London, July 4, 1985
Link: Charles Beare
I arrived in New York by ocean liner at six
o'clock one dark Saturday morning in January 1960. Rembert Wurlitzer had
visited London while I was still at the violin making school at Mittenwald, and
without even knowing me had suggested to my grateful parents that I spend a
year in New York, as he felt that his workshop under Mr. Sacconi had achieved
great advances in the techniques of restoration, and anyway I would benefit
from seeing large numbers of the world's finest instruments. Any trepidation I
felt as I gathered my belongings on the dockside quickly evaporated when a
tall, elegant gentleman raised his hat and introduced himself as Rembert
Wurlitzer, and by nine o'clock I was at the Wurlitzer premises on 42nd Street,
meeting some of the best friends I have ever had.
Mr. Sacconi gave me a warm handshake and a
friendly smile, and as I watched him sit down at his bench and remove the table
of a 1720 Stradivari that had arrived from Spain that same morning, I realized
that I had never imagined a craftsman with such masterly skill: everything he
did was speedy and accurate, and to watch his hands that first day was a
revelation.
Mr. Sacconi was on the extreme right of the
workshop on the mezzanine overlooking 42nd Street. Next to him sat Dario
D'Attili, who, as well as being a fine restorer, was responsible for the general
running of the workshop and also helped with appraisals: then John Roskoski, a
kindly man who was there before Sacconi came; then on the other side of a
partition René Morel, Mario D'Alessandro, Hans Nebel, Luiz Bellini (who arrived
from Brazil during the year), Vahakn Nigogosian, myself and Daniel Antoun, who
worked on bows. Not only the workshop but the whole establishment had a team
atmosphere that is seldom seen outside the sports arena, and through the
combined skill of its component personalities it dominated the American world
of violins. At the head of the team Mr. Sacconi found in Rembert Wurlitzer a
colleague of similar ability, with an infallible memory and a unique scholarly knowledge
of instruments and their history. Together they made a formidable combination
of expertise.
The restoration work that was carried out by
Mr. Sacconi and under his direction was of the highest possible standard, far
superior to anything I had seen in Europe. In particular there was great respect
for original varnish, of whatever quality, and we were called upon always to
under-retouch, to lead the eye to areas of unblemished varnish rather than
confuse it by matching everything into a homogeneous cloak, a philosophy in
stark contrast to that prevailing in Europe at the period. Many things that I
had found quite difficult and time-consuming in England were suddenly reduced to
simple tasks, because Mr. Sacconi had worked out a logical way of carrying them
out, so that time and again one asked oneself “why did no one think of that
before?” His treatment of cracks was a case in point, and I learnt that a few
minutes extra getting on old crack clean and level can save hours of
frustration with the retouching palette.
Much of all this I learnt from Dario D'Attili,
and after work or during lunch I would learn more about the great maestro with whom
Dario had already worked for twenty years, mainly of his genius, but also of
his occasional charming touches of vanity; of his infallible memory for some
things, and his dependable forgetfulness of others. I remember going out for
lunch one day and seeing Mr. Sacconi upstairs with a customer, puzzling over a
violin. We usually lunched together, and Mr. Sacconi called me to say that he
would be delayed. In fact he never arrived, and I returned to find him still
puzzling, but in a rather agitated state. I was sent to find photographs of the
«Pixis» Guarneri del Gesù, and indeed the violin turned out to be a perfect
copy of it, except for the varnish, which was unpleasant. A quarter of an hour
later Mr. Sacconi descended to the workshop in great excitement: “I made-a the
violin, but somebody they revarnish,” he cried. A few minutes later Dario
appeared. “Who made-a this violin?” asked Sacconi. “You did” said Dario, with
the briefest of glances, “but some idiot revarnished it.”
Quite often a reasonably important Italian
violin, even a Stradivari, would appear twice in the shop in the space of a few
weeks, and the second time Mr. Sacconi would make exactly the same detailed observations
as on the first occasion, but with no recollection of having seen the
instrument before. He had a photographic memory for the style and workmanship
of particular makers, in Stradivari's case even following the slight changes
from year to year, but he had difficulty sometimes recalling a specific
instrument with the same details as the one in his hand. In this his mind
worked differently from that of Rembert Wurlitzer, who on examining an instrument
would quickly observe things about it that resembled a violin seen, say, in
Paris a few years before. Nevertheless Mr. Sacconi would frequently startle his
colleagues with an instantaneous identification of the maker of an instrument
that had baffled everyone else for hours!
These remarkable powers of observation were
carried through into the new instruments that he made, and they were with him
right from the beginning. Later on Mr. Sacconi told me that he thought he had
made about one hundred instruments himself, but I suppose I have not seen more
than fifteen or so. Several of them made a powerful impression on me, but none
more than a Stradivari copy made about 1948 which would, I think, have looked
well in Cremona two and a quarter centuries before. In some of the earlier
instruments, particularly those made before the move to New York, he seems to
have been so preoccupied with the techniques of producing a copy, complete with
artificial age, that the result is in some way stiff: near perfect as a copy,
but lacking the unrestrained something-or-other that constitutes a great work
of art. Other instruments, including some of the earlier ones, show their maker
to have been inspired and artistically freed, rather than restricted, by his knowledge
of Stradivari's work.
A few weeks after my arrival in New York Mr.
Sacconi came into the workshop with the «Paganini» Stradivari viola, which I recognized
immediately, as would anyone who had seen a photograph of the striking
appearance of the back. After I had admired it for some minutes I was aware
that Mr. Sacconi seemed to be getting great pleasure from my enjoyment of it,
and my face went scarlet when I was finally invited to look at the label, «Simone
Fernando Sacconi fecit ...».
One Sunday we were all invited by a customer
for a day's fishing in Long Island Sound. Everyone knew of Mr. Sacconi's fame
as a striped bass fisherman, so the pressure was on him to catch something
pretty large. My photograph shows the result: a six inch fish accidentally
foul-hooked. Years later I took Mr. Sacconi netting for Dover sole on a sandy
beach near Dover itself. He duly dragged his end of the net through thigh-deep
water and seemed excited by our catch of nine good fish, but I was in great
trouble for doing it with a net rather than with rad and line.
Long after I had to return to England Mr.
Sacconi, when he came to visit, would help me with his wisdom and advice about
repairs, and on occasion he would simply sit down at my bench and finish in two
or three minutes some problem that I had been unable to salve. Fortunately I
was able to see him at least once or twice a year, and in his last years I
would visit him during his stays in Cremona. There he was totally in his
element, except for the time when his wife Teresita had had a serious operation
involving several blood transfusions.
His worries about her had been lightened
somewhat by his being made an Honorary Citizen of Cremona, and I congratulated
him warmly. “Why they make him and not me Onorario?” piped up Teresita, ashen
faced. “He gotta no Cremonese blood in him at all, I got all Cremonese blood.”
«I 'Segreti' di Stradivari» was Fernando
Sacconi's final gift to his profession, a detailed account of how Stradivari
made his unique instruments, and it has become almost a bible. The method
described in it is, I believe, certainly Stradivari's and almost certainly the best,
but Sacconi would have been upset at those who follow it blindly and assume
that their result will inevitably be good. He achieved what he did and became
the great person that he was by questioning everything, following his own
instincts and making up his own mind, and always looking for a better way of
doing things, and a better result. Antonio Stradivari himself can hardly have been
very different.
London, July 4, 1985
Taken from the book: «From Violinmaking to Music: The Life and Works of Simone Fernando Sacconi», presented on December 17, 1985 at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. (Cremona, ACLAP, first edition 1985, second edition 1986, pages 105-108 - Italian / English).
© 2023 - In memory of Simone Fernando Sacconi in the 50th Anniversary of his death