Objet Trouvé IV:
The Strad
As I was listening to a local classical radio station, a version of the Elgar cello concerto played by Jacqueline Du Pré came on. For the first several seconds one can only hear the persistent hiss of the recording equipment, and, above that, du Pré herself, playing virtually unaccompanied. The concerto opens with a series of gritty, double-stopped chords and enough vibrato to blow out the tweeters in your car stereo. An opening section such as this is normally feared by cellists—the double-stops alone, so difficult to play clearly on a cello, are enough to make a cellist want to close the book of sheet music, turn around, and go home. But in du Pré’s version of the concerto, despite the perpetual background hiss, these notes sound strong and defined. In the hands of any other cellist, these few seconds of notes would be a cacophonous mess. Du Pré’s version of the Elgar concerto is as Dionysian as it is Apollonian, made of equal parts Eros and restraint. Many will wonder, as I have: How did she achieve this?
Du Pré played a rare Stradivarius cello, which is affectionately known as the “Davydov Stradivarius” because it was once owned by Karl Davydov, a renowned Russian cellist. Several years ago, a cello much like the Davydov sold at auction for more than $6 million dollars. (That’s “million” with an ‘m’). That cello, known by its sobriquet as “The Paganini, Countess of Stainlein,” was, along with the Davydov and other cellos, a rare instrument made by the famed Italian luthier Antonio Stradivarius, whose shop produced a variety of stringed instruments in the eighteenth century, and of which there are now fewer than 60 still in functioning condition—of those 60 instruments, only 20 of them are cellos.
Before Stradivarius, cellos were made according to no fixed proportions or standards—some were so large, in fact, that today we would be more apt to call them a bass, an instrument that differs significantly from the cello. Around 1710, Stradivarius began producing cellos from a mold with a back length of 75 cm., and since then luthiers have opted to make this the standard size of a full-size cello. It would be hard then, based merely off dimensions or general construction, to pick out a Stradivarius from a line-up of other cellos, and yet these instruments are considered unique (and fetch unique prices at auction) by musicians and collectors. A second look at the wood and the varnish of a Stradivarius, however, reveals significant differences between Stradivariuses and more recent mass-manufactured cellos.
The wood used to make the Stradivarius, typically an aged Spruce from the Fiemme Valley of the Italian Alps, known to luthiers as the “Il Bosco Che Suana” (The Musical Woods), is still considered some of the finest available for instrument making, and luthiers come from around the world to the Fiemme Valley, as Stradivarius once did, to find it. The back of the cello, stripped and worn, shows imperfections not found in today’s mass-manufactured instruments subjected to rigorous quality control practices. The varnish, which is immediately recognizable because of its iridescent mahogany sheen, is thought to consist of a simple treatment of borax and chromium. Ironically, it is the mineral preservative that was originally applied to these instruments over three centuries ago that has degraded their rare Spruce, but because of this degradation their wood has become more porous, the quality necessary to produce their deeply rich resonances. That resonance is more than a mere formal property—something audible and quantifiable. That is time itself resonating.
To play one these instruments is to mark the passage of time; to hear one of these instruments is to hear time itself unfold, beginning above the bridge and terminating at the end-post, into the ground and into the grave of cellists past and future. Unlike oenology, it doesn’t take an expert to understand the superiority of these instruments. One simply has to listen to their music.