I wanted to go with Sam to see Gene give one of the first public performances on the new fiddle. Vienna was a little beyond our means, and the quartet was leaving town again for its annual stint at the Aspen Music Festival in Colorado, where Gene had so much trouble with his Strad years before while recording the Shostakovich quartets. That also seemed too long a haul. So Sam and I agreed to get together for a mid-July concert by the Emerson Quartet at the Caramoor Music Festival, a prestigious summer series presented on the grounds of a former estate about an hour north of New York City.
The day of the concert was one of those humid northeast summer days where you feel you’ve been wrapped in a hot wet blanket. Sam and I had driven from completely different directions to be there, and met near the ticket booth. “Well,” the violin maker said, “this is quite a change from Brooklyn.” The site was gorgeous, green and lush, bordered by old dry-laid stone walls, and dotted with prim, carefully tended gardens. The crowd milling around us was a typical classical music audience, well turned out and mostly older. We found our seats just before the quartet took the stage.
The Emerson has long been notable in its world for the uncommon practice where the two violinists alternate playing the first and second parts. In most quartets, one violinist always takes the lead; Drucker and Setzer act as equals. On the three pieces scheduled for this day’s program, Gene would only play first fiddle on one, a Beethoven quartet. He played all his parts with his usual intensity, both emotional and precise. He blended well when that was required, and soared above the other players a few times when the music called for it. I had been to a number of Emerson concerts by then and had listened to the group’s recordings a lot. To my ear, on this new violin, Drucker sounded like Drucker. I kept sneaking glances at Sam throughout the concert, trying to get a sense of his reaction. He listened studiously, with his chin cupped in his hand. At the end of the program there were the usual ovations.
“What did you think of the fiddle?” I asked Sam.
“Very good,” he said. “I’m quite happy with the way it sounded today. I hope Gene is too.” We headed toward a fenced area that served as an outdoor artists’ greenroom.
There was a knot of friends and well-wishers of the Emerson in the little enclave, but Sam became the center of attention as soon as he entered. All of the quartet members, led by the exuberant cellist David Finckel, hugged the violin maker and praised his new fiddle effusively. Even Drucker, the least demonstrative of the four, seemed to beam. His wife, Roberta, was there, and at one point she said, “Now Gene can sell his Strad and we’ll be in much, much better financial shape.” Everyone laughed. I’m almost certain she was joking.
I kept in touch with Gene throughout the next weeks of the summer. I wanted to hear him play the new violin again and hoped it might be out of his normal context in the quartet. It was nearing August when he was scheduled to play that Mozart concerto he’d been practicing in Vienna. He would appear as a soloist with a small orchestra at a music festival on one of the Finger Lakes in Skaneateles, New York. That seemed like a perfect opportunity, and I blocked out a few days to drive there for the concert.
I got a phone call the day before I was to leave. It was Gene on a cell phone—the reception was so spotty that he seemed to be yelling to me from the bottom of a well. “I’m very glad I caught you before you left,” he said. “I just wanted to tell you that I may not be playing the new violin tomorrow, and I wouldn’t want you to drive all the way up here for nothing.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked him.
“I’m just not sure if using Sam’s violin would be the right thing,” he told me. “I’ve been going back and forth between it and my Strad, and I’m thinking now that I would feel better using the Strad. I guess I can say that I’ll almost definitely use the Strad.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” I said to Gene. “But of course I understand. I hope you don’t mind if I don’t come up.”
“No, no,” he said, “that’s fine. I hope there’ll be another opportunity soon.” He paused for a moment, and I heard nothing but the hollow muted static of the cell phone. Then Gene said, “Using this new violin is making me reconsider entirely what my sound could be.” He didn’t seem excited by this new violin playing experience, as he had written Sam a few months before. The violinist sounded like he was in pain.
Later, when I asked Gene what was going on in his mind during those days in upstate New York, he told me: “I guess I called you the day before the concert, because I knew you needed to know. But even up to the last minute on the day of the performance I was going back and forth. I couldn’t decide. After the last rehearsal, with only a few hours left before the performance, I stayed behind and was still going back and forth between the two instruments. Finally, I did use the Strad.”
Not only was Drucker hearing something quite different under his ear with Sam’s fiddle than he did with the Strad, but he was also feeling something different too. “There’s much more tension in the strings,” he told me. “Under my right hand [which holds the bow] I would have expected it. What surprised me was that under my left hand it made my fingers hurt, even when I used exactly the same kind of strings. That difference physically is part of the whole package…. That’s why it’s easier to play stuff [on the new violin] that has to be loud and forceful and where the response has to be very fast. That’s why it’s more difficult for me to feel that I can mold the sound in the most lyrical phrases, especially in earlier music.”
Violinists know that a new fiddle requires some breaking in—they call it “playing in.” How long that takes varies with each instrument, and the more extreme theorists say it requires decades of playing for a violin to fully mature. During the initial break-in period for the Drucker violin, whenever I talked with Sam Zygmuntowicz, I commiserated with him. It seemed that the worst-case scenario was being played out, and that this fiddle was making Gene feel uncomfortable. But the violin maker was mostly stoic. He kept insisting that he would work with Gene to make everything right. “Pleasing finicky people is one of the useful skills for being able to ply your art,” he told me. But Sam was worried most that Drucker would not want to take the trouble to go through the process of making the new instrument right. “If Gene gets discouraged early,” Sam said, “it’s going to be very difficult to get him undiscouraged.”
About four months after the Drucker violin became Gene’s fiddle, I stopped into an Emerson Quartet rehearsal at cellist David Finckel’s apartment in Manhattan, and joined the group for a lunch break at a nearby restaurant. Throughout the meal, the musicians talked about the importance of sound, yet how variable it was between instruments and the people playing them. “Every person who plays makes a different sound,” violinist Phil Setzer said. “So even if you had the same instrument and ten different people play on it, it would sound different. It’s really true with fiddles, but it’s even true with pianos, and that’s putting your fingers down on a mechanical contraption, in a way.” Setzer and his colleagues had recently attended a memorial service for Isaac Stern, where three different world-class pianists played music on the same piano.
“Each sounded beautiful,” Setzer said, “but it sounded like they wheeled out different pianos for each one.”
As the talk continued, going through the inevitable comparisons between new instruments and those built by the old guys, we seemed to be getting dangerously close to the precipice of that void called What Do We Really Know? Drucker, who hadn’t been talking much, took over the conversation.
“I think I’ve said this to you before,” he told me. “Phil and David took to their new instruments from Sam immediately. But neither one of them had a Strad. They both had very fine instruments, but I have to say that no matter how much trouble I sometimes have with my Strad and the kind of up-and-down relationship I have with it—it’s still one of the best early Strads, and Stradivari is still the greatest violin maker who ever lived. So it’s harder to just say, ‘Okay, I don’t need that a
nymore.’ The soul nourishment that my Strad has given me when it’s in good shape, the sort of aura of the sound is something that…” He paused for a moment. None of the other musicians broke in. I had heard from Sam that the other players in the Emerson liked the new violin and thought Gene should play it instead of the Stradivari. Finally, Gene said, “Well, we’ll see how things develop.”
Early the next year, Sam took the Drucker violin back to his workbench, pulled it apart, and regraduated some thicknesses on the back and belly, particularly around the edges. He worked a bit on the bass-bar, too. The ultimate effect he was hoping to achieve was to make the fiddle more flexible, which would help make it feel more like Gene’s Stradivari. While building the new violin Sam had left the wood a little thick because the old wood he was using seemed so light to him. It was one of those cases where, all things being equal, nothing was ever equal. “I was a little too conservative,” he realized.
Drucker got his new violin back and returned to trying to fit it into his musical life. “I wish I could have just adopted it,” he told me later, “but I just couldn’t.” Several times, the new fiddle got a good chance to win him over. The Emerson was engaged in a fairly unusual recording of Johann Sebastian Bach’s famous Art of the Fugue. It was music that was not originally written for strings, and when the players hashed out their interpretation, Drucker thought the new violin might work better, and he used it for the recording, which became the Emerson’s best-selling album.
“For this Bach, somehow, the problems I was having playing the new violin didn’t matter as much,” Gene said. “First of all, the recording started at a point where I was most frustrated with the Strad. And that particular Bach is more austere and less personal sounding than much of the music we play—certainly less personal than the Bach sonatas and partitas. I don’t mean to say the music is merely academic. It’s not, and we were trying to get to a deeper level of meaning in that music. But it was fine for me to be using the new instrument on that. It was open and healthy sounding.”
Still, Drucker remained steadfast to his Stradivari, most of the time. He just couldn’t completely warm to the sound of the Zygmuntowicz in that most intimate setting, cradled between his shoulder and his left ear.
“What I’ve noticed as the difference in quality that I hear under my ear,” Gene told me later, “is that it just seems to me the Strad has a more beautiful, more refined sound. I really think that’s true. The difference is greater under my ear than even on a recording. When I hear it played back, the Zygmuntowicz sounds rounder and sweeter than I think it sounds as I’m playing it. And I suppose in a concert hall there’s even more difference. Something that I perceive under my ear as being on the harsh side may not necessarily be perceived that way at a distance.
“It’s that instrument,” he concluded, sounding more than a little weary with the whole subject, “but it’s also me and my personality quirks.”
The violinist would continue to wrestle with his choice for months, bringing to the struggle not only those personality quirks, but also his substantial talent, high-level training, and long experience. He’d spent two decades playing some of the best music ever written on an instrument made by one of the supreme craftsmen of all time. While he was willing to entertain the possibility that he was some sort of follower in the Stradivari cult, in the end, Drucker knew he had to trust what he heard under his ear.
“You learn about yourself over time,” he told me. “And I think this whole experience convinced me that I may just be a Strad player after all.”
In his workshop in Brooklyn, Sam Zygmuntowicz came to accept that with this one fiddle he’d lost the contest for a violinist’s soul. “Gene’s really tried to take to my violin. But it’s like a demon that he wrestles with. He hasn’t fallen in love with it.”
Sam did what craftsmen do—went back to work. He had years’ worth of commissions to fulfill, and when he sat at his workbench, each day was another step in trying to better understand the complicated dynamics of those magical wooden boxes he built. He was coming to believe that the best innovation in his trade might simply be a fuller and more clear-sighted understanding of the tradition he’d inherited.
“Not all Strads are great, but there really is something to these old fiddles,” Sam said. “Violinists on Gene’s level have the most highly calibrated ears and hands on earth, and there’s a consensus feeling that there’s something in there. And you’re really not going to go forward by denying it.
“There are very, very subtle differences between a Strad and ordinary violins.”
Not many people in the business think Sam Zygmuntowicz makes merely ordinary violins. He might be as close as any living luthier to understanding what those subtle differences are and, most importantly, making them disappear. So he keeps working, long removed from those days when some guys in a little town in Lombardy had gotten things awfully right. Here it is, the twenty-first century, Brooklyn, and with every measurement he makes, every cut and scrape, the old guy looms over his shoulder.
In the end, the violin maker told me, “Stradivari and I have a complicated and intimate relationship. I’m willing to yield ground—somewhat graciously—to Strad. For now.”
Chapter 14
CODA
In the fall of 2003 and spring of 2004, as it neared two years since Gene had received his new violin, the Emerson Quartet descended into an ornate theater at the American Academy of Arts and Letters in the upper reaches of Manhattan to record the music of Felix Mendelssohn. It was another of the comprehensive and definitive projects for which the quartet had become known, for it would include all seven of the nineteenth-century German prodigy’s full string quartets, a few shorter pieces for four fiddles, and, as a bonus, the well-known Octet, masterfully written by Mendelssohn when he was just sixteen years old.
Naturally, there was a question of how the Emerson Quartet would go about recording the Mendelssohn Octet. In an unusual twist, the group decided to perform all eight parts themselves, using the technique called over tracking, where parts are recorded separately and then combined onto the final finished track. The technique is quite common in popular music but virtually unheard of, and somewhat frowned upon, in classical music recording. To add more spin, the Emerson chose to use four old Italian instruments for half of the parts and four Sam Zygmuntowicz instruments for the other half. Since the Zygmuntowicz Drucker fiddle had come into the quartet, violist Larry Dutton had been won over and commissioned Sam to build him a new instrument, an altered version of his 1796 viola built by the Milanese maker named Pietro Giovanni Mantegazza.
Considering their track record, few would question the musical seriousness of the Emerson, though some critics would call the Octet concept something of a stunt. When I heard about the project it seemed to me a playful volley in the continuing game of comparing old instruments to new. The musicians vowed to never reveal publicly which parts were played on which instruments. Would listeners be able to tell?
All of this “seemed like a wild yet intriguing idea,” Gene Drucker would write in liner notes published with the recording, which would win the group another Grammy. As the quartet was nearing completion of the Octet recording, Gene invited me to come and watch a session.
Whatever wildness had originally struck the musicians when they’d had this idea, by that point they had settled into a more mundane workaday professionalism. The record label had commissioned a video to be made of the Octet recording, and as I watched it later, the players seem downright giddy with excitement as they listen to playbacks of the Emerson Quartet playing with the Emerson Quartet. On the day I visited they were doing touch-ups of shorter sections, and the breaks to hear playbacks were brief and to the point. During a longer break for lunch, no one mentioned music at all; the talk centered on travel arrangements for an upcoming tour and future bookings.
When the musicians went back to work after lunch, settling into chairs on the microphone-cluttered stage of the theater, I sat in a bac
kstage chamber with their producer and recording engineer, Da-Hong Seetoo, in front of a bank of computers that he had built himself and a large monitor and keyboard that served as his control panel. He’d win a Grammy Award for this project, too. Da-Hong, who studied at Juilliard and is an excellent violinist, handed me a musical score covered with highlighted passages, designating the parts that each musician would play.
In a live performance, each player would stay on one part for the duration—second violin, say. But for these special recording conditions, the Emerson had deconstructed the Octet, and parts were mixed and matched for each “take” of the recording to make the music flow better.
When Da-Hong would punch the “record” button and the live quartet would join the four instruments already recorded, the sound in the control room was full and solid and wonderfully exciting. I followed the score closely. Try as I might, I could not even guess which instrument was being used, a Zygmuntowicz or a Cremonese masterwork. Later, Gene all but verified for me which instrument he’d used for the first violin part. I won’t reveal the secret, but I can say that though I have listened to the recording dozens of times, I still can’t tell the difference.
This just seemed to accentuate some misgivings I was having at this time. As I tried to make sense of my long journey exploring the world of violins, I had to play a variation of the game Sam Zygmuntowicz liked to start with his colleagues in Oberlin; I had to ask myself, “What have I really learned?”
My first answer was always, “What a strange world it is.”
I suppose that’s what happens to anyone who tries to understand magic. Once its techniques are known and observed a lot of the magic goes away. After all the hours I’d spent watching Sam cut and carve the Drucker fiddle, and now, hearing it played marvelously alongside a Stradivari and a Guarneri del Gesù that was being used by Phil Setzer, I could appreciate why the old guys’ violins were so revered: they sounded great. But so did the new Zygmuntowicz. At least to my ears.
The Violin Maker Page 16