The Least Valuable Violin in the Room

Three weeks ago we published a piece about a church in Saanen where ten violinists played instruments that were not theirs. We spent a lot of words on the wood. Guarneri del Gesù, Stradivari, Bergonzi — an evening in which the objects on stage were worth more than the building they stood in, and everybody in the room knew it.

Now here is the other kind of evening.

On Saturday 12 September, in the Großer Saal of the Stiftung Mozarteum in Salzburg, there is a benefit concert called KlangBlickMomente, in aid of the Österreichische Kinder-Krebs-Hilfe. David Garrett is the special guest. He will play Brahms’s Third Sonata with the pianist Vassilis Varvaresos on a Guarneri del Gesù — at the 2024 edition of this benefit it was the 1731 Baltic, which is lent to him, and which sold at auction in New York in March 2023 for $9.44 million, the highest price ever paid for a del Gesù at auction.

Then he will put it down and play Mozart on a violin from Treviso valued, at its last public estimate, at about a hundred thousand euros.

A hundred thousand euros is not nothing. It is also about one per cent of the violin he will have just set down.

So the instrument Garrett is being handed on 12 September is, in all likelihood, the least valuable one he will touch all year.

The object

It is a violin made by Pietro Antonio Dalla Costa in Treviso in 1764. The label inside is the original, and reads:

Pietro Antonio dalla Costa / fece in Trevisio Anno 1764

The body is 357 millimetres long, 204 at its widest and 112 at its narrowest. Spruce top. A two-piece maple back that the provenance file describes, in the flat language of those documents, as remarkably beautifully flamed. It is complete and original in all its essential parts, and it works.

That last thing matters more than it sounds. Most instruments of this age and this fame are behind glass. This one is behind glass most of the time — it lives at Mozart’s Birthplace in Salzburg — but it comes out.

The man who made it

Dalla Costa is not a name most listeners carry around, and the reason is partly that he was very good and partly that he was very forged.

He was born in Alba around 1720, worked in Treviso with possible spells in Mantua and Venice, and died around 1768. Venetian school. He built amatisé — in the manner of the Amati brothers: delicate outline, low arching, clean work. On the varnish the authorities simply disagree with each other, one calling it a thinly applied Venetian red, another a magnificent reddish-brown, a third a good yellow, which tells you something about how much of this trade is eyesight.

Here is the detail we like, and it is the reason this article is shaped the way it is.

In the eighteenth century a maker who worked after somebody else’s model routinely let his label imply he had been that somebody’s pupil. It was free credibility and nobody checked. Dalla Costa didn’t do it. On his labels he wrote that the instrument was made ad similitudinem illorum quod fecerunt: Antonius & Hieronymus Fratres Amati — after the likeness of what the Amati brothers made. A copy, declared as a copy, by a man who saw no reason to pretend otherwise. (The 1764 label above is his plain form, without the formula. He used both.)

Two and a half centuries later, his name is among the most frequently faked in the trade — so thoroughly that his working dates are still argued over, because the forgeries muddied them. The one honest labeller in the room, and the forgers took his name.

• • •

What we actually know about Mozart and this violin

Now the careful part, because this is where the story gets ahead of the evidence, and we would rather not.

You will read — in the concert announcement, and in The Strad, and on Classic FM, all of it flowing from the Mozarteum’s own 2013 press material — that Mozart acquired this violin in Vienna. It has been the standard sentence for thirteen years.

The Mozarteum’s own catalogue does not say that. It says the violin was probably acquired and played in Vienna — wahrscheinlich in Wien erworben und gespielt. The Strad’s headline, on the same day its article said “acquired”, called it a violin believed to have belonged to Mozart. There is no receipt. There is no letter in his hand saying I have bought a violin. Nobody has ever produced one.

What there is, is this.

Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781 and died there in December 1791. The Cozio provenance archive dates his ownership of this violin from 1782. In 1799 his widow Constanze sold a quantity of his musical estate to the publisher Johann Anton André of Offenbach — the same sale that saved most of the manuscripts. The violin went with it, described as part of that estate, and what Constanze told André was that her husband had played it frequently.

That is the whole documentary case, and it is thinner than the phrase Mozart’s violin suggests. It is also, for an eighteenth-century instrument, unusually strong: it comes from the widow, to a buyer with every professional reason to record accurately what he was buying, eight years after the death.

In those years he was writing sonatas for keyboard and violin for the two of them to play at home. He was a pianist in public by then and a string player in private. If Constanze is right, this is the object that was in his hands on those evenings — the sound in his ear when he wrote the violin part.

We will take that. It is more than most instruments can claim, and it does not need improving.

Six pairs of hands, and one gap

The chain from 1799 to now is unusually complete, and we are going to be honest about the place where it isn’t.

Johann Anton André buys it with the estate in 1799. Around 1840 it passes to Heinrich Henkel, and from him to his son Karl Henkel, a German violin virtuoso — so for most of the nineteenth century this is not a relic at all, it is a working violin in a working family of musicians. Somewhere in this stretch it gets the treatment nearly every surviving Italian violin got: the neck and fingerboard are lengthened so it can carry romantic repertoire. That is why a modern soloist can pick it up at all. In one physical respect the violin Garrett will play is not the violin Mozart played — it was rebuilt, in the nineteenth century, so that it could keep working.

In 1909 W. E. Hill & Sons of London buy it, and the Cozio file has them holding it until 1957.

Then thirty-one years of nothing. The archive picks the violin up again in 1988, in a private collection: a businessman and amateur player in southern Germany, where it sat, largely unplayed, for decades. When the donation was announced in 2013 the provenance from the Vienna period was described as gapless. On the public record it isn’t quite — there is a hole between 1957 and 1988 that we cannot fill and have not seen anybody else fill either. It is very probably dull. Somebody sold a violin to somebody. But an article that spends four paragraphs insisting on the difference between probably and certainly does not then get to smooth over its own soft patch.

On 14 November 2013, Nicola Leibinger-Kammüller — who runs the machine-tool and laser company Trumpf, at Ditzingen near Stuttgart — gave it to the Stiftung Mozarteum.

It joined a small and strange collection: Mozart’s childhood violin by the Salzburg maker Andreas Ferdinand Mayr, donated in 1896; the Klotz concert violin he left behind with his sister when he quit Salzburg, acquired in 1956; a north Italian viola listed in the estate inventory as 1 Pratschen in futeral and valued at four gulden, bought in 1966 out of the estate of the collector Edward Speyer in England; a Walter fortepiano; a clavichord carrying Constanze’s own written certificate.

Ulrich Leisinger, the foundation’s scientific director, put the arrival like this:

The practical version, reported at the time, is the one we like better: with the Costa in the collection, the foundation can now assemble a chamber ensemble playing almost entirely on instruments the composer himself played, and hear the string sound of his Vienna years the way he had it in his ear.

• • •

It is not a relic. It travels.

This is the part the announcement leaves out, and putting it back makes the story better rather than smaller.

The Costa is not a sleeping treasure being woken for one night. It is the Mozarteum’s travelling ambassador, and the foundation says so in those words. It has been to Japan, Italy, Lithuania, Ukraine, Switzerland, Germany, Greece. In New York, twenty students at the Manhattan School of Music got to play it — not a soloist: students, one after another. The Swiss violinist Esther Hoppe recorded on it, in a live concert given in the Großer Saal of the Mozarteum — which is to say, on the same stage, in the same room, where Garrett will play it on 12 September.

So what happens on the 12th is not a resurrection. It is something more ordinary and, we think, better: an instrument that gets used, being used again, by a violinist with a very large audience, in a room where people are trying to raise money for children with cancer.

The organisers say a private donor made the violin’s appearance possible. Read that precisely and it rhymes: the instrument itself was a gift, in 2013, from a private donor. Whatever the arrangement is for one evening in September — insurance, transport, a fee to the foundation — somebody has again paid for a violin to be in a room.

That is the pattern, actually. Constanze sold it so that the manuscripts would survive. André kept it as part of an estate rather than a trophy. A donor gave it away. The Mozarteum hands it to students in New York. In two hundred and twenty-seven years nobody has treated this violin primarily as an asset — which, given that it is worth a hundred thousand euros and sits next to instruments worth a hundred times that, may be exactly why it is still allowed out of the case.

What a hundred thousand euros buys

We keep coming back to the number, so let us finish with it honestly.

By the standards of the concert-instrument market a 1764 Dalla Costa is a fine violin and not a legendary one. The del Gesù Garrett brings is a different order of object — louder, more coveted, better suited to a hall of two thousand people, made by a man whose work he has spent his career following and buying. He fulfilled what he called a lifelong dream a few years ago by taking one of his own at auction in Paris.

On 12 September the great violin will play Brahms and the modest one will play Mozart, and everybody in the Großer Saal will be leaning forward for the modest one.

That tells you what we are all actually listening for, and it is not tone. Nobody is coming to hear a comparison of Venetian and Cremonese arching. They are coming because an object stood in a room in Vienna while the sonatas were being written, and because Constanze said he played it often, and because somebody is going to pick it up in front of them and make it sound.

We will be there. We will tell you how it sounded.

• • •

The evening

KlangBlickMomente — benefit concert for the Österreichische Kinder-Krebs-Hilfe.
Saturday 12 September 2026, 19:00 · Stiftung Mozarteum, Großer Saal, Schwarzstraße 28, Salzburg

Also on the programme: Verdi, Puccini, Chopin, Saint-Saëns, Elgar, Fauré, Prokofiev.

We announced this evening back in June, in If You Were There, You Already Know — where David gave the first hint of the programme himself.

Emanuel Graf had the artistic direction of the 2024 edition, in the parish church of St Andreas at Kitzbühel — a night for the regional children’s cancer charity of Tyrol and Vorarlberg, where 588 people raised €103,380.

Sources & notes: the Stiftung Mozarteum’s collection pages, press material and concert listings; the Tarisio Cozio provenance archive; The Strad; Classic FM; Salzburg24 and DrehpunktKultur on the 2013 donation; the Amati maker archive for Dalla Costa; klangblickmomente.at and Salzburg Tourism for the concert. Where the Mozarteum says “probably”, we say “probably”. The images of the violin are stills from KlangBlickMomente’s own footage of the instrument, and are credited to them.