Selected Publications & Reports
The Stolen 1709 Mendelssohn Stradivari Violin Emerges
The Lost Music Project recently discovered the whereabouts of the 1709 Mendelssohn Stradivari violin, missing for nearly 80 years. Astonishingly, this violin had transformed into the “1707 Stella” Stradivari violin (also c. 1707) — with a different date, name, history, and provenance. The violin’s changed identity, along with its long private possession, made it difficult to detect.
Video comparison: This video is an overlay of (1) a pre-theft monochrome photograph of the 1709 Mendelssohn Stradivari violin (Mendelssohn-Bohnke Papers) and (2) a color photograph of the violin now referred to as the 1707 “Stella” Stradivari violin (and c. 1707), 2000 (photo credit: Tarisio). (Click the box to enlarge the video.)
This Stradivari, owned by the Mendelssohn-Bohnke family, was stolen in Berlin from a bank safe rented by the Mendelssohn Bank, forced into liquidation during the Nazi era because of its Jewish ownership. After the violin’s theft, it took another 50 years for this Stradivari to surface in Paris in the long shadow of the Nazi era and after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the reunification of Germany in 1990, and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. This violin then appears to have passed in the stream of commerce involving those in France, Britan, the U.S., Switzerland, Austria, and Japan.
This is a cautionary story about the importance of provenance — an object’s history of ownership, and the need for access to provenance evidence.
Below are links to both a brief summary and a preliminary report based on primary sources, witness interviews, and other information. Research is continuing.
Wanda Landowska with her 17th century clavichord, looted by the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg’s Sonderstab Musik in 1940. Photo credit: Library of Congress, Washington D.C.
"The Nazi Confiscation of Wanda Landowska’s Musical Collection and Its Aftermath,” by Carla Shapreau, Polin: Studies in Polish Jewry, eds., François Guesnet, Benjamin Matis, Antony Polonsky, Vol. 32, The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization in association with University of Liverpool Press, 2020
Erard Piano Ledger, Musée de la musique Archive (Cité de la musique - Philharmonie de Paris)
