Stolen 12 years ago, a long-forgotten Facebook post led to the return of a cherished violin. You won’t catch me singing the praises of Meta on an ordinary day. I’ve spent years of my life researching, writing and making films about the evils of Big Tech (and, let’s be honest, many more years battling an addiction to their platforms.
Dopamine, amirite?) But last Sunday was no ordinary day. I had to begrudgingly give Facebook its flowers for – of all things – a reminder that amazing and good and kind things happen, even in the darkest of times (fascism, amirite?). A reminder that being human and living in a society that functions, however non-functionally, is a privilege and a profundity that we should never take for granted.
Just more than 12 years ago, at the tail end of a torrid year, I created a Facebook page appealing for help in tracking down several stolen violins. They had been cleaned out, along with my worldly possessions, during a break-in at a house I was staying in, following a traumatic break-up that left me temporarily homeless. Four were stolen, but one – a now roughly 135-year-old French masterpiece my father had gifted me as a teenager, as my violin-for-life, my Viv – was beyond gut-wrenching to lose.
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It’s hard to describe how an object can come to feel as though it’s part of your body. Perhaps holding it gently between chin and palm, sometimes hours a day for years, building muscle memory, posture and scars that never leave you, designates a musical instrument a quasi-limb. Or an aide.
Or a Portkey (millennials, amirite?) granting you access to places and stages you could never have got to without it. Viv and I played Beethoven’s Ninth with a massed choir at Carnegie Hall in Manhattan and The Devil Went Down to Georgia at the Barnyard Theatre in Cresta, wearing denim hot pants and a cowboy hat (me, not Viv). Viv got me through eisteddfods and art school and auditions and symphonies, and 1,000 wedding performances of Pachelbel’s-effing-Canon.
Viv gave me a community and paid my way through university. The one possession I truly valued. The thing that made me me.
She.) had been bought from and beautifully restored by Mr Wozny, a brilliant violinist, violist, conductor and pedagogue, who played first desk in the then National Symphony Orchestra during the week, and on weekends taught five-year-old me how to make adults cry. My first violin was so small you could hang it on a Christmas tree, but the sounds, nay, the emissions it produced were mighty. Mr Wozny (his first name is Bernard, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to call him that), taught me patiently, for the most part, for years.
His favourite thing to say, in his rich Polish accent, his bright blues shining in total earnestness, was, “keep one eye on the strings, one eye on the bow, and one eye on the music”. Children don’t tend to stick to the violin. It takes years to stop sounding like a crime is being committed in the next room, and discipline and daily practice to master (which is why strict parents are the real arbiters of classical music careers).
I don’t have any discipline, but I stuck to the violin. Perhaps, after a decade together, that’s why I came to love Mr Wozny and he came to love me, if not my playing. I knew he did when he framed a picture of me and my siblings busking at the mall during our December holidays, and hung it in his classroom.
I knew I did when he sold me Viv. Mr Wozny made his own bridges – those delicate, ornately carved pieces of soft wood that stretch the strings tight over the fingerboard – and signed them with his name. I made sure to add that detail and many others to my Facebook page appealing for information at the end of 2013, and waited in hope for some kind of intel or sign or lucky break.
In darker moments, I wondered if Viv had simply been turfed in the garbage, the delicate gold details on her pegs and button scavenged off and melted down for a pittance. I moved on. I bought another instrument with the insurance money, changed genre, joined a wonderful band, played at festivals and parties and swanky and not-so-swanky events around the world.
But something more than just my instrument had been taken. I never came to terms with the new violin’s sound or how it felt to play. It was always a chore.
I never practised. The case stayed closed between shows. As much as I loved to make music with others, I always felt that my playing fell short, my bandmates shortchanged.
Last Friday night, I was telling my nieces the story of my violins at dinner. The youngest, Suzanna, has just started learning to play, and I was lamenting not being able to hand down to her my junior instrument, which had also been stolen.
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