Like father, like son, they give violin work a first-string effort

Originally published Saturday, October 18, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

In the hands of, say, Itzhak Perlman, a violin makes beautiful music. But if a beer truck were to run over that violin -- God forbid -- Perlman would have to pray that it was delivered into the hands of Hermann Bischofberger.

Or his eldest son, Henry Bischofberger. Or his younger son, Kenneth Bischofberger. Or any of the fine violinmakers and craftsmen who make the Capitol Hill shop of Bischofberger a sanctuary for fine stringed instruments.

This turn-of-the-century mansion, with its hardwood floors and dark moldings and high beamed ceilings and shelves full of violins and other instruments, seems a fitting place, almost reverential. But not stuffy.

Three Swiss cowbells jangle cheerfully as the front door at 1314 E. John St. is opened. Public-radio jazz music drifts from the workshop downstairs. And the authoritative voice of Hermann O. Bischofberger, 75 years strong, seems often on the edge of a chuckle or a good laugh.

"Yes, you could say I'm semi-retired now. That means I come in late and go home early!" quips the gray-haired son of a Swiss violinmaker. But that's after three-score years of making and repairing stringed orchestral instruments. And, for many years, "going home from work" simply meant shutting off the light in the workshop that was, by necessity, in the Bischofberger home.

He can laugh now, with two fine sons established in his violinmaking and restoring craft and two daughters working as nurses and his handsome wife, Jytte, still at his side. They can laugh at how their old Nash died in Montana as they trailered three children and all their worldly goods to Seattle more than 40 years ago.

"We were lured here by the promise of a growing musical life in Seattle," he said. "But I had to work on our houses, too. And I remember one symphony director who got mad at me for using a hammer at home because he said my hands should be working on violins!"

And they have, though over all these years Hermann has made only about 100 violins, violas and cellos. "As business got better, there was no time for violinmaking. For that, you need to be uninterrupted. My sons each have several unfinished instruments, like me, and I keep telling them they should make time to go away and work on them."

Fat chance. Those cowbells on the East John Street door of the old Judge Stone mansion keep jangling as more repair and restoration work arrives.

"This is one sad example," said Henry, now 46, who was the first of the two Bischofberger sons to study violinmaking. "It's a child-size piece, of course. But the father ran over it in the driveway. Don't ask me what it was doing in the driveway!" The fiberglass case looked as if it had spent the afternoon rush hour on I-5.

Henry, who played saxophone in the Garfield High stage and marching bands, now plays the violin "just about every day." But it's part of a six-day work week jammed with instrument repair and restoration. "I never really had a desire to do anything else; this whole process sort of came naturally."

Naturally ain't easily. After apprenticing under his father, he studied several years in Switzerland, then another eight years under Frank Passa in San Francisco, then home again to Capitol Hill. "In this field, you never really finish learning," Henry said.

"My father never said: 'Don't do it that way.' He was quite understanding. This is a craft where you just can't tell a person, 'Do this!' and expect to get it right.

"Besides, it's as much training the eye to work with the hands . . . (and) needs lots of patience." And, as he said, you never stop learning. "I look back at work I did in the beginning . . . it wasn't wrong, but I know now that I was missing a certain something."

Kenneth, his 40-year-old brother, has the same appreciation for the time-proven, hands-on method of learning. Looking up from a cello on his grandfather's workbench, he chooses his soft words carefully: "Doing what you know is a good job, and pleasing a customer can be a very subjective thing. Everyone 'hears' a different sound, and you can get an instrument to sound very nice, but what kind of nice sound is very subjective."

The same deliberate thinking goes into the exacting handwork of cutting and setting elaborate wood inlays along the face-board edge of an instrument, or resetting the string pegs. "Sometimes, the quality of the sound might be improved by simply moving or adjusting the sound post through the 'f' hole," he said.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.