Strads

Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Facie bat Anno 17--

Neatly pasted on the inside of an old violin newly discovered in somebody's attic, many a musty label bearing such an inscription has caused hearts to beat faster. Most violins so discovered are fakes or "copies" made in Italy, Germany or Japan to retail at between $5 and $50. Real "Strads," violins made by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, bring from $10,000 to $85,000. There are only about 540 authentic known Strads in existence, 163 of which are owned in the U. S., and when one of them changes hands the cat-eyed dealers and collectors of three continents record the event.

This week Manhattan music lovers gawped and gloated while more than $1,000,000 worth of Strads (violins, violas, cellos: 20 instruments in all) were played at a single Carnegie Hall concert. Noted Violinist Efrem Zimbalist played on his famed Lamoureux (Strads, like Pullman cars, all have individual names). Listeners marveled at the mellow, homogeneous tone quality of the eight glistening, red-gold instruments played by the Musical Art Quartet and the Stradivarius .Quartet of New York, the small string orchestra over which senatorial Walter Damrosch waved a deliberate baton. The occasion for this Stradivarius display was the 200th anniversary of the death of Antonio Stradivari. Proceeds went to the recently founded Stradivarius Memorial Association, which helps make fine instruments available to talented young musicians.

Antonio Stradivari, whose life work today represents an estimated value of about $13,000,000, was the finest violin maker in 17th and 18th-Century Cremona (Italy), which was the violin-making capital of the world. He married twice, produced eleven children, waxed wealthy enough to buy wife No. 1 a splendid funeral, lived to be 93, and kept on making finer & finer violins up to the year of his death. Contemporaries described him as a long, spare figure of a man who spent virtually all of his waking hours at a workbench littered with the tools of his craft.

In his early twenties Stradivari was still an apprentice in the workshop of Nicolo Amati, whose father and grandfather before him had made fine violins. For some 20 years after he left the workshop, Stradivari continued to imitate Amati's small, yellow-varnished models, then began to experiment with a style of his own. At the age of 56, when most men begin to take things easier, Stradivari painstakingly evolved an entirely new model, broader and darker in color than the Amati. All his life he had been a feverish but carefully slow worker; his later years showed no letdown. Though some of his last fiddles bear the marks of an old man's failing eyesight and trembling hands, the instruments he produced after the age of 83 are especially prized. (Violinists Kreisler, Zimbalist, Jacques Gordon, Heifetz own Strads of this period.)

Violin makers, even chemists and acoustical engineers, have taken Stradivari's instruments apart to see what makes them so good. One theory is that the unusually lustrous and transparent varnish Stradivari used had something to do with the Strad tone. But Antonio Stradivari's secret, like his grave, is still undiscovered. Where those bones are today, and what makes a Strad a Strad, nobody knows.

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