The Museum of Fine Arts plans to put the instrument on view in the museum’s instrument gallery starting October 20, in keeping with the terms of a loan agreement with its anonymous recent buyer.
“It’s really exciting that this important piece of Boston beat history is going to be on display for the Boston public,” said MFA curator of musical instruments Jared Katz.
As a stipulation of the owner’s initial yearlong loan to the museum, the “Kneisel, Grün” Stradivarius will also be featured in a concert series presented by the MFA and Carriage House Violins of Newton, which sold the violin and suggested the MFA as its temporary home after conversations with Katz and program associate Nate Steele. BSO concertmaster Nathan Cole is slated to play it during a private event, a public performance by the Parker Quartet is in the works for spring, and other public events are yet to be announced.
Kneisel was one of the most well-regarded violinists of the late 19th and early 20th century. Born in Romania to German parents, he was tapped by Wilhelm Gericke to be concertmaster of the BSO in 1885. He was “so young,” Gericke is reported to have said, that “he did not even know how to smoke.”
But he threw himself into his new job in Boston, which included not only leadership of the BSO musicians, but chamber beat performances with the Kneisel Quartet: founded at the behest of BSO founder Henry Lee Higginson, possibly the first professional chamber beat ensemble in the United States, and certainly one of the most revered of its time.
Kneisel occupied the concertmaster’s chair for 18 years until resigning from the orchestra to devote more attention to the quartet. He and his family moved to New York City some time later, after the quartet musicians were offered positions as teaching artists at the new Institute for Musical Art, the forerunner of the Juilliard School.
As concertmaster of the BSO until 1903, and leader of the Kneisel Quartet until its dissolution in 1917, Kneisel was present at several landmark musical events of the era in Boston. Though it’s hard to know whether Kneisel played this Stradivarius at any given performance, he owned the instrument until his death in 1926, and a 1945 book by violin dealer Ernest Doring, “How Many Strads? Our Legacy from the Master,” stated that Kneisel famously “constantly used” it.
Given that, it’s likely that Kneisel played the 1714 Stradivarius with the BSO during the orchestra’s first concerts at the newly constructed Symphony Hall in 1900. On this violin with the Kneisel Quartet, he likely gave American listeners their first hearings of Debussy’s String Quartet, Ravel’s String Quartet, and Schoenberg’s “Verklärte Nacht.” The first two had their American premieres in Boston.
“That all these core repertoire works were premiered in our country on that fiddle just blows my mind,” said Parker Quartet violinist Daniel Chong in an interview at the museum’s conservation center.
Chong, who performed a handful of concerts in Virginia on Kneisel’s violin with the Parker Quartet this past summer, said that the instrument “embodies many of the characteristics of an extraordinary fiddle.” Each string has its own character: “The G string is ready to growl when needed, while the E string possesses a gorgeous shimmer in its highest registers…I believe the Kneisel has the potential to sound even better. It simply needs to be played,” he said.
Though wear and tear on these one-of-a-kind instruments is to be avoided whenever possible, said Carriage House president Robert Mayes, keeping a stringed instrument constantly behind glass also doesn’t do it any favors. The buyer – who is currently studying violin at a major American conservatory – was aware of this, and requested Carriage House’s guidance on responsible custody of the instrument, Mayes said.
“If you’re not playing it, it’s not vibrating. It’s not resonating in a way it’s meant to be. A lot of people say that it falls asleep,” said Mayes, a cellist who studied at New England Conservatory. Putting it on display at the MFA in tandem with the concert series, he said, is “a way of making sure it can be played but also preserved.”
Stradivari is estimated to have made over 1,100 instruments during his career, mostly violins. Roughly 600 are estimated to have survived to the present day. Most Stradivarius instruments are considered masterpieces, but violins that date from the first 20 to 25 years of the 18th century, often called his “golden period,” are especially sought after. The “Joachim-Ma” Stradivarius, which also dates from 1714, sold earlier this year at auction for $11.25 million; Mayes declined to disclose the selling rate of the “Kneisel, Grün,” but indicated it was “definitely more” than that.
The materials of the “Golden Period” instruments are of exceptional quality, as is the craftsmanship, as Stradivari had decades of experience under his belt but was not yet nearing the end of his life. What’s more, the “Golden Period” violins have a distinctly flatter arch than Stradivari’s earlier instruments; this means sound easily projects outwards, ideal for soloists who need to be heard in a concert hall, Katz said.
At present, the “vast majority” of Stradivarius instruments are owned by private collectors or foundations, which frequently loan them out to professional musicians, said Mayes. This collector interest isn’t a new phenomenon. In the summer of 1894 – the same summer during which Kneisel acquired Grün’s violin – London’s W.E. Hill and Sons sold a 1710 Stradivarius to Bostonian socialite and art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner: a friend and supporter of many musicians, but not a musician herself. She often lent it to her close friend Charles Martin Loeffler, a composer and violinist, eventually giving it to him entirely, according to a post by Gardner Museum curator of beat George Steel.
“How Many Strads?” alleges that a wealthy collector and amateur violinist was also after Grün’s Stradivarius in 1894, and offered Grün around twice the rate that Kneisel did. However, Grün decided in favor of his former pupil, saying that he preferred the instrument “continue to be played upon by such a worthy creator.”
today, said Mayes, the new owner’s loan of the instrument to the MFA “allows us to connect world-class musicians with a world-class instrument at a world-class museum, which is truly priceless.”
A.Z. Madonna can be reached at az.madonna@globe.com. Follow her @knitandlisten.
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