshop to find the chair at his workbench empty. Wiltrud was working at her spot nearby with her usual concentration. When she finally noticed me she pointed toward the small room at the far left corner of the shop—the varnishing room. In my many days at the workshop, I’d only stuck my head inside that room once, on my initial tour of the place. As much as I’d studied the Hills’ and Sacconi’s books and accepted their debunking of the legends and mysteries surrounding Strad’s varnish, as I tapped on the closed door it was difficult not to feel that I was asking to be let into a chamber full of secrets.

Sam was wearing his usual cool weather outfit—flannel shirt, dark chinos, and sandals on top of heavy socks. He had on a shop apron, which I’d only seen him wear a few times before. The room was bright but cramped, with shelves and tables loaded with jars of different colored liquids. There was a small worktable with the requisite architect’s lamp clamped on the corner. Two large cabinets loomed on either side of where Sam was perched on a stool. One was an old mahogany armoire; the other a homemade beech-veneered plywood cabinet of similar
size. The door of the old armoire was cracked open a few inches, and I could see that the cabinet was filled with long fluorescent light tubes and silver reflective Mylar. Violins hung from wires strung inside. These were light boxes, where Sam could speed along the natural aging and coloring and drying for which poor old Strad would have had to rely on low-tech sunlight. I thought back to that famous letter I’d looked at in the stultifying Museo di Stradivari in Cremona: “I beg you will forgive the delay with the violin, occasioned by the varnishing of the large cracks, that the sun may not re-open them.” Sam did not depend solely on the sunlight of the Lombardy plain, nor did he have a sacred napping cot with a polar bear blanky so that he could take an afternoon siesta and impart his spirit into the drying violins. Considering the weight of tradition in his craft, these light boxes seemed a bold move toward modernity. Sam had to push his stool back to get the door open wide enough to let me into the varnish room. He got right to the point.

“I think I got the whole thing together on Friday,” Sam told me. “Then I spent part of Saturday finishing the neck. I think I got it done done done in the white sometime on Saturday. Now it’s in the light box. I washed it with a very light wash of pigment to seal it a little bit.”

He opened the light box and pulled the Drucker fiddle down from where it hung. Sam held the violin out toward me, cradling the instrument like a baby, with one hand supporting the head of the scroll and another cupping the bottom. I’d seen a number of violins in the white around the shop. They were interesting and beautiful
objects already, but there was a distinct blandness about them. An important character seemed to be missing. The violin, with just this early wash of pigment, had acquired a light cinnamon color, and a distinct shine. Sam rocked and turned the instrument.

“The wash put a texture right there in the channel,” he said. “The ribs have a wave in them as well. And the spruce has a little bit of a corduroy texture now. Look at the scroll. Now you can see little tool marks.”

He pointed to the twisting nautilus spirals cut into the wood, and sure enough, little stepped indentations were visible, giving evidence of how he’d worked his small wood chisel around the curve.

“These are not parts of the decoration,” Sam said. “They’re artifacts of the making process. I like to leave them. Some makers will sand them off or scrape them off. There’s different styles. This is not intended to be a copy-copy of a specific instrument, but it’s a Guarneri style, and I’m sort of letting myself go a little bit more in that direction. The scroll is a little more sculpted, and there’s a little more tool marking than I might do on a Strad model. Lately I like to work that way better. It’s a mix of highly finished surfaces and visible tool work.

“This is a cool moment to see a violin,” Sam told me. “In fact, this is my favorite moment to see it. It goes from inanimate and quite dull—a nice matte and creamy—and then it’s like when they turn the electricity on with Frankenstein. He jolts to life. With any luck this violin is going to wake up.”

He stuck the violin back on the wire in the light box and turned back to the worktable. “I’m just going to get
my brushes and tools together and start picking out the different sauces.”

Before I’d left Cremona, while browsing in a bookstore dedicated to lutherie near the International Violin Making School, I’d found a little boxed paperback book called
Varnishes and Very Curious Secrets: Cremona 1747
. Even though it seemed absurdly expensive—forty euros—I bought it immediately. It turned out to be the translation of a text printed originally in Stradivari’s hometown ten years after the master died, consisting of a series of recipes for varnishes for general use, like preparing paintings, or carved church pews, or, perhaps, finishing a violin. In an introduction to the original material, the book’s twentieth-century editor, Vincenzo Gheroldi, describes a fact of eighteenth-century life of which I’d been completely unaware. People—for fun!—experimented with pigments and varnishes. The practice was a “cultural phenomenon,” Gheroldi explains, that one priest of the day described as “virtuous entertainment.”

How our notions of entertainment have changed. Maybe I’d gone a little native in the wilds of violin making, because it wasn’t difficult for me to understand how, without television, someone would put away the dinner dishes, retire to the study, and mix up a batch of, say, a concoction called
bistre.
The recipe is as follows:

Refine as much as possible chimney soot, adding to it the urine of a child; put it into a glass, fill it with clear water, carefully mix using a stick, then let it rest. When most of the sediment has settled on the bottom, gently pour this liquid into another glass and let it rest for four days; what settles on the bottom of
the glass is the best bistre. Repeat this procedure three times to remove sediment from any colour to be used on paper.

Somehow, I could easily imagine Stradivari doing that. I asked Sam if he mixed his own varnishes, without mentioning the use of the urine of a child.

“It used to be that if you wanted decent varnish you had to make it yourself,” he said. “Now there are people who are making some very useable varnishes, which I’ve used occasionally, at least as a subingredient. I still cook my own. It’s kind of like making a caramel.” Sam was reaching around the table, pushing aside glass jars with different-colored stuff inside. Some of the jars had labels on them with dates.

“There’s different batches here made at different times with slightly different ingredients,” he said. “I’m not even sure where the chart is that is the key to what they are, so I don’t know anymore what the exact ingredients are. But it hasn’t varied much. Basically, the base of it is stuff that comes out of pine trees. That’s what they make turpentine from. That’s what they make rosin from. Between those two products you can make a lot of things.”

He picked up one jar with “93” written on it, then picked up another unmarked jar. Both held viscous stuff that looked a little like maple syrup. “These are from the same batch, but one was cooked for quite a while. One I call ‘medium’ and you can see that the one cooked longer is darker.” He held the jars up toward the weak gray light coming through the windows. “Even though the stuff is thick,” Sam said, “it’s still very transparent, very clear, very glow-ey.”

So, I asked Sam, is this the kind of varnish that all violin makers use? It turned out that what I was about to see was one of three steps in the
varnishing process.
What laymen thought of as the varnish on a violin actually consisted of a first coat that soaked into the wood, called the ground; a second layer of something that was impervious; then coats of actual varnish.

When Sam realized that, like most people, I was not aware of the stages of the process, he put the jars down and was quiet for a moment, like he was collecting his thoughts.

“We have to back up and go through the whole subject of ground,” he began. “The ground is the most disputed and, I think, the most critical aspect, both for appearance and sound. I’ve done a few things to the wood already in terms of getting a patina on it. There’s a little bit of natural oxidation on the surface. I washed on a little bit of natural pigment to get a little bit of color going. Now the fiddle is more or less like a prepared canvas. Whatever it is that goes on there first is what gets absorbed into the wood. So you kind of have one main go at getting it right.” I could tell that this was another of those times where I was going to speak little and listen a lot.