Master violin maker Jamie Lazzara

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Today’s Global Hit features the story of an American woman who’s lived most of her life in Florence. Jamie Lazzara crafts violins of exceptional quality. So much so that at the beginning of this year, Lazzara received an unexpected, though private honor. Laura Lynch has her story. Photographs by Holly van der Lee

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Song played during the piece is called: “Air and Simple Gifts” by John Williams
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Please note: THE MUSIC PLAYED OUT TO THE WORLD ON INAUGURATION DAY WAS ACTUALLY RECORDED EARLIER.  THE COLD WEATHER WOULD HAVE PLAYED HAVOC WITH STRINGED INSTRUMENTS – SO WHILE PERLMAN AND THE OTHER MUSICIANS DID PLAY THEIR OWN INSTRUMENTS ON THE STEPS OF THE CAPITOL THAT DAY. – IT WAS THE RECORDING THAT WAS BROADCAST.

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JEB SHARP:  Our final global hit of the decade features an American woman who’s lived most of her life in Florence, Italy.  Jamie Lazzara crafts violins of exceptional quality.  So much so that at the beginning of this year, Lazzara received an unexpected honor.  From Florence, The World’s Laura Lynch has her story.

LAURA LYNCH:  Jamie Lazzara is about to fill her tiny workshop with sounds you might have heard in the home of a wealthy patron in 16^th century Florence and she’ll do it on an instrument she made, painstakingly recreating one design by Leonardo da Vinci.  Perhaps not as rich as a regular violin, but remarkable as an example of Lazzara’s craft.  She grew up in Los Angeles but from an early age, Lazzara felt Italy was calling her.

JAMIE LAZZARA:  I came to Florence exactly because I had wanted to become a violin maker even when I was 15.  I actually had been playing violin since I was 8.

LYNCH:  Lazzara speaks Italian more than English now but when she moved here as an 18 year old, she had to learn the language before being admitted to the world’s premiere school for violin makers in Cremona.  She made it there in spite of the fact that many back home in Los Angeles told her girls weren’t meant to be violin makers.  Lazzara has proven them wrong.  Now, some of the world’s leading violinists like Sarn Oliver of San Francisco, play her instruments.  Lazzara makes a living creating instruments and doing restoration work.  She says she’s made about 100 violins over the years and they cost about eleven and a half thousand dollars each.

LAZZARA:  My violins are not so expensive. I only can make for a year because I work entirely by hand.  My prices, I try to keep them low because I don’t pay any money for publicity of any kind.  The people who buy my instruments tend to keep them and love them.

LYNCH:  One of the biggest thrills of her life was when Itzak Perlman came to Florence and tried out one of her violins.

LAZZARA:  And he played it and he said you have to make me a copy of my Stradivarius.  I told him that the one he was playing was actually a Guarneri model but he was convinced that I had to make a copy of his Stradivarius.

LYNCH:  Lazzara took months to make it, delivering it to Perlman in London in 1993.  She knew he played it from time to time; then this year, in late January, she had a visitor to her workshop in Florence, a visitor who had just watched the inauguration of Barack Obama.

LAZZARA:  An Australian film director who I had met came in and he told me he had just seen my violin being played so I hooked up a little computer I have and so we watched it and I was shocked.

LYNCH:  There it was, Itzak Perlman playing her violin on the steps of the Capitol.

LAZZARA:  I mean that was the most beautiful, moving thing.  I didn’t know that he was playing for the inauguration but when I saw the violin and the close-ups of it and having, knowing that I’m the only one who’s ever made him a modern instrument, it’s just wonderful, wonderful.

LYNCH:  As Lazzara carves out the skeleton of a new instrument, in this case a small guitar, passersby stare through the window.  The walls of the narrow space, it was a tower in medieval time, are lined with violins, mandolins, chisels and photographs of the musicians she’s worked with over the years.  The love of music that brought Jamie Lazzara to Italy decades ago still sustains her.  Hearing her violins in the hands of some of the world’s virtuosos is still a thrill but those few moments in January gave the master violin maker something she never expected, a place in history.  For The World, I’m Laura Lynch in Florence.

SHARP: You can see an audio slide show of Jamie Lazzara in her workshop.  It’s at TheWorld.org.  From the Nan and Bill Harris Studios at WGBH, I’m Jeb Sharp.  Have a happy and safe New Year.

SPEAKER:  The World is a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH Boston, supported in part by the Plow Shares Fund, investing in peace and security worldwide.  PlowShares.org. The Freeman Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts which believes that a great nation deserves great art and by the WGBH Fund for environmental reporting, whose donors include the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, supporting a cooperative approach to solving our critical environmental problems while we still can and NASA, leading research on the earth and its climate from the vantage point of space.  PRI, Public Radio International.

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