New Master

In Salisbury, Md., an amateur in the audience gushed to Violist William Primrose: "Ah, you can't get away from the old Italian instrument makers!" In South America, critics rhapsodized over the tones of his "marvelous Amati."

Last week, with a grin, William Primrose pulled the rug out from under these connoisseurs of tone. During most of his concert appearances in the past nine months, his valuable Antonio Amati viola (circa 1630) had stayed in its plush-lined case. The viola his audience heard was American (circa 1945). He had played it for more than 40 concerts to prove a point: "There's more snobbery connected with old instruments than with anything I know."

Primrose's 1945 fiddle, five-eighths of an inch longer than his Amati, was built by the only U.S.-born member of the 300-year-old European Guild of Violinmakers, a stocky, shy Philadelphian named William Moennig Jr. Moennig also does all the repairing on Efrem Zimbalist's Stradivari violin, Gregor Piatigorsky's Montagnana cello.* Moennig, 40, and his 62-year-old father live and work in a colonial house on Philadelphia's once swank Locust Street, now lined with doctors' offices. The Moennigs sit at benches side by side, poking quietly into ailing old masters with scrapers, knives, gouges, chisels. In a safe in their workshop are $250,000 worth of old fiddles which they take out and study constantly. To Violist Primrose a visit to their shop is "like going to a doctor. You say 'I feel this,' 'I don't feel that' and they will sit up with the instrument all night as though it were a sick child."

Made to Measure. For "The Primrose," Young Bill Moennig spent a year and a half studying the violist's playing technique, then almost six months shaping and making the viola. Primrose told him: "I want quality with power so that the music will come out without an obvious wrestling match in front of the public." Moennig tried to blend the measurements of a Strad and an Amati, to get the Amati's mellow roundness with the greater brilliance of the Strad.

Young Moennig was apprenticed to his father for 15 years in Philadelphia before he was allowed to study in the Saxon village of Markneukirchen, where, since 1622, ten generations of Moennigs have fashioned string instruments. He brought back to Philadelphia enough seasoned Carpathian spruce and Tirolese maple to make 300 fiddles--which, at the rate of four new violins a year, will take a long time. He is convinced-that the wood is what counts. Harvard once made electrical tone tests of imitation Strads and Amatis that Moennig had built for the Curtis Quartet--and reported them slightly better than the originals.

A Stradivari costs in the neighborhood of $40,000. Bill Moennig, who charges from $750 to $1,000 for his, is slightly cynical about it. Says he: "Invariably the tone of an instrument is rapturously admired until the audience learns it was finished a week or a month before. Then they come out with the bright statement that they'd noticed a bit of newness in the tone."

* Manhattan's Italian-born Vittorio Sacconi regularly overhauls Joseph Szigeti's Guarneri and Yehudi Menuhin's Strad; Jascha Heifetz takes his violins to Mischa Yurkevitch when in New York, to A. Koodlach in Los Angeles.

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