The Rainaldi Quartet
Paul Adam
It was on a lovely June night that four friends met for their customary musical evening in Cremona, Italy. They had been gathering like his for about fifteen years for regular monthly sessions at the home of Gianni Castiglione a luthier, a violin maker who also repaired them, who lived out in the country. The first violin of the quartet was Tomaso Rainaldi who was also a luthier but not in Gianni's class, he had at one time had been a professional violinist at La Scala. Father Arrighi was a priest who played the viola. The fourth member of the group was quite a bit younger than the rest; he was the cellist of the quartet and a policeman Antonio Guastafeste. The get togethers would start with a lively discussion about what they were going to play. Brahms, too melancholy, besides he had a reputation for harpooning stray cats, not in the mood for Haydn, OK for Beethoven and so it was. |
| Amati |
Later that evening Rainaldi's wife called Gianni and was worried that Tomaso had not come home. Castiglione and Guastafeste finally track him to his office and find him dead, murdered.
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| The Messiah |
As Guastefeste begins to re track his late friend's steps he finds that Tomaso had been travelling recently. He had been to Milan, to Paris and even to London. It seemed that he had been on music related business so Guastafeste called in his friend Gianni as a consultant to help him with the case. From what Gianni can determine, Tomaso had been on the quest of a very rare violin. He had been researching the possibility of a sister violin to the very valuable violin made by Stradivarius now kept in a museum in Oxford, England known as the Messiah. It had this name because it was the kind that you might wait for it forever and it might never come. It is the most famous and the most valuable on earth. The French call it Le Messie. No man alive has ever heard it played.
There are a few great violin makers that have become historic. Their violins are all well documents and accounted for and they become more valuable with the passage of time. The best known of these are Stradivarius, Amati and Guarneri. These were all families in the trade of violin making in the area of Cremona, Italy. Part of their secret was that they worked at it for all of their lives. You can almost hear music in the words even as the names of the violins trip off your tongue, Amati Guarneri Stradivari Guadagnini Grancino Gagliano Maggini.
This duo of Castiglione and Guastafeste backtracked through some of the people Rainaldi dealt with only to find that the trust was hard to come by. Many of these people were dealers in antiques and Guastafeste felt that you could never trust some one that wanted to sell you something; greed always was a factor that hooked some one.
For Gianni the hunt for a violin was special because violins were special where your body is in direct contact with the instrument, where you can feel the vibration in your head as you play.
'The human body has a natural frequency. That’s why harmonic music pleases and discordant music jars. We like sounds that vibrate at a frequency sympathetic to our internal structure- hence Mozart will always be more popular than Schoenberg- and the violin, of all instruments, produces that sound most effectively. It is in perfect tune with the human soul.'
Before this story is over the edges between reality and history will be blurry and you won't care. You will be a believer. The Messiah's sister is out there and it will be found. Hook up your iPod and get your self a playlist of great violin works and listen while you read.
My playlist for this book
I. Quartet of Oboe, Violin, Violoncello in F major Mozart Oboe Quartet
2. Dance of the Comediens Smetana
3. All of My Days Alexi Murdoch
4. Esisti Dentro Me Il Divo
5. String Quartet, No.3 in B Flat, Op 67 Andante Johannes Brahms
6. Fire and Rain James Taylor
7. Mal de Luna Hayley Westenra
8. So Soft Your Goodbye Mark Knopfler/Chet Atkins
9. String Quartet Op. 59 Razomonovsky Kodaly Quartets
10. L’alba del Mondo Il Divo
11. Lifelong Passion The Firemen
12. In Trutina Hayley Westenra
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