Joys were all relative for Einstein

A VIOLIN made for Albert Einstein drew $516 500 (about R4.36 million) at the Extraordinary Books and Manuscripts auction at Bonhams in New York.

After a bidding battle that chased the price to five times its low estimate, the violin went to an anonymous phone bidder.

Einstein began playing the violin at six, but it wasn’t until the age of 13, when he discovered the Mozart violin sonatas, that music became a passion.

His second wife, Elsa, said: “Music helps him when he is thinking about his theories.”

He would arrange his schedule so he could host a weekly chamber music evening at his home.

In October 1933, Einstein arrived in the US as a resident scholar at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, escaping the worsening situation in Nazi Germany. His arrival was a cause for celebration, and cabinet maker and member of the Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, Oscar H Steger, made him a violin which he presented to Einstein.

The violin has an inscription inside its body: “Made for the Worlds (sic) Greatest Scientist Profesior(sic) Albert Einstein By Oscar H Steger, Feb 1933/Harrisburg, PA.”

Einstein later gave the instrument to Lawrence Hibbs, the son of a Princeton University handyman and a budding violinist, and it has been kept in the Hibbs family ever since. – Auctions Writer