Rudolf Ernst Pliverics (1878-1964) was a Berlin violin maker and the co-author, with Albert Fuchs, of Taxe Der Streichinstrumente (Musikverlag F. Hofmeister, 1978).
George Schlieps (1894-1977) was a Russian-born German violin maker (he was the nephew of Alexander Glazunov) who worked in Helsinki, Stockholm, Estonia, Berlin, and England before immigrating to New York City in 1950. He and his son Armin worked for Rembert Wurlitzer and then opened their own shop. Armin Schlieps (1931-2005) was a bow maker who subsequently moved to Seattle and ran his own shop there.
The 1703 Strad now held at the Berlin Music Instrument Museum (Catalogue Number 4467) came into George Schlieps’s hands during WW2 according to Pliverics. He noted also that it had undergone multiple repairs and that the top had been replaced.
Schlieps lived in Berlin from 1944 till 1947 repairing violins. Who gave him the Strad? Where did it come from?
Museum records show only that the violin entered its collection in Charlottenburg, a predecessor of the present building next to the Philharmonie, on October 9, 1956. By then Schlieps was settled in New York.
Between 1947 and 1956 the violin was supposedly played by members of the Berlin Philharmonie, but we don't know who.
It was lovingly restored by Olga Adelmann (1913-2000) and subjected to a number of authentication tests. Dr. Annette Otterstedt, the musicologist who worked closely with Adelmann, provided me with all the known documentation concerning the violin. An expert on the Alemannic School [Die Alemannische Schule] of violin making (as well as being a keen gamba player), Otterstedt contends that the Cremona School was an aberration, not the Ur-School, of violin making—and that German craftsmanship was in fact much more prevalent and influential than has ever been acknowledged before by violin historians.
Otterstedt, who trained with the late Carl Dahlhaus, embodies an enviable synthesis of musicology and organology that is inspiring to me personally. Her research into, and championing of, Alemannic instruments is valuable on its own merits but also for deemphasizing and defetishizing Cremona instruments.
A Berlin Geigenbauer told me recently that he gets at least a few calls every week from strangers who have supposedly found long-lost Strads in their attics. He is good-natured but gets annoyed by all this.
The genius mythology surrounding Stradivari is a Romantic invention—he wasn’t “Beethovenified” until Fétis’s hagiographical biography came out in 1856—and it’s important to recognize that this inflated view of the man originated in a later era.
Even as we strive to cultivate historiographical awareness, though, we are faced with this tangible object, an instrument from early in his “Golden Period,” which poses real questions for us.
Alex Ross has recently published a series of beautiful essays and blog posts demystifying Wagner the gargantuan cultural icon by focusing on a few bars from Die Walküre, Act III. By keeping it real, and focussed, he arrives at a new understanding of Wagner’s greatness, stripped of heavy baggage. Piecing together the story of this little violin might just do the same for Stradivari… if only there were more pieces to work with!
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