The Violin Maker (3 page)

The workshop had a main room about twenty feet wide and fifteen feet deep, with a windowed wall lined with a workbench that was actually a jerry-rigged progression that began with an old wooden desk on one end and progressed through a series of grafts that included tabletops and built-in counters, supported by legs and drawers. Sam spends most of his workday seated in a padded modern office chair on the left. To his right sat a young woman with thick, light brown hair and an equally thick Austrian accent. Her name is Wiltrud Fauler, and she is one of two assistants that Sam has imported from Europe. The other, Dietmar, soon emerged from a small room in the far right side of the shop, looking like a factory worker in his blue apron smock, except he was barefoot. Both Wiltrud and Deitmar were friendly but had a pronounced shyness and reserve that seemed natural for folks who spend their workdays concentrating on things and not on people. After we were introduced and exchanged a few pleasantries, they quickly turned their attention back to their workbenches and over the next few hours said very little and that, mostly, to each other in German.

Sam Zygmuntowicz didn’t miss the irony of a child of Jewish Holocaust survivors hiring two assistants who were German. He was a practical businessman.

“In Germany,” Sam told me, “it’s quite different from here. They take pride in putting out things of very high quality. It’s a very honorable thing. It’s a career track
much earlier. And it’s not like the kids with discipline problems get stuck in the vo-tech school.”

Sam had his share of discipline problems while getting through school in Philadelphia. His mother kept many of his report cards, and they were full of complaints about a boy who kept a messy desk and didn’t always pay attention. When he began to focus on violin making as his future, his parents couldn’t fathom lutherie as an occupation for their son and tried to get him an apprenticeship with the local carpenter’s union. At fifteen he landed a job helping to repair school violins at a Philadelphia music store called Zapfs. When he was eighteen he enrolled in the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City. It was founded by a German immigrant named Peter Paul Prier, who’d learned the trade in Mittenwald, a Bavarian town with an intense tradesman culture that produced thousands of violins in the last century. The only equivalent to Mittenwald was Mirecourt, a town in France’s Vosges mountains, where violin making was an honored and prolific town trade. After college Sam worked for five years in the Manhattan restoration shop of René Morel, a Frenchman who’d trained in the workshops of Mirecourt.

“I guess I consider myself only a demi-American in my work attitude,” Sam says. The route that took him from reading Heron-Allen as a teenager in the Philadelphia library to running his own thriving shop in Brooklyn is, he understands, not a journey that most people today want to travel.

“Our society has gotten more materialistic,” he says.
“People go into professions to make money. There’s nothing like the traditional craft that you do in your village, where you go into it when you’re twelve and seven years later your apprenticeship is done and for five years after that you’re a journeyman and by the time you’re twenty-five you can be a master, and maybe by the time you’re thirty you can open your own shop.

“You can’t even legally hire a twelve-year-old in this country. It’s just not set up that way. And most people who go into violin making don’t go into it seeing it simply as an honorable craft—like being a drywall taper or a plumber. People consider it a kind of art, and they go into it with the expectations people bring to art. Or for a lot of people, being a violin maker is kind of like being a boat builder: something slightly romantic, an alternative lifestyle thing.

“Because of that I don’t think people get the kind of training that they should get, because that’s not what they went into it for. They didn’t get into it to get yelled at by a Frenchman in very colorful ways.”

The Frenchman he was referring to was his former boss, René Morel, whose craftsmanship is highly respected and whose mercurial nature is widely known. Many of the world’s top fiddle players come to Morel to maintain and repair their instruments. And many of the instruments they bring are among the most valuable on earth. In a small gem of a book called
The Countess of Stanlein Restored,
the writer Nicholas Delbanco follows the restoration of a Stradivari cello by that name, which belonged to his father-in-law, the eminent musician Bernard Green
house. Greenhouse had waited decades to have his beloved instrument given a major overhaul. And he would trust the job only to Morel.

During his time at Morel’s shop on West Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, Sam told me, “I used to sit at lunch with a two-million-dollar violin open on my worktable, and just stare at it, trying to understand it, trying to take it in.” After he left the employ of Morel and opened his own shop, Sam’s reputation grew on his ability to make uncanny copies of old instruments, as he did for Isaac Stern. “If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” Sam wrote once, “it is also the most direct route to learning a complex and elusive aesthetic.”

Sitting with him this first day, listening to him talk, catching glimpses of the work routine of Wiltrud and Dietmar, I began to get a feel for the workaday aesthetic of his shop. It seemed like a wonderful place to spend your time. A high-end sound system supplied a subdued soundtrack. I could see that many of the CD cases stacked near the stereo were classical recordings—a number were by clients he had mentioned—but what came out of the speakers this morning was an eclectic mix of folk and bluegrass and only a little classical. Sam is a self-taught fiddler who plays folk, country, klezmer, swing—everything
but
classical music. Wiltrud is a classically trained violinist who plays with a semiprofessional orchestra in New York. (Dietmar plays just enough to test fiddles in the shop.) “Wiltrud teases me,” Sam says, “that I like to listen to hillbilly music.”

Surrounding Sam were tools. A series of gougers
looked like elongated woodhandled spoons ranging in size from a few inches to a foot long, their tips ground to a sharp edge to rip through wood. My eye lighted on a set of wood planes. The largest was the same size I have used myself, the kind you buy in a hardware store to get rid of extra wood on doors that don’t close right. But in this shop the planes get increasingly smaller, and lined up they look like a set of unnested Russian dolls, shrinking down to a little shoe-shaped thing that is about the right size to jump around a Monopoly game board. To use it, you’d have to hold it between two fingers like the handle of a teacup.

In my library trip before coming to Brooklyn, I’d read some of the articles Sam had written about his craft over the years, mostly for the top journal of the string world, the English magazine called
The Strad
. In one piece, Sam described his work as “more than a complicated carpentry project.” But to someone like me, walking into his shop for the first time, it appeared that what he does is
exactly
a complicated carpentry project. Almost everything in the workshop seemed designed to fashion and transform wood. And, leaving out the small room with large band saws that Dietmar worked on sporadically through the morning, everything has a look of timeless tradition. A few tools look so weathered that it seems Stradivari himself could have handled them.

“The fact is,” Sam said, “my shop in many ways could be any shop throughout history. Some of the tools are more sophisticated—clamps and things. We have electric lights and we heat glue in an electric pot. But I would say that
Stradivari could walk into this shop and, after a few hours of looking around, could work here quite comfortably.”

This was the first of many times that Sam would drop the famous name Stradivari into the conversation. Over the months that followed, I would come to realize that the influence of the Italian craftsman who died in 1737 is felt almost constantly by modern violin makers. His presence was consistent and powerful, like a moon pushing and pulling the oceans in an everyday way. In the many hours I would spend in his workshop, Sam’s nonchalant talk of “Strad”—or, for variation, “the old guy”—would sometimes make it seem that Stradivari was working still. In a way, Sam was Strad’s apprentice, and the old guy might as well have been there in the shop each day, scraping away at a fiddle and muttering to himself in Italian.

The more I thought about Sam’s situation, the more remarkable it seemed. His occupation appeared to refute one of the very basic rules of our culture: that science and technology keep making things better. In a world of billion-dollar search engines, phones that play movies, bioengineering and string theory, a shop in Brooklyn can still strive to produce a product that matched a tool more than three hundred years old. Was it craftsmanship or alchemy?

By lunchtime that day—a European-style snack of cheeses, dense dark bread, and fruits shared with Dietmar and Wiltrud on a worn wooden table in the big,
bright loft kitchen—Sam and I were settling on one project I could follow.

A few years before, he’d promised a new fiddle to Eugene Drucker, one of the founders of the Emerson String Quartet, a New York–based chamber group that a lot of critics and many classical music fans would argue was the best of the current generation.

Two members of the Emerson, cellist David Finckel and violinist Philip Setzer, were currently playing Zygmuntowicz instruments. They had learned of Sam’s abilities a decade earlier when Drucker had purchased another Zygmuntowicz violin. The violinist never really warmed to that fiddle and eventually sold it. Drucker was now playing exclusively on a Stradivari made in Cremona in 1686. This was before Strad’s so-called Golden Period, which began around 1700 (when the master was pushing sixty!), but still, it was a Stradivari.

Gene Drucker had admitted to Sam that his violin could be temperamental, particularly under the rigorous international touring schedule the Emerson maintained and the consequent climate variations. Plus, the instruments that Sam had built for Finckel and Setzer just seemed more powerful, and the trend in all music, even classical chamber music, was toward more volume and force.

“That might be a good instrument for you to watch me build,” Sam told me. “Gene is a very, very good player. And he’s really sensitive to sound. And he plays on a Strad now. So my ultimate goal is to make him give up the Strad and play my instrument. The other two guys in the Em
erson gave up their old instruments almost immediately. But they weren’t playing Strads.

“Gene’s Strad is an early—almost Amati-like—Strad,” Sam explained. The young Antonio Stradivari was an apprentice in Nicolò Amati’s workshop. “When it’s playing well it’s really something. The first time he ever came out here and played it for me I just said, ‘What do you want from me? You sound absolutely fabulous.’

“But then he came out again and for whatever reason the Strad was not in good mettle and I could see what was bothering him. It wasn’t like he told me anything specific, like he needed a dark sound or a light sound. It was more like a feel—what he needed the violin to do for him and what his musical struggles are. From that feeling I’m trying to surmise what to do. I wouldn’t mind more information, but I think I have a free hand to just make a really good fiddle. And if I think it’s really good, then he’ll probably think it’s really good, too.”

Yes, this did seem like a perfect case study for building the magical box.

We finished lunch and cleared the table, and I told Sam I’d get out of his way so he could get some work done that day. On a last look around the workshop before I headed back to Manhattan, I noticed a button that Sam had stuck near the corner of his workbench. He’d had it made as a joke—but not completely a joke—to bring to a gathering of violin makers a few years before. It read:

STRAD MADE
NEW
FIDDLES.

D
id I tell you about Strad’s will?” Sam asked me. We were in his studio on a gray early fall afternoon, and he was seated on the rolling office chair at his workbench. Just back from a long vacation in Italy, he was cleaning up the odds and ends of his work schedule, getting ready to begin the Drucker violin. He’d been carving the arching of the spruce belly of another fiddle before I’d arrived, and there was a half-moon ridge of curly wood shavings around him, and the room smelled of dusty pine.

“It’s kind of a riot. Strad’s like some old man trying to fix everyone’s wagon. He was a controlling patriarch his whole life. His children never really moved out. His good
son, Francesco—he leaves everything to him. His bad son, Omobono, who Strad once tried to set up in business in Naples and who blew some money down there—
his
legacy is that his father forgives the debt that Omobono owes him. I mean, it would probably be hard to say that he was a nice person.

“But it stands to reason,” Sam said, brushing a pile of shavings onto the floor. “Someone who is too nice of a person would not maintain that standard of quality and output for so many years. Stradivari was an analytic and controlling personality in everything he did. There’s very little that’s accidental in Strad’s work. I know one of his violins—it’s got a handwritten label in it that says
‘Made by me at age 91.’
Like he was saying:
I can still do it!
”

It is no wonder that so many myths have grown around Stradivari, for so little is actually known of his life.

The historians have pinned down some facts, but not without pushing through a thicket of misapprehensions, and searching in vain over the centuries for documents and certitude. Stradivari’s last will and testament was a recent discovery, stumbled upon in 1990 by a patient Italian violin expert named Carlo Chiesa while paging through musty church records in Cremona. Prior to that, all the documentation anyone had to go on was a bill for his first wife’s funeral (the amount of which implied that the old guy had achieved a comfortable life; it is believed that there was a saying around Cremona at the time: “As rich as Stradivari”) and a few letters to clients, one apologizing for being late in delivery. But if he was the greatest violin maker of all time, Stradivari never wrote down
any of his secrets (judging from the misspellings in the few documents available, he wasn’t very well educated), and nobody who knew him bothered to either. His last apprentice, Carlo Bergonzi, might have been an important link, but he died two years after the master. Stradivari’s last surviving son, Paolo, didn’t take up the trade and sold off the entire contents of his father’s workshop—fiddles, forms, tools, templates—more than two hundred years ago. Some of the stuff has been brought back to a small museum dedicated to Stradivari in Cremona.

The standard study of Stradivari was published in 1902 in London, the work of three brothers—William Henry, Arthur, and Alfred Hill—from a long-established and respected family of luthiers and musicians. It is still in print. It is a sober, reasoned, and totally informed treatise, in many ways the opposite of Heron-Allen’s amateur musings. By the time the Hills were putting together their magisterial study in the late 1800s they had seen and sometimes worked on many of the six hundred Stradivari instruments known at the time. But while the instruments survived, such seemingly simple documentation—like Stradivari’s birth certificate—have been lost (or stolen as the Hills suspect), and even the great master’s remains have been desecrated and scattered.

Antonio Stradivari (he often Latinized his name to Antonius Stradivarius, which was the style at the time) was probably born in 1644. Even that small fact is tentative and has been established by reverse reasoning, because the crotchety old patriarch insisted on writing his age on the labels of his later violins. This seemingly simple
deduction has been challenged by at least one expert, who said those late labels were tampered with after Stradivari died. Renzo Bachetta edited the diary of Count Cozio di Salabue, perhaps the greatest violin collector of all time and the man who’d bought all of the master’s workshop materials from his last surviving son. Bachetta discovered that the count admitted to adding age notations to some Stradivari fiddles he owned. Bachetta went as far as to publish an essay entitled “Stradivari Was Not Born in 1644.” He thought that Antonio was born in 1648. Whatever the facts, the tenacious quality of the debate gives us clear clues to the passion people have about the Maestro of Cremona.

There is plenty of historical evidence that the Po Valley of Lombardy was not then the pleasant, fertile farm region it is now. In the early decades of the seventeenth century there was widespread famine, plague, and war. The Hills speculate that while the Stradivari family had been established in Cremona for hundreds of years, Antonio was actually born outside Cremona because his parents had fled the town, chased by either impending starvation, disease, or an encroaching army. The region spent much of that century under control of the Spanish crown, whose occupation was succeeded by the French and later Austrians.

Antonio returned to Cremona sometime in his boyhood; at some point between the ages of twelve and fourteen he became an apprentice in the shop of Nicolò Amati, son of one of the widely acknowledged inventors of the art of violin making and the most esteemed luthier of
that century. Or, young Antonio might have been an apprentice wood-carver in the shop of an architect named Francesco Pescaroli, and switched to violin making as an adult. That’s another debate among the experts.

Whichever is true, nobody knows
why
Stradivari was drawn to violin making, or even why, if it were not his decision, his family would force him into it. Less is known about his family, but it is nearly certain that none of his forebears had made violins, and primogeniture would be the obvious and natural reason for choosing the career in those days. There has been speculation that Amati was Antonio’s godfather, but it has never been proven.

Could it be that the young Antonio was somehow compelled to construct the means of music? That he found himself, say, pulling reeds from the riverbank and carving flutes, as Sam Zygmuntowicz did centuries later as a boy in Philadelphia? Or was it a practical matter of his family not needing another mouth to feed? Or, if you believe the theory that he came to the craft relatively late—after learning to handle wood tools and inlay cabinetry—was the career switch because he longed to build objects that would be the tools of art rather than the mere repositories of coats and blankets?

Once you get started down this road to conjecture, it’s easy to understand why lack of fact has spawned a bookshelf worth of fanciful speculation. We like to think of genius as directly linked with a colorful personality, and there’s something unsatisfying in the thought that such exalted talent could reside in a dull and seemingly compulsive worker. In the town where he lived, Stradivari
was actually fairly well known during his lifetime. There are notes of a Cremonese monk named Arisi that testify to that fact. His fame spread in the narrow world of music, and he was commissioned by foreign kings to make instruments for the court. But after Stradivari died, his reputation faded quickly. It took nearly a century after his death for his mastery to be rediscovered, and buoyed by the tendencies of the Romantic movement, his reputation reached its apogee, it seems, in the last decades of the nineteenth century.

The library I use, the New York Public, holds fifty-five volumes devoted to Antonio Stradivari. Five are categorized as novels and eight are listed as fiction for young people. The rest broadly fall into either technical analyses of the master’s craft or richly illustrated portfolios of instruments that survive. Every writer is constrained by the same paucity of fact, and the more recent have to distill what little verifiable truth there is from a cauldron of sentimental myth. “Over time a vast hagiography dedicated to the master Cremonese violin maker was introduced,” writes the contemporary Cremonese violin maker Carlo Bissolotti, “which caused even further confusion and enveloped the craftsman in a thick fog of obscurity.”

Maybe, as the Hills concluded, Stradivari simply had a quiet and happy life, evidenced by his long and fruitful productivity. Certainly what little biographical interpretation the Hill brothers offered in their study approached the level of hagiography. But it seems there just was something in the Victorian air that made Stradivari
irresistible as a Romantic icon. In 1873, George Eliot was compelled to write a poem called “Stradivarius.” It includes this stanza.

Only a few years later, when Edward Heron-Allen was publishing his examination of violin making, he chose as the book’s frontispiece that poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

Among a certain class on the island of the Virgin Queen, an Italian workman more than a hundred years dead was developing something of a cult. It continues still with surprising strength.

Nowadays we’ll see advertisements in which an old
fiddle is placed next to an overpriced watch or an aged bottle of booze and we’re expected to make the association of quality. There’s a line of crystal and silver named for Stradivari. When a young trumpeter decides to buy a serious instrument that could carry him into professional status, chances are good it will be called a “Stradivarius,” though it was stamped out in a factory in the decidedly unromantic town of Elkhart, Indiana. I own three. The top journal of the string playing world is simply called
The Strad
.

Many people know just enough of Stradivari’s reputation that when they find an old fiddle in the attic with a Stradivari label inside they think he is going to make them suddenly rich. Not long after I started learning about violin making, I met a former network newsman at a party. He was a smart and sober-seeming fellow, but when he told me of the violin a dead relative had left him I could almost see the cartoon dollar signs appear in his eyes. I had to break it to him that so many thousands of cheap, mass-produced fiddles have been made over the years and had a label with the name Antonius Stradivarius stuck inside that most violin dealers have a firmly discouraging form letter to send would-be millionaires who have found a dusty violin case in an attic.

But Strad’s reputation, both real and imagined, has enormous staying power. As recently as 1991, the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist John Hersey was bitten by the Stradivari bug and published a novel called
Antonietta
, in which he takes the basic facts available and builds a sentimental portrait of a love-struck craftsman, a wid
ower, who woos his second wife by building her one of those perfect fiddles that George Eliot rhapsodized about. Hersey was the clear-eyed and meticulous writer who gave us the masterpiece of reporting called
Hiroshima
, yet when he encountered the legend of Stradivari it was the myth that captivated his imagination.

In this century there have been two biographical films devoted to Stradivari, one made in Germany in 1935 and another produced for Italian television in 1989 starring Anthony Quinn. How many late Renaissance craftsmen have
one
movie made about their life? Since Hersey’s book was published, a Canadian filmmaker named François Girard became even more besotted with the Stradivari of legend. The 1998 movie
The Red Violin
follows an instrument through centuries as it is passed from owner to owner and from continent to continent. In the first segment of the film, the violin is made by a Cremonese master, who uses the blood of his dead wife to color the varnish of a fiddle that is fated to become famous. The violin maker character is called Bussotti, but could this be anybody other than Stradivari?

There is at least one other great designer and craftsman whose name is as well known as Stradivari’s, a man who also took wood and made art. But no casting director has ever had to wonder what actor to get to play the part of Thomas Chippendale.

Sam Zygmuntowicz brings a set of interests beyond biography to his studies of Stradivari. While he is amused
by something like the discovery of the old man’s will and the unavoidable glimpse into the craftsman’s character, Sam would rather that the master had bequeathed to posterity some technical treatise. “What I want,” he says, “and I suppose what most violin makers would want, is a little handbook that would say, for instance, ‘If you want to make your instrument more powerful in the upper register, try making it thicker here, here, and here.’” If Antonio Stradivari had left behind his shop notes, as the neophyte Edward Heron-Allen did, he might have explained some things that still perplex people. For example, why, one day in middle age, when his technical skills were at their height, did he change the size of the form on which he built his fiddles?

Working in the shop of Nicolò Amati, Stradivari no doubt assumed the normal duties of an apprentice, duties that grew in complexity and importance as his skill increased. By tradition, an apprentice could at a certain point begin making violins that bore his own label. The earliest Stradivari label ever discovered is dated 1666, when he would have been either twenty-two or eighteen, depending on which set of speculations you believe on his birth date. Though he set up his own shop in 1670, Stradivari spent the next two decades producing instruments very much like those of Amati—so much so that experts call this his “Amatise” period. It was obvious that Antonio possessed a prodigious talent. As the Hills say, the finish work on his instruments “marks him as having been one of the most dexterous craftsmen the world has ever known.” But to that point he played it safe as a designer.
The forms were virtually the same as those he’d used in his master’s shop, the details were similar, the varnish retained Amati’s characteristic yellow tint.