The Violin Maker Part 4

Sam was working on the violin top-or "belly"-that day. The spruce had been cut and carved in a close approximation of the final arching. The architecture of the upward sweep of a violin belly from the edges to the center is a vital component for sound production, and its design holds nearly endless possibilities. Once again, what had been decided upon three hundred years ago seems to work best. Consequently, Sam used templates to guide his arching. He had traced the archings of a number of great violins during his years working in Rene Morel's restoration shop.

"The templates are great," he said, "because that way I'm not trying to make the arching the way I feel that day. I have a guide. Right now I'm on a late Guarneri kick and that's what I'm using for Gene's fiddle. Generally the Guarneri arching is a little flatter than Strad's. My teacher Carl Becker used to say that it looked like someone has stretched out a sheet of rubber over something-it's all taut and smooth and low and drawn out. On some Strads the arching seems more sculpted."

The hand tool Sam used this day was a sc.r.a.per, a sharpened piece of steel that looked like the head of a spatula with no handle. The thin metal slicing off the wood made a short, raspy report. His motions were quick: three or four sc.r.a.pes in succession and then a pause. "I'm making decisions the whole time I'm doing this," Sam said. "Okay, do I want to go a little deeper in the channel?" (The channel is a sort of gutter, which swoops down just inside the purfling before rising again as the arching climbs to its maximum height in the center of the plate.) "The channel will affect the flexibility of the whole top, and that will affect how it feels to play and how it sounds.

"At this point in the process there are several variables I can choose. The arching height is one. The depth of the channel and the edge work. Then the thicknesses of the top and back. The placement and the size of the f-holes. And the ba.s.s-bar."

I came to think of the Drucker violin as something like the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz The Wizard of Oz, in that scene in the movie when he's being cleaned up and put back together in preparation for meeting the Wizard. Pieces of the fiddle were scattered about the studio-the top on Sam's desk, the back across the room near Wiltrud's workplace, the rib structure stored in a slot near the stereo-all waiting to come together.

Music played nearly constantly throughout the day in the shop, a soft background noise that was often interrupted by bleating car and truck horns from the streets below. I sensed there was some interpersonal dynamic at work, a benign battle over whose favorite music was played. One day, Sam stopped working for a moment to listen more closely to the soundtrack, which was oddly metered and filled with exotic-sounding string instruments. "Wiltrud always accuses me of listening to hillbilly music," he said, "but what's this? It's hillbilly music that happens to be from Macedonia." Wiltrud said something in German to Dietmar, and they both laughed. Sam looked at me with one of those put-upon stares that Jack Benny used so effectively.

All workplaces have a culture of sorts, and this shop had an easygoing feel. I've worked in a few places where the boss prided himself or herself on letting people come and go as they pleased, and creating camaraderie and fun. But it was still a job. Here in Sam's studio there seemed to be no sense that what was going on was even work. It was as if three people had somehow realized separately that there were all these tools in this one place and you could go there and make violins. Sometimes everyone would have lunch together. Other times they went off on their own. Sam was fairly often interrupted by phone calls. Mostly, talk among the colleagues in the workshop was brief and infrequent. Of course, that may have been because I was there, making Sam talk as he worked.

"The other night I came here and worked by myself," he told me one day. "I had to cut the scroll for a cello we're building. We just needed to get it done. It's the kind of thing that's best done late at night with good lights. So I stayed late and had the music going and everybody was gone and I just wacked it out. It was really very pleasurable. But most of what you've come here to see isn't like that."

As the pieces of finished wood acc.u.mulated, I began to get the sense that now there was much more on Sam's mind than cutting and carving, that he was moving into a realm of decision making that would affect the quality of the Drucker fiddle in important and irreversible ways. Sure, a lot of what I was watching seemed to be the work of a kindly wood-carver-a Geppetto-but Sam was obviously more than that. There was also an acoustician and an engineer at work. As he approached finishing the spruce top, his progress got slower and slower. He would often stop sc.r.a.ping, make a measurement with calipers he kept close by, and then refer to a notebook on his desk where he kept detailed information on previous fiddles he'd built.

He opened the book to a fiddle he'd made in 1993. "It was not a very high-profile musician," Sam said. "But it was actually a somewhat interesting fiddle. I recorded wood choice, arch height, exact thicknesses." The thicknesses were written on a sheet of paper with a violin outline drawn on. Rings were drawn within the shape that looked like the swirling gradient lines on a topographical map. In more than two dozen spots were measurements of the final wood thickness down to a tenth of a millimeter.

"If there's anything I can measure," Sam said, "I measure it, on the theory that it will become interesting in later years. I'll make some varnish notes, and some evaluations of the sound, and if I can I'll follow up and see how the sound might have changed over time."

"Does every violin maker do this?" I asked.

"No. Some guys take two measurements and that's it. I think I'm kind of a maniac.

"It's a work technique. Not a particularly efficient one, but we're not judged on high efficiency-which is a very good thing. I wouldn't survive, or I'd certainly have to alter my work style, if I had to be more efficient.

"But it's all part of a process of becoming-I don't know what you call it-I guess a more subtle subtle worker. The thing is that you start to care more and more about less and less." worker. The thing is that you start to care more and more about less and less."

What is the essence of craftsmanship? Often, our romantic notion is that it is unnameable, unquantifiable-that certain je ne sais quoi je ne sais quoi. But perhaps the opposite is true, that the beating heart of excellence longs to measure and quantify, to continually care more and more about less and less. James Beament, in his great book on the violin, concluded that Stradivari was a genius, but not the kind of wildman, wunderkind genius that people love to imagine. Guarneri better fit that mold. Strad was a genius of maturity and continuity. He took great pains in his work, and continued to take great pains for a very long time.

Was I watching someone similar in this former factory in Brooklyn? As more and more became less and less, I'd seen a concomitant shrinking of the tools. There were two big machine-shop-style band saws that Sam and Deitmar used to cut the rough wood blocks down to size. Sam spent one afternoon with a big gouger, a tool the size of a billy club, getting rid of excess wood on the one-piece maple back. The tape I'd recorded while he worked is full of the sound of him grunting heavily as he lunged at the wood. It sounds like he's in a boxing ring doing some sparring. The wood itself, being gouged away, let forth a noise that sounded uncannily like a scream.

Such rough work was a small part of the process. The carving quickly became more refined, done with smaller gougers and then a set of planes as the preliminary graduation of the thicknesses was done. The carving left less and less wood and more and more of something that looked like a violin. As work progressed to the final stages, I saw Sam working on the back with one of those thimblesize finger planes, a tool that would seem at home in a dollhouse workshop. I spent a whole afternoon watching him work on the final thickness graduation of the violin top with a sc.r.a.per that removed wood not in pieces, not even in shavings, but in grains. He'd weighed the piece before he started, sc.r.a.ped and sc.r.a.ped for several hours and weighed it again when he was finished. The sum difference in his day's work was three grams.

The shrinking physical scale of the work was obvious. The expanding mental side was less so.

One day, as the violin was coming together, I arrived at the shop to find Sam with the all-but-finished top turned upside down on his worktable. Onto it he was fitting a carved piece of wood that looked a little like the tail fin of a 1950s vintage car. This was the ba.s.s-bar, another part of the fiddle that would never be seen again after the instrument was completed, a kind of support beam that is glued to the inside of the belly, running longitudinally down the front, a little to the left of the center line of the instrument, under one of the feet of the bridge that held the strings tense above it. Not only does it provide support against the pressure of the string tension, but it is also considered an important factor in creating the ultimate sound of the fiddle.

Sam had carved the ba.s.s-bar with a sharp knife, and even now, as he worked fitting the piece, he'd occasionally slice a small piece away, almost like he was whittling something. The bar was made from a piece of the old spruce Sam had bought on a trip to Europe. "I selected the wood very carefully," he told me. "It's really old stuff, and it went through the whole process we use for the top-a.n.a.lyzing its density and strength and all that. Some people prefer stiffer ba.s.s-bars, but I've gone toward liking softer, lighter bars for whatever reason. I think they're a little more lively, though I couldn't prove it."

Sam had positioned the bar on the underside of the violin belly and attached it temporarily with a little clamp that had been developed by his teacher Carl Becker. I asked him to narrate what he was thinking while he worked.

"Okay," he began, "what I'm doing is I'm fitting it very carefully. There's spring to the bar. You can see that on the ends there's about three-quarters of a millimeter where it's standing up from the top." I pulled a credit card out of my wallet and asked Sam to measure the thickness with a precise caliper he used. The credit card was just about three-quarters of a millimeter.

When those ends were fitted and glued, the thicker center portion of the ba.s.s-bar would flex the violin top upward. The bar was located approximately under the lowest pitched string of the fiddle, the G. A few inches away, the sound post, a small cylindrical spruce rod, would be wedged under the bridge about where the highest pitched string-the E-is stretched.

"Spring of the ba.s.s-bar is a whole pet topic," Sam said. "At this Violin Society of America meeting where I'm going soon, it'll be very controversial. There are people who think it's an awful thing to do. It's true that it has to be done very, very carefully in order not to screw up the instrument. But I think if it's done right it makes a difference tonally, for the better.

"But at a meeting of violin makers, in some hotel ballroom, all you have to say is 'What do you think about tension in the ba.s.s-bar?' and it's like throwing a grenade into the room. I had a friend ask that question once and then he just walked out. Hours later people were still arguing."

He worked for another hour or so on the ba.s.s-bar, which looked like a couple of Popsicle sticks carved into a streamlined, aerodynamic shape. I kept imagining the scene where a whole hotel ballroom full of people shouted at one another, fighting about how this little stick should be carved and where it should be placed. While he worked, Sam talked about his theories on how the bar could change the sound of a violin, emphasizing either the lower or upper end of the frequencies, altering the responsiveness. "I don't know how much you really want to know about this," he said, several times. "I feel like I'm just starting to get an understanding of this. There could be more to know." By the time he finally glued the bar onto the top it had been dark for a while and a bl.u.s.tery wind had started to blow.

"It's starting to come together," Sam said on the sidewalk outside the shop as we were about to part, me for the subway back to Manhattan, him for the walk home. "It's starting to look like a fiddle."

It would be early spring by the time just about everything that didn't look like Gene Drucker's violin had been cut and gouged and sc.r.a.ped away. I had begun to collect discarded material which I would take home in my pocket and store in a little gla.s.s jar. There was a small section of the purfling, a stiff little sandwich of wood smaller than a toothpick. There was one of the f-hole shapes that Sam had cut into the top, the discard that gave the violin one of its most distinctive features, like an incredibly fancy doughnut hole. These two shaped pieces sat on a bed of wood shavings from both the clean spruce top and the fancier flamed maple back. A few of the shavings were broad and curled, like a sliver from a wedge of good Parmesan cheese. Most were smaller, thinner slices, like what's left when you sharpen a pencil with a knife. This was all I was going to get. As work progressed and Sam labored to perfect the fiddle, all that got sc.r.a.ped away was dust. Once he suggested I smell the spruce as he sc.r.a.ped at it, and I snorted some of what might have been Gene's fiddle as if it were cocaine.

"I'm starting to really know this wood," Sam told me one afternoon when I came into the shop. It was a dreary day with a hard, cold rain, and Sam sat at his worktable with the violin top. He'd swung the bulb of an architect's lamp directly over where he worked. He pulled a small, thin metal sc.r.a.per across the wood with quick, short strokes.

"I'm in the mood to find every little place to take away more material," he said. He sc.r.a.ped away for a while, then lifted the wood plate off the worktable and held it near his ear. With a knuckle he tapped at the wood, keeping his ear close.

"I'm listening for a couple things," he said. "If all other factors are the same, the higher the note, the stronger the piece." A few times he whacked at his architect's lamp, because he knew that produced a certain pitch that he could use for comparison. Sometimes Sam picked up a little wooden recorder, the kind children learn to play in school, and blew a few notes, trying to match what he'd just heard from his wood plate. "My life would be simpler if I had perfect pitch," he said once.

"Besides pitch, the other thing I'm listening for," he said, "is the quality in that pitch. Does it have a full sound? Does it sustain? How hard a hit does it take to make it sound? None of this is random-there are whole schools of thought on what the pitches should be." He sc.r.a.ped more, tapped and listened more. "This top is very light, so my tendency is to leave it thicker. But there's a danger to leaving it too thick. And, there's also a danger in making it too thin."

At other times, after sc.r.a.ping for several minutes, Sam would take hold of the top in both hands and give it a twist.

"The fiddle is vibrating all over the place in all kinds of different ways," he said. "The strength of the plate is important in various dimensions. One is cross-wise flex. That's probably the most important." He twisted the top to demonstrate. I realized that I had skipped a breath, fearing that he would break the carefully carved piece in half. "It's not just important how much it moves but the type of movement. Is it a crisp response? Does it want to jump all the way back, or does it have a kind of gummy, more leathery feel to it. That softer leathery feeling could actually make a better, warmer sound. But it's not an absolute and I prefer a crisper feel, because generally it will probably give a louder, more clear-sounding instrument.

"All these tests," he said, "pitches, feel, weighing-they're not so much a guide to what I actually do; they're more warnings against doing anything weird or dangerous."

From spending time with Sam while he worked I'd come to recognize certain common themes, and the one that came up most frequently was represented by a phrase he repeated again and again: "All things being equal." He would begin an explanation like that and then go on to tell me a rule about arching, or thicknesses. Almost always, as he finished his explanation, he would conclude with another phrase: "Of course, things are never equal." There were just too many variables in the equation.

"Part of making decisions when you're building a fiddle is going from general ideas of what would probably be good to very specific details of what would be good in this this situation. What I'm doing now is pretty fussy. But I am actually finding places to take material away. It would have been much more convenient to establish the thicknesses and never mess with it again. situation. What I'm doing now is pretty fussy. But I am actually finding places to take material away. It would have been much more convenient to establish the thicknesses and never mess with it again.

"It's hard to know which is a really significant part of what you're doing and which is just an incidental part. And that's true at every stage."

For crucial parts of this violin, Sam was now within tenths of a millimeter of having everything that wasn't the Drucker violin removed for good. There was no going back, and yet there was still a lot of work to do. Some of it was what Sam would call whacking away at wood: carving the scroll, the neck, the fingerboard. He'd pop the rib structure with its blocks and linings off the mold, and eventually, after he'd worried over everything some more-maybe even removed a little more wood-he'd glue the back and belly into place.

Sam had revealed much of himself over these months. Maybe not as much as Joseph P. Reid, the guy who thought you could build a Stradivarius in your bas.e.m.e.nt, would imagine. But plenty. Like it or not, Sam's character and nature were built into this box. Would it be simply average, or somehow magical? And how could you really know the difference?

Chapter 9.

WHAT DO WE REALLY KNOW?.

I wish Strad had left us a little book or something," Sam Zygmuntowicz told me more than once. "Something that said, 'Make it thinner here, here, and wish Strad had left us a little book or something," Sam Zygmuntowicz told me more than once. "Something that said, 'Make it thinner here, here, and here here; leave it thicker there, there, and there there and you'll get a particular sound. That would be nice. But, of course, he didn't do that." and you'll get a particular sound. That would be nice. But, of course, he didn't do that."

Despite his teenage work at Zapf's in Philadelphia, his training with Peter Paul Prier, his intense summer tutorial with the esteemed Carl Becker, and his five-year boot camp apprenticeship with Rene Morel, Sam maintained that most of what he'd learned about building good instruments came from studying great instruments, particularly the 1716 Cessole Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu's 1735 Plowden. "They have been like textbooks," he wrote once for The Strad The Strad. Textbooks "that I can study again and again. They are archetypes of great sound and style."

Yet after I'd been hanging around his workshop for several months, Sam revealed something that is an open secret among those intimate with famous old fiddles, but not very well known to most music lovers, let alone laymen. "People don't like to talk about it," Sam said, "but most Guarneris and Strads have been tampered with in one way or another."

The implications of what he said didn't seem terribly important at the time; but the more I thought about it, the stranger it seemed. Sam had used a very good, evocative a.n.a.logy to explain what he meant by "tampering." "It's like those old American cars in Cuba that were there before Castro, and are still running. They're cla.s.sic Chevys or Fords, but chances are that most of the parts are different." Turning this over and over in my mind, I suffered a small crisis of faith and understanding. Here I was, beginning to fully appreciate this strange, hermetic world I'd been allowed to enter. A world that seemed to contradict everything we modern Americans held dear: progress, innovation, speedy technical advance. A world where less and less meant more and more. In this world the experts seemed to agree on one thing: the work of some artisans in a small Italian town three hundred years ago might never be surpa.s.sed, and was rarely, if ever, duplicated. How could this theory, this peculiarly fascinating worldview, hold up if the work of the old guys had already been altered?

First I had to learn what had been changed on those Guarneris and Stradivaris. It turned out to be a lot.

The setting for music making in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was substantially different from what came later. Among the few solid facts known about Stradivari's workshop is that he filled orders from kings in France and England. The music that would be performed on these fiddles would truly be "chamber" music, concerts given by small ensembles in relatively small palace halls. The sonic requirements placed on these fiddles were light, and their sweet, light sound matched perfectly the Baroque music they were playing. But as the decades pa.s.sed and a new, larger, and more democratic cla.s.s of audience emerged, concert halls got larger, and with them the size of orchestras. The very music got heavier and denser. Fiddles simply needed to be louder.

Some believe it was part of Stradivari's great genius that he antic.i.p.ated the change, and his later instruments were more powerful. But still not powerful enough to stay in running order for hundreds of years. Through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most older violins were taken apart and the original ba.s.s-bar replaced with a larger, thicker bar. The neck was lengthened and tilted at a sharper angle to allow for a longer fingering board and stronger strings at higher tension. Often, when the instruments were apart for these changes, the new craftsmen would regraduate the tops and backs. Of course, they were unable to add wood (except patches to repair worn spots or cracks); they always removed wood, making the bellies and backs thinner.

Sometimes, they considered more drastic action. The Hill brothers, while researching their book on Stradivari, found the account book of a Spanish priest who took up fiddle making in late-eighteenth-century Madrid. In one entry, the priest, Dom Vicenzo Ascensio, recounts how the curator of the Spanish Royal Court instruments brought him a Stradivari violin dated 1709, and "requested me to improve the quality of the tone, which was bad."

Padre Ascensio took the fiddle apart, made some alterations, but made a worried note in his book that his "improvements" were probably not enough. "If after this work the violin is not improved, I think it hopeless unless I put a new back and belly to it." According to the Hills, the court musicians were satisfied with what was left of the Stradivari and didn't ask for any more "improvements."

More than a century later, Sam Zygmuntowicz wrote that "the original intent of the old makers is only half the story." He then described what might be the common history of a typical Stradivari or Guarneri instrument: regraduated by the Italian makers named Mantegazza; given a longer neck by the famous French copyist Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, who worked in Paris in the mid-1800s; patched and restored by the Hills in London just before the turn of the twentieth century; fitted again with another new ba.s.s-bar by the master restorer Simone Sacconi in postWorld War II New York. Where in all that retrofitting could one even find the maker's original intent?

I wondered, considering how carefully Sam had worked on his ba.s.s-bar-its carving, its placement, its controversial much-argued-over springiness-wouldn't Stradivari and Guarneri have done the same? What did it mean that, decades later, someone who wasn't Stradivari or Guarneri had pried open their masterpieces and stuck in a new ba.s.s-bar, like some Cuban mechanic putting a rebuilt carburetor into a 1958 Impala? If Sam spent so many hours, days, and years studying those old fiddles, keeping notebooks full of detailed graduation charts that looked like topographical maps-whose work was he actually a.n.a.lyzing?

And I thought of a game Sam liked to play when he met with his colleagues during that summer week in Oberlin. After the dinner dishes had been cleared, as the makers finished their wine, or popped open another beer and socialized a bit before returning for the evening session in the workshop, Sam would get the attention of the table and ask a simple question, yet one among his particular craft that was loaded with portent. Okay, Sam would say, getting an impish look, "What do we really know?"

I sat in on one session of What Do We Really Know? at Oberlin, and there was a lot of banter and good-natured bl.u.s.ter as the makers debated arching and graduation and design. (Luckily, no one threw in the loaded-grenade question about ba.s.s-bar tension.) Afterward, walking from the dining hall to the workshop in the muggy Ohio night, I asked Sam what had been concluded-What did did they really know? they really know?

"Actually, very little," he said.

Well then, what did Stradivari really know? Though there is all that debate about exactly when and how he came to the workshop of Amati, there is no doubt that Antonio Stradivari learned his craft in the old guild tradition. Guilds kept secrets, and craftsmen trained in the system considered themselves only that-craftsmen-and not artists. In the flowering of the Renaissance, many artisans began to see themselves as individuals, as artists artists. With the development of printing in the sixteenth century, many of these artists produced treatises. The first was the Italian sculptor Ghiberti, says Jacques Barzun in his magisterial history of Europe. And, Barzun writes, "After Ghiberti's the deluge." Alberti, one of the architects of St. Peter's in Rome, left treatises on architecture, perspective, computation, and bookkeeping. Palladio wrote his famous works on building. Durer wrote on painting and human proportions. Da Vinci compiled his notebooks. Violin making developed and reached its apotheosis in an age where all these ideas were still in the air. Yet no violin maker from the Golden Age of Cremona left behind a manual. The rules were built into the objects themselves.

The Hills also note that for a lengthy period after his death, Stradivari's instruments were not considered the epitome of sound. That distinction belonged to people like Jakob Stainer, an Austrian luthier who worked around the same time as Stradivari, or later makers who thought they had surpa.s.sed all the guys from Cremona. But somehow, as time pa.s.sed, a different standard developed. It was back to the future. Though there would be a small, cultish group of players who preferred the Guarneri sound (a group founded by the great Paganini), they remained a subset. For a long time now, what everyone has wanted from a violin maker, no matter what they did to achieve it, was the sound of Stradivari.

But how do we really know that sound?

Despite being exceptionally difficult to talk (and write) about, sound, in a fundamental sense, is quite simple. It is air vibrating. Yet the complicated way those vibrations are produced-especially in a bowed string instrument-and the equally complicated ways those vibrations are perceived by humans give scientists from a variety of fields lifetimes' worth of work and, so far, few definitive answers. And no amount of empirical research has made hearing less personal. Sound, Sir James Beament concluded, in The Violin Explained The Violin Explained, is "subjective and susceptible to suggestion, belief and myth."

So now, when listeners think they are hearing a Stradivari, they think it is an unmatchable example of great sound. But there are plenty of examples of times when listeners, even trained experts, are just plain wrong. Such stories that I came across ranged from the most theatrical (and perhaps apocryphal) tale of how Fritz Kreisler once played an entire concert on a cheap manufactured fiddle. Of course, he was known for playing the great Guarneri that would later be named for him. As he basked in the warm applause this night, the story goes, Kreisler lifted the fiddle in the air, smashed it to pieces, and enjoyed the shocked gasps of the audience before summoning his del Gesu from the wings. You have to wonder if the audience really got what must have been the point of his theatrics. Many can recognize the sound of Kreisler, but almost no one can actually spot the sound of a great Cremonese fiddle.

More recently, David Finckel, the cellist of the Emerson Quartet, has been playing on a Zygmuntowicz copy of the famous Duport cello long played by Finckel's teacher, Mstislav Rostropovich. When the cello was finished, Finckel convinced Sam to put a fake Stradivari label inside the instrument. After concerts, when admirers came backstage to congratulate him and marvel at his instrument, Finckel would show them the Strad label. "Oh, of course," more than one music fan told him, "with that sound it had to be a Stradivari."

"I got more than a few laughs out of that," Finckel told me.

In 1963, violin maker and acoustics researcher Carleen Hutchins (one of the founders of a group of violin researchers called the Catgut Acoustical Society) wrote an article for Scientific American Scientific American in which she reported that she had taken a five-dollar violin that was used by Harvard physicist George Saunders as "his 'standard' of badness" on his many acoustical experiments. Hutchins took the bad fiddle apart, did some adjustments, and then used it in a test with a college music department audience. Players behind a screen alternated between playing the revamped five-dollar fiddle and an "excellent Cremona violin." (Hutchins did not report its maker.) The two were judged equal in tone by the trained listeners. in which she reported that she had taken a five-dollar violin that was used by Harvard physicist George Saunders as "his 'standard' of badness" on his many acoustical experiments. Hutchins took the bad fiddle apart, did some adjustments, and then used it in a test with a college music department audience. Players behind a screen alternated between playing the revamped five-dollar fiddle and an "excellent Cremona violin." (Hutchins did not report its maker.) The two were judged equal in tone by the trained listeners.

Tests like this have been undertaken for a long time. Perhaps the earliest was done in 1817 by the French National Academy. The results, according to Sir James Beament, are remarkably similar and tend to support what I began to call the Zygmuntowicz Uncertainty Principle. These tests, Beament writes, "have all produced results which one would expect from pure chance."

My favorite episode in the game of What Do We Really Know? comes from a BBC radio program from 1977, when music critic John Amos gathered together three formidable experts: violinists Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman, and Charles Beare, then (and now) one of the most respected and successful violin experts and dealers in the world. Stern and Zukerman entertained millions (and made millions) playing the fiddle. On Beare's word, millions could be spent obtaining one.

For the test, the BBC had gathered four instruments. One was a later-period Stradivari, the 1725 instrument dubbed the Chaconne. One was a 1739 Guarneri del Gesu. Another was a violin made in 1846 by Vuillaume, the most respected maker of his day, and a brilliant copyist. The fourth fiddle was a little over a year old, produced by a British luthier who was actually still alive. All four would be played in the London Broadcasting House studio by a noted British soloist. He would play parts of the same two pieces on each. First, the Bruch violin concerto in G minor, whose opening allowed the player to work on all four strings of the instrument. Second, the iconic Bach Chaconne. The violins would be played behind a screen so the judges could not pick up any visual clues.

From the start they complained. Isaac Stern said the recording studio was the wrong place to perform such a test. Charles Beare said it didn't matter what people heard in the audience, "the difference between great and good is what [the violin] does for a great player under the ear with an orchestra." Zukerman didn't have a chance to protest before John Amos gave them all a figurative pat on the hand and promised, "It's not an examination of you. We're just wondering whether one can tell immediately the tone differences."

In this case, it turns out, these two great virtuosos and one renowned expert might as well have flipped a coin to determine their opinions. No one got more than two out of four correct. And the correct guesses and wrong guesses were completely different among the three men.

The talk continued for a little while after the results. Isaac Stern strongly advised young players to work with a new instrument until they knew enough and had enough money to buy an old one. (Twenty-five years later, after he commissioned Sam Zygmuntowicz to copy each of his famous old Guarneris, Stern often lent the copies to up-and-coming young players.) John Amos tried to elicit some final lessons learned from his panel of experts. Zukerman said his Guarneri made him feel better when he was nervous. Beare, the dealer in old instruments, stuck to his guns that older was better.

Finally, as the program was running out of time, Maestro Stern said, "We hope your listeners are as pleasantly confused as we are."

Confused, to say the least. That's what I was. The world of violins began to seem like a variation of the famous tale of the emperor's new clothes. Or a strange little society where there was some form of ma.s.s hypnosis at work. Stradivaris are the greatest violins ever made because...everybody says so. They're better because...no one knows. They sound better...except when they don't, or when it's not a Stradivari that you think you're hearing.

I was in the midst of all this uncertainty, trying to understand what it said about violin making that no one really knew what made great great great, when a curator in New York threw the proverbial hand grenade into the figurative room full of violin experts. He said that he'd scientifically determined that the most famous Stradivari violin of all couldn't have been made by Stradivari.

The story of the violin known as the Messiah is perhaps the epitome of the Stradivari mystique-though mythos might be a better word.

The Messiah was made in 1716 but was still on a shelf in Stradivari's workshop when he died in 1737. As with almost everything connected to Stradivari, the reason it was never sold led to much speculation. The most romantic conclusion-and perhaps the correct one-is that the old guy knew that this was his most perfect creation in a long and distinguished career and he simply could not part with it. As the Stradivari-owning violinist and writer Joseph Wechsberg said in his entertaining and generally clear-eyed book The Glory of the Violin The Glory of the Violin, before and after the Messiah "no better violin was ever made."

Antonio's youngest son, Paolo Stradivari, who shunned the family business and became a merchant, didn't seem to have such reverence for the fiddle. After his father's death, he agreed to sell the violin to Count Cozio di Salabue in 1755. Though Paolo died before the transaction was complete, the count made it part of his great collection for about fifty years, until he sold it to Luigi Tarisio, the man who had become the premier collector and rescuer of Stradivari's instruments as the master's reputation faded in the decades after his death.

From there, the story gets nearly comical. Tarisio often brought his Cremona discoveries to Paris, where J. B. Vuillaume would act as a broker for resale. (And who, while the Strads were in his possession, often made copies so frighteningly exact that there are plenty of rumors that a number of instruments considered Stradivari are actually Vuillaume.) While in Paris, Tarisio spoke often of this perfect violin he had obtained-it was then named for the count who'd originally bought it: the Salabue. In fact, Tarisio mentioned this fiddle so often that one day Vuillaume's son-in-law Delphin Alard, a great violin soloist himself, had finally heard enough. "Monsieur Tarisio," Alard reportedly said, "your Stradivari is like the Messiah-he never comes."

Tarisio emulated the master maker; he died before selling the perfect violin. A solitary and miserly obsessive, he was reportedly found in a dingy Milan garret, clutching two violins (can we imagine the ident.i.ty of one of them?), his cold body lying on a mattress stuffed with money he'd made over the years selling the old Cremonese masterpieces. Vuillaume was the first dealer to learn of Tarisio's death and made a quick trip to Lombardy, where he bought everything from Tarisio's survivors, including the perfect Stradivari violin, which he now named the Messiah.

Back in Paris with his find, Vuillaume did some of that Cuban mechanical work on the fiddle, lengthening the neck to put it into modern playing shape, changing the ba.s.s-bar. He probably made many copies based on its form. And though he set a price on Stradivari's masterpiece, it was always too high for a taker. The Messiah stayed in a gla.s.s case in his shop. Whether that was purposeful or not, Vuillaume, like Taris...o...b..fore him, like the great Stradivari before that, died before parting with the Messiah. Of such coincidences are legends made.

Finally, after Vuillaume's estate was settled, the Messiah became the possession of the man who'd inspired its memorable name, Delphin Alard. He already owned a Strad and didn't much care to play his new one.

The Hills bought it in 1890 for 50,000 francs, about 2,000 British pounds. After a series of sales to people who were more collectors than performers, the Messiah ended up back in the possession of the Hills. Though it had hardly been played throughout its life, the violin was perhaps the best-known instrument in England, having arrived for a show in antique instruments in 1872 and been the subject of a series of articles in the British press on the majesty of the Cremonese masters.

The two surviving Hill brothers decided that the Messiah should be kept pristine and agreed to donate the violin to the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. (Once again, the "curse" of this fiddle appeared; both brothers died before the legal work was done.) But eventually, after World War II ended, the Messiah went on display at the Ashmolean, destined to be studied and revered for ages as the most perfectly preserved example of Antonio Stradivari's genius.

Then, in 1997, Stewart Pollens, a New Yorker who worked preserving the violin collection at the city's Metropolitan Museum, got permission from the Messiah's keepers in Oxford to take some high-quality photographs of the violin. It is a rare person who actually gets to touch the instrument.

As Pollens later recounted it, he'd long had some suspicions about the authenticity of the Messiah. There was so much legend and myth mixed into the provenance of this fiddle that some discrepancies in the doc.u.mentation were ignored. For instance, a few of the descriptions that Count Cozio made while he owned it didn't match those of the Hills. Two patches inside the instrument noted by Count Cozio were not mentioned by the Hills, who wrote an entire monograph about the Messiah in 1882. Pollens was not the first to question the authenticity of the Messiah. One story had it that Simone Sacconi, the legendary twentieth-century restorer and copyist, who'd devoted his life to studying Stradivari, had been given an audience with the violin and declared it a copy by Vuillaume. But decades had pa.s.sed since there'd been any serious public discussion of the Messiah and its authenticity.

That changed when Pollens sent some of those high-resolution photos he'd taken to a German scientist, Dr. Peter Klein, who a.n.a.lyzed the violin's spruce belly using the technique of dendrochronology. The growth of a tree is unique to the climatic conditions of each year it is alive, evidenced by its internal rings. Dendrochronology can compare the growth rings of a certain tree with a collected database of trees from the same region and give a surprisingly accurate date for the last year that tree lived.

Klein told Stewart Pollens that the spruce of the Messiah front had been alive in 1738. Since Stradivari died in 1737, this finding started a new-and incredibly two-fisted-game of What Do We Really Know?

While it may be true that violin makers will fight vociferously over the tension in a ba.s.s-bar, that kind of argument really is a function of caring more and more about less and less. Pollen's claim directly pointed to the validity and expertise of violin experts and dealers, a very small coterie who operated as gatekeepers to a rarefied place where top fiddles were reaching prices of nearly $5 million. There was more and more money involved, and these people cared quite a bit. If the most famous fiddle in the world had fooled all the experts, who would fully trust a dealer's appraisal again?

"When you try to move in on the world of dealers," I was told by a well-known violin maker who'd tried it once, "they'll kill you. Not literally kill you. But almost."

The charge against Pollens was led by Charles Beare, the London expert who'd so confidently told the BBC audience (after not identifying correctly half of the violins played for him) that modern makers needed to just keep trying to make them as good as the old guys. Along with the remaining heirs of the Hill family and officials at the Ashmolean, Beare enlisted two different dendrochronolgists to date the Messiah. Unsurprisingly, they were given greater access to the instrument and came back with a finding that the wood could be last dated in the 1680s, and furthermore, it matched well with the wood of other acknowledged Strads from his Golden Period in the early 1700s.

That didn't end the argument so much as kick it to a higher and more shrill level. There were intimations of a cover-up, broad intimations of incompetence from both sides, and some good old-fashioned mudslinging. Pollens, writing to an online violin Web site called Sound-post, complained about ad hominem attacks against him. The editor of the site collected all postings on the Messiah controversy under the rubric "Tree Ring Circus."