Violins built by the Italian violin maker Antonio Stradivari (1644?–1737) have a special mystique in the classical music world. They’re also extremely expensive. In 2011 an anonymous buyer paid the record sum of $15.9 million for a violin—named “Lady Blunt” after Lady Anne Blunt, one of its previous owners—which was considered by experts to be the second best-preserved of Stradivari’s creations. And what about the best-preserved Stradivarius? Tellingly nicknamed “the Messiah,” it sits in a climate-controlled case in the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, receiving the kind of curatorial attention and care reserved for precious works of art.
Of the more than 1,200 instruments built by Stradivari over his 60-year career, about 500 are still in circulation today. Most are violins, but there are also a few violas, cellos, guitars, mandolins, and harps. He is credited with several design innovations and refinements that helped bring the violin to its modern form. Stradivari was considered a master craftsman in his own time and in the decades that followed, but his reputation as the best of the best solidified only in the early 19th century, when violin performances increasingly shifted to large concert halls, where the bigger sound and better projection of Stradivari’s instruments could be fully appreciated.
It is no surprise that Stradivarius instruments are sought after for their historical value, not to mention their visual beauty. What is surprising, at least to nonmusicians, is that many violin players and other people in the classical music world consider the violins of Stradivari to be musically superior to any new instruments. Players speak of the violins’ sound as having brilliance, depth, and character unlike anything else. But is it really possible that, despite our modern technological wizardry, we still haven’t been able to craft instruments that sound better than the ones that were built in the 17th and 18th centuries?
In fact, musicians and scientists are still searching for an explanation of what makes a Stradivarius special. Early theories tended to focus on the varnish—maybe Stradivari had added some sort of secret ingredient—but chemical analyses in the 2000s revealed nothing unusual about the composition of Stradivari’s varnish. Another line of inquiry focused on the wood itself. Scientists hypothesized that the cooler climate of the Little Ice Age (1300–1850) may have been a factor, since it would have caused the alpine spruce trees used for the belly (the upward-facing surface) of the violin to grow more slowly, leading to denser wood and better sound. More recently, scientists found that some of the wood Stradivarius used for violins was treated with various chemicals, including aluminum, calcium, and copper, which may have altered its acoustic properties.
Another group of scientists and violin makers set out to examine the possibility that the superiority of Stradivarius instruments might be an illusion. Could it be that the Stradivarius mystique had conditioned violin players and listeners to expect great sound from a Stradivarius instrument and that this expectation had influenced their subjective evaluations of an instrument’s sound? Similar psychological effects had been demonstrated in blind tests of fine wines. In a series of experiments, the researchers blindfolded expert violin players and allowed them to test old violins—including several by Stradivari—against top-quality new instruments and rate their preferences. The results shocked many of the participants and are guaranteed to be controversial for decades: some of the new instruments won.