Free The Violin Maker by John Marchese

the first letter of his name onto the title and began calling his model the Zowden. For Gene Drucker’s instrument, Sam would alter the Zowden shape a little by introducing some of the characteristics of a 1742 Guarneri that was once owned and played by Jascha Heifetz, the David. (Heifetz’s will left it to a museum in San Francisco.)
    It is yet another example of the tangled knot of tradition and whimsy in the violin world that gives the well-known, collector-quality Cremonese violins their names. For instance, the Plowden is named for a collector and amateur violinist, Lord Plowden, who owned the fiddle almost two hundred years ago. Sometimes, a famous violinist becomes inextricably linked with an instrument and it comes to be named for him, like the Kreisler. But that did not happen with the great Paganini’s favorite fiddle, an instrument that was so powerful that it was descriptively nicknamed the Cannon and is still called that. Perhaps the most legendary violin Stradivari ever made was one that was still in his workshop when he died and, according to one legend, had been played only once by the master himself. It is called the Messiah. It still is never played but sits in a glass case in the Ashmolean Museumat Oxford University, a gift from the Hills of London, the family of dealers whose three siblings wrote the famous book on Stradivari.
    Sam Zygmuntowicz was able to get his hands on and study a fair number of the greatest violins during his time with René Morel and Jacques Français. The shop, on the eleventh floor of a nondescript building on 54th Street in Manhattan, is a sort of Lourdes for great string players traveling through New York. At any given time millions of dollars worth of Cremonese fiddles are in for repair and healing. Morel, who often schedules his time in fifteen-minute segments, spends much of each day adjusting violins for a continuous stream of glamorous soloists and workaday orchestral fiddlers, who feel their instrument is out of sorts.
    Sam speaks often of his apprentice years at the shop, sometimes describing it as a sort of postgraduate training, other times making it seem like a sentence at a prison work farm. In the days I spent with him at the violin-making workshop in Ohio, Sam several times made good-natured jokes that he and many of his peers were ex-hippies in various stages of reconstruction—men (and a few women) of a certain age who’d been drawn to the trade by a 1970s-vintage desire to avoid corporate life, get closer to nature, and learn a craft. Sure enough, quite a few of the other violin makers I met in Oberlin lived in small rural towns and gave off a faint whiff of patchouli.
    René Morel was no hippie looking for an alternative lifestyle. He’d been trained in Mirecourt to execute the various techniques of violin making—the many cuts—with skill and efficiency. Morel often told the story of arriving as a young man at the great Manhattan restoration shop of the day, the House of Wurlitzer, and amazing everyone with the speed and accuracy of his carving.
    “Guys like René were just expected to turn out fiddles,” Sam said. “It was all handwork and they were trained to be very good technically, very fast, consistent and uniform. It wasn’t all that inspiring-looking work, but each of those guys was expected to do a minimum of two violins a week, and the fast guys did three.
    “I never have practiced that particular brand of production. I don’t think I could do it. You don’t waste any unnecessary action. You don’t reflect on anything. It’s kind of the opposite of my personal process, which includes a lot of patient reflection. But the actual techniques of people like René Morel and Carl Becker—these old guys really know how to get it done.”
    Carl Becker is a Chicago-based violin maker, now in his nineties, and one of the most respected in the country. Sam stopped to visit Becker when he was on a cross-country tour as a teenager and showed the