Yet none of them had met Antonio Stradivari in person, given his registry. There is an incredible and colorful world following the history of Cremonese violin making, it is a fascinating world because it attracts people with a profoundly different cultural and human heritage, a heritage which coincides, however, with the admiration for a perhaps underestimated beauty.
Sifting through the archives you often come across more or less important tributes to the city of Cremona and its master wood craftsmen; sometimes they are redundant or reductive, other times they recall articles or small news events that are fished out, because the beauty of a discovery lies precisely in being able to find small events, which are transferred to newspaper pages for the use and consumption of readers.
The most fascinating thing are the signatures of those who, with different titles, sat behind a desk to write, in pen or with a typewriter in relation to the period, an article dedicated to Stradivari or his colleagues from Piazza del Duomo and surroundings. What you expect is that an expert or musician decides to make readers relive the story of those four strings so famous in the world. If you broaden your view a little you find poets and writers who climb up, but it’s part of their work, between paints and spruce, but for Cremonese violin making the horizon is much broader: lawyers, diplomats, soldiers, tourists or simple enthusiasts over the centuries have discussed that beauty born from the ingenuity and hands of ‘man. Little by little you try to shed light on articles, poems, reflections or small writings which, presumably, could be obvious but which are not so thanks to the hand of those who told them.
Algenor Sydney Sullivan he is a nobody for all of us and will probably remain so for centuries to come. As Mr. Nobody, he is part of that group of people who, over the centuries, have dedicated time and thoughts to Antonio Stradivari and the city of Cremona, to tell them he took pen and paper and, in 1886, wrote a well-structured article on the highly prized company “Cremona & its violin making” which found space in many newspapers of the time. More than an article, it is a story, a sort of small description of an experience that Algenor dreamed of living since he was a child, that of being able to tell how he had imagined a beauty that was distant and, for most people, unattainable. The good Algenor did not know how to play the violin, he was not a musician and did not work wood even out of passion, he was an American lawyer who, since he was a child, had observed the history of Cremonese violin making with admiration and a hint of envy. His great-grandchildren of the 20th century probably admired other things such as the conquest of space or baseball players but in the mid-1800s Algenor, like many of his peers, was enchanted by the beauty of violins. Algenor, therefore, was and still is Mr. Nobody from a practical point of view; he had completed his studies and continued his career, but probably remained, according to the canons linked to today’s definition of success, a Mr Nobody, perhaps wealthy enough to be able to travel around 150 years ago for passion in Italy but certainly not having the necessary social feedback, because only those seem to be valid, which today make you become Someone.
Mr. Sullivan was just an anonymous tourist who had arrived in Cremona around 1880 to see with his own eyes that place where his dreams were born, he wanted to experience those emotions imagined for decades and try to describe them. The story that ended up in a good part of the US newspapers of the time was different from the one proposed by many others. Walking through the streets of Cremona, Algenor imagined being a boy the same age as Antonio Stradivari and growing up together in the city, he divided between his studies in law and ran in via Santa Veronica while Antonio dedicated himself to perfecting his talent in violin making. Mr. Sullivan’s story is different, because the lawyer imagines a dialogue between him and Stradivari where the luthier tells him about the history of violins starting from the Amati family, a dialogue that for Antonio seems more like a dream, that of being able to make exploit his talent on a par with what the Beloved had achieved. From the lines it almost seems that a sort of mix is created between legal studies and violin making, a bit like knowing how to argue in a court can help to understand the sound of an instrument and how the characteristics of the sound of a Stradivarius are in capable of making a lawyer’s oratory better.
It is a beautiful story, particular and very refined in tone, where the perspective of the typical Cremonese tradition gathers a different point of view, very different from the usual even if to review there are only the drawings that accompanied the printing in the newspapers, drawings decidedly reductive. But why did Mr. Nobody deserve so much space in the American newspapers of the time? Because Agenor Sydney Sullivan was the one who founded perhaps the most important law firm in the world, the Sullivan&Cromwell firm, a law firm that is the point of reference in the field of international commercial law. Even today, the Sullivan&Cromwell firm follows the most important companies in the world in terms of mergers or acquisitions. Politicians and Secretaries of State have passed through those offices professionally, so much so that, in 1954, they were accused of having put pressure on the White House to organize a coup. State in Guatemala. But Agenor could neither have known this nor imagined it while speaking with Antonio Stradivari, given that upon his death in 1887, Agenor left as a legacy scholarships for poor students in 60 American universities, in addition to his story of his adolescence spent in Cremona together with the Cremonese luthier.
