Word: stradivari
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...violin is a thin, hollow wooden box with a long neck, a body shaped like a figure eight, and a capacity for more subtlety of expression than any other orchestral instrument. It was perfected in Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries by craftsmen of the Amati, Stradivari and Guarneri families. Others have been trying to duplicate their masterpieces of workmanship ever since...
...small, ornamented Gasparo da Salo, dated 1609; the most famous was Paganini's own powerful Guarneri del Gesu, given to him (by a wealthy Leghorn merchant) on the condition that nobody else would ever perform on it; the most prevalent were modern models patterned closely after Stradivari designs. Because of their popularity among wealthy foreign fiddlers, there were no Strads at all available for the exhibit...
Born in 1567, the son of a doctor in Cremona (where the Stradivari were later to make violins), Monteverdi was a child of the late Renaissance. He was taught the same rigid rules of church composition as Palestrina, but quickly showed revolutionary tendencies: his madrigals, which he began publishing at 20, were damned for their "illegal" chords. By the time of his death in 1643, he had discovered harmonies which might have given Wagner himself a turn, sizzled the Italian ear with its first violin tremolos, startled it with its first plucked strings, and helped set music on an entirely...
...fiddle, five-eighths of an inch longer than his Amati, was built by the only U.S.-born member of the 300-year-old European Guild of Violinmakers, a stocky, shy Philadelphian named William Moennig Jr. Moennig also does all the repairing on Efrem Zimbalist's Stradivari violin, Gregor Piatigorsky's Montagnana cello.* Moennig, 40, and his 62-year-old father live and work in a colonial house on Philadelphia's once swank Locust Street, now lined with doctors' offices. The Moennigs sit at benches side by side, poking quietly into ailing old masters with scrapers, knives...
...Stradivari costs in the neighborhood of $40,000. Bill Moennig, who charges from $750 to $1,000 for his, is slightly cynical about it. Says he: "Invariably the tone of an instrument is rapturously admired until the audience learns it was finished a week or a month before. Then they come out with the bright statement that they'd noticed a bit of newness in the tone...