CBS News 60 Minutes Vol. XXVII No. 47
Reproduced by permission
MORLEY SAFER: When we first broadcast this story last April, we posed a riddle: What’s just two feet long, weighs just two pounds, may be ounce-for-ounce the most valuable piece of equipment ever made and--never mind Guy Lombardo--it makes the sweetest music this side of heaven? It’s a Strad, a Stradivari, one of the 600 or so remaining of 1,200 violins the Italian craftsman Antonio Stradivari made almost 300 years ago. And according to their owners, they are matchless.
(Footage of Itzhak Perlman playing violin)
Mr. ITZHAK PERLMAN (Violinist): (Voiceover) The response to my bow when I put it on the string of the violin was something that I’ve never experienced before. It just went right towards me.
The kind of sound-the quality of the tone was so perfect that-that I-you know, I just sort of gave up immediately, you know. I didn’t have any problem. You know, I just played about three notes. That was it, thank you very much. I know what it’s about, and I don’t need to try it anymore.
(Footage of Perlman)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Itzhak Perlman waxes poetic when he describes the day he bought his Strad, an instrument made by the master in 1714. Today one of these little beauties can fetch $2 million or $3 million.Did it cost you a fortune?
Mr. PERLMAN: Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, let’s put it this way: I’m glad I got it when I got it because people thought it was the most outrageous price ever. And somehow there’s always a more outrageous price around the corner or the next year.
(Footage of violins; Cremona, Italy; statue of Antonio Stradivari)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Connoisseurs, musicians, dealers call these instruments ‘miracles.’ If so, it was the miracle on Bissolati Street in Cremona, the small city in the north of Italy. Cremona is where the first modern violin was made in 1505. In 1644, Stradivari was born here and spent most of a life of 93 years improving it to a point that has not been matched in 300 years of trying. The city’s pride and joy is its own Stradivari, called the Cremonese. And because a Strad is said to dim a little each day if it is not played, the city fathers pay a man to come in every day to keep the Cremonese spry.
SAFER: (Voiceover) Cremona is still the city of violin-makers. Try, if you can, to think of a more benign industry for a one-industry town. Each of the 40 violin-makers has his own theory about the unique Stradivari sound. Some say it was the wood, the local sycamore; others, a type of maple found in Bosnia; others, the thickness of the wood.
Mr. CHARLES BEARE (Violin Dealer and Restorer): There are things that I think we still don’t understand in 1994 about what was done in 1744. This is a bit narrower.
(Footage of Beare and others working on violins)
SAFER: (Voiceover) When it comes to Stradivari, there is little that Charles Beare, a London dealer and restorer, does not know. His team of craftsmen, the workshop, the tools could have stepped right out of the 18th century.
Mr. Beare: For instance, the varnish--there’s sort of a legend about Stradivari’s varnish.
(Footage of a man working on a violin)
Mr. Beare: (Voiceover) And, in fact, whatever the trick was or whatever the substance was that he applied to his instruments has been the subject of speculation and theory for the last 200 years, really, because they-whatever it was, it-it disappeared.
SAFER: The story goes that the formula was a tightly guarded family secret. The last direct descendant to have it…
(Photograph of Giacomo Stradivari; violin-maker superimposed over Giacomo letter)
SAFER: (Voiceover) …was one Giacomo Stradivari, a great-great grandson. To all request for it, he would reply this way: ‘You ask something impossible of me. I have not even entrusted my wife and daughters with this secret. I would never disclose to anyone the contents of this precious recipe.’ It turns out Giacomo was a bit of a scoundrel. He’d been trying to get an English dealer to give him one of his ancestor’s violins in exchange for that precious recipe. The recipe turned out to be a useless concoction Giacomo himself had invented, and he never got his Strad. Great-great-grandpa, it seems, took the actual formula with him to his grave.
Mr. BEARE: But whatever that preparation was, it had a beneficial effect on the vibrations of the wood from which the instrument was made.
Unidentified Auctioneer: And to start this at $700,000. To start it …
(Footage of auction)
SAFER: (Voiceover) The men who deal in these remarkable instruments make up an exclusive, almost secret society, perhaps only six or seven of them stalking the world and the auction houses.
Auctioneer: Eight Hundred Thousand
SAFER: (Voiceover) If they weren’t so secretive, they could tell you where each of the 600 Strads has come to rest.
Auctioneer: ….$800,000. Pass. Goes home…
(Footage of auction; Beare)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Charles Beare is one of that happy few. His family has been in the violin business in London for generations.
Mr. BEARE: I’ve been looking at these things for 30-something years now, and every time I see a new Stradivari that I haven’t seen before, I learn something.
I think it’s a little too far in.
(Voiceover) And every time I see one that I haven’t seen for a little while, I still say, ‘My goodness, there’s something good there.’
It’s very tight.
(Footage of violinists; Du Pre)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Any number of violinist over the decades and centuries would agree, from Yehudi Menuhin to Ann Sophie Mutter, in such hands the instrument takes on a life of its own and passes from life to life. The Stradivari cello played by the late Jacqueline Du Pre…
(Footage of performance)
SAFER: (Voiceover) …that same Strad now played by Yo-Yo Ma.
(Footage of Yo-Yo Ma)
Mr. BEARE: Everything is perfection. The archings, the- actually the thickness at the time, the varnish-the whole thing is sort of complete miracle, even when you’ve been studying them.
(Footage of man testing violin)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Two hundred and fifty years later scientist are still trying to discover Stradivari’s secret, subjecting the instruments to every conceivable test technology can come up with, trying to duplicate a miracle.
I wonder, could you demonstrate it for us? Well, you have your Strad.
Mr. PERLMAN: Yeah.
SAFER: I’ve barrowed this fiddle from the Third Street School of Music here in New York.
Mr. PERLMAN: Mm-hmm. Well, I haven’t tried it yet. So let’s see what it’s-maybe it’s great. Oh, I see somebody’s ber--has been practicing on it. I can see a lot of rosin here.
(Perlman plays the violin from Third Street School of Music)
Mr. PERLMAN: You know, you have--it’s like you have a mute in there. You know, it’s like muffled.
All right. All right.
SAFER: OK.
Mr. PERLMAN: Now put this right there.
(Perlman plays Stradivari)
Mr. PERLMAN: So you get immediately-I don’t know if this is catching on the microphone, but to my ear, you’ve got a brightness and an openness with this violin there-you know, you cannot compare the two.
(Footage from Beare’s shop)
SAFER: (Voiceover) And there are legions of people throughout the world who think they own a Strad.
Unidentified Saleswoman: I think Mr. Beare thinks that’s very unlikely, but if you’d like to leave the instrument until tomorrow afternoon…
Unidentified Man #1: OK.
Unidentified Saleswoman: …then we could have a look and see.
Man #1: OK
SAFER: (Voiceover) I gather people are always on your case, saying, ‘I have a Strad.’
Mr. BEARE: (Voiceover) Yes. This quite often happens, several times a week actually.
There’s one recently--very nice lady telephoned from California and--about a Stradivari that was listed. And so I said, ‘Well, first of all, just let me know what’s written on the label.’ And so I get this, ‘Dear Mr. Beare, very nice speaking with you this morning. By your request, here is the information inside the violin.A.S.--Antonio Stradivarius, Cremonensis Faciebet, 1721’--fine so far. Underneath the killer line, ‘Made in Czechoslovakia.’ Well, of course, Czechoslovakia didn’t exist until the end of the First World War.
(Footage from Beare’s shop)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Much more rare are people who come into the shop, as one violinist did, thinking he’d been conned. He told Beare with a heavy heart that he’d paid some wise guy in the street $5,800 for an instrument.
Mr. BEARE: And I said, ‘Well, you’ve bought – you’ve bought a Stradivari,’ and he nearly fainted. We had to get wet towels and water and things. And then-but he said, ‘You know, nothing like this has ever happened to me in my life.’
(Footage of Carnegie Hall; Marcelle Hall; photo of Julian Altman)
SAFER: (Voiceover) And there’s the great Carnegie Hall caper. Ten years ago an American woman named Marcelle Hall called Beare to say her husband, Julian Altman, an all-around nasty character, had summoned her to his prison deathbed to tell her the fiddle he’d been playing for 50 years just might be worth something.
Mr. BEARE: It was very, very dirty and scratched up and, you know, not looking at all happy.
(Article from The New York Times titled ‘Huberman Violin Stolen At Carnegie’; poster of Huberman)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Indeed, it was the same fiddle that had made headlines in New York in 1936 when it was stolen at Carnegie Hall from virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman. Not a squeak had been heard from it. How it got to Altman remains a mystery.
You think there are more?
Mr. BEARE: There must be a dozen sitting somewhere. I mean, these old Italian palaces are full of things that haven’t been dusted since the 18th century, some of them. And, you know, I wouldn’t-it wouldn’t surprise me at all if there was one hidden in Italy somewhere.
(Footage of violin repair shop)
SAFER: (Voiceover) Like even the best of Italian craftsmanship, a Ferrari or a fiddle, a certain amount of time must be spent in the shop.
Unidentified Man #2: There’s a little crack there, another one just by the bridge foot. And we endeavor-when we repair cracks, we endeavor to make them invisible.
SAFER: Have you ever had to leave that overnight for repairs?
Mr. PERLMAN: Yeah. Yeah.
SAFER: Do you feel funny about it?
Mr. PERLMAN: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The whole violin sort of can go out of adjustment very quickly. So then comes the big, major surgery, which every--whi--which we all dread…
(Footage of man repairing violin)
Mr. PERLMAN: (Voiceover) …because a violin sounds wonderful-will it sound good after they take the top off and then put it back on? Because, you know, we’re dealing with something that is so mysterious, you know, I mean, what makes a fiddle sound so fantastic? I don’t believe in a lot of fooling around with the fiddle. Once it sounds good, I believe in leaving it-leaving it alone, you know.
SAFER: Do you have any idea what his secret is? What it is he had?
Mr. PERLMAN: No, absolutely not. It’s wonderful, you know, to have some sort of mystery that cannot be explained, cannot be put in a computer and analyzed. It’s nice.
SAFER: (Voiceover) Nice, indeed, to know musicians may come and go, fashions fade, but some things last and last. Some things never get used up.
(Footage of Perlman in concert)
Produced by John Tiffin
