Stradivari's Legacy

Joseph Nagyvary has been bewitched by the violin's physical mysteries for more than 30 years. The retired Texas A&M University biochemistry professor half-seriously traces his infatuation to his first formal violin lesson more than 40 years ago, when he played an instrument once owned by Albert Einstein.

For the past 30 years, Nagyvary has been using science to investigate what makes the legendary violins of Antonio Stradivari, Nicolo Amati, and Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri so special. During the 17th and early-18th centuries, these great violin makers lived in the northern Italian city of Cremona.

Since this golden age, violin makers have tried just about everything imaginable to reproduce those instruments' distinctive sounds, but they've had little success. Nagyvary believes the sonorous secret lies within the instruments' polymers, particularly in the woods of the instruments' bodies.

For years, Nagyvary has been gathering evidence that the instruments' sweet sounds came from the soaking their wood got as it floated downriver on its way to Cremona, as well as from chemical treatments used to prevent mold and to ward off woodworms. Violins made in Milan--just 80 miles away--during the same time period are riddled with the telltale holes of the pests, he says.

With all due respect to the master craftsmen, Nagyvary speculates that because these solutions were likely prepared by the chemist at the local apothecary, a good deal of the credit for the consistently superior quality of the Cremonese instruments should go to that forgotten fellow. "The chemicals we found were so sophisticated that it seems unlikely that they were produced by the violin makers themselves," he says.

Recently, he made a new discovery about the instruments' wood. With help from Noel L. Owen, a chemistry professor at Brigham Young University, Provo, Utah, and Joseph DiVerdi of Colorado State University, Fort Collins, Nagyvary was able to examine some slivers of wood from deep within several instruments using infrared spectroscopy and solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometry.

He compared samples from a Stradivarius cello, a Guarneri violin, and several instruments that were produced in England and France during the same time period.

The IR data showed a distinct absorbance decrease in the carbonyl regions for the Cremonese instruments compared with those from elsewhere in Europe. Nagyvary thinks the result indicates that some type of aqueous treatment of the wood may have reduced its hemicellulose content.

For the Guarneri violin, the NMR data further suggest that harsh chemical or high-temperature treatments hydrolyzed the material. Nagyvary also has elemental analyses indicating that the instruments were treated with wood ash, an alkaline material commonly used at the time. He speculates that this treatment was also used to prevent woodworm infestation.

Since making the discovery, Nagyvary has added a hot alkaline bath to his violin-building protocol. "The most beneficial and welcome result of the process is that there is less high-frequency noise in the sound of the violin," he says.

Interestingly, the sample of wood from the Stradivarius cello didn't show evidence of deacetylation by NMR analysis and probably did not undergo the same alkaline treatment. This result is puzzling, but Nagyvary notes that the cello doesn't have the same problem with high-frequency noise that the violin does. Also, unlike the cello, "violins are easy to boil," Nagyvary jokes.

Still, Nagyvary tempers his excitement over the finding. "We have basically one sample of a very good violin," he says. However, this small piece of information has given Nagyvary a new rationale that he's already used to build more than 150 violins.