No Strings Attached
Faber, Tony
BOOKS IN REVIEW "No Strings Attached" some professionals and executives but others common laborers who have saved their money all year, who well know the difference between good bullfighting and bad (and would be...
...Maybe there isn't much more a matador can say than that...
...If you alter [anything] the quantity and quality of the tone are almost sure to be adversely affected...
...v., \ o Strings Attached As far as the dimensions are concerned, the violin as passed on to us by Stradivari is completely standardized...
...It is a waste of time and effort to try to improve on the design finalized by Stradivari...
...And oh, yes, the violin I made...
...After several more owners, including the famed Hill brothers in London and the Wurlizter shop in New York, Daniel Barenboim, du Pre's husband, bought it for her...
...BOOKS IN REVIEW ly, some professionals and executives but others common laborers who have saved their money all year, who well know the difference between good bullfighting and bad (and would be happy to explain it to you if you show the slightest interest...
...For another, Lewine's access to him produces little more than a string of platitudes the rest of us managed to glean through chance encounters with matadors in restaurants and outside bullrings...
...For that reason alone, never mind the feeling you get when you see a matador, with his feet set, pull a bull around his body by working close to the horns—this singular spectacle is worthy of attention...
...Many of Stradivari's instruments immediately fell into the hands of Europe's finest musicians...
...For one thing, he has been a huge disappointment as a matador, capable of bursts of artistic passion, but more often than not plodding through a string of turgid failures...
...He became known throughout Europe as the master of his art, and virtuosi, kings, wealthy merchants, and competitors lined up at his door to buy his instruments...
...Many have been purchased by wealthy collectors, although it is a common practice for such collectors to lend these instruments to famous musicians or even 76 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2005...
...That's too bad, because the English-speaking world could use a jolt of afi chin toward the bullfight right about now...
...On a visit to Harlem in the 1920s, the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca gave a speech during which he called bullfighting the only serious thing that remained in the world...
...Then they repair to bars and even formal seminars in hotel ballrooms to discuss what they have seen, and they argue about the various interpretations over late dinners, and then they wake up and read what the critics have to say in the various newspapers (where those who cover bullfights are given vast dramatic license, far more like movie reviewers than sportswriters), and they ruminate over it all over again...
...In our computer and high-tech age when we have at our fingertips sophisticated tools, analytical machinery, and precision equipment of every sort, the best that the world's greatest violin makers can do is copy instruments made by this 18th-century Italian hand worker...
...He's right about that...
...company (of which T. S. Eliot was editor for many years), traces six of Stradivari's most famous instruments from their creation to the present...
...What a story each of these instruments could tell...
...But Yo-Yo first played the Davidov years before, when it belonged to Jacqueline du Pre, and subsequently borrowed it for several years from her, as she found it difficult to play...
...Now played by Yo-Yo Ma, it was purchased for him, probably for several million dollars, by an anonymous admirer and lent to him for life...
...THE PROBLEM WITH Death and the Sun is that Rivera OrdOliez isn't really a capable vehicle for revealing any of this...
...The Craftsman is therefore cautioned to strictly adhere to the plans and dimensions detailed throughout this book...
...The Cremonese luthier has been an inspiration to every serious musician ever to encounter his handiwork and will no doubt continue to be so for hundreds of more years into the future...
...And, later: "You see, bullfighting is very special...
...Somehow it wound up in Russia, where it was played by a number of great cellists, including Carl Davidov, the royal court musician to the Czar, who performed on it with Franz Liszt, among many others...
...Without a bull," Lewine writes in perhaps the book's most lyrical passage, "the cape passes of bullfighting are like the steps of a lovely folk dance, but when the charged atmosphere of the ring and the menacing beauty of the bull are added to the dance of the cape, and when the dancer is made to perform under threat of bodily harm...
...I recall talking to afantastic young German violinist, whose instrument was a Stradivarius...
...Tony Faber, the former managing director of Faber and Faber, his family's famous publishing • • • • aspiring young musicians...
...It is often said that one of modern technology's great embarrassments is its inability to match the quality of violins made completely by hand nearly 400 years ago by Antonio Stradivari...
...I followed the directions exactly—did not change a thing...
...You'll see some Americans and other foreigners at the bullfights, to be sure, but many of those are veteran aficionados who understand as much—and often more—about the bulls as the Spaniards do...
...The bullfighter is a different kind of man...
...SEVERAL YEARS AGO I decided to make a violin...
...Wielhorski was an amateur but was able to get a sufficiently fine tone from his Strad to inspire Felix Mendelssohn to write his second cello concerto for him, and Robert Schumann to write that he was the most gifted dilettante he had ever met...
...In fact, an effort to reproduce exactly a particular Strad, and to sell it as an original is considered the apex of a modern craftsman's skill, and has only rarely been accomplished...
...that is a performance that can inspire a depth of emotion...
...Antonio Stradivari lived from 1644 to 1737 in the small northern Italian town of Cremona and, in the course of his life, made over 1,000 violins, violas and cellos, a harp, and a couAlfred S. Regnery is publisher of The American Spectator and the author of an upcoming book on the conservative movement...
...Having played one for most of my life, and having some fairly well-honed woodworking skills I thought I might combine the two and get satisfaction out of the process if not the result...
...That is the most important thing for me...
...Not bad for just one nearly 300-year-old cello...
...Faber's book is a fine introduction to this legend of a man...
...It is difficult to know if life is more or less serious than during Lorca's time—the answer is: probably both—and yet bullfighting holds the same anomalous place in world culture as it did nearly a century ago...
...r%.' Many of Stradivari's instruments immediately fell into the hands of Europe's finest musicians...
...Most of Stradivari's instruments have remained at the pinnacle of the music world and have, over the centuries, entertained countless millions of people in every corner of the world...
...And they do...
...In the process he tells us about the famous and often eccentric owners of those instruments, the often bizarre way they were acquired, the many attempts—some quite successful—to copy Stradivari's instruments, and a good deal of music history as well...
...Faber takes, as an example, Stradivari's Davidov cello (many of the most famous Strads have acquired names over the years, often for one-time owners), one of only 21 surviving cellos made by Stradivari...
...I found a good little book entitled You Can Make Reviewed by Alfred S. Regnery a Stradivarius Violin, containing all the instructions, a set of plans, and, on the first page, an admonition to the amateur violin maker: Stradivari's Genius by Toby Faber (RANDOM HOUSE, 233 PAGES, $23.95) JULY/AUGUST 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 75 BOOKS IN REVIEW pie of lutes...
...he told me that it was one of three owned by Deutsche Bank available to Germany's top young players...
...By then, it is usually time for the next bullfight, and the cycle repeats...
...Made in 1712 for the Medici family, it remained in the Pitti Palace until Austrian troops occupied Venice in 1737, who presumably took it back to Austria...
...He became the singular standard-bearer of his craft, and his instruments remain the most sought-after, and the most expensive, in the world...
...It was then purchased by a Polish nobleman named Wielhorski sometime in the middle 1800s for $200,000, a Guarneri cello, and the finest horse in his stable...
...Many have been purchased by wealthy collectors, although it is a common practice for such collectors to lend these instruments to famous musicians or even aspiring young musicians...
...It looks pretty good, but somehow it just never sounded like a Strad...
...Full of hopes but rarely expectations, they watch the two-hour drama unfold in front of them...
...I want to feel happy in front of the bull again," Rivera OrdOriez reveals to Lewine at one point...
...There is nothing like it in the world...
Vol. 38 • July 2005 • No. 6
