Cremona,
Italy
Violin Making ~ by Will
Sullivan
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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.
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. |
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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.
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. |
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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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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.
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. |
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| The entrance to the garden next
to the Stradivarius museum. |
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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.
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The
main plaza in the city of Cremona.
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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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