It was the 1980s and the virtuoso violinist Yehudi Menuhin was performing at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. "He played an encore and I'm sitting in the orchestra and I said to my wife, `Something happened to his violin,'" said Etienne Vatelot, one of the world's great violin restorers, warming to the story.
After the concert Vatelot asked Menuhin why the sound was different during the concert and the encore. "He laughed and explained that he had two Stradivari with him in the dressing room," Vatelot said. "He used one for the concert, but when he came out for the encore he accidentally picked up the second."
As Vatelot spoke, he cradled with a trembling hand the top of an 18th-century violin that appeared to have been stepped on by a high-heel shoe. "I come in every day," he said, a smile curling about his lip, "but I can no longer do certain things that require a steady hand."
So four younger violin restorers sat around him tapping, sawing and shaving in a mad jumble of rusted tools, varnish pots and, of course, stringed instruments whose bodies lay about like tortoise shells.
Certainly a steady hand was one of the attributes, along with a passion for musical instruments, that helped Vatelot, 80, become one of the leading luthiers, as makers, restorers and dealers of stringed instruments are called. But what keeps him in the business is above all a keen ear for the qualities of a violin and a physician's diagnostic skill for analyzing what may be wrong with it. For more than half a century, virtuoso violinists and cellists from around the world have brought their instruments to him to be fixed, tuned and generally brought back to life. Along the way, he has helped revive a craft in France that nearly disappeared in the decades after World War II.
Vatelot was born in Mirecourt, known as "the city of violins," the son of a violin maker and the great-great grandson of a guitar maker. "There were 1,000 violin makers in a city of 6,000," he said.
In 1909 his father, Marcel Vatelot, moved to Paris to open a workshop in the central Rue Portalis, in the rooms still used by Vatelot. Marcel Vatelot gained entry into Parisian musical circles through his wife, Jehane, the daughter of a noted cellist of the time, Andre Hekking. Their circle included the composer Maurice Ravel. Later, Marcel Vatelot sent his son to Mirecourt and to New York, where he worked with Rembert Wurlitzer, who ran the foremost violin restoration shop in America, to learn the craft.
While Marcel Vatelot was respected, he was not nearly as gifted as his son, who soon eclipsed him. It was just after 1950 that the great soloists began to beat a path to Vatelot's door. "I had particularly at heart the search for the why of a tone, and the modifying of a tone," he said. "This permitted me to have a clientele of great soloists, Pablo Casals, Yehudi Menuhin, Isaac Stern."
But business was slow in those years. "Classical music was not fashionable, the business was reduced to some old amateurs," Vatelot said, seated in his office surrounded by violins and photos of great soloists who entrusted their instruments to him and became his friends: the cellists Mstislav Rostropovich and Yo Yo Ma, the violinists Isaac Stern, David Oistrach and Ivry Gitlis.
So with the filmmaker Claude Santelli, who produced a moving documentary on violin restoration, and with the cooperation of soloists like Menuhin and the violinist Arthur Grumiaux, Vatelot labored on a project to establish a school for young luthiers in Mirecourt.
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