CREMONA, ITALY -- ereguly@globeandmail.com
Antonio Stradivari's house in the heart of Cremona is a disgrace. The street-level floor has been turned over to a kitchenware shop plastered with discount signs. The three upper floors look abandoned. A simple marble plaque provides the only clue that the world's most famous violin maker, whose instruments are worth millions apiece, lived here with his first wife from 1667 to 1680.
But musical pilgrims to this handsome northern Italian city, about 90 kilometres southeast of Milan, need not be entirely disappointed, for just along the very same street is a unique school - La Scuola Internazionale di Liuteria di Cremona, the international luthier's school.
Housed in a shabby 15th-century palace, it is devoted to reviving the lost art of fine violin making. Its inspiration is the design and craftsmanship of Stradivari's creations, the playable antiques coveted by the best-known masters of stringed instruments, among them Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and Gil Shaham.
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Cremona's luthier school is an unlikely success story in the globalization sweepstakes, and a sign that the slowly mending economy is healthy enough to support growth in the high-end niche.
The graduates, from more than 50 countries, including Canada, have spread across the globe, setting up workshops from Beijing to Boston.
But many graduates - about 150, at last count - have stayed in Cremona, where they lovingly craft violins, violas and cellos that sell for small fortunes.
When the financial crisis hit a year-and-a-half ago, Cremona graduate Luca Salvadori feared the worst for his business. Indeed, his mainstay Spanish and Russian clients largely disappeared. But his Japanese clients held firm, and Chinese buyers have come on strong.
In his workshop, no bigger than a walk-in closet, Mr. Salvadori is making a violin that will be sold by the Yamaha music division in Japan that caters to professional musicians and wealthy collectors. He's charging Yamaha €20,000 ($30,000) for the instrument and is sure the company will tack on a hefty markup.
The walls are covered with framed awards for his creations, making him one of the stars of the industry. Wood shavings cover the floor of his workshop, in the centre of the small city, population 70,000. "I'm passionate about the details," says Mr Salvadori, 48 years old. "I make only five violins a year."
Cremona's luthier school owes its existence to a pre-Second World War dream among Cremona's cultural elite to restore the city's violin-making glory. Benito Mussolini's violent and ruthless northern lieutenant Roberto Farinacci (raised in Cremona and executed by Italian partisans in 1945) had a similar vision. He wanted to make his city "the unquestioned cradle of violin making in the world," according to a book on the school's history.
In 1937, Cremona held a celebration to mark the 200th anniversary of Stradivari's death. A year later, local politicians convinced several violin makers who had attended the event to launch the luthier's school. The school struggled for decades from war, lack of funding and internal debates about the ideal violin form - Stradivarian versus French (the former won).
By the 1970s, the worst was over and the school, under a series of savvy headmasters and expert instructors, gained national and international attention while Cremona itself became established as Europe's reborn violin-making centre, a status it had lost by the early 19th century.
The city and the school managed to repatriate several famous violins made by Stradivari and two of his Cremona contemporaries - the Amati and Guarneri families - whose instruments are equally coveted by leading musicians. They are on display in Cremona's town hall, where a curator plays them for a few minutes each day to exercise the precious wood.
Today the school is led by Mirelva Mondini, a former high school teacher who doesn't make or play violins herself but is devoted to fighting for the private and state resources to keep the school in fighting form.
"We're the ambassadors of violin making to the world," she says.
In its 72 years, the school has produced 858 graduates, two-thirds of whom were non-Europeans. The latest batch of luthiers in training - about 160 in total, spread over the five-year course - is about one-third Asian.
One is Japan's Yuji Kaneko, 25, who says Cremona was his first choice for a violin-making education.
"In Japan, there were no opportunities to find good luthier schools," he says. "After I go back to Japan, I'll go to a workshop."
The school has no classrooms, exactly, only laboratories filled with chunks of maple, spruce and ebony, some harvested 20 years ago and worth €150 or more for a half-metre, plus resins, tints, glue pots, wood-carving and shaving tools, and templates based on Stradivari violins (more than 600 of which still exist).
"The design hasn't changed because Stradivari was the best," says Giorgio Scolari, 58, a "maestro" - master instructor - who has taught at the school since his 20s.
Yves Lafontaine, 50, a classical musician from Quebec who has spent much of his career in China and Japan, started at the school in 2006 to learn to make his own instruments. In his view, the quality of the instruction at the school is uneven.
The best education, he says, can come from the private Cremona workshops, assuming their owners are willing to take on students as unpaid apprentices.
That's exactly what he did, joining a workshop owned by Luisa Vania Campagnolo, housed in an 18th-century building with vaulted, frescoed ceilings, where he is learning both violin construction and the trade. Ms. Campagnolo makes only three violins a year. The rest of the time is spent restoring instruments.
"Restoration is where the real money is," Mr. Lafontaine says. "There is more restoration work than people who know how to do it."
In the hands of top musicians, violins must work hard. Musicians travel constantly (sometimes with the violin in a paid airline seat next to them). Concerts are played in hot, humid conditions one day, cold, dry conditions the next. The wood expands and contracts. The strings put pressure on the bridge, the fingerboard and the scroll. Some of the average violin's 75 parts have to be replaced every few years. A musician will pay thousands of dollars for repairs for a cherished instrument.
Making, restoring and repairing violins has given Cremona a new lease on life. An annual trade show of handcrafted instruments, called Cremona Mondo Musica, attracts thousands of visitors every autumn. A triennial violin-making competition also brings in visitors and luthiers from far-flung places, as do the related festivals and concerts.
"Cremona has nothing left except violin making and government jobs," Mr. Lafontaine says. "Violins bring in a lot of money here."
Will Cremona's violin-making success relegate the antique Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri instruments to museums? Some builders and musicians argue that a finely crafted modern violin has the same sound quality as an antique at a fraction of the cost. (The highest price for a Stradivari at auction was $3.5-million (U.S.), in 2006, and privately traded ones have gone for millions more.)
Not so, says Korean-American violin virtuoso and EMI recording star Sarah Chang. She plays a 1717 Guarneri that was found for her by the late Isaac Stern, one of her mentors, when she was a teenage musical prodigy.
"The main reason I play it is because I love its sound so much," she says.
"I know its secrets, what it can and cannot do for me. If you play a [new one and an old one] side by side, there is a depth and character and a certain colour to the older instrument."
