Beare Necessities with Charles Beare
The Strad Magazine - December 1997
Charles Beare is one of the most influential instrument dealers in the world. He tells Anne Inglis how the scene has changed in four decades
London’s principal instrument dealer, Charles Beare, celebrated his 60th birthday this year and with it 40 years in the ever-changing violin business. Dealing in London has likewise altered out of all recognition, principally with the absence of Hills – who used to rule the world from Bond Street – and other names such as Cyril Jacklin, Paul Voigt, Ernest Voigt and Withers. ‘Guivier is still there,’ Beare points out, ‘but the others whom I recognized when I came into the business have gone and others have taken their places.’
So has the quality of instruments Beare saw on a day-to-day basis changed over the years? ‘It is markedly higher now,’ he reflects, ‘because we are getting to see top instruments which went elsewhere in those days.’ There are fewer home-owned instruments to see; Beare reckons that in the early ‘60s that there were about 130 Stradivarius in the UK but he is hard pressed to think of 40 today. Guarneris, Gaglianos, Grancinos, Gabrielis and the like have left Britain in similar proportions. But, at J & A Beare, he sees what remains and the instruments that pass through. The shop is a sort of casualty station, he says, the fiddle equivalent of an accident and emergency department.
‘The other massive thing that happened is that the scene was invaded by the auction sales,’ Beare continues. ‘Whether it was us or Hills or Paul Voigt, we were sitting there carrying out everything to do with violins, from rehairing bows to curing buzzes and making bridges and sound post, spending time making them sound, valuing them, providing a general service as our shop still does. But the auction sales are interested in momentarily making 20% or 25% of the value in a twinkling of an eye and in nothing beyond that. There was a huge commercial opportunity to take trade away from the specialist in all fields of the arts and antiques and they jumped in and took it.
‘It could sometimes be said, but of course not by me, that their expertise has lagged some way behind their financial acumen. And I think at the moment they are rather out of fashion. In the ‘70s the inflation in value of the musical instruments was driven by auction sales trying to make more and more money out of them, whereas the violin makers, repairers, dealers or specialist were regretting this inflation because it was taking instruments out of the hands of the next generation.’
Financially, though, this must have been to Beare’s benefit as well in a handsome way? ‘Financially it is to your benefit if you have a couple of instruments – and I can’t deny it has been to our benefit,’ Beare concurs. ‘But if you look back at the market generally, in 1960 the average orchestral player was earning £1,000 a year and you could buy a good Pressenda or Rocca for about two-thirds of that. Orchestral salaries at the moment are 30 times that amount and a Pressenda or a Rocca has gone up by about 150 or 200 times.
‘This I sincerely and bitterly regret because violins that were relatively easy for British musicians to acquire are now beyond their means. There was an incentive to sell instruments here to enrich the local profession and keep in Britain instruments which would be coming back for the next generation. Now nearly all of these things go out of Britain – a cause of enormous regret. We have a very modest home market and I can’t remember selling a Stradivari here in the last ten years.’
One solution to this problem is sponsorship which has never really got off the ground in the UK. Beare helped establish the Loan Fund for Musical Instruments – a very British idea – which lends money on the basis that a performer’s earnings will cover repayments. The sums involved may not be massive but the Loan Fund has helped hundreds of musicians buy quality instruments that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to afford. UK banks are not known for their sympathy for and understanding of musicians’ needs in this respect and the Fund has never had a bad debtor.
On the next level, a player may need a Guadagnini or better to further a career. Here, there has been plenty of progress during the last ten to twelve years, often with the understanding of a sympathetic individual. Beare mentions the case of Nigel Kennedy for whom a Stradivari was bought on the basis he would buy it himself gradually. Nigel Brown of N.W. Brown in Cambridge originally thought up the scheme and has since helped many musicians in a similar way.
‘But in fact Kennedy was able to buy it because of his success and perhaps a minute part of this success might be due to the fact he was playing on an instrument people wanted to listen to.’ Tasmin Little, at the time playing on a Lockey Hill, was another beneficiary of the scheme: ‘She got the use of a fiddle [a Guadagnini] that was ten times more than she could have afforded. She bought ten percent of it, and she and others in the same scheme have the option but not the obligation to buy any further share when the instrument is reviewed annually. Six years on, she now owns over half. It is kind of this benefactor but then he or she gets money too, when the instrument is revalued. So there aren’t any losers.’
With the rarity of old instruments, and rarified prices, the perspective on new instruments – once regarded as a last resort or at least a leap into the unknown – has changed in the last 20 years. Today any UK symphony orchestra has many modern instruments, most made in Britain. This upturn in a small but significant industry is due entirely to another development in Beare’s 40 years in the trade, the Newark School of Violin Making. This center of expertise also has solved another problem – who to get to repair these fantastic old instruments. ‘Newark was an inspired idea,’ says Beare, who employs in his own workshop five Newark-trained staff, alongside one from the now closed Welsh School, one from Mittenwald and his son who trained in Salt Lake City.
Another piece of background in the new-found acceptance of modern instruments was the existence of purchase tax. Forty years ago that meant 33.5% on anything new. The choices of buying an old violin for £200 or a new one for £200 were unequal: the old one might be worth £220 the next year but the new one was worth £150 the next day. If makers are registered for VAT (a sales tax of 17.5%) that applies to an extent but most makers are well below the VAT threshold. ‘This has made new making possible and Newark has made new making exist,’ Beare asserts. ‘There has been a renaissance in this country.’
Modern instruments fit happily into the Loan Fund’s lending. ‘The value of a modern instrument is what a maker will charge for a new one,’ says Beare. ‘If you had a maker who was charging outrageous prices which couldn’t be obtained on the second-hand market then obviously that would be a problem which would be considered.’
Beare is positive about the position of British makers in other places, though noting that ‘worldwide there are about ten to twelve makers. In this country they are doing very well and getting better. People take them seriously now.’
Beare’s own business has its own new instrument and bow making parts: what interest does he still take in that? ‘I always wanted to retire at 40 or 45 and make new instruments and carry out repairs but I had to give all that up to run a business,’ he says. ‘When Martin Bouette, my son Peter and Andrew Fairfax come along, with much more talent than I ever had for making new instruments, and likewise Tim Baker making the most marvelous bows, I get my satisfaction because they’re miles better than I could ever be.’ Nearly ten years ago J & A Beare gave Bouette the framework in which he could do some restoration of top instruments and some new making. They are yet to be launched commercially, the idea being not mass production but aiming for the top, ‘falling short obviously’, but always trying to close the gap between old and new instruments.
‘I always thought it should be possible for somebody intelligent to make a violin as good as a Rocca,’ Beare insists. ‘If a Rocca is ten times what you would need to give for a new instrument and the quality and sound are not too far distinguishable then there ought to be a good living in new instruments. I would always want to sell an instrument for the price I would be willing to buy it back for. Say I sold an instrument for £10,000 plus VAT, I would want to offer £10,000 to buy it back the following year.’
Beare’s expertise is legendary and he is renowned for detecting the authorship of old instruments. Had he retired 20 years ago, to whom would he have passed his skills? Beare currently is working out a plan to pass on the information and keep the business alive after his retirement in some ten years, though details are yet to be finalized. ‘As I think everyone knows, Frances Gilham has joined us after leaving Christie’s and she is already playing a very important role here. Most of the other staff have been here for many years.’
One of the very real worries expressed by the instrument fraternity is that vast body of knowledge is held by so few specialists. If Beare says a fiddle is by X then he is surely held in such esteem then that is it.
‘No,’ he counters, ‘because occasionally that isn’t it. I know I make mistakes. We all make mistakes. You believe a fiddle is by somebody then suddenly you buy one with an original label of another maker. This doesn’t change the quality of the instrument but it is the way knowledge progresses. The only way in which you can learn is by seeing instruments with original labels and if people hadn’t taken so many of them out it would be a lot easier. Having a photographic memory helps; in fact, you have got to have a photographic memory. I memorize not instrument by instrument but the details of a maker’s work so that if I see something a little esoteric coming through the door I might remember another fiddle like it years ago.’
He takes a piece of paper and draws a graph with a curve that rises quickly then tails off. ‘This is what I feel I knew at the beginning. You learn quickly then you reach a plateau.’ Beare draws a second curve, which crosses the first one at about the time of his Cremona Stradivari exhibition in 1987 and goes up and up – ‘This is what people think I know. But it is true no one will ever know more than 25% about old instruments. When I asked my father how long it would be before I really knew anything, he answered ten years. For a twenty-year-old that is quite depressing. Now, if somebody asked me how long it would be before anybody knows if you know anything, I would say 20 years because you need to be a certain age before people will believe you.
‘It is exactly the same with furniture and paintings,’ Beare argues, ‘no more difficult or easy. Some fiddles you can spot like a flash from the other side of the sales room but others are incredibly difficult. We have had cases here with people coming from abroad, expecting me to place an identity on their violin, being very disappointed when I haven’t been able to.’
Beare vowed that on his 60th birthday he would come into his office just three days a week and, at home, put some time into new instruments and into his long-awaited book on the Venetian makers. But he’s had much of the basic information for over 20 years, so why has it taken until now for him to commit his knowledge of this area to paper? He explains the background: “E.M.W. Paul [real name Paul Rosenbaum], a lawyer and refugee from Hitler, went first to Switzerland and became a photographer and then came to England and became a violin dealer. He was a pupil of George Dykes who taught him the difference between French and German bows. It was a little time before Paul realized that the only bows Dykes was buying were the ones he said were German and not worth anything, then he realized they were the good French ones. ‘So Paul decided to look after himself in the fiddle world and one of the first things he discovered was that nobody seemed to know anything about the Venetian makers. So he went to Venice and examined archives there. Paul suffered from angina and said he hoped I would take the project on – we had both been befriended by Rembert Wurlitzer and there was a natural friendship between us. When Paul died in 1966, I received a suitcase full of documents, photographs and a far larger quantity of jottings and some typing.
“For the first few years I tried to decipher all this, and then to write something but I was not an experienced writer. I rewrote all this at the end of the 70’s, but now I haven’t touched it for 18 years. It is a disgrace in a way that the book hasn’t already appeared but hardly a month goes by without some new information. Having been looking at Venetian instruments for so long as I have, now probably is the time to write the book.’ Planned as a two-volume edition ‘with good photographs and the best articles I can do on the individual makers’, Beare hopes to complete it ‘within a year’. In a world where books rarely seem to meet their projected schedules, Beare’s contribution to instrument knowledge will be eagerly awaited by the international violin community.
Anne Inglis, formerly editor of The Strad, is a journalist specialising in stringed instruments. She currently edits the newsletter of the British Violin Making Association and the journal news & views published by the European String Teachers Association, and also writes the auction reports for The Strad.
By Anne Inglis
