The name
Stradivarius is associated with
violinThe violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
s built by members of the Stradivari family, particularly
Antonio StradivariAntonio Stradivari was an Italian luthier and a crafter of string instruments such as violins, cellos, guitars, violas, and harps. Stradivari is generally considered the most significant artisan in this field. The Latinized form of his surname, Stradivarius, as well as the colloquial, "Strad", is...
. According to their reputation, the quality of their sound has defied attempts to explain or reproduce, though this belief is controversial. The name "Stradivarius" has become a superlative often associated with excellence; to be called "the Stradivari" of any field is to be deemed the finest there is. The fame of Stradivarius instruments is widespread, appearing in numerous works of fiction.
Construction
While Stradivari's techniques have long been up for debate and not fully understood by modern craftsmen and scientists, it is known for certain that the wood used included
spruceA spruce is a tree of the genus Picea , a genus of about 35 species of coniferous evergreen trees in the Family Pinaceae, found in the northern temperate and boreal regions of the earth. Spruces are large trees, from tall when mature, and can be distinguished by their whorled branches and conical...
for the top,
willowWillows, sallows, and osiers form the genus Salix, around 400 species of deciduous trees and shrubs, found primarily on moist soils in cold and temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere...
for the internal blocks and linings, and
mapleAcer is a genus of trees or shrubs commonly known as maple.Maples are variously classified in a family of their own, the Aceraceae, or together with the Hippocastanaceae included in the family Sapindaceae. Modern classifications, including the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group system, favour inclusion in...
for the back, ribs, and neck. There has been conjecture that this wood was treated with several types of minerals, including potassium borate (
boraxBorax, also known as sodium borate, sodium tetraborate, or disodium tetraborate, is an important boron compound, a mineral, and a salt of boric acid. It is usually a white powder consisting of soft colorless crystals that dissolve easily in water.Borax has a wide variety of uses...
), sodium and potassium silicate, and
vernice biancaVernice bianca is a type of sealer varnish used in violin making. It is mainly prepared with a mix of egg white and gum arabic.-Possible preparation:# Melt 20 grams of powdered gum arabic in a water bath# Add a half spoon of honey and let it cool down...
, a varnish composed of
Gum arabic220px|thumb|right|Acacia gumGum arabic, also known as acacia gum, chaar gund, char goond, or meska, is a natural gum made of hardened sap taken from two species of the acacia tree; Acacia senegal and Acacia seyal...
,
honeyHoney is a sweet food made by bees using nectar from flowers. The variety produced by honey bees is the one most commonly referred to and is the type of honey collected by beekeepers and consumed by humans...
, and
egg whiteEgg white is the common name for the clear liquid contained within an egg. In chickens it is formed from the layers of secretions of the anterior section of the hen's oviduct during the passage of the egg. It forms around either fertilized or unfertilized egg yolks...
. He made his instruments using an inner form, unlike the French copyists, such as Vuillaume, who employed an outer form. It is clear from the number of forms throughout his career that he experimented with some of the dimensions of his instruments.
Market value
A Stradivarius made in the 1680s, or during Stradivari's 'Long Pattern' period from 1690 to 1700, could be worth hundreds of thousands to several million
U.S. dollarsThe United States dollar , also referred to as the American dollar, is the official currency of the United States of America. It is divided into 100 smaller units called cents or pennies....
at today's prices. The 1697
Molitor Stradivarius, once rumored to have belonged to Napoleon Bonaparte (it did belong to a general in his army, Count Gabriel-Jean-Joseph Molitor), sold for $3,600,000 in 2010 at Tarisio Auctions, then a new world record.
Depending on condition, instruments made during Stradivari's "golden period" from 1700 to about 1725 can be worth millions of dollars. In 2011, his "Lady Blunt" violin from 1721, which is in pristine condition, was sold at Tarisio auctions for
£The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...
9.8 million, or about $15.9 million. (It is named after Lord Byron's granddaughter
Lady Anne BluntAnne Isabella Noel Blunt, née King-Noel, 15th Baroness Wentworth , known for most of her life as Lady Anne Blunt, was co-founder, with her husband the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, of the Crabbet Arabian Stud. The two married on 8 June 1869...
, who owned it for 30 years.) It was sold by the Nippon Music Foundation in aid of the
Japanese earthquake and tsunamiThe 2011 earthquake off the Pacific coast of Tohoku, also known as the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, or the Great East Japan Earthquake, was a magnitude 9.0 undersea megathrust earthquake off the coast of Japan that occurred at 14:46 JST on Friday, 11 March 2011, with the epicenter approximately east...
appeal.
Controversy over sound quality
Above all, these instruments are famous for the quality of sound they produce. However, the many blind tests from 1817 to the present (as of 2006) have never found any difference in sound between Stradivari's violins and high-quality violins in comparable style of other makers and periods, nor has acoustic analysis. In a particularly famous test on a
BBC Radio 3BBC Radio 3 is a national radio station operated by the BBC within the United Kingdom. Its output centres on classical music and opera, but jazz, world music, drama, culture and the arts also feature. The station is the world’s most significant commissioner of new music, and its New Generation...
program in 1977, the violinists
Isaac SternIsaac Stern was a Ukrainian-born violinist. He was renowned for his recordings and for discovering new musical talent.-Biography:Isaac Stern was born into a Jewish family in Kremenets, Ukraine. He was fourteen months old when his family moved to San Francisco...
and
Pinchas ZukermanPinchas Zukerman is a world-renowned violinist, violist, and conductor. He is considered one of the greatest violinists of the 20th and 21st centuries, and his ongoing 45-year career has seen him perform with the world's best-known orchestras and record over 100 works...
and the violin expert and dealer Charles Beare tried to distinguish among the "Chaconne" Stradivarius, a 1739
GuarneriThe Guarneri is the family name of a group of distinguished luthiers from Cremona in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries, whose standing is considered comparable to those of the Amati and Stradivari families...
del Gesú, an 1846 Vuillaume, and a 1976 British violin played behind a screen by a professional soloist. The two violinists were allowed to play all the instruments first. None of the listeners identified more than two of the four instruments. Two of the listeners identified the 20th-century violin as the Stradivarius. Violinists and others have criticized these tests on various grounds such as that they are not
double-blindA blind or blinded experiment is a scientific experiment where some of the people involved are prevented from knowing certain information that might lead to conscious or subconscious bias on their part, invalidating the results....
(in most cases), the judges are often not experts, and the sounds of violins are hard to evaluate objectively and reproducibly.
In a test in 2009, the British violinist Matthew Trusler played his 1711 Stradivarius, said to be worth two million U.S. dollars, and four modern violins made by the Swiss violin-maker Michael Rhonheimer. One of Rhonheimer's violins, made with wood that the
EmpaThe Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology or Empa is an interdisciplinary Swiss research and service institution for applied materials sciences and technology...
researcher Francis Schwarze had treated with fungi, received 90 of the 180 votes for the best tone, while the Stradivarius came in second with just 39 votes. The majority (113) of the listeners misidentified the winning violin as the Stradivarius. (Analysis of the treated wood revealed a reduction in density, accompanied by relatively little change in the speed of sound. According to this analysis, treatment improves the sound radiation ratio to the level of cold-climate wood considered to have superior resonance.)
While the majority of world-class soloists play violins by Antonio Stradivari, there are a few exceptions. For example,
Christian Tetzlaff-Biography:Tetzlaff was born in Hamburg. He began playing the violin and piano at the age of 6, and made his concert debut at 14 years old. He studied with Uwe-Martin Haiberg at the Musikhochschule Lübeck and with Walter Levine at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.He is...
formerly played "a quite famous Strad", but switched to a violin made in 2002 by
Stefan-Peter GreinerStefan-Peter Greiner is a successful German violin maker.He built his first violin at the age of 14. He did his training in Bonn, where his workshop is today....
. He states that the listener cannot tell that his instrument is modern, and he regards it as excellent for
BachJohann Sebastian Bach was a German composer, organist, harpsichordist, violist, and violinist whose sacred and secular works for choir, orchestra, and solo instruments drew together the strands of the Baroque period and brought it to its ultimate maturity...
and better than a Stradivarius for "the big Romantic and 20th-century
concertoA concerto is a musical work usually composed in three parts or movements, in which one solo instrument is accompanied by an orchestra.The etymology is uncertain, but the word seems to have originated from the conjunction of the two Latin words...
s."
Theories and reproduction attempts
Nonetheless, some maintain that the very best Stradivari have unique superiorities. Various attempts at explaining these supposed qualities have been undertaken, most results being unsuccessful or inconclusive. Over the centuries, numerous theories have been presented – and debunked – including an assertion that the wood was salvaged from old cathedrals.
DendrochronologyDendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating based on the analysis of patterns of tree-rings. Dendrochronology can date the time at which tree rings were formed, in many types of wood, to the exact calendar year...
, or tree-ring dating, has proved this false.
A more modern theory attributes tree growth during a time of global cold temperatures during the
Little Ice AgeThe Little Ice Age was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period . While not a true ice age, the term was introduced into the scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939...
associated with unusually low solar activity of the
Maunder MinimumThe Maunder Minimum is the name used for the period roughly spanning 1645 to 1715 when sunspots became exceedingly rare, as noted by solar observers of the time....
, circa 1645 to 1750, during which cooler temperatures throughout Europe are believed to have caused stunted and slowed tree growth, resulting in unusually dense wood. Further evidence for this "Little Ice Age theory" comes from a simple examination of the dense growth rings in the wood used in Stradivari's instruments. Two researchers – University of Tennessee tree-ring scientist
Henri Grissino-MayerHenri Grissino-Mayer is an Associate Professor and Director of the Laboratory of Tree-Ring Science at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Grissino-Mayer is a dendrochronologist who specializes in the use of tree-ring analysis to reconstruct environmental and cultural history...
and Lloyd Burckle, a Columbia University climatologist – published in the journal
Dendrochronologia their conclusions supporting the theory on increased wood density.
In 2008 Dutch researchers announced further evidence that wood density caused the claimed high quality of these instruments. After examining the violins with X-rays, the researchers found that these violins all have extremely consistent density, with relatively low variation in the apparent growth patterns of the trees that produced this wood.
Yet another possible explanation is that the wood originated in and was harvested from the forests of northern
CroatiaCroatia , officially the Republic of Croatia , is a unitary democratic parliamentary republic in Europe at the crossroads of the Mitteleuropa, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean. Its capital and largest city is Zagreb. The country is divided into 20 counties and the city of Zagreb. Croatia covers ...
. This
mapleAcer is a genus of trees or shrubs commonly known as maple.Maples are variously classified in a family of their own, the Aceraceae, or together with the Hippocastanaceae included in the family Sapindaceae. Modern classifications, including the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group system, favour inclusion in...
wood is known for its extreme density resulting from the slow growth caused by harsh Croatian winters. Croatian wood was a commodity traded by Venetian merchants of the era, and is used today by local luthiers and craftsfolk for musical instruments.
Some research points to wood preservatives used in that day as contributing to the resonant qualities.
Joseph NagyvaryJoseph Nagyvary, born in , is a Professor Emeritus at Texas A&M University and has spent years studying and analyzing violins made by Antonio Stradivari and Giuseppe Guarneri.- Biography :Joseph Nagyvary was born 1934 in Szeged, Hungary...
reveals that he has always held the belief that there are a wide range of chemicals that will improve the violins' sound. In a 2009 study co-authored with Drs. Renald Guillemette and Clifford Spiegelman, Nagyvary managed to get hold of shavings from a Stradivarius violin and examined them: burning small amounts to find their chemical composition showed that the wood shavings contained "borax, fluorides, chromium and iron salts." He also found that the wood had decayed a little, to the extent that the filter plates in the pores between the wood's component
tracheidTracheids are elongated cells in the xylem of vascular plants that serve in the transport of water and mineral salts. Tracheids are one of two types of tracheary elements, vessel elements being the other. All tracheary elements develop a thick lignified cell wall, and at maturity the protoplast...
s had rotted away, perhaps while the wood was stored in or under water in the
VeniceVenice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
lagoon before Stradivarius used it.
Dr. Steven Sirr, a radiologist, worked with researchers to perform a CT scan of a Stradavari known as "Betts" by using data obtained to identify the differing densities of woods used in the instrument. These data were then used to create a reproduction instrument.
Further reading
- Walter Hamma
Walter Hamma was a German violin maker.His father was the violin maker Fridolin Hamma. Walter Hamma was pupil of the violin making school in Mittenwald 1933-1935. He worked with Ferdinand Jaura and later for Caressa & Francais in Paris. During the second world war the workshop in Stuttgart was...
, Meister Italienischer Geigenbaukunst, Wilhelmshaven 1993, ISBN 3-7959-0537-0
- Violin Iconography of Antonio Stradivari 1644–1737, Herbert K. Goodkind, Larchmont, New York, 1972.
- How Many Strads?, Ernest N. Doring, William Lewis & Son, Chicago, 1945
External links
- A FourDoc (short on-line documentary) about a group of violin makers making a violin in the original spec of the maurin Stradivarius in just five days
- What makes a Stradivarius so Great?
- Carleen Hutchins obituary, today's master violin maker who tried to emulate Stradivarius Los Angeles Times, issue August 18, 2009
- Cozio.com Online database of instruments by Antonio Stradivari.
- Cheniston K. Roland, Discography (incomplete) of Stradivarius recordings
- Mark Levine, "Medici of the Meadowlands", The New York Times 3 August 2003 Herbert R. Axelrod
Herbert Richard Axelrod is a tropical fish expert, publisher of pet books, and entrepreneur. In 2005 he was sentenced in U.S. court to 18 months in prison for tax fraud.-Early life:...
's Stravarius collection.
- Chladni patterns for visualizing violin plate resonance patterns
- Stradivari Violin Forms A detailed study of Stradivari's molds and drawings kept in the Cremona Museum..
- How Stradivari and Guarneri got their music discusses the chemical techniques used to figure out what makes these instruments' unique sound. From the February 1, 2007 issue of Analytical Chemistry
- An image of the scroll of a Stradivarius
- "The Case of the Missing Stradivarius," an annotated historical novel by author Emanuel E. Garcia which investigates the secrets of Stradivari violins and musical virtuosity.