Early Music Advance Access published March 29, 2011

The mysteries of Stradivari

Stewart Pollens, Stradivari (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), £90 / $150

Forgive this reviewer for breaking Rule One (‘Don’t judge a book by its cover’) when seeing the names on display here. Stradivari is practically a household name, synonymous with miraculously perfect craftsmanship, Stewart Pollens is one of the world’s foremost authorities on musical instruments, and the Cambridge University Press imprint speaks for itself. The cover’s real clincher, however, is the breathtaking photograph of a violin—not that this is a coffee-table book. There are other volumes with larger, more lavish pictures of instruments but few with so many excellent photographs and drawings of their associated paraphernalia. It is the author’s unrivalled familiarity with, and ability to ‘read’ such things as forms, patterns, fittings and templates that makes this volume so valuable.

Pollens manages to debunk many of the myths that have accumulated around Stradivari to an almost Shakespearean degree—there have even been claims that he never existed—without destroying the mystique of the man. Setting the scene with a panorama of Cremona and a biography of Stradivari, the author extracts everything there is to be found in the scanty documentation of the luthier’s life. The following chapters are then devoted to each of the main areas of Stradivari’s production. Pride of place goes to violins, violas, cellos and their bows, but then come pochettes, violas da gamba and d’amore, lutes, the mandola and mandolino, the guitar and the harp.

The author does not trouble himself with one recent, cinematic myth: admirers of the film, The red violin (1998), will be disappointed that the blood of neither of Stradivari’s wives has been found in his varnish. (There might, however, be screenwriters kicking themselves that they omitted the murder of his first wife’s first husband by her own brother.) The first widespread myth to go is that Stradivari was apprenticed to Nicolò Amati. In fact he is not known to have been apprenticed anywhere. His circle of acquaintances, in addition to luthiers, included architects, a sculptor, an engineer and probably the craftsmen of a Cremonese intarsia workshop, although the extent that these friendships contributed to Stradivari’s skill as an instrument-maker can only be felt, not measured.

Measurement is integral to the study of instrument-making but, after presenting all the evidence of Stradivari’s painstaking planning and formulas, templates and paper patterns, Pollens time and again shows how instinctive and improvised his execution was: ‘freehand, as it were’. We are disabused of ‘the romanticized notion that each of Stradivari’s violins was conceived as a unique work of art’, since there is clear evidence that necks and bodies were made in batches, and yet Stradivari was no ‘sausage-machine’. The image of a creator with tool in hand, still open to the possibilities of the moment and the potential value of an imperfection, in the curves and ridges of a scroll for example, will remind musicians of certain composers, pen in hand. Bach, Handel and Mozart easily spring to mind. Even when carving pochettes, those sonic eunuchs of the violin family, Stradivari still worked hard to optimize their tone.

The material devoted to the mysteries of Stradivari’s varnish could come from a Harry Potter novel (‘pigment from ancient mummified remains’, ‘40 drops of dragon’s blood’) or an alchemical treatise (‘the ingredients are to be combined, allowed to stand for several weeks with periodic shaking, then heated in a water bath for fifteen minutes, and filtered’), until things go sci-fi as Pollens fires up the ‘Fourier transform infrared spectroscope’. Hats off to the author who is equally adept as a luthier, chemist, physicist, mathematician, historian and communicator of difficult concepts in a comprehensible way. For example, when defending his belief that the Ashmolean Museum’s ‘Messiah’ violin was made after Stradivari’s death, Pollens escorts the reader through the intricacies of dendrochronology. The truth about the ‘Messiah’ instrument is, however, still the subject of controversy.

The chapter to which the Early Music reader will pay particular attention is ‘Violin fittings and setup’, in other words: what is a ‘period instrument’? The answer is frustratingly difficult to pin down, not through lack of evidence but rather because of the wide range of information the evidence yields. In the workshop, experimentation had not yet ceded ground to standardization, but once instruments left Cremona, contemporary taste for a nasal tone meant that tables and backs were routinely ‘regraduated’, to use the euphemism which makes Pollens’s toes palpably curl. (This perhaps accounts for why many Strads sound acidic at close quarters but project deep into concert halls.)

The upshot for historically informed performance practitioners, for whom standardization is often more important than experimentation, is that new orthodoxies have evolved for practical reasons, based on the evidence which best conforms to current tastes. This affects dimensions of bass bar, sound post, strings, bridge, fingerboard etc. (The same might be said about current pitch standards.) Most string players are looking for an instrument that will blend with an orchestra, a clone of a Baroque ideal. As we have seen, however, Stradivari did not do clones.

Some orthodoxies vary from region to region, just as playing styles vary. Violinists in Germany will quote from the Quantz treatise they have propped against the music stand while brazenly using unhistorical set-ups, including chin rests and shoulder pads, while violinists in England, few of whom read Quantz, sniff at the length of their neighbour’s fingerboard. Pollens cites one Stradivari violin as an example of how an instrument can fall victim to dogma. It belongs to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, where the author was Conservator of Musical Instruments. Long before his time, the violin was sent to be ‘baroqued’ by a highly respected craftsman. The result was disastrous, not Pollens’s word but my own. This is a violin I spent time playing and recording on, a physically uncomfortable and musically unsatisfying process that yielded at best a cold, hard sound. Before reading Pollens’s book, I believed this to be the inevitable fate of a violin imprisoned in a museum and played only promiscuously. Now I can see that the conventional approach to conversion did not suit this instrument. The craftsman restored one of my own violins with beautiful results.

When looking for a metaphor for a historically informed approach to performance, we could do worse than contemplate, with the help of Pollens’s excellent book, the life’s work of Stradivari: plan, calculate, measure and then have the courage to go ‘freehand, as it were’.

Early Music, © The Author 2011. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.