This article about parting with great instrumens appeared in The New York Times yesterday. Note especially the comments about playing instruments which may be "just as good."


Selling a 300-Year-Old Cello

Nigel Luckhurst/Lebrecht Music and Arts

Bernard Greenhouse with his Stradivarius cello in 1975

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

Published: January 13, 2012 (The New York Times)

On a cold day last winter, an ailing Bernard Greenhouse, wearing an elegant bathrobe and attached to oxygen, was wheeled into the living room of his Cape Cod home, which was festooned with paper cutouts of musical notes. Relatives and students, locals and caregivers had gathered to celebrate the 95th birthday of one of classical music's most respected cellists, a founding member of the famed Beaux Arts Trio and a beloved teacher. Young cellists performed for him, and then Greenhouse indulged in a martini and a plate of oysters. Thus fortified, he decided he wanted to play for the company. He picked up his cello and, though a bit wobbly, soulfully rendered "Song of the Birds," a Catalan folk melody transcribed by Pablo Casals, with whom he studied many years ago.

Abelardo Morell for The New York Times

The Countess of Stainlein cello, one of the few remaining Stradivariuses.

"And then he laid down the bow and praised the cello for its beauty," Nicholas Delbanco, Greenhouse's son-in-law, recounted. "He said it had been his lifelong companion and the darling of his heart." Indeed, the instrument, known as the Countess of Stainlein, ex-Paganini of 1707 — perhaps the greatest surviving Stradivarius cello — had been with Greenhouse for 54 years. It was his voice on numerous recordings and a presence at up to 200 concerts a year. Toward the end of his life, Greenhouse asked his nurses to lay the instrument next to him in bed.

But in a twist of exquisite poignancy, Greenhouse was not actually playing his precious cello that day on Cape Cod. It was an exact replica that was made especially for him, a beautiful instrument but not the Strad. As they listened to him talk of his love for the cello, his daughter Elena Delbanco and her husband grieved that he could not tell he was playing the substitute. "We knew that this was the beginning of the end," Nicholas Delbanco said. Five months later, Greenhouse died.

Despite saying that he wanted to sell his cello while he was still alive so that a worthy young musician might benefit from it, Greenhouse was unable to part with it. Now his family has entrusted the sale of the Countess of Stainlein to the Boston violin dealer Christopher Reuning, who this week will open sealed bids starting in the millions of dollars.

Much attention in the music world is given to the sale of Strads and other rare string instruments. The numbers are tallied up like baseball records: $15.9 million for the 1721 Lady Blunt Stradivarius violin this year; more than $10 million for the Kochanski Guarneri del Gesu in 2009. Reuning expects that the Greenhouse cello will match or exceed the previous record of $6 million for a cello. Behind the dollar figures, though, is a story of possession and loss, of performers giving up the instruments that have defined their artistic and emotional selves.

"It was the pride of his life," Elena Delbanco, a lecturer at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said of her father's Strad. "It was his soul mate. Until the day he died he could not bear to part with it.

"I would like him, were he around, to think that we did the right thing and be happy where the cello went," she continued. "I would like it to be loved as much by its next owner as it was by my father."

The master makers of bowed instruments flourished in northern Italy from about 1550 to 1750, when supreme craftsmanship, superior woods and varnish, enduring models and a highly developed apprentice system centered on a few families. The best-known were located in Cremona and included Amati, Guarneri and Bergonzi. But the greatest acclaim has belonged to Antonio Stradivari, or Stradivarius, as he was also known. Only about 600 instruments attributed to him are still in existence, including 20 of his prime cellos — made after 1707 in a slightly smaller size, called Forma B, and more adapted to solo playing. The Countess of Stainlein is the earliest known Forma B.

While researchers have suggested that it can be difficult to tell the difference in sound between old and new instruments, dealers certainly benefit from the mystique that keeps prices high. And musicians themselves talk of the old violins and cellos as repositories of secrets to be slowly discovered, sources of limitless color and nuance. Here is Greenhouse describing his instrument's sound, as recounted in "The Countess of Stanlein Restored: A History of the Countess of Stanlein ex-Paganini Stradivarius Cello of 1707," a book by Nicholas Delbanco that uses an alternate spelling of the cello's name: "The quality of sound is something that one wears, that adorns an individual as though it were a beautiful piece of apparel. The ear can be deceiving sometimes; sometimes I'll pick up one of the lovely modern celli in the morning and be very happy with it, but in the afternoon I'll ask what could possibly have pleased me." Sound is not fixed, Greenhouse said, "but with my Strad there was never a time when I've been disappointed." Greenhouse was a player of refinement and introspection. In a Beaux Arts recording of Schubert's Trio in E flat, the elegiac opening measures of the Andante con Moto movement convey everything beautiful about his playing. The vibrato is light and warm; the notes taper elegantly. The drop in the 15th measure to a low G sounds like a cat jumping onto a carpet.

Beyond their sound, though, the old instruments encapsulate history, passing through the hands of the world's great performers. The history of the Greenhouse cello has been traced to 1816 and Vincenzo Merighi, the son of a violin maker who played in La Scala's orchestra, becoming its principal cellist in 1823. Merighi later played quartets with Paganini, who bought the cello for his collection. The collection was consigned by his son, Achille Paganini, to a Paris luthier named Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in 1846.

Count Louis Charles Georges Corneille de Stainlein-Saalenstein, an amateur musician and a host of musicales, appears to have acquired the cello in 1854, and it then passed to the Countess of Stainlein. After her death in 1908, Paul Grummer, a future cellist in the famed Busch Quartet, took possession. A collector in Aachen, Dr. George Talbot, bought the violin from Grummer in 1938. Nineteen years later, Greenhouse heard about the instrument and tracked it down. "I opened the cello case and fell immediately in love," he says in Delbanco's book. "The color of the varnish, the shape of the instrument, it was so beautiful, so very beautiful, and it seemed to me a great jewel." He paid what his daughter Elena described as a fortune for the time, although a tiny fraction of what it's worth today.

Through the optic of history, those in possession of these instruments are caretakers, not owners. For their players, the transfer to the next caretaker symbolizes the end of performing, the termination of an artistic prime, the memories of which reside in long-used instruments. "The violin is not only a friend," said Aaron Rosand, 84, once a prominent soloist in the tradition of the great Romantics like Oistrakh, Milstein and Heifetz. "It's something that you live with. Every day it becomes more dear to you. It's almost like a living thing. You treat it carefully; you treat it gently. It talks to you," he said. "You're caressing your instrument all the time. Parting with an instrument that has become such a wonderful friend is just like losing a member of your family."

In 2007, Rosand announced that he planned to sell his Guarneri del Gesu, the Kochanski, and donate $1.5 million of the proceeds to the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied and continues to teach. He recently had back surgery and could no longer stand long enough to perform. "It didn't make any sense to tie it up," he said. Over the next couple of years, Rosand received offers, including some from noted players who came to try it out. "I could hardly bear to hear it played by someone else," he said. But their offers were not large enough. "I wasn't going to part with it just for admiration for someone's fiddle playing. Once I decided to sell it, I wanted to get the price for it."

Then he received a visit from a man he described as a Russian oligarch. Working through the dealer Peter Biddulph, Rosand flew to London with the Kochanski and checked into a suite at the Langham Hotel one day in October 2009. He resisted any urge to play it one last time. "I didn't have the heart to," he said. The next day, Biddulph and the Russian arrived at the suite. The mood was somber as the dealer examined the violin. They spent three or four hours in the suite, waiting for e-mail confirmation from Rosand's bank that the money had gone through. They ordered tea and filled the time with small talk about the violin's travels and Rosand's concert tour in the old Soviet Union. When the e-mail arrived, the Russians left, and Biddulph took the instrument to his vault. The price, according to Rosand, was $10.1 million.

"It's hard to completely express what it meant to me," Rosand told me last month when I spoke with him about letting his instrument go. "The agony, the tears I shed on just thinking about the parting." He made good on his pledge to Curtis, paid $2 million in taxes and is using some of the rest to help with his grandchildren's educations and to give to charity. He said he talked to the buyer about having other violinists use the instrument, but he received no assurances and does not know if it remains in a vault or under a violinist's chin.

Some musicians have taken other routes. Several years before his death, Isaac Stern sold his famed Ysäye Guarneri del Gesu to the Nippon Music Foundation, which allowed him to use it until the end of his life. The foundation buys valuable instruments and lends them out to top players. "It gave him some security at the end of his life, and it got him to continue to play on the violin," said his son, the conductor Michael Stern.

The conductor Lorin Maazel, who was also a violin virtuoso in his younger days, auctioned off his 1783 Guadagnini to an anonymous bidder for $1.08 million and poured the money into his Castleton Festival for young musicians. "It made my life complete as a musician," he said of his fiddle. "But a magnificent violin needs to be played and kept alive. I always knew I would have to part from it." The family of Gregor Piatigorsky lent his 1714 Strad cello, the Batta-Piatigorsky, to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is on display in the musical-instruments collection. The loan agreement allows for it to be played on approval by the family. Museum officials said there had been only one request, and it was turned down.

Raphael Hillyer, the founding violist of the Juilliard String Quartet, was in his 90s and repeatedly spoke of his plans to sell his viola, a late-16th-century Gasparo da Salò. Twice, Hillyer summoned Christopher Reuning to his home in order to hand over the instrument. The last time was in November 2010. Reuning went to Hillyer's apartment in downtown Boston. The violist was seated at the dining-room table. He held his instrument up and offered it to the dealer to hold. Documents were spread out on the dining table. Hillyer asked Reuning a series of questions: What would it sell for? What is the commission? How long would it take? They talked for more than an hour, with Hillyer returning again and again to the same questions.

"He sat there clutching it in his hands," Reuning recalled. "I realized he was not ready to give it up. I told him, Why don't you keep your viola and we'll talk again sometime?" They made another appointment for just after Christmas, but Hillyer died on Dec. 27, at age 96.

"It's inconceivable that my father ever would have let it go," Jonathan Hillyer told me. "I think his life would have ended immediately if he did such a thing. It's part of what kept him alive. He played it every day, even when it got to be so painful to pick it up. It was his life force. If he had sold it, it would have been like he was giving up."

One day last month I met with the cellist Laurence Lesser in a barren practice room at the offices of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. Lesser, 73, is a prominent teacher, performer and former president of the New England Conservatory of Music, and owns a 1622 Amati cello.

We talked at length about Greenhouse, whom Lesser described as a friend, and about the nature of musician-instrument relationships. I asked him to describe the sound of his Amati, and Lesser looked at me and said, correctly, "You want to hear it, right?"

He carefully removed the 400-year-old instrument from its case and pulled off a burgundy silk bag. Then he began to play, producing the extraordinarily mellow sound, singing but complicated, that musicians say is typical of the great instruments.

"I don't know how long I'm going to be playing," he said after he was done. "I may have huge medical expenses, I may need the money it will bring. How can I predict that? I don't know how I'm going to die or when, or what's going to happen in the family."
He had no intention of selling, he said, but if he did, it would be like selling his old house. Once out, you move on. "I'm not sentimental about these things," he said. "It's almost a person, but I still value people more than things." But as Lesser talked more about his Amati, the complicated nature of his attachment to it became more apparent.

"We respond to these old instruments because they feed us, they inspire us," he said. "Life has so many possibilities and such endless richness that unless you just shut down, you're always going to learn from the environment. For us string players, our instruments are our environment. It keeps stretching us, it keeps demanding of us, it keeps us aspiring to grow. And it's the same old wooden box. I know I love playing on this cello, and I love it now more than I ever did."

In early December, I visited Reuning's shop on the fourth floor of a generic office building in Boston's Back Bay. Inside, though, is the re-creation of an Old World luthier's shop. Violins and violas hang like bats in a glass-and-dark-wood cabinet. Stringed instruments in various stages of undress lie on work tables in the restoration room. The Paganini, Countess of Stainlein cello didn't fit in the shop's safe, so it sat in a corner in its scuffed black case. Reuning took it out of its case and brushed his fingers over its glowing, almost iridescent back. "This varnish is absolutely glorious," he said. He pointed out the Forma B's extra-high ribs, which make the cello thicker and create greater volume and resonance. The back is made of an expanse of maple, with its "flames," or rows of tiger stripes, so beautiful that other violin makers would recreate them with varnish on cheaper models made with poplar or willow.

Heirs entrusted with the sale of such instruments stand to make a significant amount of money, but they're also left with an enormous responsibility. "I began to worry about what was going to happen to it," Elena Delbanco told me. "Really worry, that somehow it would come to harm or I would make bad decisions about how to sell it, or it would end up somewhere where it wouldn't be played again."

So Reuning — who will receive a commission — devised an unusual sale in which the Delbancos would have an opportunity to review the sealed bids, giving them a chance to accept a lower offer if they felt it better honored the cello. That is, if they believed a lower bidder, like an investing consortium that lends out instruments, might mean it was more likely to be played.

"What we're hoping for is a bid that also makes emotional sense," Elena Delbanco said, "so that we feel really happy that some wonderful young talent is going to play it."

I asked her what she would do if confronted with a $7 million bid that meant the Strad would stay in the case and a $5 million bid that ensured it would be played. The extra money, she acknowledged, could be put to philanthropic uses — buying instruments for needy children, for example. "It would be amazing to do good," she said. "But you can't do good at the expense of the cello's future." At the same time, they don't want the Strad buried in a museum or in an oligarch's vault. "That would make us sad," she said, "but we understand we may not have control over that." Ultimately, she acknowledged, they would have to accept that the cello now had a caretaker other than her father or his family. "Once it's out of our hands," she said, "what can we do?"

Daniel J. Wakin writes about classical music and dance for The Times.

Editor: Joel Lovell