The Violin Maker (10 page)

He worked for another hour or so on the bass-bar, which looked like a couple of Popsicle sticks carved into a streamlined, aerodynamic shape. I kept imagining the scene where a whole hotel ballroom full of people shouted at one another, fighting about how this little stick should be carved and where it should be placed. While he worked, Sam talked about his theories on how the bar could change the sound of a violin, emphasizing either the lower or upper end of the frequencies, altering the responsiveness. “I don’t know how much you really want to know about this,” he said, several times. “I feel like I’m just starting to get an understanding of this. There could be more to know.” By the time he finally glued the bar onto the top it had been dark for a while and a blustery wind had started to blow.

“It’s starting to come together,” Sam said on the sidewalk outside the shop as we were about to part, me for the subway back to Manhattan, him for the walk home. “It’s starting to look like a fiddle.”

It would be early spring by the time just about everything that didn’t look like Gene Drucker’s violin had been cut and gouged and scraped away. I had begun to collect discarded material which I would take home in my pocket and store in a little glass jar. There was a small section
of the purfling, a stiff little sandwich of wood smaller than a toothpick. There was one of the f-hole shapes that Sam had cut into the top, the discard that gave the violin one of its most distinctive features, like an incredibly fancy doughnut hole. These two shaped pieces sat on a bed of wood shavings from both the clean spruce top and the fancier flamed maple back. A few of the shavings were broad and curled, like a sliver from a wedge of good Parmesan cheese. Most were smaller, thinner slices, like what’s left when you sharpen a pencil with a knife. This was all I was going to get. As work progressed and Sam labored to perfect the fiddle, all that got scraped away was dust. Once he suggested I smell the spruce as he scraped at it, and I snorted some of what might have been Gene’s fiddle as if it were cocaine.

“I’m starting to really know this wood,” Sam told me one afternoon when I came into the shop. It was a dreary day with a hard, cold rain, and Sam sat at his worktable with the violin top. He’d swung the bulb of an architect’s lamp directly over where he worked. He pulled a small, thin metal scraper across the wood with quick, short strokes.

“I’m in the mood to find every little place to take away more material,” he said. He scraped away for a while, then lifted the wood plate off the worktable and held it near his ear. With a knuckle he tapped at the wood, keeping his ear close.

“I’m listening for a couple things,” he said. “If all other factors are the same, the higher the note, the stronger the piece.” A few times he whacked at his architect’s lamp,
because he knew that produced a certain pitch that he could use for comparison. Sometimes Sam picked up a little wooden recorder, the kind children learn to play in school, and blew a few notes, trying to match what he’d just heard from his wood plate. “My life would be simpler if I had perfect pitch,” he said once.

“Besides pitch, the other thing I’m listening for,” he said, “is the quality in that pitch. Does it have a full sound? Does it sustain? How hard a hit does it take to make it sound? None of this is random—there are whole schools of thought on what the pitches should be.” He scraped more, tapped and listened more. “This top is very light, so my tendency is to leave it thicker. But there’s a danger to leaving it too thick. And, there’s also a danger in making it too thin.”

At other times, after scraping for several minutes, Sam would take hold of the top in both hands and give it a twist.

“The fiddle is vibrating all over the place in all kinds of different ways,” he said. “The strength of the plate is important in various dimensions. One is cross-wise flex. That’s probably the most important.” He twisted the top to demonstrate. I realized that I had skipped a breath, fearing that he would break the carefully carved piece in half. “It’s not just important how much it moves but the type of movement. Is it a crisp response? Does it want to jump all the way back, or does it have a kind of gummy, more leathery feel to it. That softer leathery feeling could actually make a better, warmer sound. But it’s not an absolute and I prefer a crisper feel, because generally it will
probably give a louder, more clear-sounding instrument.

“All these tests,” he said, “pitches, feel, weighing—they’re not so much a guide to what I actually do; they’re more warnings against doing anything weird or dangerous.”

From spending time with Sam while he worked I’d come to recognize certain common themes, and the one that came up most frequently was represented by a phrase he repeated again and again: “All things being equal.” He would begin an explanation like that and then go on to tell me a rule about arching, or thicknesses. Almost always, as he finished his explanation, he would conclude with another phrase: “Of course, things are never equal.” There were just too many variables in the equation.

“Part of making decisions when you’re building a fiddle is going from general ideas of what would probably be good to very specific details of what would be good in
this
situation. What I’m doing now is pretty fussy. But I am actually finding places to take material away. It would have been much more convenient to establish the thicknesses and never mess with it again.

“It’s hard to know which is a really significant part of what you’re doing and which is just an incidental part. And that’s true at every stage.”

For crucial parts of this violin, Sam was now within tenths of a millimeter of having everything that wasn’t the Drucker violin removed for good. There was no going back, and yet there was still a lot of work to do. Some of it was what Sam would call whacking away at wood: carving the scroll, the neck, the fingerboard. He’d pop the rib structure with its blocks and linings off the mold,
and eventually, after he’d worried over everything some more—maybe even removed a little more wood—he’d glue the back and belly into place.

Sam had revealed much of himself over these months. Maybe not as much as Joseph P. Reid, the guy who thought you could build a Stradivarius in your basement, would imagine. But plenty. Like it or not, Sam’s character and nature were built into this box. Would it be simply average, or somehow magical? And how could you really know the difference?

I
wish Strad had left us a little book or something,” Sam Zygmuntowicz told me more than once. “Something that said, ‘Make it thinner here, here, and
here
; leave it thicker there, there, and
there
and you’ll get a particular sound. That would be nice. But, of course, he didn’t do that.”

Despite his teenage work at Zapf’s in Philadelphia, his training with Peter Paul Prier, his intense summer tutorial with the esteemed Carl Becker, and his five-year boot camp apprenticeship with René Morel, Sam maintained that most of what he’d learned about building good instruments came from studying great instruments, partic
ularly the 1716 Cessole Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesù’s 1735 Plowden. “They have been like textbooks,” he wrote once for
The Strad
. Textbooks “that I can study again and again. They are archetypes of great sound and style.”

Yet after I’d been hanging around his workshop for several months, Sam revealed something that is an open secret among those intimate with famous old fiddles, but not very well known to most music lovers, let alone laymen. “People don’t like to talk about it,” Sam said, “but most Guarneris and Strads have been tampered with in one way or another.”

The implications of what he said didn’t seem terribly important at the time; but the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Sam had used a very good, evocative analogy to explain what he meant by “tampering.” “It’s like those old American cars in Cuba that were there before Castro, and are still running. They’re classic Chevys or Fords, but chances are that most of the parts are different.” Turning this over and over in my mind, I suffered a small crisis of faith and understanding. Here I was, beginning to fully appreciate this strange, hermetic world I’d been allowed to enter. A world that seemed to contradict everything we modern Americans held dear: progress, innovation, speedy technical advance. A world where less and less meant more and more. In this world the experts seemed to agree on one thing: the work of some artisans in a small Italian town three hundred years ago might never be surpassed, and was rarely, if ever, duplicated. How could this theory, this peculiarly fascinating worldview, hold up if the work of the old guys had already been altered?

First I had to learn what had been changed on those Guarneris and Stradivaris. It turned out to be a lot.

The setting for music making in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was substantially different from what came later. Among the few solid facts known about Stradivari’s workshop is that he filled orders from kings in France and England. The music that would be performed on these fiddles would truly be “chamber” music, concerts given by small ensembles in relatively small palace halls. The sonic requirements placed on these fiddles were light, and their sweet, light sound matched perfectly the Baroque music they were playing. But as the decades passed and a new, larger, and more democratic class of audience emerged, concert halls got larger, and with them the size of orchestras. The very music got heavier and denser. Fiddles simply needed to be louder.

Some believe it was part of Stradivari’s great genius that he anticipated the change, and his later instruments were more powerful. But still not powerful enough to stay in running order for hundreds of years. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most older violins were taken apart and the original bass-bar replaced with a larger, thicker bar. The neck was lengthened and tilted at a sharper angle to allow for a longer fingering board and stronger strings at higher tension. Often, when the instruments were apart for these changes, the new craftsmen would regraduate the tops and backs. Of course, they were unable to add wood (except patches to
repair worn spots or cracks); they always removed wood, making the bellies and backs thinner.

Sometimes, they considered more drastic action. The Hill brothers, while researching their book on Stradivari, found the account book of a Spanish priest who took up fiddle making in late-eighteenth-century Madrid. In one entry, the priest, Dom Vicenzo Ascensio, recounts how the curator of the Spanish Royal Court instruments brought him a Stradivari violin dated 1709, and “requested me to improve the quality of the tone, which was bad.”

Padre Ascensio took the fiddle apart, made some alterations, but made a worried note in his book that his “improvements” were probably not enough. “If after this work the violin is not improved, I think it hopeless unless I put a new back and belly to it.” According to the Hills, the court musicians were satisfied with what was left of the Stradivari and didn’t ask for any more “improvements.”

More than a century later, Sam Zygmuntowicz wrote that “the original intent of the old makers is only half the story.” He then described what might be the common history of a typical Stradivari or Guarneri instrument: regraduated by the Italian makers named Mantegazza; given a longer neck by the famous French copyist Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who worked in Paris in the mid-1800s; patched and restored by the Hills in London just before the turn of the twentieth century; fitted again with another new bass-bar by the master restorer Simone Sacconi in post–World War II New York. Where in all that retrofitting could one even find the maker’s original intent?

I wondered, considering how carefully Sam had worked on his bass-bar—its carving, its placement, its controversial much-argued-over springiness—wouldn’t Stradivari and Guarneri have done the same? What did it mean that, decades later, someone who wasn’t Stradivari or Guarneri had pried open their masterpieces and stuck in a new bass-bar, like some Cuban mechanic putting a rebuilt carburetor into a 1958 Impala? If Sam spent so many hours, days, and years studying those old fiddles, keeping notebooks full of detailed graduation charts that looked like topographical maps—whose work was he actually analyzing?

And I thought of a game Sam liked to play when he met with his colleagues during that summer week in Oberlin. After the dinner dishes had been cleared, as the makers finished their wine, or popped open another beer and socialized a bit before returning for the evening session in the workshop, Sam would get the attention of the table and ask a simple question, yet one among his particular craft that was loaded with portent. Okay, Sam would say, getting an impish look, “What do we really know?”

I sat in on one session of What Do We Really Know? at Oberlin, and there was a lot of banter and good-natured bluster as the makers debated arching and graduation and design. (Luckily, no one threw in the loaded-grenade question about bass-bar tension.) Afterward, walking from the dining hall to the workshop in the muggy Ohio night, I asked Sam what had been concluded—What
did
they really know?

“Actually, very little,” he said.

Well then, what did Stradivari really know? Though there is all that debate about exactly when and how he came to the workshop of Amati, there is no doubt that Antonio Stradivari learned his craft in the old guild tradition. Guilds kept secrets, and craftsmen trained in the system considered themselves only that—craftsmen—and not artists. In the flowering of the Renaissance, many artisans began to see themselves as individuals, as
artists
. With the development of printing in the sixteenth century, many of these artists produced treatises. The first was the Italian sculptor Ghiberti, says Jacques Barzun in his magisterial history of Europe. And, Barzun writes, “After Ghiberti’s the deluge.” Alberti, one of the architects of St. Peter’s in Rome, left treatises on architecture, perspective, computation, and bookkeeping. Palladio wrote his famous works on building. Dürer wrote on painting and human proportions. Da Vinci compiled his notebooks. Violin making developed and reached its apotheosis in an age where all these ideas were still in the air. Yet no violin maker from the Golden Age of Cremona left behind a manual. The rules were built into the objects themselves.

The Hills also note that for a lengthy period after his death, Stradivari’s instruments were not considered the epitome of sound. That distinction belonged to people like Jakob Stainer, an Austrian luthier who worked around the same time as Stradivari, or later makers who thought they had surpassed all the guys from Cremona. But somehow, as time passed, a different standard de
veloped. It was back to the future. Though there would be a small, cultish group of players who preferred the Guarneri sound (a group founded by the great Paganini), they remained a subset. For a long time now, what everyone has wanted from a violin maker, no matter what they did to achieve it, was the sound of Stradivari.

But how do we really know that sound?

Despite being exceptionally difficult to talk (and write) about, sound, in a fundamental sense, is quite simple. It is air vibrating. Yet the complicated way those vibrations are produced—especially in a bowed string instrument—and the equally complicated ways those vibrations are perceived by humans give scientists from a variety of fields lifetimes’ worth of work and, so far, few definitive answers. And no amount of empirical research has made hearing less personal. Sound, Sir James Beament concluded, in
The Violin Explained
, is “subjective and susceptible to suggestion, belief and myth.”

So now, when listeners think they are hearing a Stradivari, they think it is an unmatchable example of great sound. But there are plenty of examples of times when listeners, even trained experts, are just plain wrong. Such stories that I came across ranged from the most theatrical (and perhaps apocryphal) tale of how Fritz Kreisler once played an entire concert on a cheap manufactured fiddle. Of course, he was known for playing the great Guarneri that would later be named for him. As he basked in the warm applause this night, the story goes, Kreisler lifted the fiddle in the air, smashed it to pieces, and enjoyed the shocked gasps of the audience before summoning his del Gesù from
the wings. You have to wonder if the audience really got what must have been the point of his theatrics. Many can recognize the sound of Kreisler, but almost no one can actually spot the sound of a great Cremonese fiddle.

More recently, David Finckel, the cellist of the Emerson Quartet, has been playing on a Zygmuntowicz copy of the famous Duport cello long played by Finckel’s teacher, Mstislav Rostropovich. When the cello was finished, Finckel convinced Sam to put a fake Stradivari label inside the instrument. After concerts, when admirers came backstage to congratulate him and marvel at his instrument, Finckel would show them the Strad label. “Oh, of course,” more than one music fan told him, “with that sound it had to be a Stradivari.”

“I got more than a few laughs out of that,” Finckel told me.

In 1963, violin maker and acoustics researcher Carleen Hutchins (one of the founders of a group of violin researchers called the Catgut Acoustical Society) wrote an article for
Scientific American
in which she reported that she had taken a five-dollar violin that was used by Harvard physicist George Saunders as “his ‘standard’ of badness” on his many acoustical experiments. Hutchins took the bad fiddle apart, did some adjustments, and then used it in a test with a college music department audience. Players behind a screen alternated between playing the revamped five-dollar fiddle and an “excellent Cremona violin.” (Hutchins did not report its maker.) The two were judged equal in tone by the trained listeners.

Tests like this have been undertaken for a long time.
Perhaps the earliest was done in 1817 by the French National Academy. The results, according to Sir James Beament, are remarkably similar and tend to support what I began to call the Zygmuntowicz Uncertainty Principle. These tests, Beament writes, “have all produced results which one would expect from pure chance.”

My favorite episode in the game of What Do We Really Know? comes from a BBC radio program from 1977, when music critic John Amos gathered together three formidable experts: violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman, and Charles Beare, then (and now) one of the most respected and successful violin experts and dealers in the world. Stern and Zukerman entertained millions (and made millions) playing the fiddle. On Beare’s word, millions could be spent obtaining one.

For the test, the BBC had gathered four instruments. One was a later-period Stradivari, the 1725 instrument dubbed the Chaconne. One was a 1739 Guarneri del Gesù. Another was a violin made in 1846 by Vuillaume, the most respected maker of his day, and a brilliant copyist. The fourth fiddle was a little over a year old, produced by a British luthier who was actually still alive. All four would be played in the London Broadcasting House studio by a noted British soloist. He would play parts of the same two pieces on each. First, the Bruch violin concerto in G minor, whose opening allowed the player to work on all four strings of the instrument. Second, the iconic Bach Chaconne. The violins would be played behind a screen so the judges could not pick up any visual clues.

From the start they complained. Isaac Stern said the
recording studio was the wrong place to perform such a test. Charles Beare said it didn’t matter what people heard in the audience, “the difference between great and good is what [the violin] does for a great player under the ear with an orchestra.” Zukerman didn’t have a chance to protest before John Amos gave them all a figurative pat on the hand and promised, “It’s not an examination of you. We’re just wondering whether one can tell immediately the tone differences.”

In this case, it turns out, these two great virtuosos and one renowned expert might as well have flipped a coin to determine their opinions. No one got more than two out of four correct. And the correct guesses and wrong guesses were completely different among the three men.

The talk continued for a little while after the results. Isaac Stern strongly advised young players to work with a new instrument until they knew enough and had enough money to buy an old one. (Twenty-five years later, after he commissioned Sam Zygmuntowicz to copy each of his famous old Guarneris, Stern often lent the copies to up-and-coming young players.) John Amos tried to elicit some final lessons learned from his panel of experts. Zukerman said his Guarneri made him feel better when he was nervous. Beare, the dealer in old instruments, stuck to his guns that older was better.