The Stradivarius That Still Sings After Three Centuries

In 1716, Antonio Stradivari pressed his hands against a spruce top in his Cremona workshop and shaped what musicians now call the "Messiah" violin. Three hundred and ten years later, that instrument still holds its voice. The varnish has barely cracked. The tone has only deepened. Acoustics researchers at Cambridge have spent decades trying to unlock its secret, scanning the wood with X-rays and modeling the geometry with supercomputers, yet no one has successfully replicated what Stradivari built.…