The Road Ahead

The Messiah (No, not THAT one!)

  In 1716, when he was 72 years old, Antonio Stradivari created what may have been his masterpiece. He chose not to sell it to anyone during the remaining twenty-one years of his life; no one knows why. Curiously, his sons also held on to the violin for years, the youngest finally selling this untouched, unplayed instrument to a notable collector, Count Cozio de Salabue, in 1775.

The violin then passed to the hands of Luigi Tarisio, an intinerant musician and dealer whose passion for old violins led him to become the savior of many of them, and the conduit through which most of today's greatest violins emerged into the market. He always bragged, during his selling trips to Paris, of a remarkable violin, unique in fact, and though he always said he would bring it with him, he never did. Tarisio's stubborness about this so exasperated the soloist and dealer Delphin Alard that one day he flared up, yelling at Tarisio, "This violin of yours is like the Messiah: always promised but he never comes!"

Alard's father-in-law, Jean Baptiste Vuillaume, a legendary dealer and maker in his own right, went to Italy with a bag of gold the moment he received news of Tarisio's death. There in his old friend's room, Vuillaume found The Messiah in the drawer of an old chest. He bought it on the spot--for a really good price! (Nobody said this was altruism.) Bringing the violin back to Paris, Vuillaume modernized it, put it up for sale, and then held on to it for the rest of his own life, making several copies of it and protecting The Messiah from war, fire and the ravages of time. He allowed Alard to play it only once, the record says, then it was locked away in a glass case.

Ultimately, like many of its fellows, The Messiah made its way to England as that country's economy and artistic life grew, exerting a magnetic pull on this and so many other wonderful works of art. The firm of W.E. Hill & Sons, the world's leading dealer for more than a century, became The Messiah's new home. Hill sold the violin once or twice but always bought it back. Finally, as the last of the partners grew old, in 1939 or so they decided to place it on loan with the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Hidden in a bunker in the English countryside during WWII, The Messiah was not placed on exhibit until the late 40's; it is still there today.

Here is a picture of the top of this unique violin:

 

It's so perfect, it's hard to believe it has traversed continents, oceans and wars to survive so untouched; yet so it has, for 292 years.

 

Here's the back:

 

 

See how beautiful the wood is, how graceful the curves: artistry blended with an extremely advanced accoustical concept, one that even today has never been fully explained or explored.

 

When he was finished, Stradivari placed his label inside:

 

 

As for The Messiah's condition: For comparison, just look at the two corners pictured below, one the Lady Blount Stradivari of 1727, widely considered one of the best preserved violins from that era, the other from The Messiah:

 

Look how crisp the angles and points of the edges are, how the two thin strips of light-colored wood come together in a perfect, nearly invisible angle. In fact, the violin looks so new, some people have had a hard time believing it's genuine. But that's another story!

I think it's just pretty remarkable. Stradivari was old, very old by the standard of eighteenth century Italy, and still he makes this beautiful creation. The complexities of making a violin are almost beyond imagining; Stradivari understood them, worked with them, better literally than anyone else has done. The violin's not perfect, there are tiny flaws and places where his knife seems to have slipped, but somehow those blemishes only serve to reinforce the sense of a master who understood, almost magically, how to use his materials to produce an instrument that would triumph over time.

And he never parted with it: Why? He lived for another twenty-one years, constantly striving to improve his work, anticipate the needs of musicians who would not be born for centuries, playing in halls the like of which existed nowhere on earth. Perhaps he didn't carry this milennial vision around in his head; perhaps he was merely a great craftsman. But what if he did? And what did this one instrument, of the thousands he made and sold, mean to him?

Maybe in the next life...I'd better start working on my Italian.

Other Places, Other Days

Maybe it's because it's Autumn.

I mean, this is always a nostalgic season: the colors the last reminders of the brightness of summer, faded perhaps but somehow richer; the smells, that dry, dusty smell of the leaves, more of them on the ground now, and over all just a hint of woodsmoke; the crystalline light, the silver remnant of the molten gold that poured from the sky just a few weeks ago.

But I was not prepared for what happened, twice now since Sunday.

The first time, I was walking down a back street, heading for my favorite lunch place here in town, when suddenly I was on a different street: I was in Chile, thirty years and more ago, passing pastel-colored adobe houses with small, high windows and iron doors, on my way to my fiance's house, on my way to Amelia. The quality of the light was the way it had been all those years past; the smells were those of that long-ago street. It was as if a transparency had been dropped over the actual scene--a flicker, really, of that other place; a moment, and then it was gone. 

And then again, another glimmer of the past, but this time I was in the provincial capital where I had had my first job in Chile. Before me, laid over today's street stretched the shadowy outlines of that other street I had once followed, nervous but eager, walking up from the train station, past the shuttered noonday shops, past the plaza with its trees and shimmering gardens, the light warm and viscous, subtly resistant to my passing.

I've had memories of the past, sure; but never have I felt displaced, transported from this time to that, to some other place and time. And what was so strange was that, even in those brief moments, I felt myself actually to be in that place. I could feel the quality of the air on my skin, the warmth of the sun, the light reflected off those bright houses, then the transition into shadow under the flowering trees; I could sense the smells and noises of those places, real and yet obviously not.

The other bit of time travel happened as I was riding my bike along the old railroad bed that stretches between Wheaton and parts northwest, running through woods, past brooks and marshland, and, in this season, beautiful with the colors of the leaves.

I was enjoying the day, a warm blue sky above and the peaceful drowsiness of the trees as they fall asleep for the long winter. Suddenly, there on my right was a man mowing his grass. The green smell of his barbered lawn hovered thick and sweet in the afternoon air, and I thought of summers when I was a boy. Mowing the lawn had been my chore, my bane sometimes, and the core of my childhood income.

But never had I thought of how much I would miss those days, sweating in the hot yard, deafened by the machine I pushed for what seemed like hours. Today, though, I was overcome with such a longing for the simple pleasure of the fragrant grass, and for what it symbolized: a simpler time, before I had responsibilities, before I had set out in the world on my own. Before death had brushed past me on his way to gather up those I loved and carry them away.

And so all this was about distance and about time: the abyss of years and experience that yawns between the sober man of today, who has lived things he would never have chosen to know, and that younger man, walking up sundrenched streets filled with promise and a future--a woman, a job, an adventure; and that separates this white-haired pilgrim from that boy who swam through summer's light and the redolent liquor of the deep green grass.

Maybe this is what being old is about. I hope not; most days I don't feel old, not yet. But then how to think about this longing for other places, other times? How to carry the burden of the years?