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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
Geoffrey Seitz
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Photography by Kevin A. Roberts
At Geoffrey J. Seitz, Violinmaker, the eponymous violin shop in Holly Hills, string instruments crowd every corner. This is no carefully curated showroom. It’s more like a teenager’s bedroom, superficially messy but with a certain chaotic logic, everything in its place, no matter what Mom says.
Violins packed onto a long table go from cheaper ones for students, starting around $350, to antique instruments farther back, with asking prices in the thousands. (A violin by Giovanni Guadagnini is priced at $150,000.) Violins produced in St. Louis have their own display case, while another one holds more exotic instruments. There’s a Stroh violin, which projects its sound through a goofy horn, and an instrument made of an armadillo shell. Then there are the violins Seitz makes himself. They can take 400 hours to build, patience-testing time spent with chisels and files and planes, and cost between $10,000 and $20,000 each.
Seitz grew up on a strawberry-and-tomato farm in Lemay, playing drums, piano, and violin. On a trip through the West, he broke a string and took his fiddle to a shop in Spokane, Washington. He was so impressed with the place and its owner, Glenn Stockton, that he moved to Spokane on a whim to work with him and become a violin-maker. “I just moved out there without him even knowing it,” Seitz says. “I asked him to take me on as an apprentice, and he said no, of course.” Seitz kept asking, and eventually, Stockton caved. Starting in 1977, Seitz spent two years at the shop, learning the luthier’s craft.
He says Stockton taught him the importance of the tiniest details—and that the most important detail is glue. He uses horsehair glue that comes in a granular form and has to be soaked in water, then cooked in a boiler. It holds forever, but comes apart without breaking the wood when repairs are necessary. “There is supposedly stuff in the pyramids still glued together with that stuff,” he says.
In addition to making violins, Seitz is a classically trained player. He’s won two national fiddling contests. And he’s a walking encyclopedia of violin-making. He says the popular obsession with replicating the great makers of centuries past, names like Stradivari and Guarneri, goes too far.
Seitz prefers to do his own thing. He draws his own patterns. His sound holes and purfling (the violin’s decorative edge)are unique. And he has a secret varnish recipe. He says most varnish is either too stiff or too soft. “The varnish I make is perfect,” he says. “It’s very flexible but durable.”
Seitz, who’s also an appraiser, says the mark of a great violin, apart from its sound, is an ineffable artistic beauty. “It has kind of a uniqueness to it,” he says. “It does something to you when you look at it, like a painting does. It will move you a little bit.”
