Has a 300-year-old Stradivarius violin stolen by the Nazis during the Second World War turned up in France? Pascale Bernheim, an expert on looted musical instruments, believes so.
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The first clue was an article in a local newspaper.
It reported that violinist Emmanuel Coppey had demonstrated his talent on several old violins during an evening of music and wine in the city of Colmar in the Alsace region of France, near the German border.
Luthier Nicolo Amati had made the first in 1624, and Antonio Guarneri crafted the second in 1735, Les Dernières nouvelles d’Alsace reported.
The third was made by fellow Italian Antonio Stradivari, in 1719.
“I am absolutely convinced that it is the Lauterbach,” Bernheim told French news agency AFP – referring to the name of one of the violin’s first owners.
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Nazi soldiers looted the violin from a museum in the Polish capital Warsaw in 1944, according to French newspaper Le Parisien, which investigated the story.
Bernheim found that Polish industrialist Henryk Grohman had owned the instrument before the Second World War, then handed it over to the Polish museum before his death.
The instrument survived years in East Germany during the Cold War, then was last seen in France in the early 1990s.
‘Golden period’
Stradivari made only nine violins in 1719, two of which are missing – the “Lauterbach” and the “Lautenschlager”.
But the “Lautenschlager” has a back made of two pieces of wood – not one, like the “Lauterbach”, the Parisien says.
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A classical concert producer named Emmanuel Jaeger organised the music evening in Colmar on 31 March.
He had contacted Bernheim in 2017 to trace the origin of a violin owned by Jean-Christophe Graff, a luthier – or violin maker – from Strasbourg.
But when the British luthier Charles Beare examined it before he died last year, he said it was a Stradivarius from the Stradivari’s so-called “golden period”, Bernheim said.
He was worried he was holding a stolen instrument.
“To my knowledge, Beare twice examined the violin, then it underwent a dendrochronological analysis,” Bernheim said, referring to testing used to determine the age of wooden objects.
‘Which one is it?’
Neither Jaeger nor Graff responded to AFP’s request for comment, but Jaeger has said Bernheim was wrong.
“To the best of my knowledge, this isn’t the stolen violin,” he told the Alsace newspaper on Thursday. He says the violin used at the concert was another of those made in 1719.
Bernheim, however, is adamant that is not the case.
“If it really is a Stradivarius from 1719, and not the Lauterbach, then which one is it?” she asked.
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A rare Stradivarius violin, the “Joachim-Ma Stradivarius”, fetched $11.3 million (€9.64 million) at auction in New York in February.
The record belongs to another Stradivarius – the “Lady Blunt,” which in 2011 sold for $15.9 million (€13.7 million).
(with AFP)