Helen Zelon

From Dean Street’s cracked sidewalk, hard by Triangle Sports and Bergen Tile, number 475 looks nondescript. It’s a nowhere sort of place, six stories of squat yellow-brick symmetry with tidy window frames painted green. But on the fourth floor of this generic industrial building, Samuel Zygmuntowicz, world-renowned master luthier, is at work creating something extraordinary.

Violin-making as a profession peaked between, say, 1500 and 1700. But Zygmuntowicz has nearly single-handedly revived the virtuoso craftsman’s traditiona, demonstrating a passionate, perfectionist devotion to the instrument-maker’s art — and the unflagging dedication to the world’s greatest concert violinists.

The violin-maker’s studio is a sunny aerie draped in coral brocade and rose-tinged velvet. “It’s an artist’s space on the outskirts,” Zygmuntowicz explains. He says it with a hint of a smile, after offering up a soft-skinned handshake that could crush a small bird. The 47-year-old Zygmuntowicz finds “a perverse kind of satisfaction” in being a master violin-maker in the grit and grind of industrial Brooklyn. Seeing patrons in silk scarves and shiny shoes waiting downstairs by the gate delights him.

The shiny shoes didn’t always beat a path to his out-of-the-way door. “In the beginning, people jus wouldn’t come to Brooklyn,” Zygmuntowicz explains. “Now, more concert musicians come here than to BAM. It’s not a lot of gawkers. People come here to do business.” And that business is focused on a product: Painstakingly hand-crafted Zygmuntowicz violins, at roughly $40,000 per. or as their maker, modest to a fault, calls them, “my fiddles.”

During a tour of the combination studio, salon, and workshop extraordinaire, Zygmuntowicz’s Austrian assistant, Wiltrud, tosses a curt wave over her shoulder. Her eyes don’t shift; she’s intent on the violin body, clamped down with vise grips at two-inch intervals, on the bench in front of her. “Wiltrud’s gluing,” her boss says quietly. “She can’t talk.” His own bench is dustless, whistle-clean. Tools hang neatly from a horizontal magnetic stripL blades, planes, adzes, miniature saws, delicate files, tiny calipers that measure down to a tenth of a millimeter.

World-class musicians own priceless, centuries-old instruments made by famous makers (think Stradivarius). Renowned for the sensuality and intimacy of their tone, these treasures take a beating when artists perform and travel. Lithiers who can copy antique instruments faithfully — in appearance and, more critically, in voice — earn ferociously loyal followings. Zygmuntowicz’s reputation is the best of the best. He is the 21st-century maker whose intruments rival and even occasionally outstrip the originals.

In the early 1990s, violin superstar Isaac Stern commissioned two copies of Stradivari instruments from Zygmuntowicz. Stern played his Zygmuntowicz fiddles on concert stages around the world — and priased their merits to anyone who would listen. After his death, the same instruments sold at auction for record prices. One symphony musician drove all night, from Cincinnati to midtown, to see one of Stern’s Zygmuntowicz violins. “He had to have it,” said auction representative Jason Price. One hundred and thirty thousand dollars later, it was his.

Other high-profile musicians who bank on Zygmuntowicz include the complete Emerson Quartet — America’s remier chamber music ensemble — and heartthrob superstar Joshua Bell, whose Zygmuntowicz violin is in the works, neatly stasked between other half-made instruments.

“Violins have sound the way people have personalities,” says Zygmuntowicz. That sound is shaped by what’s missing, he explains - the Bosnian maple or Tyrolean spruce that’s been carved, planed, and sanded away. Later in the process, when an instrument is “in the white” — fully constructed, its unfinished wood the color of blanched almonds — the maker confronts a sudden, irreversible act: applying varnish. “It’s very fraught,” Zygmuntowicz says, agitated at the thought. It’s the make-or-break thing. Getting the subtle paterning the shapes, the shading — it’s hands-on, you’ve got to get your fingers in there.” As he speaks, he gestures in the air, reaching for an invisible instrument, waving a palm over its unseen surface. His fingernails, trimmed short, are as clean as his bench.

Like the fiddles he builds, Zygmuntowicz’s life has been shaped by absence, and by the occasional dramatic stroke. He grew up near Philadelphia as the third son of Holocaust survivors. “I was quiet,” he says. “I read a lot. I was into biology. I liked dissecting. A lot.” He began sculpting — his favored medium was the shiny red wax that cases wheels of Gouda and Edam — and taught himself how to make instruments, from Japanes knotweed flutes to dulcimers. A visit with a seller of horsehair left images that are still fresh decades later. “I remember seeing hanks of horsehair draped on his walls and connecting for the first time with the idea of the bow.”

Earlier still, Zygmuntowicz read a children’s story about a Hungarian violin-maker — a refugee, like his own father — who left the old coutnry with his son for Genoa, home of Paganini and repository of Italian violin culture for centuries. Father and son thrived thre, and the master passed his craft to his son. “I’ve replicated that experience at a viariety of points,” Zygmuntowicz says. “I was always seeking out father figures in the trade.” He found two, in the charismatic, demanding master luthier Carl Becker, with whom Zygmuntowicz interned in Chicago, and in Rene Morel, proprietor of a legendary New York violin workshop where he spent five years.

Zygmuntowicz moved on from there to set up his own shop in Brooklyn. His first original instrument sold to a concert musician he met at Bargemusic, the Brooklyn waterfront institution. Then he met the wife of Emerson Quartet violinist Eugene Drucker at a party; Drucker borrowed, then bought, a Zygmuntowicz. Zygmuntowicz’s copy of a famous Stradivarius, commissioned by Straad magazine, was featured on its cover. And Drucker kept loaning his Zygmuntowicz to other players, prompting close to a dozen additional sales and the eventual commission of new instruments for the entire Emerson Quartet. Then, in the early 1990s, Stern called. Zygmuntowicz had arrived.

So why are his instruments special? Is he better than other living makers? “Nooooo,” Zygmuntowicz demurs, eyes glinting with mischief. “I don’t carve wood better than the best, I don’t varnish better than the best. I am good at assimilating a lot of information and synthesizing it in an organic, natural way. I take what I need from a variety of sources, and I use it.” He slides a slender dowel betwen his fingertips and taps it, absently, on his thumbnail. “I consistently make really good-sounding violins. Musicians aren’t working with me because they consider me an artist. They want what I can do.”

Just ask Lawrence Dutton, Emerson violinist. Dutton recently replaced his 1796 viola with a 2003 Zygmuntowicz. In a recording of a Mendelssohn octet to be released in 2005, the four Emerson players doubled on the eight instrumental parts, half on old instruments, and half on their Zygmuntowiczes. “I listened to it, and I can’t tell the difference,” says Dutton. “The quality of the sound, the voice, is so similar it’s freaky.” Dutton predicts that 300 years from now, “he’ll be talked about like Strad is today–the greatest instrument-maker of his time.”

A player as well as a maker, Zygmuntowicz has won blue-grass fiddling contests and gigs locally with a band called Grand Picnic. But lately he doesn’t play for pleasure much. “My life is very dense,” he says. Business is skyrocketing — clients wait three to four years for new orders — and he’s got a wife and two young sons to spend time with. He cuts loose only when he’s finishing an instrument. “Then, I play a lot, as if I’m one of my clients, with that kind of intensity.” Otherwise, the Zygmuntowicz studio is silent — its instruments mute, waiting in stillness for the bow’s animating stroke.

Originally appeared in BKLYN magazine.

Filed in Articles, Features, City Life