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The Red Violin

Somewhere it's too early for tragedy

By Lori LamothePublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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(via newviolinist.com)

For two centuries sound disappeared —

the violin adrift in an attic

or unheard in a roomful of boarders smoking cigars.

Its color forgotten, its curves

locked in a coffin.

There are stranger things than luck

so when its music rose again

in 1930s Berlin —

the violin’s woodfire genius flying toward the sun —

we made the same mistake the Greeks

were always going on about.

We thought the barrier between men and gods

was a thing to be broken, easily,

with baroque abandon,

the way a child snaps a toy in two.

But the sparks rising from the place

where strings met bow were already under suspicion.

A few more years and the sonata

Mendelssohn’s great granddaughter played

would be shut up in silence.

Even the girl herself

would die in a car crash,

the melody of her life an echo in its shell.

The violin sold and eventually auctioned off,

bought by another grandfather

for another gifted girl.

Not a sad ending at all. Even so,

somewhere it’s still too early for tragedy.

Somewhere another Hitler waits in the wings,

listening for his cue

as red notes float across the silence

and waltz with sunlight.

*

Originally published in Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review

A little more info about the Red Violin:

Antonio Stradivari created the famous “Red Violin” in 1720 in Italy. As the poem indicates, it disappeared for two hundred years. No one knows exactly where it was or who owned it until it turned up in Berlin during the 1920s-1930s. A photo shows violinist Lilli von Mendelssohn, the great granddaughter of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, playing it in 1925.

Felix Mendelssohn was a child prodigy who composed 12 symphonies between the ages of 12 and 14. According to Goethe, the seven-year-old Mendelssohn’s playing was far better than Mozart’s. He called it “the educated language of an adult compared with the prattling of a child.” Felix’s sister Fanny was also a brilliant musician and composer; experts believe some of her works were attributed to her brother because girls were not supposed to write music in the 1800s.

Sadly, the Nazis did everything they could to eliminate music composed by Jews, including Mendelssohn’s work. They added the composer’s name to a list of “forbidden artists” and cut references they deemed Semitic from his compositions.

The situation in Berlin became so dire that rebels smuggled most of Mendelssohn’s manuscripts to Warsaw and Krakow in 1936–37 so they would not be destroyed. Unfortunately, both of those cities fell under Nazi rule and the manuscripts had to be smuggled out again, to locations that were not under Hitler’s control. As a result, some of the composer’s works are still missing today.

I first came across the story of the Red Violin when I saw the movie by that name. Though it’s only loosely based on true events, it got me interested enough to do a little research.

One disturbing truth is that when the violin finally surfaced in Germany, Mendelssohn’s own descendants could not play his music on it. That irony seemed to say something about humanity — we can create otherworldly instruments and write heavenly music, but our species’ desire to become god-like is also dangerously destructive.

The Red Violin was sold in 1956 to an American industrialist and again in 1990 to the grandfather of fledgling 16-year-old violinist Elizabeth Pitcairn (though this fact would not come out until 2003). Pitcairn is now considered one of the world’s most gifted musicians. You can watch her play “The Red Violin Suite” on YouTube.

Much of the original varnish remains on the violin three centuries later. It is considered one of the best, if not the best, of Stradivari’s remaining instruments.

Pitcairn first saw the violin when she tried it out as a teenager before it went up for bidding at Christie’s:

“I had special permission from the auction house to try it for 20 minutes. My first memory was seeing this elderly gentleman cradling it — it was glowing red, the most beautiful violin I had ever seen. Even though there were many people milling about, I was in my own world, listening to the incredible sound coming out of it.”

A little more info about how Stradivari made the Red Violin:

When the world’s most famous violin maker created the instrument in 1720, its wood would have been close to white. Stradivari would then have left the violin out in the sun to dry and, when it was ready days or weeks later, he would have painted it with his own secret varnish. The sunlight would have darkened the light wood and Stradivari’s mineral-rich coating would have deepened the color even more.

According to New Violinist:

The red color of the violin is due to the application of this varnish. It was one way to help differentiate instruments from different makers. The theory is that red was also a highly popular color amongst the aristocracy at the time and this could also have influenced his choice.

surreal poetry
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About the Creator

Lori Lamothe

Poet, Writer, Mom. Owner of two rescue huskies. Former baker who writes on books, true crime, culture and fiction.

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