The Violin Maker

by John Marchese

  The next leg of our trip was a substantial comedown. Slogging our luggage through the dingy vault of the old Milan train station. Tripping through my hastily crammed traveler’s Italian to get us tickets on the Mantova line. Fighting through jet lag–laden fatigue to get something to eat, trade for some euros, and catch the right train. But we were going to Cremona! I was going to walk the same cobblestones that Stradivari walked, maybe sit in the same church pew, breathe the same air, and watch the same sunset.

  Sam Zygmuntowicz was not especially encouraging when I told him of this trip. He’d been to Cremona and seemed resolutely unimpressed. “You might find something of interest,” he said stoically. “At least you’ll eat well.” But I ignored his lack of enthusiasm and sided with his colleague and rival Gregg Alf, whom I’d met at the violin makers’ workshop in Oberlin. When he was young, Alf had moved to Cremona to study violin making and stayed on for eight years. Alf had written, “I felt that the spirit of Stradivari would be in the air.”

  After clattering through the dull industrial suburbs of Milan, the train took us eastward into countryside that turned increasingly rural and agricultural with each passing kilometer. We were in the rich, fertile floodplain of the Po River, mostly brown now in fall, but with a few brilliant patches of green here and there. Jana and I sat nervously, watching the countryside, letting the unintelligible and musical language of our fellow travelers wash over us, checking again and again with the conductor.

  Cremona?

  Not yet.

  I decided to distract myself with the book I’d been rereading on the transatlantic flight. Just before I began this whole project I’d taken a short trip to New Orleans and met a doctor there who played violin seriously. When I told him that I was about to see how a violin is built, he told me forcefully: “You have to read The Violin Hunter.” It turned out to be a good prescription.

  The book is a historical biographical novel by William Alexander Silverman, who wrote it in 1957. The violin hunter of the title is Luigi Tarisio, who had died owning the Messiah. Starting as a poor itinerant carpenter and dance fiddler, Tarisio dedicated his life to rediscovering and collecting the then-neglected violins of Cremona’s Golden Age.

  Now locked in a shabby second-class train car, I retraced the journey Tarisio had made on foot in the mid-1820s, wandering from his home in Milan toward Cremona, doing odd jobs for his bed and supper, hoping to fiddle at a dance, shrewdly stopping at monasteries where he knew he could find not only a charitable host, but also perhaps some dusty fiddles commissioned more than a hundred years before.

  However he did it, wherever he found them, Luigi Tarisio appeared in Paris in 1827 with a sack full of old violins. Legend has it that he had walked all the way from Italy, carrying the trove of masterpieces on his back. He was rough around the edges, but Tarisio knew enough to search out the leading violin makers and dealers of the day—M. Aldric, Georges Chanot, and Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume.

  With the appearance of these previously unknown fiddles, word spread through Paris quickly. During his visit, Tarisio provided Paganini with the del Gesù that would become his lifelong love, an instrument so powerful it was called the Cannon. Leaving behind several Stradivaris, a Bergonzi, and a couple violins by lesser-known Cremonese, the violin hunter returned to Milan with a wallet stuffed with francs to finance and renew his search. Over the years he unearthed scores of Cremonese instruments and became a primary agent in rebuilding Stradivari’s reputation.

  There has been plenty of revisionist work on the biography of Tarisio. It’s commonly accepted that he placed fake Stradivari labels in lesser instruments, though he hardly started that practice and would certainly not be the last culprit to do so. Tarisio took the credo “Buy low, sell high” very seriously, and probably cheated some unknowing Italians out of valuable pieces. But Silverman paints a warm-hued portrait of the man, lanky and plain, unlucky at love, committed to the old violins with a nearly religious fervor. As our train finally pulled into Cremona, I looked up at the tall bell tower of the Torrazzo attached to the town’s main cathedral, the inevitable first view one gets of the town. You can’t miss it; Cremona is a low-built provincial place, and the Torrazzo is the tallest bell tower in Europe. I realized that I now shared one small experience with Tarisio and, come to think of it, many of the legends of the violin world.

  We waited near the grim, dirty train station—it spoke of Mussolini more than Stradivari—for Patricia Kaden, whom I’d retained to guide us through the city and its cache of violin lore. A French Canadian by birth, she’d lived in Paris for a while, then landed in Cremona more than a decade before my visit with a husband who’d decided to become a violin maker and wanted to go to the source. He was no longer in Cremona, but Patricia had stayed on and used her affinity for fiddles and trilingual skills to help folks like me. She advertised her services in a few violin journals, so I’d heard of her, but it was a violin maker I’d met at Oberlin who had convinced me I should hire Patricia. “She knows the town,” he’d told me. “Not just the violins, but the restaurants and cafés.”

  Patricia arrived pushing a big old bicycle. She was a small woman in latter middle age, friendly and attractive, with a propensity for walking. “No need for a cab,” she said, “follow me.” We wheeled and dragged our luggage through uneven streets and over stone sidewalks for what seemed like an hour until we finally reached the Palazzo Cattaneo, the ancestral home of Duke Cattaneo, a dashing man (Patricia whispered that he’d enjoyed a reputation as a European playboy in his day) who’d turned the palazzo into something of an artists’ colony. We climbed four narrow, twisting flights of stairs to an attic suite with a giant wood beam just high enough to stand under in the parlor, a beautiful marble bath, and a small bedroom. “I love it,” Jana said. “It’s ancient.” That seemed worth the fifty euros a night we were being charged.

  “You probably want to rest a little,” Patricia said. “But come tonight and join us for aperitivo at six or so. You’ll meet some people.”

  It is estimated that there are now more violin makers working in Cremona than there were in all the years from the first Amati through Bergonzi, when the violin’s design and construction was being developed and perfected. That’s probably an estimation uttered with some sarcasm; but when Jana and I arrived for drinks that evening at a bustling little alley café called the Bar Bolero, Patricia handed me a printed list of luthiers in town. It went alphabetically from Katarina Abbuhl to Nicola Zurlini—ninety-eight listings. Many of the listings were firms where several partners worked. So there were well over a hundred violin makers plying their trade in Cremona at the dawn of the twenty-first century.

  Even after just a few hours in town, it was easy to see what attracted them. Cremona was a charming place. When the sun went down and the mist rolled in from the Po, there seemed to be an otherworldly quality to the old city. If you let your imagination run just a little, it was easy to feel that Stradivari’s spirit was indeed in the air.

  There was also a very practical lure: the International School of Violin Making, the only school of its kind in Italy, which offers a five-year program that awards a diploma as a master of violin making. Italian kids could enter the school at the age of fourteen and earn their high school diploma and the technical degree. Over the years, the school has attracted a large number of foreign students, most of whom, like Gregg Alf, arrive in Italy as adults. Alf, I would learn, was still something of a legend in Cremona for driving around town in a Jaguar convertible. The local police would stop him all the time—not to arrest him, but just to marvel at the big engine.

  The school was born, not coincidentally, in 1938, a year after the two-hundredth anniversary of Stradivari’s death. In 1937, the city of Cremona hosted a celebration and exhibition dedicated to the city’s most famous son. The popularity of the event convinced the Mussolini government (reportedly, Il Duce himself was fond of fiddles) that there was good public relations potential in reviving the Italian violin making traditio
n. The school’s founders offered the directorship to Simone Sacconi, the Roman-trained luthier who’d helped organize the Stradivari exhibition. He turned down the job. He had recently moved to New York, where it wasn’t long before he became the widely acknowledged master of violin restoration at the famed House of Wurlitzer, and fanatical devotee of Stradivari. But Sacconi would not forget Cremona.

  No one interested in violins could forget Cremona. However, for many years Cremona had forgotten its illustrious cadre of luthiers. Most glaring was the town’s neglect of Stradivari.

  In 1869 the church where Antonio and his second wife were buried, San Domenico, was torn down, and the bones from the burial vaults were mixed and unidentified and supposedly reburied by workmen somewhere outside of town. (There is some suspicion that they simply dumped the bones in the Po.) Stradivari’s house and workshop had survived into the 1920s, by which time the rooms that saw the supreme mastery of the luthier’s art had become a tailor shop and a pool hall. The government replaced it with an office building just before the great Depression.

  In the accumulated literature devoted to Strad, nearly every violin fanatic who makes the trek to Cremona writes a sad report of neglect. In The Glory of the Violin, Joseph Wechsler, who arrived in 1948, wrote, “Like other pilgrims I found nothing at all. The houses where they lived had disappeared. No streets were named after them. There was not even a great Cremonese violin left in the city where they had been created.” Wechsler found a sixth-generation descendant of the master, a lawyer named Mario Stradivari, who complained that he hadn’t even been invited to the great exhibition of 1937. The city’s leading expert on Stradivari at the time, Renzo Bacchetta, explained to Wechsler that Cremona was simply a provincial town understandably fixated on what supported its citizens. “They cared only that the price of cheese should stay up,” Wechsler reported. “If Stradivari had invented a new kind of cheese, they would have built him a monument.”

  Somehow, Mussolini’s government had changed all that, and now Cremona held a significant number of people who revered Stradivari. I met about a dozen my first night there.

  On our first visit to the Bar Bolero, Patricia introduced Jana to the charms of the dry sparkling wine called prosecco. I stayed stalwart to my crude American habit of drinking whiskey before dinner. A sample of some fresh local cheeses made me understand why someone might want to monumentalize the makers. Through the evening violin makers came and went. Over the years I have hung around a number of bars that catered to a particular clientele—cops, musicians, journalists, actors, people who worked in other bars—but I’d never even imagined there could be a watering hole where you could be sure to meet a violin maker. One, a small man named Toto who wore a jaunty hat and scarf, invited us to visit his workshop whenever we liked. Another, Marco, a solidly built guy with a high forehead and dark, piercing eyes, chatted formally with us for a few moments and then moved away. I glanced in his direction a little while later and found him staring at me, and not in a friendly way.

  I talked mostly with Franz, a foppish thin man who’d worked as a violin maker in Cremona for many years. He was just back for a visit, since he’d recently moved to Zurich, where he was playing guitar with a band that performed the gypsy jazz music made popular by Django Reinhart. “As a violin maker I had to deal with these musicians all the time,” he told me. “They just drove me crazy. I got so sick of musicians that I decided to become one.”

  As Sam Zygmuntowicz had predicted, that night we ate quite well.

  The next morning I got out early with a map, trying to make a quick survey of sites that the town had created to counteract its reputation for neglecting Antonio Stradivari. Cremona on a weekday morning had a comfortable small-town feel, as shopkeepers performed their opening rituals, parents dropped their children at schools, workmen patched some of the old streets. I felt like the only tourist in the whole city.

  I wandered through the labyrinth of the old town, where the streets crisscrossed each other in a grid-defying maze. Across the via Plasio, left on the via Cavollatti, then I realized I was lost. After backtracking on via Mazinni and a shortcut through the vaulted walk-ways of the Galleria—there I was at the Piazza Roma, a small park that contained the symbolic tomb of Antonio Stradivari. It was a slab of red-hued marble, about the size of a coffin, sitting off on the side of a walking path. On top of the red marble was a white marble re-creation of the carved plaque from Strad’s original crypt. The whole thing looked more like a resting bench than a monument. I stared at the “tomb” for a time, knowing that there was just about nothing there that was really connected to Stradivari. The monument looked forlorn and neglected. It seemed to embody an almost complete lack of significance. Then I unfolded my map and headed for the Piazza Stradivari.

  Though it was a few short blocks from the heart of Cremona—the bustling Piazza di Commune—the Piazza Stradivari was a barren field of stone blocks, bordered by some of Cremona’s more modern buildings, all of them giving off the strong scent of government bureaucracy. In the midst of the otherwise empty plaza stood a statue that, from a distance, looked like two vaguely human forms, man and boy. Unfortunately, from close up it looked nearly exactly the same—some form of man looking at some form of violinlike object held up to him by some form of child. Though one small detail of Stradivari’s daily life has been passed down through the generations—he always wore a white leather shop apron—the sculptor ignored that fact and clad the master in an elaborate cape. This was the town’s tribute to Stradivari. I couldn’t shake the following thought from my head: someone important in Cremona had a nephew who was a sculptor. I made my way back to the Palazzo Cattaneo to pick up Jana, hoping that our afternoon search to find the spirit of Stradivari would yield better results.

  That afternoon, Patricia led us down the hushed halls of the Museo di Stradivari and into a big room filled with glass display cases and painted with a trompe l’oeil technique that made the simple flat walls seem like elaborately carved marble interiors of a palace. An ornate glass chandelier hung from the ceiling. The bizarre elegance seemed at odds with what the display cases held: stuff that had survived from Stradivari’s workshop and the few little tidbits of documentation on his life. Astonishingly, the museum dedicated to the world’s greatest violin maker didn’t have one violin.

  There was the bill for his first wife’s funeral. He’d gone all out, hiring more than a hundred priests and fathers of various denominations (heavy on the Franciscans and Dominicans) to celebrate the mass, procuring big and little bells to be rung, retaining a corps of gravediggers with capes. Maybe the old guy was truly heartbroken. Perhaps he just felt the need to maintain appearances in a town where people spoke of being “rich as Stradivari.” The historian who found these documents told the Hills that Francesca Feraboschi Stradivari’s funeral was “probably among the most conspicuous of the time.”

  Across the room, another case held the famous letter Strad sent a client apologizing for the delay in delivering a violin—the varnish simply needed more time to dry. I had read the translation of this letter in any number of books and articles about Stradivari. Finally seeing the real item made me understand better why the profound lack of raw material had led to such extreme speculation about nearly everything connected with the man. In the wake of the masterpieces he created, there was a gaping void left by the scant and mundane stuff that has survived from his life. The experts and the acolytes could study his violins with the fervor of religious fanatics. But the only documentary evidence left from his life gave little more insight into the man than the fact that Antonio Stradivari was a lousy speller.

  Delving deeper into this strangely static room, we stared into more cases that held faded drawings of f-holes, scrolls, and necks—Strad’s templates for his work. There were calipers and cutting tools, several instrument molds that looked very similar to those I’d seen in Sam Zygmuntowicz’s workshop, except the unvarnished wood of the master’s forms was now aged and brown. The place re
minded me, unfortunately, of the first museum I’d ever visited when I was a kid in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The Everhart Museum had glass cases just like the ones I now viewed, filled with a carefully arrayed collection of dead moths. It was a cultural experience that stripped all the fun from getting out of school for an afternoon. The way the curators of Cremona presented the workshop materials of their genius native son had all the sweep and grandeur of a collection of dead moths. Months after I had returned from this trip to Italy, I read a sentence in another book that perfectly captured the essence of the Museo di Stradivari. Victoria Finlay, in her wonderful Color: A Natural History of the Palette, writes of visiting Cremona searching for Stradivari’s “secrets” with varnish pigments. Of the odd, stuffy, stultifying Museo dedicated to him, she decided, “It must qualify as one of the most boring museums about an interesting subject in the whole of Europe.”

  All the artifacts in the collection had been sold in the mid-1700s by Stradivari’s last surviving son, the cloth merchant Paolo Stradivari, to Count Cozio di Salabue, who was building a collection of violins reputed to be the greatest ever assembled. When Count Cozio died, what was left of his collection ended up in the hands of his descendants. The Stradivari shop paraphernalia was sold in the early twentieth century to a Roman violin maker named Giuseppe Fiorini. Fiorini donated the material to the city of Cremona in 1930, so it was available for the big exhibition in 1937. After that, the stuff ended up in what the town fathers named the Museum of Organology on the third floor of the Palazzo dell’Arte. “This was a most unhappy location,” according to Francesco Bissolatti, a Cremona native who became a violin maker by going through the town’s international school in the 1950s. Bissolatti set up a shop in town and taught at his alma mater for years.