Bériot’s Concerto, Bériot’s Violin

The Kirche Saanen, 26 July 2026. A full church, sunflowers on the platform, and along the left-hand wall a white cloth with the instruments waiting their turn: twenty-two Guarneri del Gesù, four Stradivari and a Bergonzi were in this room. Still from video by Daniel Waldhecker, used by permission.

The year he didn’t go

Cristian Fatu was ten years old, and had never left Romania, and was on his way to Italy with his violin teacher and a few other students to play in a competition. Thirty minutes into the flight, the captain came on and said there was a technical problem and the aircraft was returning to Bucharest.

His mother was travelling with him. She was taken ill in the air, badly, in the minutes after the announcement, and an ambulance was waiting when the aircraft landed. He spent that day in a hospital emergency room with her.

And so, in his words:

A whole year, lost to an engine.

And then the part that is not about fear at all.

He went back. Eleven years old, same competition — the Concorso Internazionale di Musica “Città di Stresa”, on Lake Maggiore — and this time the plane landed. He won first prize with the Bériot Concerto No. 9.

What he remembers of the greatest morning of his childhood is the breakfast. He remembers the money too — “the Italian Lira with those cool drawings and really big numbers…. 10.000, 50.000 and so on” — and there is an old VHS cassette of that performance, somewhere in his mother’s apartment in Bucharest.

Hold on to the tape. Everything else in this article is about what happened thirty-two years later.

Saanen

Now move forward thirty-two years, to the evening of 26 July 2026, in the church at Saanen, where David Garrett had brought the Guarneri del Gesù Club out of private living rooms and into public for the first time, assigned each violinist an instrument himself, and given his fee to the Menuhin Festival’s String Academy. We wrote about that night at length: ten violinists, a quarter of a billion dollars of wood, and a frescoed church.

Fatu came forward with his second violin of the night and explained it before playing a note.

Then he played the love theme from Cinema Paradiso and dedicated it to his girlfriend.

Cristian Fatu playing Morricone’s Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso on the violin this article is about — the one the programme gives as the “Beriot” del Gesù of 1729. Julia Okruashvili, piano. Kirche Saanen, 26 July 2026. Video by Daniel Waldhecker, used by permission.

We all used to play. He found the hook himself, standing up, in his second language, and he was underselling it — because he had not just played the thing. He had lost a year to it, gone back, won with it at eleven, and there is a tape.

The concerto

It is the Ninth, in A minor, opus 104. There are ten of them and almost nobody plays the other nine.

What No. 9 is for is not the concert hall. It is the first piece that lets a child feel like a soloist — an orchestra behind you, an A minor entrance with some swagger in it, a slow movement short enough to survive, a finale you can be fast in. Every pedagogical tradition that runs on graded repertoire uses it: Romania, Russia, Japan, the American suburbs. It has probably been played by more ten-year-olds than any other concerto ever written, and it is very good at the one job it has, which is winning children their first competition.

It was first published in Mainz, by Schott, in 1859.

The man

Charles-Auguste de Bériot was born in Leuven on 20 February 1802 and died in Brussels on 8 April 1870.

He was orphaned young — around nine, by most accounts — and taken in by his father’s friend Jean-François Tiby, who was also his violin teacher. At about the same age, he played a Viotti concerto in public.

So the composer of the concerto children win with was himself a child winning with somebody else’s concerto. That is either a nice symmetry or the entire history of the instrument in one sentence.

He went to the Paris Conservatoire at nineteen to study with Baillot, who disliked his technique. Viotti heard him and told him to listen a lot and take what seemed good to him, which is roughly what he did. Court violinist to Charles X, chamber virtuoso to William I of the Netherlands. Then Maria Malibran — the most famous singer in Europe, married to somebody else. They lived together, had a son in 1833, married in 1836 when her marriage was finally annulled, and she was dead within the year, at twenty-eight, of injuries from a riding accident.

He turned down the Paris Conservatoire in 1842 and took Brussels instead, and there he built the Franco-Belgian school — Paganini’s fireworks bolted onto French discipline — and taught Vieuxtemps, whom he had found at eight years old and taught for nothing.

Now the part that changes the article.

He resigned his post in 1852 because his eyes were failing. By 1858 he was completely blind.

Opus 104 was published in 1859.

We are being careful here: a publication date is not a composition date, and we have not found one for the Ninth. But the piece that teaches children what a concerto feels like reached the printers from a man who could no longer see the page.

It gets worse and then, in a way, better. In 1866 his left arm was paralysed — the fingering arm, the one his whole method was built to train — and that ended his playing for good. (One account says surgeons then amputated it to stop the pain; the Flemish music archive records only the paralysis. We would rather tell you the sources disagree than pick the more dramatic one.) In 1867, blind and unable to play, he published the École transcendante du violon.

The violin

And now we have to be honest, because this is where the story we were handed comes apart in our hands.

The printed programme at Saanen says: del Gesù “Beriot” 1729. Fatu said 1729 from the stage — it is what he was told when the instrument was put in his hands. Our own hub page for him said 1729. We wrote that.

The public record does not contain a 1729 del Gesù that belonged to Bériot.

What the Tarisio Cozio archive lists under his name is three instruments. A Gasparo da Salò, nicknamed “de Beriot”. The 1744 “de Bériot” del Gesù — the famous one: it passed through the hands of Luigi Tarisio, the pedlar who spent his life walking Italian villages buying forgotten violins, was sold on around 1840, and Bériot kept it until his death, when it went to his pupil Willem Ten Have. It is dated c. 1744 — del Gesù’s last year. And a violin catalogued as the “de Beriot, Lysy” — by Giuseppe Guarneri filius Andreae, del Gesù’s father, with a note that it is “a collaboration with Guarneri ‘del Gesù’.” Its label reads 1706. Cozio dates it c. 1715–22. The del Gesù reference site files it under 1726. Nobody says 1729.

There were three ways to read that, and the man who was holding the violin has closed one of them. We put the question to Fatu, and his answer was short: it is not the 1744. He pointed us instead at the expert who knows the instrument’s history, and offered to make the introduction.

So two readings are left.

Either there is a genuine early del Gesù with a Bériot provenance that has never entered the public archives — perfectly possible; these instruments spend generations in private hands, and the people who own them hold papers the archives never see. Or — and this is the one we would like to be true — the violin in Fatu’s hands was the “de Beriot, Lysy”, whose date is disputed by every source that has ever looked at it, and whose father-and-son authorship makes “an early del Gesù” a fair description even though the archive files it under the father’s name.

If it is that one, then look what was standing in the church.

Because after Bériot, the “de Beriot, Lysy” belonged to Yehudi Menuhin, from 1939 — and after Menuhin it belonged to Alberto Lysy, his first and only private pupil, who in 1977 founded his academy in Gstaad, in Menuhin’s honour, ten minutes down the valley from the church at Saanen.

That is what the archive says. Here is what Menuhin says, which we found separately and which nobody appears to have set beside it.

In September 1939, to mark the birth of his daughter Zamira, Menuhin’s first wife Nola gave him a Guarneri violin. It was the month the war started. And of that violin Menuhin wrote that he

September 1939 at one end. The archive’s Menuhin-from-1939, Lysy-from-1980 at the other. Two sources that do not cite each other, agreeing on both dates and on the name of the boy.

So we are no longer looking at a rumour. We are looking at a violin that was a present for a newborn in the first month of the Second World War, handed on to the pupil who would spend his life building a school in a Swiss valley — and, if the instrument in Fatu’s hands on 26 July was that violin, brought back into that valley for one evening, in the seventieth-anniversary season of Menuhin’s own festival, without a word said, because nobody in the room knew.

One thing still does not line up, and we are not going to bury it: Menuhin calls his wife’s gift a Guarneri, and the archive catalogues the “de Beriot, Lysy” as the work of Giuseppe Guarneri filius Andreae, the father, not the son. The dates agree. The maker does not. (Lysy’s own biography, for its part, calls the gift a 1742 Guarneri — a third instrument, and the only claim of the three that nothing else supports.)

We have gone to the people who would know — the owner, and the expert whose certificates are what an instrument’s identity finally rests on. If the paper settles it, we will tell you, here, in this paragraph.

One footnote, because it happened in the same room. Menuhin did once own an “Ebersolt” del Gesù — the archive dates it 1739, the Saanen programme 1741 — but only from 1972 to 1978, and Lysy is nowhere in its history. That is the violin David Garrett lifted to close the concert, and played Träumerei on. In 1978 it passed briefly to a London dealer named Peter Biddulph, who was sitting in the church that night, turning eighty, while every violinist on the stage played him Happy Birthday.

What the hook actually holds

Strip out everything we can’t prove and the thing the concert accidentally demonstrated is still standing.

The table, before the hands: instruments laid out on a white cloth while one of them is being played. Still from video by Daniel Waldhecker, used by permission.

Not by “classical composers” in the abstract — by working violinists who bought and sold and quarrelled over wood, whose fiddles are now in vaults and on stages and in the hands of strangers, still making noise.

It is not only Bériot. The other thing every student grinds through is Kreutzer’s 42 Studies, and there is a Stradivari of 1727 that carries Kreutzer’s name — except that when you open its file, the label says choisi par Kreutzer. Chosen by. Not owned by. Even the parallel dissolves when you check it, which tells you how much of this trade runs on a name attached to an object by somebody who wanted the object to sound more expensive.

Which brings us back to the man who was holding the violin.

Cristian Fatu’s own position, argued in our interview in June, is that a great violin is a Formula 1 car — a tool, not a relic — and the sound is the player’s. His own two violins were made in 2018 and 2019.

So the least sentimental violinist in the room got handed the most sentimental object of the night, and what he did with it was play a film theme from 1988 and dedicate it to somebody he loves.

That is probably the correct use of a dead man’s violin. It is certainly better than a display case.

Coda: the tape

There is one more object in this story, and it is worth about nine euros.

Somewhere in an apartment in Bucharest, in a drawer, there is a VHS cassette with an eleven-year-old on it, playing the Ninth Concerto of Charles-Auguste de Bériot and winning a competition in a town on Lake Maggiore, in a country whose money no longer exists — a year later than he was supposed to, because of an engine and a mother’s imagination.

Bériot’s violin — whichever one it is — survived a hundred and fifty-six years and came to a church in the Alps. The tape has to survive one flat, one drawer, and a format nobody can play any more.

We would like to see it. We would like it, if we are honest, more than the certificate.

Sources: Cristian Fatu, in correspondence with The Strings Society, August and September 2026, and from the stage at “Masters of Sound”, Kirche Saanen, 26 July 2026, with the printed programme of that evening; his interview with us, 16 June 2026; the Concorso Internazionale di Musica “Città di Stresa”; the Tarisio Cozio archive and its Carteggio essay on Menuhin’s violins; The Strad; the Studiecentrum voor Vlaamse Muziek biography of Bériot; IMSLP for the first publication of op. 104. Where the sources disagree, we have said so rather than choosing. No photograph of the violin appears here: the images in circulation are not ours to republish.