A rare Stradivari violin has been auctioned in New York for 15.3 million dollars (around 14.4 million euros).
As the auction house Tarisio announced, it remained just below the record price of 15.9 million dollars that was paid in 2011 for another violin by the famous Italian instrument maker Antonio Stradivari.
The violin, made in 1714, dates from Stradivari’s so-called golden period and is also called »da Vinci«. The instrument had belonged to the famous virtuoso Toscha Seidel for almost four decades, who used it to record the film music for the Hollywood classic »The Wizard of Oz« and taught his even more famous student Albert Einstein.
“That violin was playing right next to the great mathematician and scientist,” when Seidel and Einstein played quartets together at Einstein’s Princeton home, explained Tarisio auction house founder Jason Price. In 1933, Seidel and Einstein also gave a concert in New York to support Jewish scientists who had fled Nazi Germany.
Most recently, the instrument had belonged to a collector from Japan. The auction house did not say who bought it on Thursday.
