Albert Einstein's first violin sells for £860,000 at auction

Professor Albert Einstein playing his violin

(Image credit: Bettmann / Getty Images)

Albert Einstein is, of course, most famous for formulating his General Theory of Relativity. He also made important contributions towards quantum theory, even if he was at times as puzzled by his findings as the rest of us. That the Nobel Prize in Physics was last week awarded to a trio of scientists for their work, conducted 40 years ago, into quantum mechanics, just goes to show how far we’ve come and how much we have yet to understand in this scientific field. What is less well remembered is that Einstein had other pursuits besides working out how the universe is put together, and one of these was playing the violin.

Einstein is thought to have owned around ten violins during his lifetime. But what is believed to be his first full-size instrument was bought for him by his family in 1894, shortly before the young Einstein left for Switzerland to continue his schooling. Into the wood Einstein etched “Lina”, the name by which he called all of his violins, and it would remain his principal violin during the years he worked on his famous theories until around 1920.

In 1932, he gave the violin to his friend and fellow Nobel laureate Max von Laue before leaving Germany for the US to escape the Nazis’ rise to power. Two decades later, Laue gifted it to an acquaintance, Margarete Hommrich of Braunschweig, whose great-great-daughter consigned the instrument to Cirencester-based Dominic Winter Auctioneers to be sold last week. They did – for a hammer price of £860,000. With the buyer’s premium of 26.4% taking the total amount paid to over £1 million, Einstein’s violin becomes the most expensive such instrument that wasn’t owned by a concert violinist or made by Stradivarius, says BBC News.

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But before selling it, Dominic Winter Auctioneers tapped Paul Wingfield, director of studies in music at Trinity College, Cambridge – who had just so happened to have recently composed a musical drama called Einstein’s Violin – to research and confirm the instrument’s provenance. “I think [Einstein] used [the violin] as a way of mulling things over,” Wingfield tells Rhys Blakely in The Times. “It just really helped him order his thoughts.”

So important were the violins to Einstein that he mentioned them alongside his scientific manuscripts and books in his will of 1927. He updated that will in 1934, shortly after arriving in the US, and that document – torn into pieces, but retrieved from the bin by an employee of the Princeton Bank & Trust Company, which held his assets – was valued at up to $30,000 when it appeared for sale with Christie’s in New York yesterday, alongside personal letters and photographs of Einstein. Other notes and letters of his have fetched upwards of £1 million in recent years.

In 1950, Einstein filed a final will in which he left his violin to his grandson, Bernhard Einstein. Einstein had remarked that if he hadn’t become a scientist, he would have liked to have been a musician. Music’s loss was science’s gain.

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