Evening star., 1899-02-04
| T WAS NOT GENUINE

| Among the fallacies tenaciously clung
| to by persons who fancy themselves to be
! possessed of what is called the artistic
| temperament is that one which portrays
! the soulful man invariable scrub
| when it comes to business propositions
| said a well-known Washington violinist.
| This is an amiable delusion which 1 am
| about to puncture to some small extent by
| relating a story of very recent occurrence
as to its finale, with the details of which
l am perfectly familiar. It's a story of a
violin and of the genuinely gifted owner
thereof.
This man is, and has been for the past
twenty years SO, of the finest of
American violinists. He is a Bostonian,
and has lived in Boston all of his life, ex-
cept when he has been concert touring the
country, and he gave that up some years
ago. He is a man of fine family, and he
traces his ancestry very directly indeed
back to the Mayflower and beyond. There
has been a violinist in his family ever since
the Mayf1ower got over to this side, and
also a violin. The violin brought over by
the Mayiower progenitor of the Massachu-
setts family was a genuine and very valu-
able Stradivarius. In fact, it is one of the
great violins of the world today. was
handed down by him to his eldest son,
whom he made into a violinist, and thus
transmitted from sire to son, going always
to the son who exhibited the greatest apti-
tude for the violin. 1t fell into the hands
of this Boston violinist of whom l am
speaking more than thirty years ago, when
he was young lad. II was a beautiful in
strument in finish, and its tone was mag
nificent 1t was the one heirloom of the
family regarding which the greatest
amount of space was consumed in the many
NNi11C hIyi itS
days of Massachusetts, and it has been
cared for throughout its long life-well, as
orchid is cared for duri - its short life.
Fabulous sums were offered for it by great
European violiniStS VINO came to the United
States early in this century. Ole Bull made
an enormous offer for it upon his first visit
to the United States, and he wrote to the
father of the Boston viOlinist increasingly
with regard to it from Europe, renewing
and amplifying his offers. A deaf ear was
turned to all of these offers. 1t was in
tended that the violin should always
main with the descendants of the man who
brought it over in the Mayiower. Many
other offers have since been made, but all
have been declined.
We'll. about a year ago this Boston vio-
linist, while travelling from Boston to New
York to take part in concert, got into a
railroad smash-up. He was in the sleeper
the time of the collision, with his violin
alongside of him. He was pretty badly
hurt before he got out of the mass of
wreckage, but not completely disabled.
When he found himself eXtricated and an
onlooker at the wrecking proceedings, he
suddenly bethought him of his precious
Strad. He had to be held to prevent him
from climbing back on top of the wreck
to get at his instrument. After seven or
eight hours. during which he hung about
the wreck like a crazy man, his violin was
handed to him in its leather case. The
case was crushed in. The Boston violnist
had the heartbreak of opening the case
and of seeing his glorious instrument
crushed in. He took il back to Boston
with him and carefully picked out the
pieces of the wrecked violin. Inside of It,
up near the neck, he found pasted some
writing, done very small and fine, in the
penmanShip of the last century, and dated
11J9. This bit of writing was a confession.
1t stated that this not the great Strai
that had been brought over in the May
flower. The writer, who had inherited the
violin before the middle of the last century,
had been hard up for money-the pasted
note went on to say So, on one of his Eu-
ropean trips. he had a precise duplicate of
his glorious Strad made in Italy by an ac
complished violin counterfeiter. The gen
uine Strad he had sold to a great French
violinist, and this instrument was but a
perfect duplicate-a replica. With the
statement that he could not die and hand
down to posterity a perpetual fraud, the
writer of the pasted note went on to say
that he had had the top of the counterfeit
Strad removed and had pasted the coDfes-
sion within, thus to in some measure salve
his guilty conscience.
This was a hard blow to the Boston vio-
linist you may well believe. He went
secretly to work to trace the original Strad
that had been brought over by his ances-
tor in the Mayfiower, and it did not take
him long to ascertain that the Strad is now
the cherished and priceless possession of an
aged German violinist. Then the Boston
violinist had his broken counterfeit Strad
patched up by an expert, and when it was
put together again it was found not to
have lost a particle of its former glorious
tone. The Boston violinist put himself in
correspondence with one of the violin col
lectors who had yearned for his instru-
ment, stating frankly that the violins out
er appearance had been damaged in the
railroad accident, but that its tone was un-
injured, and offering it for sale at a slightly
reduced fgure-a matter, STILL of several
thousands of dollars. of course. the Bos-
ton vioinist had carefully removed the
pasted confession from the inside of the
counterfeit Strad before having it patched
up.
THE collector came to Boston and
took the instrument at the Boston violin
lists figure, and it is the collectors
most highly-priZed instrument. The beau
ty of the story is that it's true down to
the very last detail, just as | have told it.
Wherefore, I guess the artistic tempera-
ment is able to take care of itself. even
when it gets mixed up in matters of busi-
ness