The violin Joshua Bell can’t let out of his sight has
twice, and for many years, been in the hands of thieves. Yet it helped save the
lives of 1,000 people.
The French poet, dramatist, novelist, writer,
journalist, and critic Theophile Gautier is credited for birthing the phrase,
“All passes, art alone endures.” Technically, it was “enduring” within a longer
passage (“All passes, art alone enduring stays to us; the bust outlasts the
throne, the coin, Tiberius…”). But a tour of the Louvre, the Art Institute of
Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the concert halls of London,
Tokyo, San Francisco and Buenos Aires, the local violin shop, provides ample evidence
of the basic sentiment.
As does the Gibson “ex-Huberman”
Stradivarius violin. Now in the worthy hands of virtuoso Joshua Bell, the
violin’s history is perhaps one of the most storied among the few hundred
surviving fine
Italian violins crafted by Antonio Stradivari of Cremona. It was stolen –
twice – and was used to help Jewish musicians escape the Holocaust. Composer
Johannes Brahms heard his own composition – the difficult violin Concerto in D
Major – played on the instrument and it is said to have brought him to tears.
Why tears? Branislov Huberman (1882-1947)
played a Brahms (1833-1897) concerto at the age of 14. The composer wept with
joy to observe and hear the prodigy’s quality of play and interpretation.
That had to have been joyful for Huberman
as well, but the acclaimed Jewish-Polish violinist who studied in Berlin, where
he met Brahms, experienced much sorrow and ultimately triumph with his Strad.
First, there were the thefts. The “Gibson”
(named for an earlier owner, George Alfred Gibson, an Englishman) was stolen in
1919 from Huberman’s hotel room in Vienna but recovered due to inept fencing
(attempt to sell it) within three days. But in 1936, while Huberman was playing
his second violin (a Guarnerius) on stage in New York City’s Carnegie Hall, it
was stolen again. The thief, Julian Altman, a Julliard-trained violinist who
later played it with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., only
confessed to his wife on his deathbed in 1985 that he had the stolen
instrument.
Huberman died in 1947 and never saw that
Strad again. But that fateful concert in Carnegie Hall was part of a much
bigger cause that, in many ways, proves true the words of the French poet.
Huberman watched the rise of the Nazi Party
in Germany with alarm and responded in a way that ultimately saved the lives of
about 1,000 European Jews. He did this by creating – with the help of many
others, including the Italian anti-fascist conductor Arturo Toscanini and
physicist Albert Einstein – the Palestinian Symphony Orchestra (later renamed
the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra). Musicians were recruited and auditioned
from the European capitals at risk from the impending Holocaust. But they also
needed money to buy their freedom, and that of the musicians’ families, so
Huberman traveled to New York to raise those funds from concerts and personal
connections.
The plan worked, and we can assume today that
least some of the children, grand children and great grandchildren of those 100
or so musicians make their way through the Brahms concerto.
Bell, himself of maternal Jewish lineage,
bought the instrument in 2001 from British violinist Norbert Brainin, for $4
million, saving the instrument from a collector (in Germany) who planned to put
it in a museum. Bell had another Strad he sold to purchase the ex-Huberman,
understanding its provenance and the work of the Polish violinist who saved
artists, and, art itself.
“I never connected so quickly with an
instrument,” says its current owner. “This is my violin. I can’t let it out of
my sight.”
