Stolen 1734 Stradivarius to sing again at private concert
Instrument went missing in 1980
WASHINGTON — After a meticulous restoration that took more than a year, a Stradivarius violin that was stolen from violinist Roman Totenberg and missing for decades is about to return to the stage.
Mira Wang, a violinist who immigrated to the United States from China 30 years ago to study under Totenberg, will play the instrument at a private concert in New York on March 13, and more performances after that are possible.
The violin, known as the Ames Stradivarius, is one of roughly 550 surviving instruments made by Antonio Stradivari, history’s most renowned violin maker. Built in 1734, it’s likely worth millions of dollars, although it hasn’t been appraised since it was recovered.
It was stolen in 1980 while Totenberg was greeting well-wishers after a performance in Boston and wasn’t recovered until 2015, three years after Totenberg died at age 102.
The presumed thief, journeyman violinist Philip Johnson, was himself dying of pancreatic cancer when he showed his exwife a locked violin case in his basement. Nearly four years after his death, she took the violin inside the case for an appraisal and learned it was the stolen Stradivarius. It was soon returned to Totenberg’s family.
It’s not clear how often Johnson played the instrument, but The Washington Post reported that he played it in public as recently as 2011, the year he died.
For Totenberg’s three daughters, who, like their father, had given up hope that they’d ever see the violin again, its recovery has been a series of joys. Jill Totenberg compared it to “Christmas, even though we’re Jewish.”
They’ll hear it again at Wang’s performance for the first time since it disappeared.
“I’m sure we’ll all cry. I’m absolutely sure of it. Whether we cry at the same time is something else, but we definitely will cry,” she said. “When that violin was returned to us, we really felt like our father was back in the room with us that day.”
Another happy surprise: 35 years after it disappeared, the violin wasn’t in bad shape.