richardaskwith.com

Why are the instruments created by Antonio Stradivari 300 years ago still prized above all others? The Times sent me to Cremona to find out.

 

The Times, 2 December 2023

In a still, small, wood-lined auditorium in northern Italy, a young violinist stands alone on a circular stage. Two hundred people look down in silence. Only this moment matters. She raises a small wooden instrument to our gaze. It seems impossibly frail: barely 400g of curved wood, fashioned in this city — Cremona — nearly 300 years ago. She lifts it to her shoulder, clasps it there with her chin and half-closes her eyes. Its streaked varnish glows like sunset. Then, with unnerving force, she drags her bow across its delicate strings.

Music fills the auditorium like light. Delicate pianissimi float unwaveringly to the chamber’s furthest curves. We feel the resonance in our bones.

The melodies are familiar: Vivaldi, with Paganini to follow and, later, more modern themes by artists including Monti and Morricone. But the texture of the sound is intoxicating: the purity of tone; the sweetness in the upper register; the rich, irresistible projection.

The soloist is a young Moldovan musician called Aurelia Macovei. It’s a name to watch, but few of her listeners will have noted it. They’re focused on the violin, not the player. It’s a 1727 Stradivarius, known as Vesuvio, one of six Stradivarius instruments housed (some on loan) in Cremona’s magnificent Violin Museum. Vesuvio was bequeathed to the city in 2003 with the stipulation that it should be played, from time to time, by up-and-coming violinists.

It is not the first time Macovei has played the instrument, but it still thrills her. This time she took the precaution of rehearsing with it beforehand, alone in what is one of the world’s most acoustically perfect chambers. The first time she just started playing and the beauty of the sound overwhelmed her. “Halfway through the recital I began to cry. Tears were pouring down my face and I was terrified that they would damage the violin.”

Such reactions are not uncommon; nor is the subsequent burning desire to keep the instrument. “I wish I could play it all the time,” Macovei says. “Every time I play it, I learn so much. It shows me new possibilities.”

Will she ever have a Strad of her own? She laughs a little sadly. “I doubt it.”

She is probably right. Antonio Stradivari, whose long life (1644-1737) was spent almost exclusively in Cremona, made about 1,100 stringed instruments. Perhaps 650 survive — including fewer than 500 violins. These change hands only rarely. When they do so, they tend to be priced in the millions.

“I remember when they were just a few hundred thousand,” says Florian Leonhard, a Hampstead-based violin-maker, restorer, dealer and world-recognised authority on fine stringed instruments. “Top performers sometimes bought their own. But by the mid-1990s they reached a million, and then ten years later it was nearly 10 million.”

“More and more instruments are becoming less and less affordable,” says Matthew Huber, the London head of Tarisio, a specialist auctioneer. “And musicians aren’t paid very well, unfortunately.”

Dozens of the world’s most successful soloists play on Strads. Only a lucky handful own them. Most have their instruments on loan, from musical foundations such as the Chicago-based Stradivari Society or Japan’s Nippon Music Foundation; or, in some cases, from philanthropic collectors. Nicola Benedetti’s is owned by the London-based US financier Jonathan Moulds; James Ehnes’s was bought for his use by the US computer scientist David L Fulton; Ilya Gringolts plays his courtesy of an anonymous benefactor.

For the patrons there are obvious attractions. “It’s a very safe place to put your money,” says Paul Hayday, co-founder of London’s other big specialist auctioneer, Ingles & Hayday. (Over the past 40 years, Stradivarius violins have consistently yielded an annual return between 4.9 and 7.7 per cent, which is better than gold.) But investors “also have the joy of owning a wonderful piece”, Hayday says. “And they get to interact with some great players.”

The players, meanwhile, often thrive on leaving the burden of ownership to someone else. And if the patron is a true music lover, it can create what Hayday calls “a lovely relationship”. Benedetti rewards Moulds with occasional private recitals. Ehnes and Fulton bond over their love of fast cars. Gringolts describes his patron as “a wonderful person, deeply devoted to music and art, and very knowledgeable. We’ve grown very close.”

“It’s a lovely way to spend your money,” says Leonhard, who occasionally acts as a three-way “matchmaker” between would-be benefactors, up-and-coming stars and soon-to-be-available instruments. Opportunities to buy are rare, but they do come up from time to time, sometimes at auction. Earlier this year, Ingles & Hayday sold a c 1685 Stradivarius violin for £1.8 million and Tarisio sold a 1708 Strad, the Empress Caterina, for $5.9 million. Such prices are dwarfed by the $15.34 million fetched by the 1714 da Vinci, ex-Seidel Strad last year, or, for that matter, the record $15.9 million for which Tarisio sold the 1721 Lady Blunt Stradivarius in 2011.

The prices vary because each instrument has made a different journey through the centuries. Experts lovingly trace these, using the highlights as nicknames. Strads are typically named after former owners (Lady Anne Blunt, Catherine the Great, Bavaria’s King Maximilian Joseph) or, more evocatively, former players (Kreutzer, Paganini, Brodsky, Lipinski). The da Vinci, ex-Seidel, initially named in honour of its Leonardo-worthy beauty, spent several decades as the property of the Hollywood-based violinist Toscha Seidel, who played it in, among other films, The Wizard of Oz.

What’s strange is that, no matter how painstakingly their provenance is traced, these violins bear limited resemblance to the instruments that Stradivari created. The main body — the sound box — will be more or less as he made it. So, perhaps, will the scroll (at the end). But the peripheral parts (neck, fingerboard, bass bar, bridge, strings, pegs, chin rest) will not be what left the maker’s workshop, and the sound is probably different too. The big exception to this rule is the 1716 violin known as the Messiah, which Stradivari kept in his workshop until his death. Now owned by the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, which preserves it “as a yardstick for future violin-makers to learn from”, it has rarely been played and, apart from the tuning pegs and the tailpiece, is considered “as new”. It is not, however, for sale.

Collectors seem unperturbed by philosophical doubts as to whether a much fiddled-with fiddle remains truly “original”. As long as an instrument began its life in Stradivari’s workshop, it is considered authentic and likely to fetch more than 40 times its weight in 24-carat gold. A well-preserved violin from the maker’s “golden period” (roughly from 1700 to 1725) could be worth ten times more.

Are such prices justified? That’s a matter for debate. Cremona’s golden age of violin-making, from the mid-16th century to the mid-18th, produced other great luthiers: the Amatis, the Guarneris, the Bergonzis. Their works rarely change hands for more than a few hundred thousand pounds. (Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, known as “del Gesù”, is the most significant exception.)

There are modern makers too, who use every possible trick of technology and traditional craft to produce superb instruments — some so closely modelled on Stradivarius originals that they are, effectively, clones. “There’s no real difference between the sounds,” says Leonhard, who markets his as “true copies”. “Yet our instruments sell for perhaps a tenth of the price.” The auction record for a violin by a living maker is $132,000.

Are collectors paying for an illusion, then? It depends how you look at it. Many researchers have attempted “blind” comparisons. An unnerving number have concluded that Strads are no better than the best modern violins or the best by other old Italian makers. Sometimes such verdicts are based on audience reaction and thus might tell us more about the audiences than the instruments. Others have taken a less subjective approach.

“There have been some really good, well-designed tests,” says Colin Gough, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Birmingham and a leading specialist in violin acoustics, “including some where even the people handing the instrument to the player don’t know which instrument is which. And acoustic measurements have not been able to find a characteristic difference.”

For Leonhard that doesn’t matter. “You’re not just buying the sound,” he says. “You’re buying the name and the whole idea of owning one of these incredibly rare instruments. It’s like a Michelangelo sculpture. You can make a copy from a 3D printer and it’s identical. But it’s not the same.”

Professor Gough has not ruled out the possibility that there really is an acoustic difference. “My mind is open. How we recognise sound quality in the human brain is far more complex than current measurements can hope to match.” The greatest players, he adds, “undoubtedly feel that, when they play a Strad, they do feel something unique.” He suspects that this miraculous “tingle” may be created by a synergy between great instrument and great player. The former encourages the latter to adapt their style to release its “spirit” — causing “major changes in the wave form of the sound produced”.

The great players’ own testimonies tend to be less tentative. Pavel Berman once described his first encounter with his Stradivarius as “almost religious”; Benedetti called hers “love at first sight”; for Ehnes it felt “a bit like The Wizard of Oz: everything being in black and white and then in colour”.

“It was like a vision,” the Cremona-based violinist Fabrizio von Arx recalls. “A revelation,” Gringolts says. It felt, Min Kym wrote, “as if all her life, my Strad had been waiting for me as I had been waiting for her.”

Yet there’s still something that strains credulity in the proposition that Stradivari was the only person to find a way of creating this effect. It took roughly 4,000 years for the first primitive attempts at stringed instruments to evolve into what we would recognise as violins, which appeared in northern Italy in about 1530. Then, over just a couple of centuries, these instruments were refined, mainly in Cremona, by great violin-making families such as the Amatis and the Guarneris. Stradivari joined in around 1660 (possibly starting as an Amati apprentice) and by 1700 had begun the 25-year “golden period” in which, we are asked to believe, he achieved a level of perfection that was not only unprecedented but, it seems, unsurpassable. And that, apparently, was “the end of history” for violin-making.

This seems far-fetched, yet perhaps it is not totally implausible, once you factor in the many ways in which Stradivari was favoured by fortune. He lived a long life — 93 years — and worked for most of it. He learnt from the best possible teachers, from an early age, spent decades honing the craft they taught him, and only really started experimenting with his own distinctive style when he was well past 50. He lived in a time and place that brought him into regular contact with violinist-composers such as Giuseppe Tartini and Arcangelo Corelli, providing priceless feedback.

He was selling his exquisitely finished instruments at a time of high demand from Europe’s royal courts. As a result, he could work at his own pace and buy the best materials. These included maples (for the sides) from Croatia and spruces (for the front and back) from the Paneveggio forest in the Dolomites — all of which, thanks to the unusually cold climate in the period from 1645 to 1715, had grown more slowly and evenly than usual and so had produced particularly dense, resonant wood.

Years of trial and error taught him recipes for varnishing and treating the wood that enhanced his instruments’ resonance, not just in his lifetime but for centuries thereafter. Those subsequent centuries may also have conferred further acoustic advantages as the varnished wood dried out. While the idea that a stringed instrument can “remember” how people have played it is far-fetched, there is, Gough says, “a widespread belief among top performers that this is the case”. In their view, the playing of three centuries’ worth of all-time greats could only be another factor in Stradivari’s favour.

Those who came after him were less fortunate. The two sons who had worked with him died soon after he did, and much of his workshop’s methodology was lost. Meanwhile, Stradivari’s success had sated the top of the market. Violin-making went into steep decline in Cremona, while elsewhere in Europe mass production became more prized than exquisite sound. Many later luthiers used modern, fast-drying varnishes — which turned out to stiffen their instruments as the decades passed. Some embellished their work with fake “Stradivarius fecit” labels. But relatively few, before the late 20th century, dedicated their whole lives, as Stradivari had, to the pursuit of musical perfection. And none did so in such propitious circumstances.

“It was a moment in history that cannot be repeated,” von Arx says.

Those who follow such matters will have noted that other luthiers connected with that moment — notably Guarneri — can and do achieve multimillion-pound prices at auction. But it’s Stradivari, and he alone, whose instruments have become synonymous with pricelessness. They are a media meme, featuring in stories about tragicomic mishaps (“Violinist leaves priceless Stradivarius in taxi”) and daring heists (“Gang snatch priceless Stradivarius at crowded railway station”). They are what we dream of finding in the attic too. “We get about 50 emails a day,” Huber says, “asking us to look at instruments that ‘might be a Stradivarius’.”

“It’s a pity that people focus so much on the price,” says Peter Beare, a Kent-based restorer and luthier, “and not on how good these instruments are.” Yet it all adds lustre to the Stradivari myth, and the myth encourages musicians to dream. “When you hand a player that kind of instrument, their face lights up,” Huber says. “They’re inspired. They’re searching for colours as they play.”

Nor is it just the performers who feel inspired. In Cremona, von Arx has spent much of the past three years overseeing the repurposing of the townhouse where Stradivari once lived. It opened this summer as Casa Stradivari: a centre of musical excellence where young luthiers now study their craft under the same roof as an acoustic research centre, a space for musical masterclasses and accommodation for visiting performers-in-residence.

“Violin-makers come here,” von Arx says as we watch the sun go down from the roof terrace where Stradivari often worked, “and they burst into tears. His presence here is so strong that they can feel him.”

Bénédicte Friedmann feels him too, in a small atelier a few streets away. She has been making violins here since 2007 and says: “I had a powerful feeling of walking in the footsteps of Stradivarius when I came to Cremona. It’s intimidating, but you also have dreams. You want to be the next Stradivari.”

She is not the only one — because Cremona is in the grip of a violin-making renaissance that would have been unthinkable a century ago. Some trace this back to the setting up of the Violin Museum in 1937, some to a bequest in 1970 from the cheese magnate Walter Stauffer, which financed an academy for musicians and an international school of violin-making. The publication in 1972 of Simone Sacconi’s masterpiece The “Secrets” of Stradivari stoked wider interest in Cremonese traditions of violin-making, as did a spectacular Stradivarius bicentenary exhibition in the city in 1987. The following year a Strad broke the $1 million barrier at Sotheby’s for the first time. Instrument-making was glamorous again. By 2012 Unesco had added the traditional violin heritage of Cremona to its intangible cultural heritage list, and now, since the opening of Casa Stradivari, no one can be in any doubt: Cremona has reclaimed its past.

“When I started out there were barely any luthiers in Cremona,” says Bruce Carlson, a US-born maker and restorer who set up shop here in 1972. Now, by some counts, there are more than 250. “Of course, most of them are exporting,” he says. “And at least it means that the whole musical world passes through Cremona.”

There’s a trade fair every year, and an international violin-making competition every three. Would-be luthiers come from all over the world to study. And top soloists come too, drawn, among other things, by the discernment of Cremona’s audiences. “I have never performed in Cremona before,” says Gringolts, who on December 18 will mark the anniversary of Stradivari’s death by playing the 1715 Cremonese at the Violin Museum, “but I’m looking forward to it.”

“The miracle of Stradivari,” von Arx says, “was that he imagined the music of the future. He made violins for Tartini, Corelli, Vivaldi and Geminiani. Yet he created a universal resonance that inspired Paganini, Saint-Saëns, Shostakovich, Kreisler.”

To emphasise the point, he picks up the 1720 Stradivarius known as the Angel that he co-owns with his Swiss patrons and plays a few bars of Kreisler. The high rafters ring with the yearning, dancing melodies of Liebesleid. Once again, I feel the resonance in my bones. And I realise that, for some reason, my eyes are pricking with tears.

The world outside, with its grinding cacophony of misery and greed, has vanished. There is only this moment, and my wonder that a species as dysfunctional as ours could have learnt to make music of such healing beauty, and a sense that this gleaming sweetness is a taste of the divine.

Perhaps the Angel is responsible. Or perhaps it is merely the myth of Stradivarius that emboldens von Arx to believe that angelic playing is within his reach.

Either way, I hope that Stradivari is listening.

Read this article in its original context here.