The Violin Maker (2 page)

T
he magical box is smaller than a bread box and just about infinitely more complex. There are at least sixty-eight different pieces in a violin, and usually seventy, because finding a large unblemished piece of wood is rare, so the belly and back plates typically are made by joining two pieces. Except for a few metal screws that help make minute adjustments in the tuning of the strings—and the strings themselves—every bit of the thing is made of wood.

This is an object that is formed with a thousand cuts. They start with the roughest—the felling of a tree in the forest—and get progressively smaller and more painstaking. In the late stages of construction, the difference be
tween right and wrong is measured in millimeters, often fractions of that. Building a violin begins in butchery and ends in surgery.

They are called luthiers, the builders. The name is derived from the lute, a bulbous guitarlike instrument that was all the rage in medieval music, and the term is now applied to those who make or repair a whole range of descendants and relatives, from fiddles to guitars. Though its origin is traced back to a primitive sticklike thing called the rebec played by Moorish nomads in the first millennium, the violin as we know it appeared rather suddenly in the middle of the sixteenth century. In little more than a hundred years its design was perfected. The laws that govern the building of this box were decided upon a short time before the laws of gravity were discovered, and they have remained remarkably unchanged since then. It is commonly thought that the violin is the most perfect acoustically of all musical instruments. It is quite uncommon to find someone who can explain exactly why. One physicist who spent decades trying to understand why the violin works so well said that it was the world’s most analyzed musical instrument—and the least understood.

Consequently, a luthier, a really good one, is at once a woodworker, an engineer, an historian, a mechanic, and a shaman. What kind of person takes up this trade?

“My parents were Polish concentration camp survivors,” says Sam Zygmuntowicz. “They resettled in Sweden and
moved to Philadelphia in 1952. I was their first child born in America. My father started a laundry business.

“From a very young age I was highly involved with art. I won a couple of school art contests for sculpture. My older brothers had studied violin but didn’t continue, so I wasn’t offered violin lessons. I was interested in music though, and I finally took a few guitar lessons when I was around seven years old. Then I picked up the recorder on my own. I got interested in traditional folk music and bought a five-string banjo when I was thirteen and taught myself to play.

“Later that year my family moved, and near our new house was a drainage ditch leading to a park. There were some bamboolike reeds growing there, which I thought would make good flutes. I went to the library and looked for books on flute making. Of course, I didn’t find much. I did find a big book on organology, and from that I gleaned some information about Aztec bone flutes and such. I also found a book on guitar making and another that was an introduction to instrument acoustics.

“But the most important book I found was a charming old book called
Violin-Making as it was, and is.
I think that book inspired quite a number of current violin makers.”

Sam had sent me this biographical sketch by e-mail before we’d actually met in person. I made a date to visit his studio the next week. Before that, I went to the New York Public Library to see if it had a copy of
Violin-Making as it was, and is.
The book was available, but reading it wasn’t easy, because the copy at the library was old and rare. Before I was allowed to touch it the librar
ians confiscated any pens in my possession and made me wear white gloves. This made note taking too difficult, so I just paged through and read bits. I tried to appreciate how this peculiar book could inspire a young man like Sam Zygmuntowicz, but I have to admit that at first the book’s main inspiration on me was a pronounced drowsiness.

If this was the key to understanding the motivation to modern lutherie, it was an odd one. Published in 1885 by a polymath Edwardian dandy named Edward Heron-Allen, this amateur’s guide to the world of fiddles is one of the most eccentric books I’d ever seen, full of untranslated phrases in Latin and Greek, poems in tribute to the violin, and a guide to building a fiddle so exhaustive and detailed that you’d have to assume the author suffered from attention surfeit disorder. Later, when I asked Sam what it was about this book that inspired him so much, he said:

“It just made violin making seem romantic.”

There was one thing I’d written down after reading Heron-Allen, when the librarians gave me my pens back. His primary injunction as he begins the treatise is this: “Given: A log of wood. Make a violin.”

That’s the process I wanted to pursue with Sam: watch him take a log and turn it into a fiddle, follow the instrument from its roughest stage to its first performance. If I were a romantic like Mr. Heron-Allen, I might quote Henry Wadsworth Longfellow to describe what I was hoping to see.

But I was heading for Brooklyn and was more than willing to settle for a little less romance.

It was a cool and sunny spring day when I first went to meet Sam. On the subway to Brooklyn, I tried to guess what he would look like. Was there some kind of badge or special outfit that a luthier could wear to give a signal of his status, like the way a white lab coat says
doctor
? Could he, like an auto mechanic, wake in the morning and slip into his trade by donning a stiff set of matching pants and shirt with his name stitched over the shirt pocket?

Apparently not.

My first glimpse of Sam Zygmuntowicz was through a chain-link fence. I was standing on a littered sidewalk on Dean Street in Brooklyn, across the street from the busy loading dock of a tile and flooring store whose front doors faced Flatbush Avenue, a main, wide artery of the borough, where I’d just fought my way across four lanes of angry traffic. Behind us was downtown Brooklyn, a mid-rise cluster of fancy stone structures from a more prosperous past, and a few glassy new buildings that promoters were pointing to as signs of Renaissance for the borough. A
few blocks in the other direction was Park Slope, a neighborhood of tree-lined streets and impressive brownstones, one of New York’s great gentrified enclaves, set on a rising hill that begins at the famously polluted Gowanus Canal and runs up to Frederick Law Olmsted’s Prospect Park. I knew that Zygmuntowicz lived in a row house in Park Slope and that he commuted to work (usually on foot) in this adjacent neighborhood that was still so nondescript and generally bereft of charm that on the day of my first visit the real estate people had still not invented a cute new name for it.

The chain-link fence through which I spotted Sam surrounded a small, unpaved, and weedy driveway leading to the loading dock of a converted six-story factory building, where at one time workmen inside the brick walls and wired windows had manufactured stuff like sporting goods. Now, most of the space is residential and a lot of the residents work where they live, occupied doing new cottage industries like producing video, or art, or, in Sam’s case, violins, violas, and cellos. He’d lived in this building for a while, before he got married and started having children.

To say that Sam Zygmuntowicz didn’t look like I expected a violin maker to look is absolutely true. But what difference does it make, since I didn’t know then what I was expecting? The image didn’t come to me until months after this first meeting, when Sam, a little frustrated by the simple-minded questions I was asking him, said testily, “I hope you’re not going to do what people have a tendency to do with violin makers: make me seem like a kindly old wood carver—like Geppetto.”

Banish the thought, I told him at the time. But when I considered the question later, I realized that the old man who’d carved Pinocchio was kind of what I was hoping for.

That first morning, Sam came across the parking lot to unlock the heavy Master lock on the swinging gate of the fence. He gave a small wave as he emerged from the building and walked slowly toward me. He was, like me, a middle-aged man of average height and medium build, who somehow looked shorter and heavier than he really was. And he was dressed nothing like Geppetto. No suspenders, no heavy leather apron, no knickers. He had a youthful and friendly face, a little mottled, and wore large glasses. His hair was thick and wiry, black with some touches of gray. He was wearing what I would learn is his characteristic outfit: comfortably cut dark cotton chinos and a plaid flannel shirt. On his feet he had leather sandals over dark socks.

The gate between us opened, Sam stuck out his hand and said, “You found it all right?” Then he glanced around for a moment, a little shy and embarrassed by the banality of his question. I was standing in front of him, wasn’t I? “Of course you found it all right,” he said, and swung the gate open wide to let me through. He locked up behind me and led me across to the building. We trudged up four flights of wide stairs and arrived at a landing with a big steel door. Sam pushed it open, and we entered his studio.

Inside was a scene similar to any number of lofts I’d visited around New York. The exterior walls were concrete and pocked in places. The wood floors showed some
scars. Sun poured in through high windows that filled most of the south wall. Just inside the door sat an ebony baby grand piano on a well-worn carpet, a few plants flanking its keyboard, and a music stand tucked into the curve of the soundboard. To the right was a seating area with a broken-in maroon couch and mismatched chairs placed on another threadbare carpet. Every item of furniture seemed to come from the kind of store that some would call
antique
and others
thrift
.

Beyond that there were some homemade cubicles that created a hallway leading to a kitchen where I could glimpse the corner of a giant old commercial stove and table. On a cabinet leading to the hall was a big marionette dressed in a tuxedo, holding a violin in one wired hand and a bow in the other. (This was long before his Geppetto complaint, but Sam would later assure me that he had no hand in carving this fiddle-playing puppet.)

Across from the puppet was a glass-fronted barrister’s bookcase, and as we passed it I tried to catch the titles of a few of the books stuffed inside.
Understanding Wood
.
The Violins of Antonio Stradivari
. And, of course,
Violin-Making as it was, and is.

Although most of the loft had a thrown-together, do-it-yourself feel, this bookcase sat against a new wall that looked professionally built. To the left of it was a pair of polished doors in a buff rosewood finish. Just to the side of those doors hung a small black-and-white framed photo of Sam standing with Isaac Stern, the two of them holding a fiddle together and lifting it toward the camera. On the photo was an inscription from the legendary vio
linist that read “To Sam, thank you again for your wonderful craftsmanship.”

I had read what I could about Sam before coming to visit, and I knew that this was one of the most prestigious commissions of his career, one that had generated a buzz about him in the relatively small and insular world of violins. Maestro Stern was among the faction of top soloists who preferred the fiddles of Giuseppe Guarneri, known in his time around Cremona, Italy, as del Gesù. If the violins of the older and more productive Antonio Stradivari were considered the Rolls-Royce of the trade, those made by Guarneri del Gesù were on the order of Jaguars—more erratically made, but powerful and distinctive. Stern had long played one of the most coveted of Guarneris, called the Panette (most top violins have been labeled at some point in their lifetime, usually by a dealer appropriating some cachet from a famous previous owner). The famous soloist had heard of this young, up-and-coming luthier named Zygmuntowicz who was gaining a reputation for his careful copying of famous instruments. Stern commissioned a copy of the Panette. After it was built, Stern brought the new instrument to a rehearsal with some of his friends, including Yo-Yo Ma, and played it without mentioning that it was a duplicate. Until the great old violinist said something himself nobody noticed he was not playing his regular great old violin. Soon, Maestro Stern asked Sam to copy his other great Guarneri, the Ysaye. Word spread quickly, and Sam’s reputation climbed.

“Someday, maybe, I’ll tell you the story of that fiddle,”
Sam told me. Then he pushed open those double doors and led me into the workshop of his studio, the inner sanctum of his professional life.

From talking on the telephone with him, I had a basic understanding of how the business worked. Unlike some luthiers, who produced fiddles and then sold them through dealers, Sam took commissions from violinists themselves and then designed each fiddle for the particular player. He was able to make between six and eight violins in a year. (He also usually had one cello in the works at any given time.) When we met his price was $27,000 for a violin and $46,000 for a cello. Because he had more customers than hands, the wait from commission to delivery was about two years, and the larger cello could take five.

“Usually,” Sam said, “when I talk to people about violin making I don’t get that technical. I talk about the business aspects, the people aspects—things that are understandable to people who have similar concerns in their own field.”

I was interested in the business and personal aspects of his trade, of course, but entering Sam’s studio for the first time, looking around, I found myself focused on the technical part. The technical part seemed like a wonderful mystery made manifest all around me—a tableau of saws and chisels, files and brushes, stained jars filled with pigments and solvents. Everywhere—on tables, hanging from wires, tucked into storage slots—were the familiar parts of fiddles: the curved, feminine-shaped backs
and bellies, the nautilus twist of the scrolls, the flat, dark wedge of the fingerboard.