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Having survived the pandemic, the city of Cremona is embracing new technology in its efforts to bring its violin making heritage to the world

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The grand opening of the Casa Stradivari on 4 July

YUMA MURATA

The Italian city of Cremona is increasingly finding different ways of making its violin making heritage relevant and tangible to diverse audiences. Visitors to the Museo del Violino (MdV), which opened ten years ago this month, can now browse digitised archives, catalogues and other documents in a new consultation room. In the same space they can also feel the archings on a 3D-printed replica of Stradivari’s ‘Stauffer, ex-Cristiani’ cello of 1700, which is the nearest they will get to touching one of the precious Cremonese instruments in the museum’s so-called Treasure Room. Half a mile across the city, at Corso Garibaldi 57, the house where Stradivari lived and worked from 1667 to 1680 has been restored from a derelict state and is now open to the public for guided tours. No mere relic, the Casa Stradivari is instead a cultural centre housing a workshop for apprentice violin makers, rooms for acoustic analysis and varnish research, a space for concerts, exhibitions and instrumental training, and a studio apartment for an artist-in-residence.

The driving force behind the renovation of Casa Stradivari has been Swiss–Italian violinist Fabrizio von Arx. He plays on the ‘ex-Madrileno’ Stradivari of 1720, which was rechristened the ‘Angel’ in 2018 when it was blessed by a cardinal in Venice’s Basilica San Marco. As a 300th-birthday tribute to the violin, von Arx devised a musical pilgrimage from Geneva to Cremona for a documentary, and wanted to end the film with a visit to Stradivari’s first house and workshop. He found the building abandoned, the homeware shop that used to occupy the ground floor having closed down. ‘The place was derelict but I felt something special being there,’ he says. ‘When I climbed up to the top of the house, and stood in the room with the roof terrace where legend has it that Stradivari hung his newly varnished violins to dry in the sun, it was intensely emotional.’

Inspired to bring the house back to life, in 2021 von Arx co-founded the Casa Stradivari Foundation, which commissioned an extensive renovation of the building. ‘The aim was not just to reconstruct the house but to remake the lifestyle of Stradivari,’ says the violinist. ‘It is an artistic project inspired by Stradivari’s continuous research and perfecting of the violin form, and the synergies of this work with the music of the great violinist–composers of his time, such as Corelli, who were developing violin technique. Casa Stradivari is a living house, a place that celebrates the artistic approach and the transmission of ideas and creativity.’

On 1 October four apprentice violin makers will start an 18-month course in the Casa Stradivari atelier under the guidance of Cremona-based luthiers Bruce Carlson, Marcello Ive, Primo Pistoni and Davide Sora. The apprentices will each make a full quartet of instruments. Researcher Carlo Andrea Rozzi and luthier Alessandro Voltini will oversee the acoustic analysis of the instrument plates and the finished instruments, and chemist Curzio Merlo will conduct studies of the varnish. ‘We will also have violin makers from across Europe come to give masterclasses and presentations,’ says von Arx. ‘These will be in the MdV and will be accessible to the violin making community of Cremona. The foundation will also present public concerts in the MdV’s Arvedi Auditorium. We want to be open not just to violin makers and musicians but to the whole city.’

‘Casa Stradivari is a living house, a place that celebrates the artistic approach’

UWE ARENS

At the MdV, the new consultation room is also addressing the interests of different audiences. Three computer workstations allow visitors to browse catalogues dedicated to Stradivari workshop artefacts and to the museum’s collection of instruments by 20th-century Italian luthiers. There is information about the classical Cremonese instruments exhibited in the museum’s Treasure Room, plus material from the Bacchetta archive, a census of Italian luthiers who were active in the years immediately preceding the Stradivari bicentenary celebrations in 1937. MdV curator Fausto Cacciatori says future digital content will include documents about the conservation interventions carried out on the museum’s instruments and paper exhibits. He adds: ‘We are also looking at making available the manuscripts of Count Cozio di Salabue, which are kept in the State Library in Cremona.’

A large video screen in the consultation room plays a sequence of computed tomography (CT) images of the ‘Stauffer, ex-Cristiani’. Below the screen is a 3D-printed replica of the cello’s soundbox, which Harry Mairson, a professor of computer science at Brandeis University, MA, US, produced after making CT scans of the instrument in 2017. Cacciatori says: ‘While the contents of the room are particularly interesting to instrument makers, researchers and scholars, this 3D-printed replica has already made the room extremely popular with a wider, less specialist audience, because they can touch and feel an object that is completely alike in shape, size and volume to an original instrument. We are developing other projects to expand this kind of offer in the near future.’

The consultation room’s workstations are a prelude to making more documents and materials available on the museum’s website, says Cacciatori. ‘Improving accessibility is one of the goals of any modern museum, and we absolutely want to develop this digital provision in the coming months. The first years of the MdV’s life were characterised by the study of the collections and the publication of catalogues. This commitment must be accompanied by the maximum dissemination of knowledge.’