It was prized, stolen and disguised — after helping its owner and Albert Einstein spirit dozens of musicians out of Hitler’s Germany.
No wonder Joshua Bell cherishes the 300-year-old Stradivarius violin he’ll play Monday at Lincoln Center: Its history is more twisted and uplifting than any work of fiction.
The Grammy winner remembers seeing it nearly 15 years ago in a London shop where he went to buy some strings. The shopkeeper emerged from a back room “with a stunning violin in hand,” Bell, 48, recalls. “He told me it was the famous Huberman Strad, and I was instantly intrigued.”
Bell didn’t know the whole story back then, but he did know this: The violin spent nearly 50 years incognito — the golden varnish that violin-maker Antonio Stradivari applied in 1713 slathered with black shoe polish.
The man who did the slathering was Julian Altman, a young freelance violinist — and, as his wife described him, a womanizer and gambler — who reportedly took the biggest gamble of his life in 1936. Dressed as a Cossack with a flowing blouse and breeches (he was playing a gig at a Russian restaurant nearby), he allegedly finagled his way inside Carnegie Hall’s stage door by offering a guard a cigar, snuck into musician Bronislaw Huberman’s dressing room and plucked the Strad from its case while Huberman was onstage, playing his other rare violin.
Huberman’s beautiful violin became Altman’s ugly secret — albeit one with a gorgeous sound. He played it in orchestras and restaurants, and Altman’s wife, Marcelle Hall, says she fell in love when she heard him play “Lara’s Theme” from “Doctor Zhivago” in 1968.
In 1985, as Altman lay dying, he told Hall to search his violin case for documents. There, she found clippings from 1936 about the theft of a violin — and realized it was the one in that case.
After Altman’s death, Hall returned the violin to its insurer, Lloyd’s of London, for a finder’s fee. Though Huberman was paid $30,000 for his loss, the violin’s value had jumped to $1.1 million.
Flash-forward to the ’90s, when Bell met the violin’s latest owner, Norbert Brainin, a member of the Amadeus Quartet. “One day, you might be lucky enough to have such a violin,” Brainin told him. Prophetic, indeed.
Bell found the instrument again on a 2001 day in London, just as it was about to be sold for $4 million to a German industrialist who wanted to add it to his collection.
The idea of the violin resting silently in a vault made Bell ill. “This was an instrument meant to be played, not just admired,” says the New Yorker, who sold his own Strad to help pay for it.
But the Carnegie caper was only part of its past. What really fascinated Bell about the Huberman Strad was Huberman, a Polish-Jewish violinist whose 1929 visit to Palestine inspired an orchestra. He auditioned musicians from all over Europe and won hard-to-get exit visas for 60. Einstein helped Huberman raise money to settle the musicians and their families in what was then Palestine (now Israel). The fund-raising US concert tour was a success — except for that one night at Carnegie.
Says Bell, whose Russian-Jewish great-grandparents emigrated to what was then Palestine, “When I perform in Israel with the Israel Philharmonic, I am always touched to think how many of the orchestra and orchestra members are direct descendants of the musicians Huberman saved from the Holocaust — with funds raised by concerts performed on the same instrument I play every day.”