Standard Bearer
The Strad Magazine - May 2006
Born into one of the great violin-dealing dynasties, Peter Beare is upholding its reputation
for quality, winning prizes galore for his making and peer recognition along the way.
Caroline Gill meets a remarkably modest man
My American grandfather said to me when I was young that there is a difference between Americans and Brits,’Peter Beare tells me. ‘Brits will say “Here’s how my father did it, so I’m going to do it the same way”; Americans will say “Here’s how my father did it – there must be a better way.”’ Beare maintains that he takes to heart a little of both these ideals. In violin circles the name Beare is a big one, and perfectionism and drive are undiminished in the youngest generation of one of the trade’s most influential dynasties.
Beare is an interesting set of contradictions: calm and humorous, but with an energetic enthusiasm that betrays the sort of unassuming confidence that can only appear uncontrived in those who are truly skilled at what they do. Talk to those who know him and they express surprise that he is willing to talk about himself enough to agree to a magazine profile. Indeed, Beare himself refuses to acknowledge that he has the reputation as one of the world’s best makers, despite the impressive list of players that have his instruments in their collections and the awards with which he was garlanded at the 2004 British Violin Making Association (BVMA) competition.
I ask him why he decided on violin making. ‘The why is easy,’ he says. ‘I love working with wood. When I was at school I got very into sailing and used to race.’ He points at a four-metre wooden dinghy resting against a pile of his father’s books. ‘I made that in the dining room when I was 16. I’m just restoring it at the moment.’
The combination of working with wood, a love of sailing and a strong scientific bent meant that Beare spent much of his time at school thinking he would train as a naval architect. ‘But then I realised that would mean working with composite materials and I didn’t want that. With violin bows you can get much prettier curves with composites, but it was the working with wood I always came back to. I decided I could make fiddles as a job and boats as a hobby, and that was clearly going to work better. And of course it had the music element, and I love music.’
Beare trained at the prestigious Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City. He is full of praise for its founder, Peter Prier, but given that Prier’s own training was in Mittenwald I wonder why Beare chose to travel so far for what might be considered an essentially German training. ‘Because my dad came home with a load of skiing brochures!’ he laughs.
The more serious rationale behind his decision to study in the US was based on his belief that part of the business of working in violins – dealing, restoring or making – is to make friends of one’s colleagues. ‘We had a lot of people in the firm who had been through Mittenwald or Newark, so we already had a lot of friends in Europe. It was very nice to go to Salt Lake City and get to know people in the States well.’
It was also a rich educational experience that Beare defines as unique, despite its Mittenwald heritage. ‘The Mittenwald style is very recognisable and I don’t think the Salt Lake style is the same, although on a technical basis and how the school is structured it’s similar. I thought Peter Prier was very open: although you did things one way at the workbench, which is the best way to start, he was open to other ideas and influences. You discussed it and looked at it. So the end result was very different.’
I wonder whether Mittenwald and Salt Lake are his biggest influences as a result of his training, or if – as do many modern makers – he allies himself to the old Italians when making his instruments. ‘I do several things,’ he says. ‘I’ve done a few copies; I also make from scratch. I think they’re both great disciplines. I love copying because you get a chance to do much more than just look at an instrument. Otherwise, the next day – how much do you remember?’ He smiles. ‘For me, not much.’
Beare’s genuine modesty is very engaging, but it is easy to observe from talking to him that he is assembling an understanding the depth of which is not easily established simply by looking. ‘If you sit down and have the opportunity to make a bench copy, you learn so much about that maker: a lot of which you can draw from and use to influence your own making. I think school was good for technical things, but it’s not about style. That comes with time, unless you’re a Strad-like genius. The rest of us have to work pretty hard at it and develop our own tastes.’
‘I’ve always restricted it to the great makers, though,’ he continues. ‘Strad, Guarneri and Bergonzi. The more you look at them the better you realise they are. I think if you deviate tooar from those makers you’re going to restrict the potential of your instruments to sound great. Of all the influences I’ve had, though,’ he says, ‘from Salt Lake City to working with people now, the thing I like to do is open my mind as fully as possible to their way of doing things and immerse myself. At school I saw people who couldn’t listen and I thought that restricted them a lot.’
And what conclusions has he come to about how he wants to make his violins? ‘I think the Sacconi interpretation of how Strad worked feels right and makes sense. It’s a very free way of working and allows you to apply your current thoughts within tight constraints. I used to take a mould, build the ribs on it, finish the front and back and then assemble the parts. However, the way I would interpret Strads as having been made is to glue the front and the back on to the rib structure having graduated the plates and having done the majority of the arching, but not yet cut the outline, inlaid the purfling or finished the channelling. Studying the old instruments and seeing the amount of variation you get, the amount of consistency of the overhangs and details such as the pins, all seem to point to doing it this way. But the key is an accurate rib structure. If you look at the great early Cremonese rib structures they’re incredibly accurate.’
Beare describes making from scratch and creating copies as ‘completely different’: ‘I think the right way to make a copy, if there is a right way, is to think from scratch. I think most people have clicked this now, which is really nice to see: all over the world there are people sitting down and designing. It’s not about pushing a pencil round outlines and reducing it back to a mould and building on that. If you’re going to imagine yourself in Cremona three hundred years ago, you wouldn’t have just put a pencil round someone else’s design.’
Nor would you have more tools than were strictly necessary for the job. Sitting in drawers in his immaculately tidy workshop are gadgets Beare has designed for making his job easier, such as a small implement he made to turn edges. ‘But in the end,’ he admits, ‘I prefer just doing it with a knife and rasp. It’s too clinical otherwise. I try to use the largest tool to do the job and get it shaped so there’s not so much fussing. Inevitably, we’re all obsessed with getting the latest tools, but I tend to shove all of them in a drawer and keep it to a minimum. The only things here not specifically adapted are a couple of screwdrivers and my files.’
On leaving Salt Lake City, Beare undertook training with Carl Becker in Chicago. He describes what he learnt there: ‘Working with Carl Becker was fascinating and made me think a little bit harder about shapes. He had done quite a few things I had never seen before and is a totally superlative craftsman.’ He also spent time in the workshops of Premysl and Jan ˘Spidlen in Prague and Etienne Vatelot in Paris, as well as at J.&A. Beare’s in London. Investing such time in open-minded apprenticeship has paid dividends. Beare’s award-winning entry in the 2004 BVMA competition was bought by Curtis Price, principal of the Royal Academy of Music; another was bought by Nigel Kennedy. Beare’s favourite of his own instruments, however, is a copy of the 1711 ‘Parke’ Stradivari that was bought last year by Shlomy Dobrinsky, first violin with the Philharmonia Orchestra.
‘I’m totally in love with Peter’s violins,’ enthuses Dobrinsky. ‘I tried several instruments in the shop, including a Serafin and Gagliano, without looking at the labels, and Peter’s looked antique. It sounds old, which is such a rare quality for a new fiddle to have. Usually they have a brash sound – which is characteristic – but with Peter’s violin it had so many colours. It’s so hard as a professional to find a fiddle that you love, but that you can afford.’
Paradoxically, the smaller price tag of modern instruments can sometimes keep at a distance the very players most capable of harnessing their sound. This is a perennial problem for modern makers, Beare feels, when it comes to selling their instruments. Although he suggests that certain players might find it harder to draw the sound from some (and he stresses some) new instruments than those that have 200 years of playing in, he maintains that he doesn’t believe that to be the norm. He argues that there are good and bad instruments in every period and that prejudice against modern ones is fast disappearing.
However, the problem of bridging the gap between people’s perceptions of old and new instruments is one that has exercised Beare and is something he addressed at the Amiata Summit in Italy in 2004. ‘The whole idea of it was “Why aren’t we as good as Stradivari?”’ he explains, ‘the subtext being “What should we be doing?” I asked myself what we’re lacking in modern instruments. How do they fall short? There is something about new instruments that some players find a bit difficult. I think it’s the characteristic warmth of sound and wonder if it’s a question of playing in.’
For the summit, Beare made an instrument from scratch, which he describes as ‘ending up a bit Straddy.’ Did the fact that he ended up making something so Strad-like in its design help him to come to any conclusions? ‘There were no lightening bolts! But I don’t think that was expected. I think it just reinforced the idea that you’ve got to think about what you’re doing from scratch and make an instrument properly. Science and technology – that’s the thing.’ But surely a maker can never know what their instrument will really sound like until it has the strings on it? There has to be something indefinable that makes an instrument sound individual. Beare laughs. ‘Yes, magic’s fun, isn’t it? It’s all about character and feel. I don’t think you should be blinkered into thinking that numbers are the be-all and end-all. Just a starting point.’
Which brings us back to the schoolboy naval architect, who loves science and working with wood in equal measure. Out of a drawer he takes a prototype for a new bass-bar that he has designed: it has a carbon fibre strip over the top, a rare earth magnet inserted in the middle and is lighter than usual. ‘Through the f-holes I will be able to add rare earth magnets to change the mass of the bar and see how the sound is affected. You can do things to bridges and the soundposts to change the sound, but you can’t muck around with the bass-bar without taking the front off. And then bang goes everything because there are so many variables from putting it back on again. This is a one-off experiment rather than a substitute for a correctly made bar and I can always take this one out if it doesn’t work!’
Beare’s workshop is a converted barn he shares with three other makers – Martin Bouette, Ute Wegerhoff and Andrew Fairfax – all of whom he cites as significant influences in his making. Here he works on his instruments quietly and without distraction, three days out of five. The other two he is at the shop in London, seeing clients. The ‘shop’ is J.&A. Beare, the violin dealership that has been in the family for several generations. Beare’s father, Charles, is one of the most well-known and respected violin experts in the business. It would have been so easy, wouldn’t it, to have followed his father into his trade?
‘I wanted to be really good at something,’ he responds. ‘I get a lot of satisfaction out of doing something well. My memory is not as good as my father’s: his evenings were always spent reading books and memorising the fiddles. It’s where his natural drive was. Mine was always about making things. It may also be that I didn’t go into the same area as my father just because I thought he was so good at it that I wouldn’t be that good. It would be frustrating and I’ve never got heavily involved. If you’re going to be a dealer you have to really know the instruments so well and that’s more than a lifetime’s occupation. I realised very early on I wouldn’t be happy if I didn’t do some making.’
It is hard to pin down Beare to his specific influences: possibly in part due to the open-mindedness that allows him to gather inspiration from every experience he has, whether as restorer, appraiser or maker. Apart from the attention he pays Guarneri and Bergonzi, as well as his particular affinity to the Strad outline, however, Beare is emphatic that Bouette is one of his biggest influences: ‘He makes fantastic fiddles. I don’t want to embarrass him, but he is one of the most together makers and has really thought through how things should be done.’
It was Bouette, says Beare, who encouraged him to think carefully about how he was actually going to make his instruments and it was through discussions with him that he came to his conclusions about the Sacconi theory. ‘I thought one day I would start to think about what I actually like and what I want to do, and it’s only very recently that I’ve really thought along those lines.’
So, what direction for Beare, now that he is applying his years of meticulous research to his role as one of the world’s leading violin makers? ‘I don’t set out to be radical,’ he says. ‘I try to make an instrument work as well as I can, in all ways, and I’m not that prolific. My approach, rather than just sit there and crank out the same thing time after time, is to try and understand what makes the great instruments great. You can learn the craftsmanship side from people but everything else you learn from the instruments.’
Caroline Gill
