In March 2025, an anonymous buyer purchased the 1715 “Baron Knoop” Stradivarius for $23 million (U.S.), making it the most expensive violin ever sold. (The seller, the American stringed-instrument collector David L. Fulton, had purchased it for a more modest $2.75 million in 1992.) Previous record setters have included the 1721 “Lady Blunt,” which fetched $15.9 million in 2011, and the “Joachim‑Ma,” which went for $11.25 million in February 2025.
All three of these models were made by Antonio Stradivari, a Cremonese luthier whose output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is said to epitomize perfection in violin manufacturing. Depending on your point of view, they may indeed be examples of flawless human handiwork. Or they might be, as the fiction writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce once put it, objects that “tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.” Either way, where do these exorbitant value judgments come from?
Tom Wilder looks for the answers through the wider cultural world that brought the violin to prominence after its development in the sixteenth century and laid the stage for it to become the most iconic instrument of Western music: a physical manifestation of “taste, refinement, and wealth.” The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. As two examples, an acoustic Gibson owned by John Lennon sold for $2.4 million in 2015, while the 1959 Martin D‑18E that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album went for just over $6 million in 2020 (he had picked it up for just $5,000). Pricey, but not near the numbers a Stradivarius commands.
Socrate Barozzi (right) bought his Stradivarius from Alfred Hill of W. E. Hill & Sons in 1923. Bain News Service; Library of Congress
As one of the world’s busiest ports, a centre of global finance, and the largest city in Europe, nineteenth-century London was the destination for musicians looking to join a growing orchestral landscape, teach affluent students, and make a name for themselves. Into this urban hullabaloo they brought their Continental instruments, including those crafted in Cremona, Italy.
Music had to that point been shaded with raucousness in so‑called free and easies: publike entertainment rooms with shows supplied by amateurs. Spurred by the influx of higher-calibre musicians, Wilder explains, “the civilizing of industrial society — meaning its lower classes — was to be achieved through the suppression of traditionally popular (though barbarous) pastimes, and their replacement by ‘endless sources of rational amusement.’ ” There emerged two conjoined ideas: that music was a “respectablizing activity” and that it ought, therefore, to be morally uplifting.
And so the lowly fiddle received a reputation overhaul, transmogrified through the wiles of teachers, dealers, and performers from a symbol of sin and avarice (the “devil’s own instrument”) to an emblem of skill and high culture, the model for civilized recreation. In the Royal Albert and other purpose-built concert halls, great symphonies by European composers such as Haydn and Mozart were performed. Across the upper social strata, salon concerts and music lessons became a decorous pastime, with well-to-dos (including Anne Blunt, Baroness Wentworth, who was not the original owner of the Stradivarius that bears her name, though she had it for three decades) relying upon the appraisals of luthiers, auctioneers, and firms like W. E. Hill & Sons to provide the best instruments they could afford.
Around the same time, arts and crafts, once considered interchangeable concepts, were diverging. Crafts — with which violin making had largely been allied — became “associated with the body and lowly physical labor, while the fine arts were linked with a higher, contemplative pleasure.” Societal opinion had shifted not just musical tastes but the creation of the instrument into the realm of art.
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As with all art, the public imagination is an important factor when ascribing quality. Beginning in the nineteenth century, Wilder argues, it was the “communal judgment of a largely middle-class public that now defined cultural borders and values that conformed to a new concept of the artistic masterwork — an absolute, sacrosanct, musical text that contained within itself the life force of its master creator.” Then followed the rise and rise of the indisputable master — in the high-concept compositions of Beethoven, the rediscovery of Bach, and the establishment of the “Old Master” in the sphere of painting.
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