The Violin Maker Part 7

Chapter 13.

WHAT YOU HEAR UNDER YOUR EAR.

After the birthday party I started playing the new violin," Gene Drucker told me later. "I was working on a Mozart concerto that I was going to play that summer at a festival in upstate New York.

"I liked the openness of the sound. My wife, Roberta, found it very big. But something started happening. The sound was so direct, so penetrating, that it was almost too much under my ear, without as much sweetness leavening the punch and the volume as I might desire.

"About a week after that we went to Vienna. The quartet was doing that theater piece based on Shostakovich-The Noise of Time. Written by the British playwright Simon McBurney, The Noise of Time The Noise of Time is a multimedia performance that examines the Russian composer's life and work from the n.a.z.i siege of Leningrad to his complicated and controversial connection with Stalin and later Communist regimes. The Emerson Quartet is used to great effect. The musicians mix onstage with actors, and live music mixes with recorded sound and visual effects. Ultimately, the musicians play Shostakovich's haunting and powerful fifteenth string quartet, his last, which many think he wrote as his own requiem. is a multimedia performance that examines the Russian composer's life and work from the n.a.z.i siege of Leningrad to his complicated and controversial connection with Stalin and later Communist regimes. The Emerson Quartet is used to great effect. The musicians mix onstage with actors, and live music mixes with recorded sound and visual effects. Ultimately, the musicians play Shostakovich's haunting and powerful fifteenth string quartet, his last, which many think he wrote as his own requiem.

"I used the new violin for that performance in Vienna," Drucker said. "It worked fine for that. And I kept preparing the Mozart concerto and was also working on a Bartok sonata and some other repertoire for the summer festival. I remember practicing in that hotel room in Vienna and liking some things about the new fiddle and not being totally convinced about other things and wondering, What I define as quality in my innermost set of definitions as a violinist-Does this violin really have it, or not?"

When next I talked to Sam Zygmuntowicz after the birthday party, I asked him what he knew about Gene's reaction to the new violin. "For Gene," he told me, "he's surprisingly all right with the whole thing.

"For Gene," he added.

Sam talked for a while about his theory of psychoacoustics, and the important interface between the player and the instrument. "Strads have a way they like to be played," he said. "Gene will have to adapt to the new fiddle. This is a Guarneri model and is a little different and you've got to play it that way. He's got a fiddle now that will allow him to whack it. It will be able to bring out other aspects of his playing."

Drucker had visited Sam's shop for what the violin maker described as part sound post adjustment, part pep talk. "He played all kinds of music while he was here," Sam reported. "Excerpts from the quartet repertoire, concertos. He really played extended pa.s.sages and it was very emotional. Sometimes I had to interrupt him. He just wants to crawl into the music."

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 cla.s.sical 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 mold the sound in the most lyrical phrases, especially in earlier music." 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-cla.s.s 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 relations.h.i.+p 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 anymore.' 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 ba.s.s-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 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 alb.u.m.

"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 part.i.tas. 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 something in there. And you're really not going to go forward by denying it. 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 sc.r.a.pe, the old guy looms over his shoulder.

In the end, the violin maker told me, "Stradivari and I have a complicated and intimate relations.h.i.+p. 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 Quartet would go about recording the Mendelssohn would go about recording the Mendelssohn Octet 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 cla.s.sical 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 backstage 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 pa.s.sages, 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" b.u.t.ton 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?" "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 Gesu 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.

During one break in the recording session, I was sitting in the control room chatting with Phil Setzer. While he talked, he absentmindedly cradled and stroked the violin he was playing that day.

Because he used his Zygmuntowicz violin almost exclusively, Setzer had to borrow an old fiddle for this project, and he'd been able to use one belonging to David Fulton, who is a computer software millionaire and in recent years has ama.s.sed one of the best collections of violins in the world, many of which he lends to top performers. Fulton had lent Setzer the favorite fiddle of the late Isaac Stern, the 1737 Guarneri del Gesu known as the Panette.

There we were, sitting on folding chairs in a rather dingy bas.e.m.e.nt room. Setzer pushed the fiddle in my direction and asked, "Have you ever held anything worth five million dollars?" He let my fingers grasp the del Gesu for a brief moment and then pulled the violin back with a comic flourish. I have listened to the sections of the finished Octet recording where I know Setzer is using the del Gesu, and, once again, I cannot pinpoint a real difference, let alone a $4.975 million difference.

I understood Sam's position that it was futile to keep questioning whether the old instruments really were better-accept the fact and keep working. But in the final a.n.a.lysis of what I'd learned about new fiddles and old fiddles and the violinists who played them, I once again found that Sir James Beament seemed to get it right. In the last chapter of The Violin Explained The Violin Explained he concluded that it was simply the prime market force of supply and demand that determined the astronomical prices paid for the famous old guys' violins. However, Beament wrote, "They do not make any different sound, and no audience can tell what instrument is being played. But if a player thinks he plays better on such an instrument, he will." And, "audiences are even more susceptible to suggestion than players." That's not going to change anytime soon. he concluded that it was simply the prime market force of supply and demand that determined the astronomical prices paid for the famous old guys' violins. However, Beament wrote, "They do not make any different sound, and no audience can tell what instrument is being played. But if a player thinks he plays better on such an instrument, he will." And, "audiences are even more susceptible to suggestion than players." That's not going to change anytime soon.

In the year after he finished the violin for Gene Drucker, Sam went on filling his various commissions. Then, in May of 2003, the estate of Isaac Stern put up for sale the two del Gesu copies Sam had built for the Maestro. The sale was handled by a new online auction house named for the great hunter of violins, Tarisio. Sam's copy of Stern's Panette sold for $130,000, which was a record price for an instrument crafted by a living violin maker.

In the weeks and months after that auction, Sam dealt nearly constantly with calls for new commissions. He raised his price for a new fiddle to more than $40,000. Despite that (or maybe because of that), his waiting list just kept getting longer. Soon, it would include two of the most heralded strings players of our time. One was superstar violinist Joshua Bell, who played on a Stradivari known as the Gibson ex Huberman, a fiddle whose history was picaresque, and included going missing for decades after being stolen from backstage at Carnegie Hall. The other was Yo-Yo Ma, who has lifetime possession (on loan from an anonymous owner) of one of the most revered instruments in the world, the cello known as the Davidov. It had previously been used by Jacqueline du Pre.

"It happens that a number of my clients own Strads," Sam told me. "They're coming to me for something very specific. Unfortunately-though I'm not really complaining-that sets the bar a little higher."

Before finis.h.i.+ng this book, I joined Sam for one last time in Oberlin. He'd stopped attending the workshop dedicated to violin making and had switched to a weeklong gathering of researchers in violin acoustics that included scientists and more technically minded violin makers. Sam said he felt he'd learned about as much as he could about building the box from his violin making colleagues; he was now most excited about understanding the science underlying how the boxes vibrated. "The key to innovation," he told me, "is more knowledge." But even the scientists were still trying to discover the "secrets" of Stradivari. Not long before this, a climatologist from Columbia University and a dendrochronologist from the University of Tennessee (one of the men who'd been part of the tree ring circus dispute over the authenticity of the Messiah) published a paper speculating that the wood Stradivari used in his violins was especially strong because it grew during a peculiar 70-year climatological period known as the Maunder Minimum, or "little Ice Age," when colder weather would have made trees grow slower and denser.

n.o.body mentioned that discovery in the few days I spent sitting in on the acoustics workshops at Oberlin. Most of the information presented was rather opaque-PowerPoint presentations full of charts and equations. Luckily, like the violin makers I'd first met here in Ohio, the acoustics group held a friendly c.o.c.ktail hour and dinner and then most people headed back to the workshop for more informal, at-ease evening sessions. I'd been in these workshop rooms before. It was the same building where on a hot night several years ago, a violin maker had introduced me to the notion of the magical box. This time, things were different. The centers of attention this night were acoustic testing machines that could record a spectrum of sound output from a fiddle that was carefully positioned before a microphone and tapped on the bridge with a little hammer. Compared to this, the violin making workshop had indeed seemed like a bunch of old Geppettos carving away. Now the rooms had the look and feel of a laboratory.

Late that night Sam took me to his workbench and showed me an instrument he'd created for testing. "Here's Gluey," he said, holding up the violin. It was a cheap factory-made fiddle that he'd taken apart, sc.r.a.ping the belly and back as thin as he would ever dare. He put in a ba.s.s-bar, gave the fiddle some varnish, and set up the strings and sound post for a professional player. Then he made a bunch of veneerlike patches in various sizes that he could stick on and pull off the belly and back as he wished. The purpose was to test how changing thicknesses in various places affected the vibration of the top and back plates and how that altered the sound. Though much of the experimentation was recorded the old-fas.h.i.+oned way-using unreliable ears-Sam also had built his own contraption, which measured the sound spectrum created by plucking one of the strings. The results are recorded by special acoustics software on his laptop computer.

Over the next few hours Sam talked and talked and tested and tested. Time seemed to stop for him, and I got more and more tired. He said things like: "We've gone from a static approach to a dynamic approach. Violins aren't static; they're changing all the time. Every part is moving." At one point he pulled out his laptop and showed me a three-dimensional "movie" of a violin vibrating, complete with air being pushed out of the f-holes.

"Isn't this cool?" Sam asked. "What's important is what's invisible, but I think technology will help us see the invisible."

Whether he was right, or whether he would ever realize his notions, or whether that will help him make fiddles better than those of the old guys, I don't know. But I finally understood then that I had been given a window into a room that few of us ever see in the modern world. What I'd witnessed in his workshop was craft; what I was seeing tonight seemed to be the true soul of craftsmans.h.i.+p. Sam was here, essentially, on vacation. He'd been in the workshops since early morning and it was approaching midnight. As the great sociologist C. Wright Mills wrote in his study of work in the book White Collar White Collar, "The craftsman's way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living.... There is no split of work and play." Not only was Sam Zygmuntowicz a very successful violin maker, but he was also a lucky guy.

I had been playing the trumpet a lot around this time, and one job I got was to perform in the backup band for a variety show. This was not your run-of-the-mill variety show but one produced, directed, and largely starring priests from the diocese of Scranton, my hometown, where I'd played at the funeral of the governor and heard the young violinist play Irving Berlin, and, for all intents, started on this whole project.

For this show, there was only one short and frighteningly disorganized rehearsal in the late afternoon before the first performance. In the run-through of one number, a priest with a very good voice sang Charlie Chaplin's song "Smile," accompanied by an accomplished pianist, who happened also to be a monsignor. After the first time through the lyrics they asked me to play a short solo but said I wouldn't have to play it during the actual show.

The night of the performance, a young violinist showed up to play that solo-the same young violinist who'd played "How Deep Is the Ocean" in church and spun a web of sound that enveloped hundreds of mourners and made them hold their breath. He wasn't quite so young now; he'd gone through a conservatory and was starting his career. He played beautifully, infusing Chaplin's song with more sophistication and an even richer sound than he'd achieved with Irving Berlin's tune. The odds were against him: the show was in a big, sterile auditorium, with such acts as a priest doing ethnic jokes and others lip-synching and dancing to the disco hit "YMCA," but once again, the violinist reached the heights of poignancy.

Backstage afterward, I introduced myself and told him how good he sounded. Naturally, I asked him what kind of fiddle he was playing. "It's about a hundred years old," the violinist said. "It belonged to my grandfather. It was made in Romania." He mentioned the maker's name, but I didn't recognize it.

As he wiped off the violin and placed it in the case, the violinist said to me, "I like to think that this fiddle has a gypsy soul."

After all I'd seen and heard in this strange and magical world of violins, I wasn't going to argue with him.

Source Notes The bulk of what is presented here is based on many hours with Sam Zygmuntowicz in his workshop, taking notes, or, more often, running a tape recorder as he described what he was doing and the principles behind it. The result was hundreds of pages of transcripts from which I drew much of the narration. I did the same in my more limited time with Gene Drucker. In keeping with standard journalistic practice, neither Sam nor Gene was given any prior review or approval of the text.

I also drew from articles by Zygmuntowicz and about him in the main journals of the trade. They included various issues of The Journal of the Violin Society of America The Journal of the Violin Society of America, The Strad The Strad, and Strings Strings. Those three journals were also helpful in informing me about various other subjects in the book as well as giving me a continuing understanding of issues in the world of fiddles.

The first book that caught my attention was Edward Heron-Allen's Violin-Making as it was, and is, Violin-Making as it was, and is, and I find myself returning to it often because it is so strange and charming. Sam Zygmuntowicz told me that when he reads Heron-Allen now, the eccentric Englishman seems even more astute. and I find myself returning to it often because it is so strange and charming. Sam Zygmuntowicz told me that when he reads Heron-Allen now, the eccentric Englishman seems even more astute.

James Beament's The Violin Explained: Components, Mechanism and Sound The Violin Explained: Components, Mechanism and Sound really became my "go-to" source. It is a tad technical, but Beament's scientific skepticism, combined with his intimacy with the subject-he plays the ba.s.s fiddle and is married to a violin maker-makes for a clear-eyed a.n.a.lysis of how violins, old and new, function on the player and listener. really became my "go-to" source. It is a tad technical, but Beament's scientific skepticism, combined with his intimacy with the subject-he plays the ba.s.s fiddle and is married to a violin maker-makes for a clear-eyed a.n.a.lysis of how violins, old and new, function on the player and listener.

The Hills' survey of Stradivari was invaluable. Antonio Stradivari: His Life and Work (16441737) Antonio Stradivari: His Life and Work (16441737) has stayed in print so long for obvious reasons. I also used the Hills' subsequent has stayed in print so long for obvious reasons. I also used the Hills' subsequent The Violin-Makers of the Guarneri Family (16261762). The Violin-Makers of the Guarneri Family (16261762). Simone Sacconi's Simone Sacconi's 'Secrets' of Stradivari 'Secrets' of Stradivari is likewise indispensable for understanding Stradivari's work. And, for my purposes, it gave great insight into Sacconi himself. That understanding was b.u.t.tressed by a collection of reminiscences of Sacconi published in 1985 by the Cremonese a.s.sociation of Professional Violin Makers, t.i.tled, is likewise indispensable for understanding Stradivari's work. And, for my purposes, it gave great insight into Sacconi himself. That understanding was b.u.t.tressed by a collection of reminiscences of Sacconi published in 1985 by the Cremonese a.s.sociation of Professional Violin Makers, t.i.tled, From Violin Making to Music: The Life and Works of Simone Fernando Sacconi From Violin Making to Music: The Life and Works of Simone Fernando Sacconi.

A more circ.u.mscribed look at Stradivari's work-Stradivari's Genius: Five Violins, One Cello, and Three Centuries of Enduring Perfection-was written recently by Toby Faber and was quite helpful. An entertaining look at one Stradivari instrument and its restoration by Sam's former boss, Rene Morel, is Nicholas Delbanco's 2001 book The Countess of Stanlein Restored: A History of the Countess of Stanlein Ex Pananini Stradivarius Cello of 1707. The Countess of Stanlein Restored: A History of the Countess of Stanlein Ex Pananini Stradivarius Cello of 1707.

Several more general looks at the violin and its world were very helpful. The most readable is one from the early 1970s by Joseph Wechsberg called The Glory of the Violin. The Glory of the Violin. More academic in tone, but no less helpful, were Alberto Bachmann's More academic in tone, but no less helpful, were Alberto Bachmann's An Encyclopedia of the Violin An Encyclopedia of the Violin, first published in 1925, but still available; and The Violin Family The Violin Family (various authors) from the New Grove Musical Instrument Series. (various authors) from the New Grove Musical Instrument Series.

Several fictional works based on real people from the world of violin making were both entertaining and source material. William Alexander Silverman's The Violin Hunter The Violin Hunter is one; John Hersey's is one; John Hersey's Antonietta Antonietta is the other. And anyone interested in fiddles should try to see the movie is the other. And anyone interested in fiddles should try to see the movie The Red Violin The Red Violin. I've watched it half a dozen times and, while working on this book, told questioners many dozens of times that, no, I was not writing a book like The Red Violin The Red Violin.

If one were to be inspired to try making a violin at home, then Joseph V. Reid's You Can Make a Stradivarius Violin You Can Make a Stradivarius Violin would be a decent place to start, though I can a.s.sure you that it's not as easy as he makes it seem. would be a decent place to start, though I can a.s.sure you that it's not as easy as he makes it seem.

Gene Drucker's recording of J. S. Bach's unaccompanied sonatas and part.i.tas for violin has been reissued by Parna.s.sas Records. I referred to enclosed liner notes written mostly by Drucker. I also used The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Doc.u.ments The New Bach Reader: A Life of Johann Sebastian Bach in Letters and Doc.u.ments.