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Caring for violins, broken and prized

A college student in need of a new viola played a sonata on one near the reception area; a woman inspected the repaired chin rest on her violin. The phone rang. The door buzzed.

Strohl, a violist in her 58th season at the Metropolitan Opera, had come in to retrieve her bow. Two days before, she’d dropped it off for re-hairing — a service it requires frequently. She needed the bow to perform “Elektra” that evening.

“Eighty-one sixty-six, right?” she asked, counting out bills for David Segal, the firm’s proprietor. In minutes she was gone.

String musicians, professional and amateur, come and go from this shop on a quiet side street off Columbus Avenue — all of them needing “immediate satisfaction,” said Segal, who has been in business at this location for 32 years.

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A native of Israel, Segal inherited his love of string instruments from his father, who also made violins for a living. After studying the craft in Italy, the younger Segal came to New York and worked for Rembert R. Wurlitzer, a renowned authority on violins and other string instruments, before starting his own business in 1975.

Like many violin makers, he set up shop in the vicinity of Carnegie Hall. After relocating a few times, he ended up in his current space four blocks from Lincoln Center.

Tuesdays and Wednesdays, Segal makes new violins at his home in Yonkers, New York, while a manager runs the shop in Manhattan, which is open Monday through Friday. The other days of the workweek, Segal joins the manager and a few other staff members at the store to focus on repairs.

String instruments, he explained, are delicate creations, each made of dozens of pieces, any of which might break from use or changes in weather. “The wood is susceptible to dryness and humidity,” Segal said. “It shrinks and swells.”

Sometimes, too, there are mishaps, as when a woman came in with her 16-year-old’s cello. Its neck had cracked in two when the strap on its case broke and the contents had crashed to the ground.

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On a recent afternoon, Segal — wearing a brown apron and glasses, which made him look a little like Geppetto as he sat hunched over a workbench — methodically took apart a violin that had developed a crack in its top. To put the instrument back together, he would use glue made of boiled-down fish skin that was being kept warm in a little electric pot.

Customers might spend anywhere from $2 for an E string (such small items are stored in the labeled drawers of an old wooden card catalog) to millions of dollars for rare, centuries-old violins, which are kept in a safe.

The young viola player in the room off reception, Lukas Shrout, a junior at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, was looking for something in the $15,000 to $20,000 range while he was home on spring break. His mother, a physical therapist, sat on a stool and pondered how she would pay for this. She had been told, she said, that many musicians take out a home equity line of credit.

Finnegan Shanahan, a professional violinist and the shop manager’s assistant, went between Shrout and the workshop, where violins are tucked in rug-cushioned cubbies, cellos lean against the walls and violas hang from the ceiling. After consulting with his boss, Shanahan reached up and took down another viola to show Shrout, who reached out, eager to try it.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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JANE MARGOLIES © 2018 The New York Times

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