The Violins of Nathan Milstein

 

The Ukranian-American virtuoso played four priceless instruments in his career. But one Strad was his favorite, and he renamed it for his wife.

 

The virtuoso violinist Nathan Mironovich Milstein (1903-1992) had a remarkable career by many indicators – his training, his colleagues, his interpretations of works from the Romantic period, and his own life journey from the Ukraine to America during a tumultuous era. Among his many distinctions is the fact he performed in concert up to the age of 82, ending there only because of a debilitating injury to his hand from a fall.

 

So it might make sense that over his long tenure, he was known to play on at least four exceptionally fine violins, three made by Antonio Stradivari and the fourth by Stradivari’s contemporary, Bartolomeo Guarneri. Milstein also had a favorite bow, now known as the “Milstein” Francois Tourte, made in Paris around 1812.

 

But it bears noting that he owned two of the Strads while the third (the 1717 Reiffenberg) and the Guarneri (the 1727 “Milstein Guarneri ‘del Gesu’”) were borrowed. This is increasingly the case with the most prized (and highly valued) violins today in that the musician merely has them on loan from a wealthy collector or an institution that actually owns the instrument. This is sometimes true of very fine stringed instrument bows.

 

This is not an entirely new phenomenon. One prolific collector of Stradivarius and Guarneri violins (as well as fine instruments by other makers) was Rembert Wurlitzer (1904-1963), the heir of the Wurlitzer Co. fortune who separated himself from the musical instrument and jukebox company to buy, authenticate, restore and sell about half of the known 600 Strads in the 1950s. A Wurlitzer certification is highly respected in contemporary authentications.

 

Wurlitzer owned the Reiffenberg violin, although whether that ownership coincided with Milstein playing it is difficult to determine by available records. Milstein’s most prized instrument, the 1716 “Goldman” Strad, was so named as it was owned by collector Henry Goldman, a scion of the family that founded the Goldman Sachs investment banking firm. Milstein considered that his primary instrument through much of his career and renamed it the “Maria Teresa,” to honor both his wife and his daughter who are so named.

 

The Reiffenberg violin is a rarity in that it retains its original label (“Antonius Stradivarius Cremonensis Faciebat Anno 1717”). Labels that say Stradivarius more typically are made by someone else, simply indicating it’s “in the style of” and are of much lower value. It has been owned by Dmitry Sitkovetsky, a Azerbaijan-born classical violinist and conductor, since 1983.

 

Goldman owned the 1716 Strad from 1911-1923, and it changed hands three times before Millstein acquired it in 1945. After Milstein’s death, the family retained ownership until 2006 before selling it to Los Angeles-based businessman Jerry Kohl, a music lover who lends the instrument to players of distinction.

"The Violin Makers of the United States" by Thomas Wenberg

Neither a musician nor a maker of musical instruments, this deeply shy writer traversed America to meet luthiers face-to-face and describe their work.

It was published more than 30 years ago, and all copies sit within a fine Moroccan goatskin cover. It’s available through the standard (today) online booksellers, starting at $180 per copy from its limited run. And somewhat like the 3,500 luthiers it documents in an encyclopedic format, “The Violin Makers of the United States” by Thomas Wenberg (Pizzicato Publishing Company, 1986) was painstaking researched by hand.

By hand and a pickup truck, that is. Author Wenberg drove back and forth across the US for the better part of two years, from one violin shop to another, to gather as much information as was possible from the violin makers of that time, most of whom are unknown in the great concert halls and universities where fine instruments are played. In fact, among the craftspeople he interviewed – in person as much as possible, and certainly not via email or studied online, as those communications and information technologies were in the most nascent and inaccessible forms in the mid-1980s – some were best described as hobbyists. Others were the premier luthiers in America, however, prized by musicians of ambition and accomplishment.

Wenberg later went on to a political career, serving in the state senate of Oregon under a new name, Wilde. Which hints at the quirkiness of Wenberg, who readily acknowledged, despite his accomplishments, having learning disabilities (dyslexia and attention deficit disorder), being an “extreme introvert,” and social anxiety. He nonetheless overcame these as barriers to assembling the most complete summary of violin makers in the country.

It bears knowing that Americans who made fine stringed instruments were generally not as highly regarded as the European masters of previous centuries. Another chronicler of the craft, Christopher Germain (a Philadelphia-based violinmaker), notes that very crude, amateur-built instruments constructed in the Colonial period appear to have been made out of frustration more than anything else, the better European-made fiddles being rare and expensive. European makers began to immigrate to the Americas by the 19th century, upping the ante considerably. By the latter 20th century, America’s stability and prosperity drove its violinmakers to match those of the Old World. Germain says the violins made in the US began to rival their European counterparts by the 1980s.

Wenberg/Wilde’s book is unrivaled and heralded, even if a large percentage of the people chronicled in “The Violinmakers of the United States” may by now have passed on. Violins in auction houses today might make note of the luthier’s pedigree for being in the book.

But just as notable is how this shy person somehow overcame his own insecurities to accomplish something remarkable through an exhaustive, solitary effort – using a pickup truck instead of a Google search window to learn about the people who make fine stringed instruments. Not unlike luthiers themselves, whose largely solitary work creates something enduring, Wenberg/Wilde crafted a tome worthy of great music, great musicians and great instrument making.

Violinmaking: Why the Age of the Wood Matters

 

Great violins last hundreds of years, so perhaps a ten-year wait for wood to age isn’t so bad for violinmakers. But scientists hope to speed things up.

 

The nature of violinmaking is that the mastery thereof is part science, part art – and lots of patience. Just looking at one aspect of the process, determining if the raw wood has sufficiently aged, illustrates this point.

 

The reason wood – spruce for the soundboard and maple for the bridge (ebony and rosewood are typically used for the fingerboard) – needs to age is for the natural water content to dry out. For some wood applications, furniture making for example, it is less important that this process occur naturally over a long stretch of time. But a dining room chair is not a $50,000 violin.

 

For fine violins – as well as fine cellos and violas - the amount of moisture in the wood of a violin needs to be equal to that of ambient moisture. The technical term is “equilibrium moisture content.” If this equilibrium is not achieved, there can be several bad effects on the raw material:

 

• Bowing along the face of the wood board
• Curvature springing along the edge of the wood board
• Twisting (“winding”) of the board
• Cupping, or a curvature across the width
• Grain of wood splitting
• Collapse of the wood cells
• Moisture traps in the center cells of the wood, even if the external regions are dried.

 

The drying method used by suppliers of wood to a violinmaker (they’re also known as “luthiers”, although the term also applies to makers of violas, cellos, stringed bass, and guitars) is to stack cut pieces from logs in such a way that maximizes air exposure. Some say three to four years of drying is sufficient, and others argue for wood that has aged for at least ten years. Experts say the difference is seen in quality, which is factored into the material pricing (less-aged wood is priced lower). But they also advise that such things as the wood itself, the age of the tree, and where it grew, can affect dry times.

 

This naturally begs the question about speeding up the dry time with heat, applied through kilns. This is something used in all kinds of woodworking, but again, a violin is not a dining room chair.  A kiln changes the very cellular structure of the wood. That would have a deleterious effect by changing the sound of the finished violin.

 

All that said, there are violins made with accelerated, kiln processes. These are the lower-end, manufactured violins typically made for beginner-level students, particularly those produced in China.

 

There is also some research underway at the Institute for Musical Instrument Making at the University of Dresden in Zwota, Germany, which claims thermally modified timber, “artificially aged wood,” can considerably reduce storage times and costs. The researchers note that demand for high-quality wood that has been aged for several years is not keeping up with increasing demand for quality musical instruments – and that the demand for old-growth wood has an environmental cost as well.

 

“Fir trees have grown calmly in the mountains for 250 to 300 years with fine and uniform growth rings, until they provide light and yet stable resonating wood for guitars, violins, violas or cellos. But this precious wood is becoming rarer and more expensive, and to complicate matters, only one in five of these old trees is suitable for instrument making,” says Klaus Eichelberger, a member of the university’s wood research faculty.

 

The method used by the researchers, described as a “mild pyrolysis,” is not yet advanced to commercial use. But they say it is promising, with “ larger dimensional stability, higher durability, and an improved tonal behavior, comparable to artificial aging without negative effects.”

 

Perhaps one day the wait for usable material in finer stringed instruments will not require quite so much time. For now, patience remains a virtue – for virtuosos.