Correction Appended

Could it be that the ravishingly warm and woody brilliance of a well-played Stradivarius results not so much from the craftsmanship of Antonio Stradivari - by common consent the world's greatest violin maker - but from his phenomenally lucky choice of wood and varnish? And that the real credit for that hauntingly beautiful sound belongs to a bunch of microbes?

Such suggestions have lately brought an angry flush to the faces of violin lovers who have long venerated the name Stradivari and a handful of other master violin makers of 17th-and 18th-century Italy.

But Dr. Joseph Nagyvary, a Hungarian-born professor of biochemistry at Texas A&M University who has been making experimental violins for the last five years, relishes uttering such blasphemies. He presented his ideas in a cover story for Chemical and Engineering News, he is sponsored as a lecturer on the subject by the American Chemical Society and, more recently, he has been awarded a $275,000 grant from the Texas Advanced Technology Program, a state development agency, to try to establish Texas as a center of violin making to rival old Cremona, where Stradivari, Giuseppe Guarneri and their fellow craftsmen lived and worked. 'He Just Was Lucky'

''Stradivari may not have known any more about violin making than we do today,'' Dr. Nagyvary said the other day. ''He just was lucky enough to have the right materials handed to him. What we have found, by using the electron microscope and other sophisticated instruments, is that the sound produced by the great violins results from their chemistry and microstructure as well as their obvious geometry. Once we understand that, we can reproduce it and make violins which are just as good or even better than those by Stradivari.''

''Nagyvary? He's an eccentric,'' sniffed Jacques Francais, whose Manhattan salon is one of the world's best-known places to buy a vintage violin, one of which sold for the record price of $1.25 million this year.

''The guy is really after publicity,'' said Carleen Hutchins, a founder and longtime secretary of the Catgut Acoustical Society, a nonprofit organization devoted to research and the development of better stringed instruments.

Dr. Nagyvary says his detractors have ''misrepresented violin making as an art form when, in fact, it is a science.'' In general, his approach is supported by a team of British researchers at Cambridge University who are studying Cremonese violins with sophisticated measuring devices because they, too, believe that chemistry and microstructure are possibly the vital key to their fabulous acoustical qualities. #2 Schools of Debate The debate - even the high temperature of the debate - is not new. For centuries, voices have quavered with emotion while discussing what makes the violins of the old Italian masters sound so good. The emphasis has varied at different times. The most heat has been generated by those who insist that Stradivari's genius lay in the preparation of the varnish and those who focus on the way the instruments were shaped and put together.

An advocate of the second theory, Ms. Hutchins, who has been making violins for 25 years, concentrates on what she describes as ''tuning the plates'' - testing and planing the top and the bottom faces of the instrument until they resonate according to certain standards. But Dr. Nagyvary scorns Ms. Hutchins's work as ''pseudoscience.''

When he began using an electron microscope to analyze small chips of wood taken from Cremonese violins, he said, he found that they contained a high salt content. ''That could result from several coats of Mrs. Stradivari's saffron chicken soup,'' he said, ''but a more plausible explanation is that when trees were cut in this part of Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries they were dumped in a river, floated downstream to Venice and kept in a lagoon for as long as two or three years before being sold.''

''This process,'' he continued, ''permitted the absorption of salt and the growth of bacteria and fungi that chewed the soft organic matter in the wood so as to permit the flow of liquids between the tubular cells of wood. The result was a fiftyfold increase in permeability, and that allowed the deep penetration of varnish. The combination of highly permeable wood and a very hard composite varnish, which happened to be used by all craftsmen of the period, even on furniture, is what accounts for the remarkable acoustic properties.''

''We have developed ways to reproduce that process,'' he said. ''Already, spectrum analysis shows that the notes produced by our experimental violins are comparable to those made by Stradivarius violins. That is, the difference between our violins and Stradivarius violins is not greater than the difference between different Stradivarius violins.'' Distributing the Results

By next summer, he expects to have more than a dozen violins finished, and he says he intends to donate them to well-established music schools and some selected violinists and orchestras.

Although Dr. Nagyvary's theories have the cachet of publication in a learned journal and state government financing, there is no shortage of rival ideas about how to make a great violin. William Fulton, a retired aerospace engineer and now secretary of the Violin Society of America, thinks that wood to be used in violin making should be exposed to an atmosphere of ammonia for several weeks to duplicate the ancient smokehouse treatment. According to another tradition, the raw wood, before being varnished, should be rubbed with crushed shrimp from the Adriatic.

Mr. Francais, who comes from a family of violin makers, dismissed all ''amateurs'' and said the skilled young craftsmen who work in his repair shop were, in their off hours, fashioning new instruments that produced a superb sound ''without all that romanticism.''

Professional violinists are just as divided on the subject as the violin makers. Isaac Stern said he thought there were some quite good recently made violins but considered himself unqualified to judge them because of his long personal attachment to his two Guarneris. Pinchas Zukerman, who also plays a Guarneri, said that while he had heard some fine new violins, they simply couldn't compare with the Stradivarius and Guarnerius instruments. Opinions of the Impecunious

On the other hand, some young violinists who cannot afford the big prices fetched by the celebrated instruments, think highly of Nagyvary violins. Samuel Cohen, a member of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, said of his Nagyvary, ''This is the first time I have found a new instrument that sounds like an old Italian instrument - and I cannot be fooled by the sound.'' Zina Schiff, a young concert violinist who studied with Heifetz and Galamian and recently made a couple of recordings with her Nagyvary with the Israeli Philharmonic, said, ''Wherever I play, conductors and other artists marvel over my instrument, and I just smile inside.''

In the end, what makes a great violin sound so beautiful may be largely a matter of who is playing it. As they used to say about Jascha Heifetz: he could make a cigar box sound like a Stradivarius; in lesser hands, a Stradivarius could sound like a cigar box.

photo of Dr. Joseph Nagyvary (NYT/Zigy Kaluzny)