Stolen Strad recovered and lent to student

The last time an aspiring young violinist took a shine to this 1734 Stradivari violin, he simply stole it — snatching it in 1980 from the office of its owner, the violin virtuoso and teacher Roman Totenberg, at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, Mass. It remained lost for 35 years.

Now the violin, which is worth millions, has been passed on to another aspiring violinist to play — legally, this time.

The stolen Strad resurfaced in 2015, several years after the death of the apparent thief, a violinist with a checkered career, when his ex-wife turned it over to the FBI. The bureau returned it to Totenberg’s three daughters, Amy, Jill and Nina Totenberg, who decided to have it restored and sold — but who wanted to make sure it wound up with a musician, not locked away in a collection.

“He was such a wonderful teacher,” Nina Totenberg, NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, recalled of her father, as she took a break after covering Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court. “He loved, loved, loved, loved teaching young people so much.”

But getting it into the hands of a young player was easier said than done. The finest Stradivari violins sell for millions of dollars, putting them far out of the reach of most artists, let alone students.

The Totenbergs turned to Rare Violins of New York, which restores and sells the instruments. After at least one false start, it sold the violin to an anonymous buyer who agreed to lend it to a promising young violinist. The company said that the violin was sold for between $5 million and $10 million. It was not clear how long it would remain on loan.

But it was formally presented to its first recipient, Nathan Meltzer, an 18-yearold who studies with Itzhak Perlman and Li Lin at the Juilliard School, in a ceremony Tuesday at the Rare Violins offices on West 57 th Street, near Carnegie Hall.

As the Totenberg sisters looked on, Meltzer picked up their father’s old violin and played the Recitativo and Scherzo by Fritz Kreisler.

“It has a beautiful, warm tone in every register — every string, every register — and a very quick response time,” Meltzer said. “Right now I’m still in the honeymoon stage.”

Great violins must be played to fulfil their potential, so lending them to musicians can enhance their value. The recipient of the violin bears the cost of insuring the instrument.

Ziv Arazi, the chief executive of Rare Violins, said that he hoped the arrangement — part of a new project called In Consortium — would inspire other “dedicated investors to further the aspirations of promising young musicians.”

The violin used to be known as the “Ames” Stradivari, for George Ames, the English banker and violinist who owned it briefly in the 19th century. Now it is being called the “Ames, Totenberg” Stradivari for Roman Totenberg, who died in 2012 at the age of 101.