| Cremona,
Italy |
| Violin
Making |
| By Will Sullivan |
| The floor
of Antonia's flat in Cremona, Italy is covered with curvaceous, delicate
wood shavings, and broken edges of overstretched strings. The walls
are tenuously decorated with a ghostly menagerie of unvarnished instrument
carapaces. For a room dedicated to music, the air is silent as a treasonous
whisper. This world of creation is at once the making of music and the
cessation of its sound, a bastion of hope, and a graveyard of possibility.
Hildegard shakes her head and grabs her coat from behind the door, leading
us into the street and cursing under her breath at the damp falling weather
outside, “The instruments don’t do well in this weather.” She says.
Such are the
worries of her craft. For she is artisan of an ancient sort, a violinmaker,
and for one night in Northern Italy, our host. |
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| It’s October
28, and I’ve arrived in Cremona with a group of musician friends, a
brief stopover on our way through the to the Alps and into Bavaria’s Black
Forest. After a day of driving through the warm breezes of the Mediterranean,
the weather in Cremona is abrupt and as we walk along towards the promise
of a warming drink, the city lay shrouded in a deep autumnal fog, hovering
low over the building tops and the slippery streets covered in fallen,
rotting leaves, their vibrant colors melding to a dark chocolate brown.
Located on the road to Brescia, Cremona seems to happen, rather than appear.
Traveling along the motorway, the city may not even merit a second
glance after a sobering day of shopping in Milan; and romanticizing over
the Shakespearean projections of what lay beyond in Verona. But it’s the
architecture created inside the buildings that’s the true treasure, for
Cremona is the ancestral home of the violin. Although I caught only a brief
glimpse of Antonia’s workshop, the hum of numerous other artisan instrument
shops reverberates through the streets as we walk, and some unknown electricity,
like the tinted yellow-orange charged air before a thunderstorm, seems
to illuminates the mist. Immaculately dressed Italians stroll along
the cobblestone avenues, wafting past us lazily, and carrying with them
the faint cologne of strong coffee and expensive cigarettes. Sound
and sensation are at their visceral peak. |
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| Italian
culture is almost preternaturally attuned to such feelings. This multi
faceted sensual tapestry feels raw, like a winter wind that numbs your
face, a frigid gust that momentarily steels your breath. One can become
over stimulated by the breadth of offerings. But the Italians deliver their
culture with a certain sense of panache the French lack; it rarely feels
forced and therefore it rarely chills the blood.
In Italy,
beauty is ubiquitous, in the clothes, the cars, the food, the wine and
most notably the art. But the paintings that saturate the galleries of
Rome and Florence to the south, like a voluptuous Tuscan wine, are a mere
shadow of the artistry of the violin. Their beauty is unquestioned, but
it is, unarguably, two-dimensional. The violin is not challenged by the
restrictions imposed by canvas or stucco and so it is, perhaps, both the
most sophisticated and most misunderstood art form in Italy. |
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Offshore
Resources Gallery
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| A three
dimensional palate of architecture and penitent mathematical precision,
the violin is unique in it’s ability influence emotion through sound. The
promise of its haunting, perfectly played notes, echo somewhere in the
deepest chasms of the heart and soul. Within its structure, the violin
bears the inherent temperament of human emotion, yet with a longing no
human voice, no pen, no sweeping stroke of the brush could ever produce.
In half
a millennium, beginning most notably, with the founding of Andre Amati’s
workshop in 1560, the basic design of the instrument has changed little,
and many would argue, has been improved upon nearly as much. It may be
the quintessential combination of renaissance sensibility and baroque romanticism.
But other far less tangible notions also dictate the structure of the violin:
those of passion and purity.
Antonia,
and those practicing their craft in Cremona, are following these notions
in hopes of pulling them from obscurity and fastening them concretely to
the delicate wooden pieces making up the instrument’s body. And because
of this, it would seem that Cremona’s austere presentation is dictated
by choice, gently penitent to the unsurpassable beauty created within its
walls. |
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| We stroll
through the Piazza de Stradavari, and beside the Terrazzo, one of the
finest remaining examples of a medieval tower in all of Italy. The astronomical
clock, nearly 400 years old, gives of an aged golden reflection on the
street below. But my attention is fixed on the little room across the plaza,
and the darkened window behind which lay on the finest collections of rare
Stradivarius violins in the world. Known for their tonal magnificence,
Stradivarius’s instruments are prized by world-class musicians to this
day.
It’s amazing
to think of something so perfect, that it has not only lasted for 450
years, but also, still plays with the same vigor of its youth, and the
added experience of four lifetimes. Think of a jockey, designing and building
a thoroughbred from scratch and then racing it for hundreds of years, its
skill increasing with age. That still, may be a far cry from the performance
of a vintage Strad. |
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Offshore
Resources Gallery
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| The night
is admittedly brief, for us the weary travelers, and Antonia, the tireless
artist. We talk briefly of the Stradivari Institute of violin making,
and the instruments that are coming out of the city these days. Many voice
the frustration that those making instruments in modern times are given
little credit against the Strads. One critic even went as far as to say,
"‘it may be beautiful now, but let’s see how it plays in 250 years."
It must be frustrating to create art that may not be appreciated in your
lifetime. But, I think, this has always been the great dilemma of those
who hold genius in their hands. With it, comes a certain madness, and a
certain ephemeral frustration at the brevity, and poorly designed longevity
of the human lifetime. Somewhere in their minds, I wonder if all of them
don’t think with a little work, they could design a better model. If anyone
should undertake such goals, it should be those in the business of giving
the voice of an angel to a delicate construction of wood and string.
Of course,
I know little of the intricacies of this art. I can only wonder at
what frustrations plague the minds of those who create in Cremona. However,
Italian sensibility has always been lost on creation, and the rest of us
are fortunate for their incessant obsession with beauty. It’s not impetuous
to say, that the world would be far less beautiful, without the amorous
following of the Italians.
There is
much to ponder in Cremona. It deserves a certain slowness and intellectual
discussion. For while much of Italy’s beauty is vividly apparent on the
surface of everyday life, the violin, an instrument of pure human longing
and passion, requires a look beneath the surface, beyond the drab gray
buildings that blur seamlessly into the gray autumn sky.
We leave
Cremona in the early morning much as we found it, bathed in a shroud of
mystery and thick fog. The road ahead promises more of what came before,
the endless swaths of picturesque countryside and the promise of adventure
ahead; the Alps leading to the fairytale of Neuschwanstein, the Bavarian
Castle designed by King Ludwig the II.
But Cremona
will linger in my mind for some time to come. It hovers in the realm
of disbelief and naïve misunderstanding. For a place so minute and
unspectacular, its lasting impression is filled with an immeasurable depth
of beauty. I think of the small, wooden treasures doted over each day,
the hope that they will become even a shadow of the precedent set for them,
and the knowledge that even if they are to do so, it may not be in a lifetime
that we know. Such things weigh heavy on the mind. Antonia, I am sure,
thinks little of this, and goes back to work, her mind set on a simple
task: to build the most beautiful human voice the world has ever heard.
With Cremona fading into the background behind me, it’s comforting to think
of people in the world who still believe in miracles, and somehow manage
to create them.
To contact
Will Click Here |
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