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.
◆
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.
Concurrently with these ideas came various forms of institutional gatekeeping. In classrooms, general repertoire moved away from contemporary works and took on a historical dimension. Already by 1870, concert halls had become museums of sound, with most performed repertoire written by dead composers. “Contemporary composers, like contemporary violin makers,” Wilder writes, “were expected to bow down before their more distinguished predecessors.”
Those antecedents had been cemented by W. E. Hill & Sons as much as by the Cremonese families, notably the Amati, Guarneri, and Stradivari households. Profiting from the great man theory of history, these luthiers were perceived to have natural abilities and characteristics that led their creations to become definitive in their field. Indeed, modern violins are largely “artistically derivative” copies of those predecessors: “the product of a protoindustrial process based on an internal mold conceived to ensure consistency.” As Wilder notes, a violin’s worth became less associated with its physical or tonal qualities than with the abstract notions of creativity, genius, and authenticity. Any with a Cremonese pedigree became what the art critic John Berger called a “spiritualized possession.” This is not solely because the public is gullible, or the art world crazy; the urge to own possessions and exhibit ourselves through them is deep-seated in all of us.
To have or play a violin created by a recognized master confirmed one’s reputation and gilded the music brought forth from horsehair and catgut. As the Canadian violinist James Ehnes writes in the foreword to A Cultural History of the Violin in Nineteenth-Century London, “The objective beauty of a finely crafted and useful tool becomes enhanced by qualities that are not inherent to the object, but rather to the art that it is capable of producing. Violins become ‘bold,’ ‘colorful,’ or ‘sweet.’ ”
Ehnes plays a Stradivarius, the 1715 “Marsick.” While speaking with me recently, ahead of a recital in Birmingham, England, he said that his violin is never out of his sight, nor is it ever played by anyone else. The paradox of the instruments’ overvaluation is not lost on him: “How did we get to this point, where a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century violin, manufactured to be a simple musician’s tool, can now sometimes sell for millions of dollars, often to be locked away in a safe or bank vault, its voice — the reason for its existence — silenced?”
Wilder, a seasoned luthier with Wilder & Davis Luthiers Inc., which has workshops in Montreal, Toronto, Banff, and Vancouver, writes with refreshing cynicism about the current scene, not sparing his colleagues and clients: “When today’s musicians demonstrate a continuing partiality for Cremonese masterworks, they are validating the verdicts of their mentors.” He notes that the Western canon “provided the bourgeoisie with the opportunity to wrap itself in history while simultaneously laying claim to artistic authority.” And he smacks down the artistic profession as being “largely about transmuting transcendence into pounds and pence.”
Although Wilder rightly rebukes the bloated language of modern auction houses as “clotted twaddle,” his own prose is something of an academic gravy, thickened with sentences like “The alleged autonomous ‘thingness’ of works of canonical music assumes that true value is a function of the created thing itself.” Elsewhere he writes, “Consecration is about the power to impose legitimizing categories of perception and appreciation and to determine what has meaning and what has value — the very core of the production of culture.”
The name Stradivarius remains a part of the common lexicon, associated with concepts of excellence, craftsmanship, and wealth. The violins may be rare, excellently made, and, to some, worth the money. But none of that is actually worth a fig if their price outshines their purpose: to provide a little ear tickling and make it pleasurable to be inside your own head.