The Luthier's Apprentice

Nadia Kovac arrives in Cremona and walks from the train station to Giovanni Ferraro's violin workshop on Via Palazzo, entering a city saturated with the history of the instrument she can no longer play.

Nadia reckons with the injury that ended her performing career -- focal dystonia in her left hand, the neurological condition that took everything specific and left everything general.

Nadia remembers the night she played the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra youth program -- the hall, the stage, the tuning A, the silence before the first note, the left hand in its prime.

Giovanni teaches Nadia about the woods that make a violin -- spruce for the top, maple for the back and sides, ebony for the fingerboard -- and shows her the planks that have been drying in his attic for years.

Giovanni introduces Nadia to the tools of the luthier's craft -- planes, gouges, knives, and bending irons, many handmade or inherited, each an extension of the hand that holds it.

Nadia explores Cremona beyond the workshop -- the Piazza del Comune, the Duomo, the Torrazzo, the hundred-plus active luthiers -- and hears a 1715 Stradivari played in the Museo del Violino.

Giovanni selects the template for his last violin -- a modified Stradivari form -- and Nadia traces its contours, confronting the perfection of a shape unchanged for three hundred years.

Giovanni cuts the spruce top plate for his last violin from the plank that has dried for seven years, and Nadia watches with the total attention of an apprentice learning to see.

Nadia's father Marko Kovac -- his departure from Split, Croatia in 1991, his life as a carpenter in Minneapolis, the hands that taught her to hold a chisel before she held a bow, and a phone call from Cremona.

Giovanni carves the arching of the top plate -- the curved surface that is the violin's most critical acoustic element -- and Nadia watches his seventy-eight-year-old hands find their steadiness in the work.

The sides of the violin are bent from thin strips of maple over a heated iron, and Nadia learns through breaking that the wood resists before it yields.

Giovanni cuts the f-holes by hand, following a pencil line drawn freehand after seventy years, and tells Nadia that practiced is better than perfect because practiced has memory.

Nadia carves a practice plate too deep, thins it past acoustic viability, and Giovanni teaches her that you cannot know where too far is until you have gone there.

Nadia learns to carve and fit the bass bar inside the top plate, and discovers the principle that governs the violin and the craft: the essential things are invisible.

Nadia receives emails from her former colleagues in the Cleveland Orchestra and reads them in her room above the workshop, measuring the distance between her old life and her new one.

The top and back plates are glued to the ribs, sealing the acoustic chamber, and the sound that the violin will produce is enclosed in the body that the workshop has built.