Experts have argued for years about whether there were two or three distinctly different varnish layers on a Stradivari. Peter Beare’s feeling is that there were three: a ground layer that went into the wood, an isolating “mid coat” and then the color layer on top. “You have to look at the great fiddles. If they’d put the pigment straight on, then it would have got into the end grain, but it hasn’t,” he said. It is difficult, he told me, to tell how much the extraordinary tone of Amati and Stradivari violins comes simply from their age: the wood has become lighter in weight, the pigments have oxidized. “Who knows, it could be just that. Natural oxidation over three hundred years: there’s nothing like it. But I think there was something else as well.”
It is hard to guess now what pigments were used. Some people swear by dragon’s blood. “But I use madder,” he said, describing how he mixed rosin with alum and a tincture of madder. Is that because he believes it is what Stradivari used? “Perhaps,” he said. “But really because I’ve invested the time in it. If you start experimenting with everything then you could take ten lifetimes, and in the end you have to get some varnish on the wood.”
There are five Cremonese violins and one viola held in air-conditioned splendor in the great town hall beside the cathedral in Cremona. But before I bought my ticket to see one of the greatest fiddles in the world, I noticed an old carriage in a nearby room and went to have a look. It was made in 1663—when Stradivari was twenty—and was owned by the Carozzas, the richest family in Cremona. Today it looks rather ridiculous, the kind of squat little pumpkin that Cinderella could have fled the ball in; it is even the same reddish orange color. It looks like the horse-drawn equivalent of a jolly Volkswagen Beetle, although I am sure, given its ownership credentials and its general lightness, in its time it was a cheeky Ferrari. Seeing the little coach so beautifully restored I could imagine it pulling up outside Stradivari’s workshop, the footman grandly unfolding the steps with their soft leather covers, and a member of the Carozza family delicately stepping across mud to collect the latest instrument.
And then I could imagine her returning a few minutes later, grumbling into the white leather interior to report to her companion that the varnish was not ready: the violin couldn’t be played for another month. The carriage would leave at a canter, its matching pumpkin-shaped lamps swinging grumpily behind it. But the coachman, overhearing, may well have smiled—in sympathy with the craftsman—because unlike his employers he would have known a great deal about the problems of varnish. He may also have had something to say about secret varnish recipes. In the eighteenth century they were quite a talking point.
For any coachman in those days it was a constant battle keeping the carriage shiny—the sun in summer and the ice in winter would do terrible damage to the resin. Sometimes coaches would be seen swerving dangerously from one side of the road to the other. No, not dangerous driving, the drivers would have said triumphantly if anyone had stopped them. They were merely trying to stay in the shadows to stop the sun from cracking their varnish. The British tended to feel this behavior was excessive, and “in England many a fine varnished coach is totally spoiled soon after its being used; by the indolence and slovenliness of the coach-men,”22 wrote one Frenchman, horrified at the shoddy state of the nation’s vehicles.
At the beginning of the eighteenth century there had been tremendous excitement when a Parisian called Monsieur Martin invented a long-lasting amber-colored varnish. People knew that one of the ingredients was copal—an expensive resin from the Americas that Stradivari could well have used (although of course Martinengo would not have seen it until he was an old man). But the rest of the recipe was kept a closely guarded secret. Rich people had their carriages coated with it and the Society of Arts and Sciences in London quickly offered a prize to any Englishman who could make something similar. They virtually guaranteed they would not have to pay out their thirty pounds by setting ridiculously tough criteria. The successful varnish would be “hard, transparent, of a light color, capable of the finest polish and not liable to crack.” And as a test it would be “exposed to the hot sun, frost or wet for six months.” Martin of Paris had laughed when he heard about it, and had commented that if someone ever passed that test “then I will have done with my Varnish.”
An armed guard sat outside the violin room in Cremona, looking bored, clicking his fingers one by one. The pleasures, if there had ever been any, in being surrounded by eighteenth-century paintings of great fat cherubs (they had just become plumper in European painting with the arrival of chocolate and white sugar) had evidently worn off, and after I paid my entrance fee he and a colleague walked in with me wearily. It was a side room but a grand one, full of candelabra and Corinthian columns. The six instruments were in individual display cases, so I could walk around and see every detail. They have to be played every day, so that they remain violins rather than reverting to their natural state of being pieces of wood. An unplayed instrument quickly loses its ability to vibrate properly: after a major restoration it takes a month or more to return to concert standard; rather like the musician who plays it, it has to practice regularly.
Orange is a warning color—dangerous parts of machinery are deliberately painted with it, the theory being that it is the most eye-catching color and people will see it and jump out of the way. And in Cremona’s city hall it is the orange violin which jumps out straightaway, shouting: “Look at me first!”; the yellow and brown ones don’t make the same demands. Almost all top violins have names—it is part of creating, or sustaining, a sense that they are all individuals. Mostly they are called after their most famous owners, but this one—Il Cremonese—is named after its birthplace. It was made in 1715, when Stradivari was seventy-one and at the height of his genius. It returned to Cremona in 1961, after a lot of wandering.
A week earlier I would have been surprised to think I could find wooden instruments fascinating to look at as well as to hear. But I had been well trained by Peter Beare, and this was an extraordinary piece. “Look at the back,” he had advised. “And move your head, pretend the fiddle is moving in the light.” As I walked toward it I gasped. The back of the instrument was crafted from one piece of maple, and it was boldly patterned like a tiger’s coat—so full of life it seemed as if it was going to leap off the log and start to tango. How many people, I wondered, had stood here and taken notes and wondered what on earth the maestro had done to let the wood breathe and flex in exactly that way.
As I moved my head up and down, the patterns wiggled: it was the ripples in the wood that trapped the light and then refracted it away at angles which were mesmerizing. No wonder everyone wanted to replicate “the tiger.” As a piece of abstract patterning in browns and oranges it was one of the most beautiful pieces of wood I had ever seen; as a musical instrument it was a masterpiece. I understood for the first time what I was looking for—and what so many people were trying to reproduce. This violin had an inner flame to it, a fire in its back and to a lesser extent in its belly. As I moved on to the other instruments—thinking that I should have looked at them first, as their flames were there, but cooler—I saw that the two guards had moved toward Il Cremonese. They too were looking and comparing and moving their heads up and down. That day the delicate instrument had come alive for all of us.
The relationship between color and music is a strangely entwined one: sometimes people use the same language—words like “color,” “tone,” “shade” and “harmony”—to describe both. In Brave New World, Aldous Huxley imagined a future where people would go to concerts to experience “scent and color” instruments where each note transmitted enticing smells of sandalwood and other perfumes and projected pictures on the ceiling. Huxley was not looking to the future but was laughing at the present. In 1919 a Danish singer, Thomas Wilfred, designed the “Clavilux” (a combination word like megilp, combining “klavier” with “light”), which involved dreamy transmissions of colored light projected by revolving mirrors. His dream was that eve
ry household would have one. And in 1910 the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin wrote an entire composition— Prometheus—for a “Color Organ.” His technology was even more basic than Wilfred’s—Scriabin’s composition was basically written for a musical instrument attached to a piece of wood and a few lightbulbs—but there was little to compare it with, and the composer was excited. It provided a chance for him to explain a relationship between color and music that was clear to him, yet which most people did not understand.
Scriabin was synaesthetic, which meant his brain made connections between things that the majority of people do not believe to be fundamentally connected. Synaesthesia can take several forms (people can see colors in pain, or in letters of the alphabet) but Scriabin “saw” music and “heard” colors. The Finnish composer Jean Sibelius had the same gift. “What color would you like your stove, Mr. Sibelius?” he was once asked. “F Major,” he said vaguely. So it was duly painted green.23
Scriabin would incidentally have seen F major as being dark red; his green stove would have been in the key of A. And that is probably part of the problem with designing synaesthetic instruments: nobody can agree what color goes with which note. If I were Scriabin, for example, Il Cremonese would be visually singing to me in G; if I were Isaac Newton it would be the color of D; and if I were George Field the violin’s orange would be my F.24 If there is indeed a direct relationship between music and color, then every lucky individual who can perceive it is tuned slightly differently.
I had found the Stradivari violin, but I had not really found Stradivari. Because the curious thing is that in a way he wasn’t there. One oddity about Cremona is how little it seems to love its most famous son. Which is not to say it doesn’t love violins. They are everywhere—pastry shops sell cakes in the shapes of fiddles, sweet shops are full of Cremona candy, and everywhere there are windows through which anyone can peer and see craftsmen and women squinting over small slices of wood. But Stradivari seems like an unloved child.
It took me three visits to find his gravestone in the Plaza Roma. The first two times nobody could tell me where it was: on my third attempt I asked a woman walking an Irish setter to help me, and she led me to a place on the opposite side of the square from where the tourist map had marked an X. Stradivari’s body had been tipped into the common grave long before, she said. This was just a memorial. A man came up while I stood in front of the flat stone, carefully making out the letters “STRA . . .” through the murk of a puddle. It was just a replica, he said in a gravelly voice; the original was in the town library. “Stradivari’s workshop was over there,” he said, pointing to a McDonald’s hamburger outlet in an ugly new office block. He looked scornfully at the red marble plinth on which the stone sat. “It’s dirty,” he said. “They don’t look after it, the council.” I placed some scarlet geraniums from the municipal gardens beside Stradivari’s puddle, and left it to dry out in the morning sunshine.
Stradivari’s first home, on the Corso Garibaldi, was even more disappointing. The run-down town house was marked by a small plaque announcing that the liutaio Antonio Stradivari lived there from 1667 to 1680 with his first wife Francesca Ferraboschi. It didn’t say they had six children there, but they did, and at one time the place must have been full of life. It was hard to imagine that now, or to know which was a worse sign of decay: the pigeons emerging from broken netting in the attic, or the kitsch German woodwork sold in the shop below. It was ironic: shiny pine kittens curled up in hideous hearts, in the home of a man whose work once required the most subtle awareness of grain and varnish.
Just five doors away I saw the studio of a violin-maker whose name I recognized: could Riccardo Bergonzi be a descendant of Carlo Bergonzi, who made some of the greatest violins after Stradivari died? I went in; Bergonzi was there, and agreed to show me his studio. If there really is anything in a violin that reflects its maker, then Bergonzi’s instruments must be full of laughter and life. He was a jazz saxophonist in his spare time, and his artistic skills were evident throughout his workshop. Not just in the jazzy paintings—his upstairs showroom was startling in its breezy creativity, orange instruments contrasting spectacularly with bright turquoise walls. There was little on the shelves of his workshop that Martinengo wouldn’t have recognized. There was madder and turpentine, safflower and dragon’s blood, turmeric and propolis. The local propolis was “as yellow as gold” and as bendy as willow, Bergonzi said. Gamboge and saffron—which I would meet more formally in my search for yellow—were there too. There was plenty of mastic—which he let me taste, and it was horrible—and benzoin, which he said was “flexible and brilliant; better than mastic.” Having made my imaginary journey with Martinengo, they all seemed like old friends.
He dismissed the speculation about Stradivari’s varnish as simply that. Perhaps, he said, the recipe was lost because there wasn’t a recipe. “My theory is that he never made his varnish, but bought it from a shop.” So for Bergonzi the “trick” was in the tailoring. “Maybe Stradivari would go and see the professional varnish-maker and say that last one was nice, but it’s summer now and I need something softer,” he suggested. Perhaps Stradivari’s “secret” was that he varied the varnish according to the needs of the violin, rather than keeping to a formula.
He was a descendant of Carlo Bergonzi, he confirmed, but he hadn’t known that when he walked into a violin shop at the age of eleven to buy an instrument, “and fell in love with the smells and the wood and the atmosphere.” It was as if his genes had jumped up and said “I belong here.” Three years later he went to the violin school Mussolini had started. The place had been quiet for years, but in the 1970s it was beginning to boom: “It was full of Californians and Australians: men with long beards and big gestures.” He remembered all sorts of hallucinogenic happenings: “there were green violins, blue ones, anything you could imagine . . .” And then he paused, suddenly serious. “But I do believe that when you make an instrument you have to respect that you are part of a story. You can’t play around with that too much.”
After I left Bergonzi’s studio I went down to the cathedral and found two things. First, around the sacrament chapel, I saw a carved procession of three violins and several lutes marching up the columns. This is the part of the church where the sacrament is reserved—where the physical becomes sublime and the sublime becomes physical—so it is important for Cremona that this should be the place where music is honored. And the second thing I saw was some curious-looking wood in the choir stalls curving around the back of the altar. With an approving nod from the verger, I slipped under the rope, and found that behind each choir stall was a different picture, made of the contrast between delicately varnished maple woods, spruce, cherry and what looked like walnut. Each one was a celebration of Cremona’s fame for creating magic out of wood.
A few scenes were biblical—suffering Christs, patient Marys— although mostly they were secular—people tending cattle or returning home to medieval villages. Most interesting for me was a lute, alone on a mythical plain, waiting to be played. There were no violins: perhaps they had not been invented yet. I wondered whether the pictures were made by an anonymous luthier, taking time out from his usual line of work. Maybe even my Sephardic master, although that would have been too much to hope for.
I looked at that stained wood and remembered Stradivari’s spirited bill for “one filippo,” his astonishing tiger-like violin, and Riccardo Bergonzi’s curious insistence that he was—they all were—part of a story. And looking again at that lonely, iconic lute, I was reminded also of a Jewish legend—of the Golem who can be created from mud by singing it to life with special sounds. The Golem lives and breathes, but always preserves deep inside it the spirit of the one who made it. But most of all I remembered an extraordinary musical performance—at a tiny AIDS hospice in Thailand, during a tour by violinist Maxim Vengerov in his role as a cultural ambassador for Unicef. Vengerov took out his Stradivarius violin (the “ex Kiesewetter” made in 1723) and played
to the audience of fifteen—including visitors—with all the energy and concentration that I had seen him give to a packed Sydney Opera House a few months earlier. He played a fugue by Bach, and the music seemed to take on a life of its own. It floated around the bed where a young soldier lay: his AIDS was discovered after a sergeant beat him so badly his intestines fell out. And it rested for a moment on a little boy whose hill-tribesman father was HIV positive, and who would soon be an orphan. It swirled gently around a middle-aged woman with purple blotches on her arms, and an old man, so weak that he couldn’t even raise his head.
And in the music there was not only the quiet drama of the present moment but also Vengerov’s own memories—of growing up in Siberia in an apartment so small they had to break down the kitchen wall to accommodate the grand piano, of children from his mother’s orphanage coming round to listen to music, and his deeper story about how his grandparents had taught him humility—when as a little boy he wanted to boast about his talent. The whole history was there in that performance, as it is when a great player plays, and when the moment is right.
No one will ever know why Martinengo ended up in Cremona. But the story I have told—in order to bring alive some of the mysteries of orange and of varnishes—is culled from what we know happened to thousands of Jews at that time, as they tried to make a place for themselves in a changing world. Whichever way our luthier travelled from Spain, there would have been terrible things and wonderful things to be seen and collected by a refugee craftsman who was wandering Europe as Europe woke up to itself. And perhaps—while he taught the Amati brothers how to cut from patterns, set the ribs of a lute and how to boil up turpentine with dragon’s blood—our luthier would have found them ready to learn a real secret.