Planet Money - Is a Stradivarius just a violin? (Classic)

Episode Date: December 8, 2021

Many music aficionados will tell you that violins and violas made by legendary craftsman Antonio Stradivari represent the pinnacle of the instruments. But what if it's all just an example of really good branding? | Subscribe to our weekly newsletter here.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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It's all about brands and why some people crave a certain brand name so badly. It's from 2014 and hosted by David Kestenbaum and Lisa Pollock. It starts with a trip to Sotheby's in Manhattan. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to Sotheby's. I went to hear what is likely to become the most expensive instrument ever sold, a viola. Not just any viola, it is a Stradivarius, made 300 years ago by the Italian master Antonio Stradivari. It was just this quick little event for the press, photographers, reporters, standing around in an art gallery room.

And I'm delighted to be able to introduce international viola soloist David Carpenter, who is going to play it for us. Enjoy. A viola or a violin is like a living, breathing thing. Handcrafted from wood, from a tree. Each one is different. And you know the story. Antonio Stradivari was the master. Some say he was the greatest maker of string instruments to ever live.

He made this viola in 1719. When Stradivari died, his secrets died with him. People have been trying to duplicate this sound ever since. What's special about the sound is that it sounds like a Strad. This is Tim Ingalls, director of Ingalls and Hayday, musical instrument consultant to Southerners.

And everybody knows that Stradivari's work has this amazing depth of tone, but also a silvery quality to the upper register. It's unique. The Strad sound is unique, indeed. And how much do you expect it will sell for? We're certainly expecting in excess of $45 million. The silence you hear right here is me trying to think of what the next question should be

Stradivarius is a very strong brand Yes, the strongest brand in our world I mean, in the violin world, I mean The running joke is that if you step into a London taxi holding a violin case The taxi driver will always ask you You got a Stradivarius in there, mate? Which is clearly sometimes true in my case But I usually choose not to tell him when that's the case. Pretty good for a 300-year-old instrument.

Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm David Kestenbaum, and I'm very excited we have a special guest host today, Lisa Pollack. Do it. Today on our show, the Stradivarius, one of the most powerful and expensive brands in the world. And certainly the guy made really nice instruments. But how nice exactly? This is a question I think about all the time when I'm buying coffee and clothes and dishwashing detergent. And jeans and shoes.

How much of a brand is real? And how much, how much is in our heads? Lisa, did you play violin as a kid or something? I had a one-day career. It was in first grade. They handed out the violins. I thought the strings hurt my fingers, and I quit. That was the end. Yeah. The real reason I'm here is because of a story I heard back in January.

It's this crazy crime story that happened in Milwaukee. More breaking news, Milwaukee. It sounds like it's right out of a movie. A rare stratosphere. The victim was the top violinist in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. His name's Frank Allmond. So he's walking to the car after a concert, and this guy jumps out and shoots him with a taser.

He falls to the ground, he yells, they got the violin, and the thief drives away. There was, of course, a press conference afterwards, where even the police chief seemed a little flummoxed by the whole thing. It appears at this time that the violin was, fact the primary target of this robbery. It's important to note that this violin is very valuable, but very valuable to a very small population. Turns out it is hard to unload a Stradivarius without getting noticed. It also turns out you can track a taser gun from the bits of confetti that shoot out when it fires.

The taser led police to suspects and then to the violin in an attic in Milwaukee, safe and sound. I read the court documents. They're kind of amazing. There was actually a confidential informant who helped him crack the case. And he said the guy accused of stealing the Stradivarius wasn't just looking for any old expensive thing to steal. He wanted a Stradivarius. He called it his dream theft. That is how strong the Strad brand is. Even thieves dream of them. Part of a brand is having a good story to tell. And there are really good stories to tell about Stradivariuses. Actually, I think the plural is Stradivarii. These are stories that you can't make up. And a surprising amount of them seem to involve nefarious behavior.

Take, for instance, the story of the Stradivarius currently played by Josh Bell. Josh Bell, if you've heard of any violinist, you've probably heard of him. Josh is very, very, he's very good. I went to talk to him at his apartment here in New York. He was practicing on the Stradivarius when I got off the elevator. Hey. How are you? Josh's Strad, insiders call these violins strads for short.

His Strad is also very famous. It used to belong to a man named Bronislav Huberman. In 1936, Huberman was playing uptown at Carnegie Hall. He was playing a concert. He had the luxury of having two violins in his case. He had a double case with a Stradivarius and a Guarnerius, the two great names, I mean, the top and the greatest violins were made by these two.

And he played the second half of the concert on the Guarneri, so he left the Strad in his dressing room. Note to Strad owners, don't leave your violin in a dressing room. After the concert, in fact, I think while they were still clapping for his final piece, his assistant ran on stage and said, your Strad is gone. Stolen. And it was stolen not by some guy trying to make money. It was stolen by another violin

player named Julian Altman. What did Altman do with it? He just played on it and he played gigs, gigs around cafes and orchestras, things like that. I think he stole it because he wanted a Strad and wanted to play on it. And this was the only way he was going to get get one was to steal it. Altman covered the violin in shoe polish so that no one would know, and he kept its identity a secret for 50 years. He confessed finally on his deathbed. That instrument now? It's the one Josh Bell is holding in his hands.

The price? $3 million. Stories like these are part of what makes a Strad so valuable. They're these rare historic objects. They've got these complicated, dramatic backstories. And there aren't many of them left. There might be hundreds of violins and only 10 violas. But part of the value is also something else. These are truly great musical instruments.

After all, that is why Altman stole that one. It sounded amazing. That violin is perhaps one of the finest violins ever made. That was clear to Josh Bell the first time he played it. He'd gone into a shop to buy some violin strings, and there it was. The guy said, you want to try it? I said, sure. And I played.

Within 10 seconds, I started shaking. I said, this is my instrument. And it was that kind of magic chemistry people talk about with meeting their future wife. In this case, it was my future violin. This is like in Harry Potter when they find the right wand for them. Something like that. It's a chemistry.

It's a chemistry that I would think of a sound, and it would just come out. And it's a wonderful feeling when that happens, maybe once in a lifetime. I could play a little bit of the Bach, which was written around the time that it was made. After the break, a blind taste test of violins. violins play So how much of a Strad's allure is the mystique, the history, and the story? And how much is the actual sound? You could ask that about any brand.

How much is the story? And how much is the quality of the actual thing you're getting? If this were Coca-Cola, there'd be a way to separate out how much is the thing itself. You could do a blind taste test, a test where you don't know what you're drinking. Of course, you could do a blinded test with a Strad. In fact, in 2010, researchers did just that. I've been a violin maker for a long time. This is Joseph Curtin.

And so the question of which violins sound better than others, old violins versus new violins, all these are questions I've lived with every day of my professional life. Joseph teamed up with this scientist in France named Claudia Fritz to do the test, the blinded test that would compare the strads with the newer instruments. They got three old violins, two strads, one Guarnerius, and three new ones. The experiment took place in Indianapolis at an international violin competition. They brought these violin players up to a dimly lit hotel room, and they had them play the violins while wearing welding goggles. So they couldn't see which instruments they were playing. We talked to John Saloninka. He was one of those violinists.

You could see that there was a violin there, but you couldn't tell at all. You couldn't see what it was. You could just see it was the shape of a violin, roughly. And in addition, you couldn't smell things. You have to understand when you pick up an old instrument and you smell it, it's a very old smell and you can smell the old wood and dust. So they put a little drop of perfume on the chin rest to mask that smell. Joseph says they had to do this. So powerful is the idea of a Strad that once you know you're holding this 300-year-old instrument made by the greatest violin maker, it's very hard to just listen to it and judge it purely for its sound.

When you pick up a Strad, it's impossible to forget that it's a Strad. Even if you try really hard? Well, trying to forget isn't usually a very successful project. The researchers had the violinists play old violins and new violins in pairs, again, not knowing which was which. John Soloninka, the violinist who took part in the experiment you heard from, he was convinced going in that he was going to be able to pick out the strads. But he could not. The researchers actually recorded his comments while he was playing the violins with the goggles on.

And afterward, they showed him the transcripts, which he says are pretty funny to read through now. I'd say, OK, now you hear that? You see where I'm doing this? That's clearly what an old instrument does. And then on another violin, I'd say, now you hear that? You see the way it sort of breaks or it does this or it's sort of a bit cloudy? That's much more of a new instrument. And in fact, in both of those cases, I was wrong. I was actually playing the opposite of what I thought I was wrong. I was actually playing, you know, the opposite of what I thought I was playing. When the researchers totaled things up, there was no evidence the players could reliably pick old from new. The researchers also asked the players to pick the instrument they liked most and least. The least favorite was a Strad, and the most favorite was a modern, fresh-made violin, a new instrument, which was much cheaper than the old ones, tens of thousands of dollars versus millions for a Strad.

I just knew it was the one I preferred the most. I really had no idea what it was. It's nice to know you like the thing that's less expensive, don't you think? I feel like I always liked the more expensive thing. Well, you know, if I knew what they were when I was testing them, I bet I would have liked the more expensive one. The study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And you can guess what happened next.

Lots of angry violinists. The study was questioning this very deeply held belief that Stradivarius violins are unparalleled, that they have a unique sound. People have spent millions of dollars to buy them or spent their lives dreaming of owning one. So this idea that strads might not be better than new violins, it upset a lot of people. Again, researcher Joseph Curtin.

Personally, it was very difficult. The study, I think, came out on New Year's Day or sometime very close to that. And the next month was, for me, very stressful and very painful in some ways. He heard all kinds of complaints. Maybe the players weren't skilled enough to know the difference. There were professionals, but also amateurs like John, who you heard from. Some people wondered how the instruments had been picked. Maybe the strads were not the best of the strads. And a lot of people hated the fact that the test was done in a hotel room. A member of the Juilliard String Quartet told the New York Times that comparing new and old violins in a hotel room was like, quote, trying to compare a Ford and a Ferrari in a Walmart parking lot. Joseph said these attacks stung, but they also raised some good

questions. So he and Claudia and some other researchers got together to do a second experiment. And this time they had more violins, better players, more time to evaluate and no hotel room. This time the players were going to get to try the violins in a rehearsal room and in an actual concert hall. The day of the test, they gathered the violins and they laid them out. Now I have a vivid memory of seeing all these old violins. They were laid out on a table. And then there were the new instruments on another table.

And after playing some of those and then playing some of the old ones, I said, you know, I think maybe the old ones are going to win this time. I really was quite overwhelmed by their quality, by the appearance, by the sound. But the results were basically the same. There was no evidence that the players could tell old violins from new violins. The most favorite violin, again, was a new one. The most favored violin, again, was a new one.

And in a way, the results were liberating, because they suggested you didn't have to spend millions to get a violin with top-quality sound. Joseph says he was relieved that the results held up, but also a little sad. This is a guy, remember, who makes violins. Well, I did get quite depressed after the Paris experiment for a little while. Why?

Well, it is partly a sense of disillusion. I've spent the bulk of my adult life trying to imitate these old instruments. And the question is, well, what am I aspiring to? What are you going to do next? Things like that. Sometimes when you debunk a myth, you realize you kind of like the myth. You needed the myth. How much of what we think of as the beautiful sound of a Strad

is the real sound of the instrument? And how much is our brains telling us it's beautiful because it's a Strad? The study suggests that some part of it is the story. Our enjoyment of things is not just the thing. There's all this other stuff around it, and it can be really hard to separate out the two. It's hard, for instance, to think about a Coca-Cola for what it is, bubbly, caramel-colored sugar water. It's much more than that. It's a Coke.

I've seen ads of people around the world singing together, uniting across borders. I've seen beautiful people open a bottle and hand it to another beautiful person. I've heard the sound of the bubbles exquisitely recorded. And for whatever combinations of reasons, when I drink a Coke, I like it. I want one even talking about it. The mythology is extremely helpful. This is John Salenica again, the guy from the first experiment, talking about the mystique surrounding the Strad. The mythology helps dealers. It helps soloists.

It helps concert promotions. It helps your career as a soloist. It helps sell recordings. Mythology helps everyone except the poor professional musician that is trying to buy an instrument or the poor violin maker of today who's making instruments that are as good or better than those old instruments. If you disagree with all this, if you still believe the strat is unsurpassed, you can take comfort in this. The researchers aren't saying that no one can tell the difference between new violins and old. What they found was that the people they tested, when they looked at the results as a whole, it was as if they were just guessing. Some people correctly identified the old ones, but no more than you'd expect from chance.

Josh Bell, the soloist who now plays the Strad that was famously stolen in 1936 backstage at Carnegie Hall, he does not buy that no one can tell the difference. I really argue that, and it's very clearly not the case to me. When you do an experiment... Do you think if you were blindfolded, you could tell the difference between a Strad and a modern instrument? Well, maybe not in the first few seconds. It might be if I'm just... It depends how you test the instrument.

But in your ideal setup, do you think you could tell the difference? Absolutely. For me, I mean, if, God, nothing would make me happier than to find a modern instrument for $50,000 that sounds like a Strad. I would be living very, very pretty right now. The researchers, of course, say there's a way to test that. And they've got the welding goggles ready for anyone who wants to try. That was David Kastenbaum and Lisa Pollack reporting in 2014.

The viola from the beginning of this episode, the one that was going to be the most expensive instrument ever sold, it did not end up selling. Tim Ingalls, the Sotheby's musical consultant, told David that nobody was willing to put up the minimum bid of $45 million. Today's episode was produced by Damiano Marchetti. Today's rerun was produced by Andrea Gutierrez with help from Isaac Rodriguez. Our executive producer is Alex Goldmark. Louise Story and Ebony Reed are our senior consulting editors. I'm Waylon Wong. This is NPR. Thanks for listening. And a special thanks to our funder, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, for helping to support this podcast.