Lev’s Violin
From the moment she hears Lev's violin for the first time, Helena Attlee is captivated. She is told that it is an Italian instrument, named after its former Russian owner. Eager to discover all she can about its ancestry and the stories contained within its delicate wooden body, she sets out for Cremona, birthplace of the Italian violin. This is the beginning of a beguiling journey whose end she could never have anticipated.
Making its way from dusty workshops, through Alpine forests, cool Venetian churches, glittering Florentine courts, and far-flung Russian flea markets, Lev's Violin takes us from the heart of Italian culture to its very furthest reaches. Its story of luthiers and scientists, princes and orphans, musicians, composers, travellers and raconteurs swells to a poignant meditation on the power of objects, stories and music to shape individual lives and to craft entire cultures.
“Attlee’s writing has borne us forward with such seductive fluency, such a captivating sense of incident and place…...”
jonathan keates literary review.
Particular Books, publication 1st April 2021.
REVIEWS
Fiddler on the Run, Jonathan Keates, Literary Review - read here
Lev's Violin by Helena Attlee – a musical quest, Jamie Mackay, The Guardian - read here
Fiddling the facts. The journeys of the world’s greatest musical instruments, Jonathan Buckley, Times Literary Supplement - read here
Lev's Violin - Helena Attlee traces an instrument's history in luminous prose, Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph - read here
Lev’s Violin, Simon Griffith, Daily Mail - read here
Lev’s Violin, Kate Wakeling, BBC Music Magazine - read here
Haunted by the soft, sweet power of the violin, Graham Elliot, The Spectator - read here
SAVE LEV’S VIOLIN!
Lev’s Violin is broken, its neck had collapsed and its fragile body needs thorough restoration.
Click here to find out all about our crowdfunding campaign to restore Lev’s violin and give its precious voice back to the world.
‘Attlee tells the story in easy, luminous prose, infused with a deep understanding of the way human value accrues mysteriously in things, and in the act of making them.’
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph.’
This is a recording of Lev Atlas playing Lautary on the violin that would take his name. “I recorded these tunes” Lev says, “when I started to realize that this kind of music was starting to drift away along with the century which brought it to life. And there was one thing connecting all the very different recordings I made - I played them on ‘Lev's violin’ ".
Here’s a video of Greg Lawson playing Lev’s violin with friends from Moishe’s Bagel.
A special recording by Lev Atlas with Oleg Ponomarev of Crows Hora - a tune he often played on Lev’s violin.
Prelude
I still remember everything, the warm night, the rows of seats, all taken, and mine right at the front. Music filled the darkened room, overflowing through open windows onto the streets of a small Welsh town. It doesn’t matter now what Klezmer tune it was that made us restless on our chairs, or pulled some people to their feet and had them dancing in those narrow spaces. What matters is the moment when two steps took the violin player to the front of the stage, and all the other instruments, accordion, piano, drums and double bass, fell silent. For that is when I heard the violin speak for the first time, with a voice powerful enough to open pores and unbuckle joints, and a shocking intimacy that left us all stupid with longing for emotions larger, wilder, sadder and more joyful than we had ever known. And after the applause faded and the lights came up, my old friend Rhoda turned her laughing face to me and said ‘How dare he speak to us like that? We’re married women!’
As we left the building I saw the violin player standing outside and so I went straight over to pass on Rhoda’s joke, explaining she was an old friend in every sense, being well over eighty at that time. I suppose I expected him to laugh and move on, but instead he drew me aside and muttered something about what he called his violin’s ‘mongrel history’, as if this could be an explanation, or perhaps even an excuse, for the seductive depth and unsettling power of its music. ‘I’ve been told it was made in Italy at the beginning of the eighteenth century,’ he said, ‘but it came here from Russia. Everybody calls it Lev’s violin, after the guy who owned it before me.’ An Italian violin called Lev? It could hardly have been more unlikely. Then he turned away, saying ‘Have a look if you like’, and pointing at the case leaning against the wall beside me. When I opened it and looked inside, my immediate impression was of an object so weathered and streamlined that it looked like something you might find on the tideline of a beach, a bit of driftwood perhaps, a water-worn pebble or the sleek remains of some sea creature. Glancing at violins in the past, I had always perceived them as a mix of curves and corners, crisp edges accentuated by a dark line of inlaid wood. But life had worn away the edges and knocked the corners off this nomad, so that in places its seams were almost flush with its sides, as if music lapping at its outline for centuries had eroded them like a fragile coastline.
Lying in its case, it looked as inanimate as some small piece of furniture, but then I bent down to pick it up. I had probably held more birds than stringed instruments at that time in my life, and the feeling reminded me of scooping a hen from its perch, its small body always so much lighter than I expect, and pulsing with life. Hens smell of hen, but Lev’s violin had a strong, human scent, an intimate residue of sweat left by generations of musicians. Until then I had always thought of violins as precision instruments, bright with varnish that caught the light and played with it, as if they were determined to be seen. But this violin was a very quiet matt brown, and it wore a history of mishaps on its body, a labourer’s uniform of dark scars and deep scratches as expressive as the lines on an old face.