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Stradivari 'owes it all to worms' By Robert Uhlig, Technology Correspondent

THE secret of why the sounds of Stradivarius violins have never been surpassed may be hidden in their maker's unwitting attempt to protect them against woodworm, a scientist has discovered.

Joseph Nagyvary, a biochemist at Texas A&M University in College Station, has devoted his life's work to finding out why instruments made by a semi-literate boy in 17th century Cremona are so dramatically better than anything built since.

He has subjected Antonio Stradivari's violins, which sell for up to £960,000 at auction, and much more privately, to vibrational laboratory tests and had craftsmen carve front and back plates to reproduce the vibrations.

He tried to emulate the coating of Stradivari's raw maple and spruce instruments and used wood from a lost forest now at the bottom of Lake Superior, but none of his efforts has matched the sound of a Stradivarius.

Now Dr Nagyvary believes he has discovered the secret. The answer is borax, the preservative Stradivari used to protect his wood. Whereas wooden artefacts from other northern Italian cities were riddled with woodworm, those from Cremona and Venice had very little.

Borax, Dr Nagyvary discovered, also bound the molecules of wood together, altering the sound it produced in a violin. When Stradivari died, aged 93 in 1737, the outbreak of woodworm in northern Italy was over and borax was no longer used to preserve the wood of violins.

Dr Nagyvary thinks no one realised the effect of the borax on the instrument's acoustics and consequently the Cremonese thought Stradivari had taken the secret of his violins to his grave.

At a recent symposium in Texas, Zina Schiff, a noted violinist, played a Stradivarius and a violin made by Dr Nagyvary, switching between the instruments throughout the performance.

Dr Nagyvary's violin was cut by a computer-controlled carving machine and used wood soaked in brine to emulate Stradivari's wood supplies. "There is a lot of historical evidence that all the logs came down a waterway, and they were stored in the Bay of Venice, sometimes for a very long period."

Miss Schiff said after the performance that she doubted whether anyone could tell the difference between the Stradivarius and Dr Nagyvary's violin.

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2001

Answers

Very interesting. I'd heard speculation, in a fairly recent year, that it was the glue.

-- Anonymous, March 30, 2001

Wouldn't it have ben because of the borax, and not the worms?

Course the borax was because of the worms, so I suppose you could take it there....

-- Anonymous, March 31, 2001