Appreciation of Karl Roy

by Robert J. Spear

Originally published in American Lutherie #111, 2012



I met Karl Roy in the summer of 1974 at the first violin repair classes held at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. I was in the Paul Arts Building, standing at an intersection of two corridors and a staircase with my class registration badge newly pinned to my shirt, and a school-issue bright orange fishing tackle box that contained a few odd pieces of violin repair tools. I was unsure which way to turn. I was literally standing at my life’s crossroads when up the stairs bounded a man of imposing figure and steely blue eyes, his head topped with silvery-gray hair. I knew who he was even before I knew who he was.

Roy was about ten years my senior, a widely traveled and intelligent man who spoke Oxford English with a German accent. He was a recently appointed director of the Staatliche Berufsfach und Fachschule für Geigenbau (commonly referred to as the Geigenbauschule), the state school for violin making in Mittenwald, Bavaria, founded by King Maximillian II in 1858. Directors there serve consecutively, and his predecessor had just retired. Despite this tradition, by the 1970s violin making worldwide was considered a dying art, and there were no schools in America that I knew about. In Germany the crafts of antiquity are taken seriously, and when a German violin maker is called a “Master,” he or she truly is, with the years of study and the diplomas to back it up. Karl was a Master in every sense of the word.