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Heavenly Strings
For Centuries, Experts Have
Struggled--Unsuccessfully--To Duplicate the Perfection of Antonio
Stradivari's Violins
by Neil Grauer
To evoke the wonders of what transpires when a bow touches the strings
of a Stradivari violin, musicians speak of the sound and tone in terms
of light and dark; of color, texture, and emotion; of electricity,
taste and temperament. And they speak of magic and mystery--especially
mystery--for of Antonio Stradivari and his instruments, much remains
unknown.
There is mystery about Stradivari's parents, birthplace, upbringing
and physical appearance. There is mystery about when he was born and
where his bones are buried. There is mystery about his materials and
methods; about how he achieved the special qualities for which his
instruments are celebrated. There is mystery about how many of them he
made--and more important, how many survive. There is the mystery of
where most of his creations spent their first eight or 10 decades, of
the identities of the original owners who cherished Stradivari's
handiwork for a century or more after his death.
The central mystery, of course, is that of genius--of how a
semiliterate boy in Cremona, a tiny northern Italian city renowned for
its musical craftsmanship, could have emerged as the greatest violin
maker of all time. He was an artist of such skill, sensitivity and
insight that his name has become a byword for the best, a superlative
applied to designate excellence. To be dubbed "the Stradivari" of any
field is to be deemed the finest there is.
"There's a very good analogy between, say, a Strad violin and a fine
Cuban cigar, as opposed to an ordinary violin and an ordinary cigar,"
observes Earl Carlyss, head of chamber music at The Johns Hopkins
University Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore for the past
nine years, and for 20 years before that a member of New York's
Juilliard String Quartet and a frequent player of Stradivari violins.
"You can make all kinds of analogies," says Carlyss. "Why would a
person spend $150,000 for a Ferrari when he could get from A to B with
a Pinto? It's the way you get there."
One could buy a number of Ferraris for what a Stradivari
commands. Prices start at between $200,000 to $800,000 and have soared
in recent years to as much as $3.5 million an instrument, depending
upon its age, condition and history. And the history of some Strads is
the stuff of romance; of fabled performers who played them; of
disappearances, thefts and miraculous escapes from war, fire and
flood; of sounds that have inspired poets and novelists, from George
Eliot and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in the last century to the late
Pulitzer Prize winner John Hersey and Prix de Rome winner Daniel Mark
Epstein in ours.
Wealthy amateurs and collectors may own more Strads than professional
performers. In 1981, an anonymous private collector in Singapore paid
$1.2 million for the magnificent "Alard" Stradivari, named for its
most famous owner, Jean-Delphin Alard, a distinguished French
violinist of the nineteenth century. Since the approximate weight of a
violin is just a pound, that collector spent about $75,000 an ounce
for his prize. He probably could quadruple his money if he put the
Alard up for sale today. Most concert performers cannot afford a Strad
and must rely on the kindness of strangers--or more precisely,
generous patrons of the arts or large corporations--for the privilege
of playing them. Midori, the Japanese prodigy, has played a famous
Strad known as The Jupiter, courtesy of the Fuji film and camera
company, which paid $3.5 million for it a few years ago and loans it
to her. If Fuji ever decided to sell "The Jupiter," it probably would
fetch $4.5 to $5 million.
Apart from the phenomenal beauty and precision of Stradivari's
instruments, what has assured their enduring superiority more than two
and a half centuries since his death is a quality even more prized
today than it was when he made them: their power. The finest of
Stradivari's predecessors, and most of his contemporaries, produced
smaller instruments with fairly high curved or arching backs that
produced beautiful but thin tones, suitable for the church services or
small chamber music ensembles that entertained the nobles who were
their patrons.
With astounding prescience, Stradivari recognized that in time,
greater demands for volume and sonority would be made upon the
violin. Somehow he foresaw, if not precisely the symphonies and
orchestras of the late eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
then at least the likelihood that music was moving in that
direction. Through constant experimentation--varying by a fraction of
an inch the arching of one instrument's back, another's length, the
overall dimensions of yet another--he created what Dutch scholar Dirk
J. Balfoort called "the violin of the future," capable of producing
not only delicate, sweet sounds but powerful, crystalline tones,
strong and clear enough to perform brilliantly with the orchestras of
today.
Had it not been for Stradivari, Balfoort wrote a half century ago,
"the violin would have become the victim of tradition, because it
would in the long run have ceased to be able to adapt itself to the
requirements of the times." Thanks to Stradivari, the violin has been
able to remain "the Queen of musical instruments."
"Strad was the one who finished the form of the instrument," says
Carlyss. "It has never changed since Strad's time...it ended with
him. You couldn't improve on what he did.
"A great Strad allows you to express yourself on every level," Carlyss
adds. "It has a range of possible expressiveness within it that allows
the person to be totally at ease with what he wants to say with the
music. I mean, you're dealing with colors, you're dealing with sounds
and you're dealing with emotions. And the music has all these emotions
going on with it. A Strad has the ability to translate the emotions
aurally to perfection--the performer's emotions. And there's something
about the sound that grabs the listener. A Strad is a Strad."
In 1902, the brothers Hill--William Henry, Arthur Frederick, and
Alfred Ebsworth, scions of a British family that had been in the
stringed instrument business for nearly 300 years--produced what
remains the benchmark for Stradivari scholarship, Antonio
Stradivari: His Life & Work (1644-1737). Expert luthiers
(stringed instrument makers), restorers and dealers themselves, the
Hills were uniquely qualified to write such a book. Having spent more
than a half century selling rare instruments when such a trade was
even more confined than it is today, they personally were familiar
with virtually every Stradivari instrument then known to exist: 540
violins, 12 violas, 50 cellos--and two guitars.
Since the Hills, other experts have attributed additional instruments
to Stradivari, who employed the Latinized version of his name,
Antonius Stradivarius, on his labels. (Scholars use either spelling
interchangeably.) Thus the accounting of existing Strads has been
inching upward toward 700 or so, a number about which collectors and
dealers politely debate. Because the sales of many Strads are
conducted privately between a few discreet dealers and well-heeled
collectors, the exact number of his surviving instruments is almost
impossible to determine.
The Hills meticulously estimated that Stradivari made 1,116 stringed
instruments during an extraordinary career that spanned seven decades,
from about 1665, when he was 21, to the year he died at the age of 92
or 93. He was, they wrote, "an expeditious worker," with tremendous
"industry and devotion to his art." They calculated that he was able
to complete at least two violins or one cello a month, or an average
of 25 violins or 10 cellos a year--and sometimes many more. In 1715,
when Stradivari was 71, the king of Poland ordered 12 violins from him
and sent his director of court music to Cremona to await completion of
the instruments. The king received all 12 in three months.
An aged violinist who died in 1853 told one scholar that his teacher
had known Stradivari and described him as "tall and thin in
appearance, and invariably seen in his working costume, which rarely
changed, as he was always at work." It is the only remotely
contemporary physical description of Stradivari that we have.
What, exactly, is it that makes "a Strad a Strad"?
Talk to any expert and take your pick:
Is it the varnish? Yes, definitely, say some; it contained secret lost
ingredients and Stradivari took its recipe to his grave. No, say
others; the formula for the oil-based varnish Stradivari used was
common knowledge among violin makers when he lived and has been
chemically analyzed to a fare-thee-well today.
The filler or sealer? (See above answers for varnish.)
Perhaps the wood makes the difference. Yes, absolutely, say some;
Stradivari selected his maple and spruce from local or foreign forests
long since cut down and he treated it in a special, secret way. No,
say others; equally fine wood is available now, easily obtainable, and
the old methods for treating it can be duplicated.
Or maybe it is the arching of the violin's back; the elegant, masterly
shaving of the wood to fine gradations of thickness and thinness; the
carving of the f-holes; the placement of the internal bass bar
and sound post. All have been subjected to meticulous modern
measurement and acoustical analyses. Exact copies can be--and have
been--made.
What about the impossible-to-duplicate effects of aging on that
marvelous wood, varnish and filler, not to mention two centuries of
playing? Yes, say some; that is what gives Stradivari instruments
their extraordinary, unique sound; a sound that causes listeners such
as poet Daniel Mark Epstein to envision "little cherubs with halos"
fluttering about a Strad while it is being played. No, not quite, say
others. "There are old violins that don't sound good," says
Carlyss.
So, what was Stradivari's secret?
"In my view, there is no secret," says Carlyss. As a member of the
Juilliard String Quartet, the Library of Congress "resident" chamber
music ensemble, from 1966 to 1986, he played all three Stradivari
violins in the Library's collection. "It's like saying, What's the
secret of Rembrandt? The Strads are works of art. They're the epitome
of baroque art. The genius used in making these things is
genius. And even if they copy it--and they can copy
it--they still can't imitate it. It's just like imitating a
Rembrandt. You can do it, but it's not the same."
That hasn't stopped people from trying--for more than 250 years. Every
so often, someone proclaims the discovery of Stradivari's "secret."
In 1984, Professor Joseph Nagyvary at Texas A&M University, a
specialist in biophysics and biochemistry, announced a recipe for
recreating Stradivari's varnish: Boil one pound of shrimp shells in
powerful lye for 24 hours, strain it through cheesecloth, then rinse
the residue thoroughly with water and dissolve it in vinegar until it
attains a syrup-like consistency. This, he contended, would duplicate
Stradivari's varnish, which Nagyvary believes was made mostly of
chitin, the polymer found in the bodies and wings of insects. (Shrimp
shells also contain chitin.)
In 1986, Nagyvary claimed that a microscopic fungus growing in the
wood used by Cremonese violin makers was responsible for their special
sound. Long soaking of the logs from which the violins' wood came made
it especially receptive to the particular qualities of Stradivari's
varnish, he said. On the other hand, in 1988, William Fulton, a
retired aerospace engineer and now secretary of the Violin Society of
America, suggested that wood destined to be made into violins should
be subjected to ammonia fumes for several weeks to duplicate an
eighteenth century smokehouse treatment.
In 1991, Mayne R. Coe, a retired organic chemist in Jupiter, Florida,
received U.S. Patent 5018422 for what he believed was the
secret to Stradivari varnish: tung oil. He claimed Italy started
importing tung oil around the time Stradivari and other violin masters
in Cremona began establishing their reputations. He cited other
research that suggested the violin makers colored their varnish with a
red dye called dragon's blood resin, extracted from the rattan fruit
from India....
You get the idea.
Whatever it is that makes a Strad a Strad and merits the enormous
prices they fetch can be applied in almost every respect, including
current market value, to the violins of Stradivari's
contemporary--and, amazingly, next-door neighbor--Guiseppe Guarneri
del Gesù (1698-1744).
More than 50 years younger than Stradivari, yet neither as productive
nor as meticulous, Guiseppe Guarneri (the "del Gesù" stems
from a symbol for Jesus he put on his labels) nonetheless created
incredible instruments as prized today for their power and
expressiveness as Stradivari's finest works.
Guarneri was a member of a violin-making clan whose house was one door
down from Stradivari's on Cremona's Piazza San Domenico. Between
Stradivari and Guarneri lived Carlo Bergonzi, Stradivari's best pupil,
whose violins also command high prices today. It was as if Leonardo da
Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael all lived on the same block.
Down the street and around the corner in one direction lived
Niccolò Amati, Stradivari's teacher; around the corner in
another direction lived Francesco Ruggieri, yet another notable
luthier. Stradivari and Guarneri were the megastars in a galaxy of
superlative seventeenth and eighteenth century violin makers, whose
serendipitous residence in Cremona has given the name Cremonese to all
the stringed instruments produced in that time and place.
Itzhak Perlman, Sir Yehudi Menuhin, Yo-Yo Ma, Anne Sophie Mutter,
Midori, and Joseph Fuchs, at 95 the oldest professional concert
violinist in the world, play Strads (although Menuhin also owns a del
Gesù); Jascha Heifetz preferred del Gesù, as do Isaac
Stern and Pinchas Zukerman (even though Stern, as did Heifetz, also
owns a Strad). With only about 250 to 370 del Gesù violins
known to exist (or about half the number of Strads), the best of
them fetch as much as any Stradivari.
Not every Strad is a Strad, so to speak (or every Guarneri a
Guarneri, since four other members of his family made violins). Not
all of them fetch millions. Of the 700 or so Strads known to exist,
only about 50 are concert-quality instruments. The others have various
defects--cracks, new backs or bellies, botched repairs by clumsy
craftsmen. Practically all have been modified to some extent over the
centuries to accommodate a particular violinist or to increase their
carrying power: perhaps a longer finger board, a bigger bass bar
inside, or a reinforcement of the belly.
Some of the alterations have been made skillfully; others, as the
Hills wrote, have been performed "in the most drastic and barbarous
manner." Consequently, says Frances Gillham of Christie's in London,
the value of Strads fluctuates considerably, depending on these and
other factors.
"They're very variable," Gillham says, "and they fall into different
categories. The most highly sought-after violins are the ones that
fall into what is called Stradivari's 'Golden Period,' from 1700 to
the mid-1720s. There are some years that people get particularly
excited about. I mean, 1716 is a year when he produced some of his
best instruments."
Yet with perhaps only 10 Stradivari instruments on the market at any
one time, says Charles Beare of instrument restorers J. & A. Beare
Co. of London, even the less desirable Stradivaris cost "not much
under half a million dollars."
Some musicians believe Guarneri del Gesù's violins are more
powerful than Strads and easier to play because they are less
temperamental. Others, while acknowledging the greater effort required
to get the best out of a Strad, feel Stradivari's instruments have
more versatility of tone.
Robert Mann, founder of the Juilliard Quartet, told an interviewer in
1991 that playing a Strad was like riding a great thoroughbred
racehorse. "What a wonderful thing to ride that horse to its fullest
potential. But," Mann warned, "it is also a horse that is very taut,
that's very supersensitive, overreacts, and can be unstrung
easily--more easily than the ordinary horse that just doesn't have
those other marvelous qualities.
"That's the way it is with a great Stradivari violin," he
continued. "It has great potential, but it also has greater
possibilities for disaster, like squeaks, like going out of
adjustment. You're on your greatest mettle and have to use your
resources to control the instrument. The rewards are great, but it's
not an easy task."
The best-known American amateur to own a Strad was the late Jack
Benny, who saw tremendous gag possibilities in possessing such a
valuable fiddle, given his comedic persona as a vain tightwad who
fancied himself a great violinist.
Benny, who studied violin as a child, had made his scratchy playing a
running joke for years. In 1955, however, he began taking lessons
again at the age of 61 in order to perform in benefit concerts for
symphony orchestras and other worthy causes, including the drive to
save New York City's Carnegie Hall. His old friend Isaac Stern noted
that Benny was a superb sight reader of music who had a good ear and
an excellent sense of rhythm, albeit limited abilities at fingering
and bowing. On rare occasions, he could pull off a performance that
even Stern admitted was astonishing.
In the remaining 18 years of his life, Benny raised more than $5.9
million for charity by performing with symphonies all over the United
States and in Canada, England and Israel. Proudly displaying his 1729
Stradivari, for which he had paid $16,000 in 1957, Benny would tell
his audience, "It's a real Strad, you know. If it isn't, I'm out one
hundred and ten dollars. The reason I got it so cheap is that it's one
of the few Strads made in Japan." Or he'd say, "This is a genuine
Stradivarius. You can always tell because it has the name of the maker
inside. Here it is right here. 'Antonio Stradivari, area code 213.'"
In 1972, two years before he died at the age of 80, Benny wrote that
he had been told his Strad had risen in value to $50,000. He wistfully
wondered if it would ever be known as the "Benny Strad." Now it
is. Bequeathed by Benny to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, it easily is
worth 10 times what it was when he died--not a bad return for the
penny-pincher he portrayed.
During Stradivari's lifetime, the king of Poland was far from his only
royal customer. Unlike so many geniuses whose greatness goes unsung
while they live, Stradivari was recognized by his contemporaries as
the best in the business. In 1682, a Venetian banker, Michele Monzi,
ordered a complete set of instruments from Stradivari to present to
King James II of England (these Strads, alas, have disappeared);
King Charles III of Spain also commissioned Stradivari to make six
violins, two violas and one cello for his orchestra, and innumerable
aristocrats and high-ranking ecclesiastics throughout Europe were
among the deep-pocketed patrons willing to pay top filippo (a
silver coin then used in Lombardy) for Stradivari's creations. His
prosperity and parsimony were such that a common expression in Cremona
then--and today--is that someone is "as rich as Stradivari."
This exalted artisan emerged from humble--indeed, obscure--origins.
Precise facts about Stradivari's life are few. Cremona claims him as a
native son, and certainly it is the only place he is known to have
lived, but tireless searches by scholars through the city's ancient
census lists and musty parish registries, as well as those of the
surrounding villages, reveal no record of his birth or baptism, and
even raise questions about the identity of his parents.
Like Shakespeare, Stradivari produced many masterpieces, but left
behind little personal documentation. His life was his work, and it is
largely through his works that scholars have been able to deduce, in
Sherlockian fashion, what little is known of his life.
That he was a continually experimenting workaholic and perfectionist
is evidenced by the incomparable beauty of his instruments, the
precision with which they were put together, the large number he is
estimated to have made, and the minute variations in each one.
That he was a poorly educated but savvy businessman is evidenced by
the few surviving letters he wrote to patrons. The handwriting is
clumsy; the sentences full of errors, omissions, transpositions, and
words of Cremonese dialect; yet also replete with expressions that
reveal Stradivari to be a surprisingly obsequious tradesman, as
probably befitted the period: "I beg you will command me, and kissing
your hand, I remain," or "not wishing to weary you further, and
kissing your hands and making obeisance."
That he was close with a lira can be deduced not only from his
persistent use of all-purpose, sometimes typographically flawed
labels, but from his quibbling over the expenses for his first wife's
funeral ("Deducted altogether 8 lira from the present bill," he wrote
at the bottom of it), and the fact that at the age of 85, he had no
qualms about buying a used grave to serve as his own--and even
appropriated its original owner's tombstone. He simply had the
previous family's name and coat-of-arms partially effaced and his own
name carved on it.
That he desired female companionship is shown by the fact that he
waited little more than a year after the death of his wife of three
decades to get married again--to a woman 20 years his junior. He
fathered 11 children, two daughters and nine sons, two of whom,
Francesco (1671-1743) and Omobono (1679-1742), also became violin
makers but left little of their own work to posterity.
When he died on Dec. 18, 1737, Stradivari was interred in one of the
small chapels in the Church of San Domenico, across the plaza from his
home, in the plot he had purchased from the descendant of a family of
minor Cremonese nobles. By 1869, the church had fallen into such
disrepair that it was demolished. Whatever bones were found in its
crypts, presumably including Stradivari's, were gathered up in a
jumble and dumped in an unmarked plot outside the city, thus rendering
his final resting place unknown.
Stradivari's narrow three-story house, with its rooftop
seccadour, or flat terrace, where he had hung his newly
varnished violins to dry, remained intact until 1888. Then it was
converted into a cafe and billiard parlor. It was torn down in the
1920s. Cremona, which remains a center of violin making, has sought to
make amends for these indignities by naming a major thoroughfare for
Stradivari, proudly preserving one of his wonderful violins and a few
meager artifacts from his workshop in city museums, and holding an
annual violin festival.
Without actual documentation, the generally accepted birthdate for
Stradivari is 1644. The Hills deduced this from the fact that during
the last decade of his life, Stradivari evidenced pride in his
vigorous longevity by stating his age on some of the labels he
inserted inside his violins. The first time he probably did this, in
1727, he wrote on a label that the instrument was "d'anni 83," or made
during his 83rd year, and all subsequent notations of this sort point
to 1644 as the year he was born.
It is these small labels, most of them pasted on the inside of the
instruments' backs, directly under the f-hole, to which are
attributed the first documentary evidence of Stradivari's presence in
Cremona, his training, and some of his personal characteristics. The
Hills once saw a 1666 label on which Stradivari identified himself as
an "Alumnus Nicolai Amati," or as a pupil of the celebrated
Niccolò Amati (1596-1684), whose fame as a master violin
maker he soon would surpass. Since children between the ages of 12 and
14 usually were apprenticed to such masters, the Hills deduced that
Stradivari's parents (whoever they were) handed him over to Amati
between 1656 and 1658. The 1666 label is the only one on which
Stradivari ever associated himself with Amati, and as to how--or even
if--the young Stradivari ever demonstrated an interest in violin
making, nothing is known.
Between 1660 and 1665, however, when Stradivari was 16 to 21, he had
his own labels printed, evidently having so excelled as a pupil in
just a few years that he was ready to seek patrons and sell violins on
his own. Yet, since few Strads from the 1660s and 1670s survive, it is
presumed Stradivari probably remained an employee of Amati for nearly
20 years, striking out entirely on his own only after his teacher died
in 1684 at the age of 88.
Stradivari's parsimony in using all-purpose labels has bedeviled
collectors for centuries. When he started out, he shortsightedly
listed the date of manufacture as "166_," to which he would add the
appropriate year of the decade in ink; in the 1670s and 1680s, he
simply scratched out the second "6" and wrote "7" or "8" over it. Even
though he had new labels printed in 1690, he continued to use the
"166_" labels as long as they lasted, simply changing the last "6" to
a "9." When he did use the new 1690s labels he did so even though the
printer botched up his first name, "Antonius" on some of them, putting
in the "u" upside down so it read "Antonins." Once the eighteenth
century dawned, he had new labels printed that simply said, "1___,"
and then filled in the rest by hand.
Stradivari's blithe tampering with his labels unfortunately made it
easier for unscrupulous dealers to later alter genuine labels to make
it appear as if certain violins had been made during supposedly more
favorable periods of Stradivari's long career.
As he aged, Stradivari seemed to grow increasingly productive. His
violins took on a broader, more substantial appearance and the colors
of his varnish darkened. Only toward the very end of his life did
Stradivari's work begin to betray his years. Shakily carved sound
holes and irregular purfling show that his hands were beginning to
tremble. (Purfling refers to the thin strips of dyed maple inlay just
inside the rims of the belly and back, used to supply lovely accents
to the instrument's appearance and, more important, to protect the
outer edges from splintering as the violin vibrates.) Failing
eyesight is evidenced in the placement of one f-hole 1/16th of
an inch higher than the other on a 1736 violin, made when he was about
92. Sandpaper marks are clearly visible on another 1736 fiddle. But
only his powers of physical dexterity had declined. His principles of
form and construction remained undiminished.
For Stradivari, each violin offered an opportunity for
experimentation, however slight. The arching under the bridge and on
the back was always different, if only minutely; the thickness of the
f-hole swirl would be altered, as would the shapes of the
C-curves, the bigger bouts, and the sides and corners. Once all 78 or
so parts of the instrument were assembled, they combined to give each
violin, viola or cello a unique voice, "never to be matched, any more
than a given diva's lovely singing can ever be heard from anyone
else's throat," wrote John Hersey in his 1991 novel,
Antonietta, which told the tale of the travels of a fictional
Strad.
Similarly unique is each Stradivari's outward appearance, due in no
small measure to the waves of the wood's grain and its age
rings. Minute variations also can be seen in the points and design of
the purfling. And there is uniqueness in what Hersey called "the only
part of the violin that will contribute nothing to its sound but will
make its appeal to the eye alone: the head on the end of...[the]
neck."
"If a violin is to be a work of art," wrote Hersey, "it must have
sensual bouts, a stunning back, perfect purfling, and, above all, a
head with an exactly symmetrical scroll that dares to challenge the
ingenuity of God's own designs: the snail's helix, the whorls of a
fingertip, the poised lips of breaking waves, the glowing swirls at
the shoulders of thunderheads in summertime--and, more to the point,
the delicate convolutions of all the human ears that will listen, one
day, to the finished violin's song."
Although Stradivari was widely renowned as a violin maker during his
lifetime, his instruments were not the most popular with many
musicians of the period. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the
majority of professional and amateur violin players preferred the
higher tone produced by the violins of Niccolò Amati or the
Austrian violin maker Jakob Stainer.
"There exists a letter to Mozart from his father, who advised his son
to purchase a Stainer or an Amati violin, not a Strad, because a Strad
is 'strident,'" says René Morel, one of the world's top Strad
dealers.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, the flexible, yet
incisive; powerful, yet clear tone of a Stradivari violin was found to
be ideal for either the intimacy of the chamber music salon or the
vastness of an orchestra's auditorium. His status as the supreme
violin maker was at last assured--and the demand for his instruments,
as well as their romance and mystery, then tenaciously took hold.
Virtually all of the Strads now have names attached to them during the
nineteenth century or later. On the rare occasions when the original
owner was known, the moniker alluded to that individual, such as the
"Tuscan," made in 1690 for Cosimo de Medici, the Grand Duke of
Tuscany. Often the name is that of a famous musician who once owned
the instrument, a royal or mythical title denoting its superiority, or
a combination of both. Hence the "Hercules Ysa˙e," a 1732 Strad
that was simply known as the Hercules until it became the pride and
joy of Eugenè Ysa˙e (1858-1931), a famous Belgian
violinist. Frequently the lineage of a Strad's ownership can be traced
back 175 years--but rarely more than that.
No finer example of the murky origins of some celebrated Strads can be
cited than the case of the "Betts," which turned up out of nowhere in
1820. A poorly dressed man is said to have entered the store of Arthur
Betts, a violin maker in London, and offered him what initially was
thought to be an imitation Stradivari, so pristine was its
condition. Betts bought it for little more than a pound sterling, and
then was astonished upon closer examination to find that it was a
genuine Strad, made in 1704. The history of the violin prior to 1820
remains unknown. After considerable peregrinations about Europe and
the United States, the instrument was purchased by Gertrude
Littlefield Clarice Whittall, a wealthy widow and doyenne of
Washington, D.C., society, who donated it and four other Stradivari
instruments to the Library of Congress in the mid-1930s. There the
Betts and its siblings have delighted audiences at annual concerts
ever since.
Stories abound of Strads emerging from dusty attics or dank castles,
but most of such tales are bogus. Many of the would-be Strads are
cheap imitations churned out in Europe or Asia for more than a
century. A few are remarkable copies made by exceptionally skilled
luthiers of the past who sought to honor Stradivari by emulating
him. One such well-known instrument is a copy of the 1716 Strad known
as the "Messiah," made in 1851 by Joseph Rocca, a fine Italian violin
maker.
The number of recognized experts in Stradivari instruments is even
more limited than the supply of Strads themselves. Only about 10 or 12
dealers of international reputation in the United States or overseas,
including those associated with Sotheby's and Christie's, are
qualified to judge whether a violin, viola or cello came from
Stradivari's workbench. Sometimes even the experts disagree. Potential
purchasers often are advised to obtain certificates of authenticity
from three or more experts to satisfy their own concerns--and those of
insurance companies.
How do the experts know a purported Strad is genuine? Experience is
the only teacher, according to René Morel, in whose New York
shop Strads are either in for repairs or up for sale fairly
regularly. "If a person knows the Stradivarius, he doesn't have to
question," says Morel in a thick Gallic accent undimmed by more than
40 years in the United States. "He takes it in his hands, he looks
around it, and he knows it's a Stradivarius. The analogy to this is
that if you open a book, and if it's in a language you can read, you
read it because you know. If you don't know it, that's it. It's a book
with print, but you can't read it. To an expert, it's easy.
"Stradivarius had a very special signature in his art of
craftsmanship," Morel adds. "In other words, at the end of a letter,
someone signs the letter, and each and every one of us, we have our
own little way of signing our name. In the hand of Stradivarius, it's
there. It's in the way he handled his tools, the way he
finished the instrument. That's his signature as a craftsman."
Every once in a while, a Strad miraculously appears--or reappears,
saved from a mysterious disappearance or disaster. In this century,
two tales of recovered and redeemed Stradivaris are especially
extraordinary.
In 1936, a 1713 Strad owned by Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman was
stolen from his dressing room at Carnegie Hall while he was on stage
playing his Guarneri. The Strad seemingly vanished forever.
Not quite. Fifty-one years later, Huberman's Strad suddenly reappeared
when Marcelle Hall, widow of a strolling violinist, gambler and
convicted child molester named Julian Altman, revealed that the violin
her husband had used for nearly half a century was the stolen
Huberman.
Hall told police that as her imprisoned spouse lay dying of stomach
cancer in 1985, he urged her to "do something about that violin. That
violin is important." Returning home, she looked inside the canvas
cover of the violin's case and found yellowed newspaper clippings
about the theft of Huberman's Strad. Altman, who had been jailed for
molesting one of Hall's granddaughters, claimed that in 1936 he had
purchased the instrument for just $100 from an unnamed friend who
might have been the thief. "Maybe for once in his life he told the
truth," Hall told The New York Times in May 1987, once the
Strad had been positively identified.
Altman, who had been a violinist with the National Symphony Orchestra
in Washington, later made his living as a performer at ritzy social
events, even entertaining such luminaries as then-vice president
Hubert H. Humphrey and then-president Richard M. Nixon with the stolen
Strad.
Lloyd's of London had paid Huberman $30,000 when the violin was stolen
and thus was its rightful owner. After Charles Beare of London
authenticated the recovered instrument, Lloyd's put an $800,000
valuation on it, authorized Beare to refurbish it, and ultimately sold
it in 1988 for what Beare says is a "confidential" sum of "over a
million dollars."
An even more astonishing story of the loss and recovery of a Strad
involves the "Red Diamond," a 1732 violin that radiates a special glow
due to the extraordinary ruby-colored varnish Stradivari had applied
to it.
On Jan. 16, 1953, as a violent rainstorm pelted Los Angeles, Sascha
Jacobsen, concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, was
driving along the coastal highway to Pacific Palisades, the Red
Diamond in its case beside him. His car stalled near Santa Monica and
water from an overflowing stream began to surround the vehicle and
fill it up. Seeking to escape the flood, Jacobsen grasped his violin
case, stepped from the car into the rising waters and struggled
through the torrent to higher ground. The Red Diamond was swept from
his arms and out to sea as he barely made his way to safety. He
watched, helpless, as the violin case floated away.
The next day, a prominent Los Angeles attorney, Frederick H. Sturdy,
was walking along the beach of the Bel Air country club and spotted a
violin case stuck in the sand. Inside the case he found slime, sand,
water--and the pieces of a violin. By amazing coincidence, Sturdy was
a friend of Alfred Wallenstein, music director of the
Philharmonic. When he learned the following day of Jacobsen's disaster
and the loss of the Red Diamond, Sturdy immediately contacted
Wallenstein. Identified as the lost Strad, the salt water-logged and
sand-encrusted violin parts were entrusted to Hans Weisshaar, an
outstanding luthier. Over the next nine months, Weisshaar
painstakingly restored the violin, returning it to its "former
glory...both in tone and appearance," Jacobsen later wrote in
appreciation. He told friends the Red Diamond sounded "better than
ever."
In 1971, a few years after Jacobsen's death, the Red Diamond was sold
at auction by Sotheby's in London for $67,600--far more than it was
insured for at the time of its ocean ordeal. The violin was put on the
auction block by Sotheby's again in 1985, with an asking price of more
than $1 million, but was not sold at that time. A few years later, an
anonymous collector purchased it privately for an undisclosed
sum--surely paying as much for the magic of its reincarnation as for
its other exemplary attributes.
Clearly, more miracles are associated with Stradivari instruments
than simply those of their enduring beauty and tone.
With the number of Strads so limited and their prices so
astronomical, musicians who cannot afford them or lack wealthy patrons
must look elsewhere for their instruments. The sources are many and
the quality of the violins, violas and cellos is excellent. In this
century, the late Simone Fernando Sacconi, once with the Emil Herrmann
Co. of Manhattan, was considered perhaps the greatest contemporary
violin maker; other respected modern violin-makers include Isaak
Vigdorchik, Luiz Bellini, Helmuth Keller and Leandro Bisiach Jr., who
produce (or have produced) instruments that are justly praised for
their craftsmanship and sound. Perhaps they are making the Strads of
the twenty-second century.
Nevertheless, none of these latter-day luthiers can hope to recreate
what Stradivari wrought nearly 300 years ago, even if they possess
immense skills, use the choicest woods, the finest varnish, and
precisely copy the dimensions and details of his instruments. As
William Dana Orcutt writes in the Library of Congress' 1938
publication The Stradivari Memorial: "What other makers lack is
simply that something which cannot be imitated, which cannot be
analyzed, which cannot be explained--that gift of consummate genius
which delivers its message to the world through the finger-tips of
those few children of God anointed among their fellows as chosen for
that purpose."
-Neil Grauer is a Baltimore writer and caricaturist and the author
of Remember Laughter: A Life of James Thurber (University of
Nebraska Press).
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