The City

The Luthier's Apprentice

Chapter 6: The City

Cremona is a small city. Seventy-two thousand people, a number that would fill Severance Hall thirty-six times, a number that is not large by the standards of Italian cities, not large by any standard, and the not-largeness is part of the character, the character of a place that has organized itself not around size or growth or the accumulation of population but around a single activity, a single craft, a single object, the violin, and the organizing is visible in the streets and the buildings and the shops and the signs and the conversations and the particular quality of attention that the city pays to the instrument that made it famous, the instrument that is not merely produced in Cremona but that is Cremona, the city and the instrument fused, the identity of the place and the identity of the object inseparable, the way a person and their work become inseparable over a lifetime of practice.

Nadia walked the city on her free hours. The afternoons when Giovanni released her from the bench, the release coming not at a fixed hour but at the moment when Giovanni judged that the day's lesson had been absorbed, the absorption visible in the quality of her work, the shavings and the surfaces and the measurements telling Giovanni what her words could not, telling him that the hands had learned what they could learn for the day and that more learning required rest, required the settling that happens when the body is freed from the task and the mind processes what the body has done, the processing that sleep provides and that walking also provides, the walking being a form of processing, the feet doing the work while the mind integrates, the integration the learning, the learning the craft.

She walked through the Piazza del Comune. The piazza was the city's center, the open space around which the civic and religious buildings gathered, the buildings facing the piazza the way the sections of an orchestra face the conductor, the piazza the conductor, the piazza the organizing principle, the space from which the city radiated outward through its medieval streets. The Duomo, the cathedral, occupied the piazza's northern edge, the Romanesque facade of brick and marble rising in a series of arched loggias, the arches repeated, the repetition the rhythm, the rhythm architectural, the rhythm the same principle that governs music, the repetition with variation that the ear hears and the eye sees and the mind recognizes as order, as intention, as the human imposition of pattern on material.

The Torrazzo stood beside the Duomo. The bell tower, 112 meters tall, the tallest brick bell tower in the world, the tallness an assertion, a declaration, the medieval builders saying: we can build this high, we can stack brick upon brick to this height, and the height is not the purpose, the purpose is the declaration, the declaration of capacity, the declaration that the hands of the builders can do this thing, and the doing is the proof, and the proof is the tower, and the tower is still standing, the standing the endurance, the endurance the craft. Nadia stood at the base of the Torrazzo and she looked up and the looking-up was the same looking-up that every visitor performs, the craning of the neck, the tilting of the head, the body's acknowledgment that the thing above is taller than the body, that the thing above exceeds the body's scale, and the exceeding is the point, the tower exceeding the human scale the way the violin exceeds the human voice, the instrument doing what the body cannot do alone, the instrument extending the body's range, the violin extending the voice, the tower extending the reach.

She climbed the Torrazzo. Four hundred and two steps, the steps narrow, the stairway spiraling inside the brick walls, the spiral tightening as it rose, the space narrowing, the light dimming, the climb becoming more effortful with each landing, and the effort was the cost, and the cost was the view, and the view from the top was the city, the whole city, the red tile roofs extending in every direction, the roofs uniform in their terracotta color and various in their pitch and angle, the roofs covering the buildings that covered the streets that connected the piazzas that organized the city, and the city was small from here, was comprehensible, was a thing that could be seen whole, and the seeing-whole was the gift of the height, the gift that the Torrazzo gave to anyone willing to climb the four hundred and two steps.

She could see the Po Valley from the top. The flat plain extending to the horizon in every direction, the plain that had been an ancient sea and that was now farmland, the fields marked by rows of poplars and the dark lines of irrigation canals, the flatness overwhelming, the flatness the context for the city, the city a vertical assertion on the horizontal plain, the Torrazzo the highest point of the assertion, and Nadia stood at the highest point and she looked out over the plain and she thought about the mountains that she could not see, the Alps to the north where the spruce grew, the Dolomites where the Val di Fiemme produced the tonewood that was drying in Giovanni's attic, the mountains invisible but present, the wood from the mountains present in the workshop below, the workshop below invisible from here but present, the city holding the workshop the way the workshop held the wood the way the wood held the sound.

She descended. She walked. She walked through streets whose names she was learning, Via Palestro and Via Solferino and Corso Campi and Corso Garibaldi, the names commemorating battles and generals and fields and heroes, the Italian habit of naming streets for history, the history layered under the feet of the people who walked the streets without thinking about the names, the names becoming invisible through familiarity, the familiarity the residency, the residency the belonging, and Nadia was not yet a resident, was not yet familiar, was still in the state of noticing that precedes the state of belonging, the state in which every street name and every building facade and every shop window is registered and catalogued and stored in the growing archive of the new place, the archive that would eventually become the map, the internal map that the resident carries, the map that makes the city a home.

She counted the luthiers. She did not set out to count them but the counting happened, the eye trained to notice the workshops, the workshops visible from the street through their windows, the windows showing the benches and the tools and the wood and the instruments, the workshops identifiable by the smell that drifted through their open doors, the smell of spruce and varnish and hide glue that was the smell of the craft, and the craft was everywhere, the workshops distributed through the old city like notes distributed through a score, the density of workshops extraordinary, more than a hundred and fifty active luthiers in a city of seventy-two thousand, the ratio of luthiers to inhabitants higher than anywhere else in the world, the ratio the identity, the identity the craft.

She saw them through the windows. Men and women, young and old, standing at benches, holding tools, carving wood. The workshops varied in size and arrangement but shared the essential features: the north-facing windows, the workbenches, the tools on the walls, the templates, the hanging instruments, the smell, the quality of attention, the particular stillness of a person absorbed in precise manual work, the stillness that Nadia recognized because she had begun to inhabit it herself, the stillness of the apprentice at the bench, the stillness that was not the absence of motion but the presence of focus.

Some of the luthiers were her age. She saw them through the windows and the seeing was a recognition, the recognition of peers, of contemporaries, of people who had made the same choice she was making, the choice to learn the craft, the choice to stand at a bench in Cremona and carve wood into violins, and the choice was the community, the community of makers, the community that had existed in this city for five centuries and that continued to exist, the tradition perpetuated not by museums or books or universities but by the daily practice of the people in the workshops, the people who carved and bent and glued and varnished, the people whose hands carried the knowledge that their predecessors' hands had carried, the knowledge passing from hand to hand across the generations, the passing the tradition, the tradition the city.

The Scuola Internazionale di Liuteria. She passed the school where Marco had studied, the school that trained new luthiers in a four-year program that combined the traditional craft with modern acoustics and materials science, the school that was Cremona's investment in the future of the tradition, the school saying: we will teach this, we will continue to teach this, the craft will not die, the craft will not become a museum exhibit, the craft will remain a living practice, and the remaining was the school's purpose, and the purpose was the city's purpose, and the city's purpose was the violin.

She went to the Museo del Violino. She went on a Saturday afternoon in late October, the museum on the Piazza Marconi, the modern building of glass and steel that she had passed on her evening walks, the building whose facade she had stood before and looked through the windows at the instruments glowing in their cases, and now she went inside, now she paid the admission, now she entered the rooms where the history was kept.

The collection. The instruments of Stradivari and Guarneri and the Amati family, the instruments displayed in glass cases that were climate-controlled and lit with the precision of surgical theaters, the lighting designed to show the varnish without damaging it, the lighting the care, the care the preservation, the preservation the purpose. She stood before a Stradivari from 1715, the instrument known as the Cremonese, the instrument that was the museum's centerpiece, the instrument that was considered one of the finest violins ever made, and the considering was not subjective, was not merely opinion, was the consensus of three centuries of players and makers and scholars and listeners who had heard the instrument and assessed it and concluded that this violin, this particular arrangement of spruce and maple and ebony and varnish and hide glue, produced a sound that was as close to perfection as human hands had come.

The violin was beautiful. The varnish was an amber-red that glowed from within, the glow not a reflection of the light but an emanation, the light entering the varnish and returning changed, warmed, deepened, the varnish doing to the light what the instrument did to the sound, transforming it, enriching it, the transformation the craft, the craft the beauty. The scroll was carved with a precision that three centuries had not diminished, the volute tight and even, the chamfer sharp, the proportions perfect, the perfection not mechanical but organic, the perfection of a thing made by hand, made by a hand that was steady and sure and guided by a knowledge that Antonio Stradivari had accumulated over his seventy-year career, the career that had produced approximately eleven hundred instruments, of which approximately six hundred survived, of which this was one, this violin in this case in this museum in this city in this October.

Nadia looked at the Stradivari and the looking was not the looking of a tourist. The looking was the looking of a person who was learning to make violins, the looking that saw not only the beauty but the construction, not only the surface but the structure, the looking that assessed the arching and the graduation and the f-hole placement and the purfling and the scroll and the varnish with the eyes of a beginning maker, the eyes that Giovanni was teaching her to use, the eyes that saw the instrument not as a finished object but as a record of the making, each element of the instrument telling a story about the maker's decisions, the maker's skills, the maker's materials, the maker's time.

She saw the arching. She saw the way the top plate curved from the edge to the center, the curve gentle, the curve long, the arching lower than the arching on Giovanni's instruments, the lower arching producing a different acoustic character, a brighter sound, a more projecting sound, the arching the signature, the Stradivari arching as recognizable to a maker as a face is recognizable to a friend.

She saw the f-holes. She saw the way they curved, the upper eyes and the lower eyes and the narrow waist between them, the f-holes longer than those on earlier instruments, the length the evolution, Stradivari's f-holes having changed over the decades of his career, the earlier instruments' f-holes shorter and more upright, the later instruments' f-holes longer and more angled, the change the development, the development the life's work visible in the wood.

She entered the auditorium. The Museo del Violino had a concert hall, the Auditorium Giovanni Arvedi, a hall designed for the acoustics of the historical instruments, the hall small, intimate, the seats arranged in an oval around the stage, the acoustics designed by the Japanese acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota, the acoustics warm, the acoustics generous, the acoustics the architecture of listening, the architecture designed to receive the sound of the instruments in the collection, the instruments that were played in the hall during scheduled listening sessions, the instruments taken from their cases and tuned and played by selected musicians so that the public could hear the sound that the museum preserved, the sound being the thing that could not be displayed in a glass case, the sound being the thing that required the playing, the playing being the activation, the activation the purpose.

She attended a listening session. A violinist from the Cremona conservatory, a young Italian woman with dark hair and precise hands, took the 1715 Stradivari from its case and tuned it and played. The violinist played Bach, the Adagio from the Sonata No. 1 in G minor, the slow movement that begins with a single voice and develops into a meditation on solitude and beauty, and the sound of the 1715 Stradivari playing the Bach in the Auditorium Giovanni Arvedi was the sound of three centuries speaking, the sound of wood that had been vibrating for three hundred years, the sound that had deepened and darkened and ripened over the centuries of playing, the sound that was not merely the sound of spruce and maple but the sound of time, the sound of the years that had passed through the instrument, the years that had vibrated in the wood and changed the wood and been changed by the wood, the years that were audible in the tone, in the darkness, in the depth, in the particular quality of the sound that no new instrument could produce because no new instrument had three hundred years of vibration in its wood.

Nadia listened. She sat in the Auditorium and she listened to the 1715 Stradivari and the listening was a revelation, not a sudden revelation but a confirming one, the revelation confirming what she had suspected since arriving in Cremona, confirming what Giovanni's workshop had been teaching her, confirming what the planks in the attic and the tools on the wall and the templates and the forms had been saying in their language of wood and steel and patience: the things that your hands make will outlive your hands. The violin that Stradivari made in 1715 had outlived Stradivari by two hundred and seventy-eight years. The violin had outlived the maker and the maker's children and the maker's grandchildren and the maker's city as it had been and the maker's country as it had been and the maker's world as it had been, the instrument surviving everything, the instrument carrying the maker's knowledge and skill and craft into a future that the maker could not have imagined, and the carrying was the purpose, and the purpose was the craft, and the craft was the city, and the city was Cremona.

She sat in the auditorium and she listened to the Bach and the Bach was beautiful and the beauty was the sound and the sound was the instrument and the instrument was three hundred years old and the three hundred years were audible and the audible was the miracle, the quiet miracle of the craft, the miracle that is not supernatural but material, the miracle of wood and varnish and hide glue and the hands of a man who has been dead for two hundred and seventy-seven years and whose hands are still present in the instrument, whose hands are still audible in the sound, whose hands are still making, in some sense, every time the instrument is played, the dead maker making through the living instrument, the making continuing after the maker has stopped, the making outliving the maker, the making the only form of immortality that the craft recognizes.

She left the museum. She walked through the Piazza Marconi and through the streets and past the workshops and past the Torrazzo and past the Duomo and through the Piazza del Comune and along the Corso Campi and down Via Palestro and onto Via Palazzo and to the door of the workshop and she pushed the door open and the bell rang and the front room was empty and the instruments hung on the walls and the varnish glowed and the smell was the smell, the smell of spruce and maple and varnish and hide glue, the smell of the living craft, the craft that was alive in this workshop the way it had been alive in Stradivari's workshop three hundred years ago, the craft that was the same craft, the same wood, the same tools, the same glue, the same city, the same hands, different hands but the same kind of hands, human hands, maker's hands, the hands that make the thing that outlives the hands.

She stood in the front room and she breathed. She breathed the smell of the workshop and the breathing was the belonging, the beginning of the belonging, the first inhale of the place that was becoming her place, the workshop that was becoming her workshop, the city that was becoming her city, and the becoming was gradual, was slow, was happening at the pace of the craft, the pace that could not be rushed, the pace of the spruce drying in the attic and the shavings curling from the plane and the varnish coats building and the years accumulating, the pace that was Cremona's pace, the pace that was the tradition's pace, the pace that was the violin's pace.

And the pace was patience.

And the patience was the city.

And the city was the craft.

And the craft was the sound of a 1715 Stradivari playing Bach in a hall designed for the instruments that the city had made and was still making and would continue to make, the sound carrying across the centuries, the sound outliving the hands that made it, the sound the purpose, the sound the city, the sound the thing.

What your hands make will outlive your hands.

This was what the city said.

And the city was Cremona.

And Cremona was the violin.