Briefe aus meiner Werkstatt

Letters from my Workshop

The windows are covered with dusted snow. Curving to half-perfected swirls against the
impenetrable glass. Beyond, are the oohs and ahhs of the mountain winds breath. A
warning cry. But no longer can I stay in this house, penned up like an animal awaiting
husbandry. I must venture out sometime, if not to fill my furnace, then to pay the land-lord
I am a luthier, a violin-maker.
I make my money with my hands. I find the most
handsome portions of cherry, oak, walnut and ash,
and I spread their vanilla, chocolate, raspberry
flesh until they bleed the most brilliant sounds
known to man.
I am proud of my station in life. My father was a
luthier, and his father before him. We are a
strapping stock of romantics.
My name is Henrich Von Schiller. These meager
Bohemian acres, in the opulent Upper Rhine, is my
kingdom and my world. I never married, though I
did love once. A simple girl who wore simple pearls
in her ears. She was the warmth of soul to my winter morn. My reason to wake. My Grund
zu sein. Though, our God in Heaven had other plans for her.
All year long I traipse these Black Forest fields that are
green in summer and white at Wintertide.
I exhaust hours in these windbuchen, sometimes
capturing a jewel of the earth, worthy of my time and
shop. Most often, I do not.
To-day I am determined to begin work on my own
Stradivarius, my Schiller. I have already designed her. I
must simply revive her from the swell of lumber beside
me. Splices collected many years from many parts of the
world.
The wood most oft used in violin-making are Maple, Spruce, Ebony, Boxwood, Willow and
Rosewood. Usually the back, ribs, neck and scroll are made of Maple while Spruce is saved
for the top, blocks, and linings.
In the main, I use Ebony for the fingerboard, pegs, tailpiece, and endpin because it is the
strongest of all lightwoods. Upon occasion I substitute Boxwood for Ebony because it is a
more common species. Many violin-makers today are importing North American broad leaf

Maple, my father could never do this. He thought it traitorous to his family and to his
country. Save the Maple for the clockmakers, he would say, They have no ears left to
listen.
As for me, I employ wood from evry land, at times in a single instrument.
Some fifty meters from my stone cottage-home is my workshop,
my manu-factory, where I write this and where I must ignite this fire
whilst in the dead chill of February. In minutes this naked, orange,
caveman will go about laughing, his fast-folding lips smacking. It is
my father, the great Eisner Von Schiller, whom I see inside these
licking flames. He will oversee my ambitious work to-day, as he
has done all my life.
This workshop holds the ghosts of my ancestry and the visions to my providence. It is here
that I learned the Arts of his luthiership. Prudence and Precision.
Of course the curls and figuring matter, mein Sohn. Beauty is a fine saleswoman, But it is
the age and density, something borne inside, which haunt the player to no end!
Father bade me seek the origin of each panel, each lining, and travel there if I can. To walk
the fields it was planted. Chopped down. Transmogrified into a new existence.
Origin foretells future. Did it come from calm meadows? A war-torn battlefield? Was it struck
by lighting or act of god? Was it abandoned in air and rain, or carefully felled and nurtured
before my workshop?
Father advised me on sellers of the wood and proprietors of the land.
I must tender a relationship with these proprietors. I may need wood from them again one
day. Father gave an instrument each year to the land-lords, polished and tuned to
exactitude.
The times are different from when father ran his manu-factory. The scraps tramped in now
are virtually untraceable. I must deal with intermediaries unawares to their own land, their
own roots.
Last week a modest couple sought my services in a wretched-ly warped
classical viola. Oh, they neglected that instrument so! What bellowed
was a grotesque sound, an unnatural durcheinander! I spent a fortnight
re-carving scrolls, graduating plates and truing arches.
She clings angrily to my double-vice. I have yet to find the courage to tell
her owners they will need the entire neck, from chin to root, rebuilt.
Father taught me to tap the top to determine timbre. She is stifled by
years of residue and neglect. It will take years to return her tone.

Specialists must tend to her tuning and pitch, not to mention bows and strings, But, I believe
she is deserving of it.
When I was a boy, father crafted a peculiar instrument for me from hard-wearing oak, three
strings of sheep gut and brass screws. I plucked those strings day-in and day-out. It
sounded like the sperlingskauz, the owl, calling soft and melancholy. I keep it in my
manu-factory, to remind me what labor and love produce. Sound is an invitation not an
expectation.
Alas, what luthier will I be? Merely another student of song.
When I tire of crafting instruments I should like to play them. I will listen to their intonations
and let their singing guide me. Each member of the familia lira da braccio, I will listen.
I will know where their melody was born because I cobbled-together its bridge and
fingerboard and peg box.
Father schooled me in the riddles of wood. Now I, too, must take an apprentice - for I will
not live for-ever. I have much to share, and if this letter finds you intrigued, please seek me
out.
Or seek out that cry you hear in the distance - grotesque or gorgeous. Be there for their
concert. Even, lo, especially, if you are their only audience, be there.
And in the case this letter does not find you, then this wood shall be my legacy. In these
porous shapes and patterns lay my love. And when you pick up a stringed instrument, no
matter the age, you will know whether the great Henreich Von Schiller touched its skin. You
will not know the strain, only the sound.
Then - close your eyes when next you hear music, from any instrument, and consider the
hands that twisted Earth into Aire.
Until that time I will be,

Henreich Von Schiller, 1806, Schniederlihof, Germany