Curtis Institute president plays a viola valued at $30m, likely the most expensive musical instrument in the world

At the Library of Congress earlier this month, Roberto Díaz was playing on an exceedingly rare viola. What didn’t cross his mind, he says, is just how much the hunk of maple and spruce clutched beneath his chin was worth.

Which is perhaps a good thing.

The Tuscan-Medici viola from the workshop of Antonio Stradivari was recently valued at $30 million, likely making it the most expensive musical instrument in the world.

“You know, it’s funny, I never really thought about it that way,” Díaz said a couple of days after the concert. “The price tag is so surreal in the sense that it almost doesn’t really register.”

Díaz is president and CEO of Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music, and through Curtis he has developed a relationship with the viola, performing on it from time to time beginning nearly 15 years ago. It was on this instrument, made in 1690, that Díaz recorded Jennifer Higdon’s Viola Concerto, an album that won two 2018 Grammy Awards.

So it was natural that Díaz, along with a handful of Curtis students, was onstage for the Library of Congress concert, organized to celebrate a new milestone in the instrument’s 335-year journey: its donation to the Library of Congress as a gift to the nation.

The viola has been on loan to the library for decades, but two recent gifts made its residency permanent. Rare instrument collector David Fulton and his wife, Amy, made a $20 million cash donation, which allowed the Library of Congress to buy the instrument from its owner, the Tuscan Corp., controlled by the family of Cameron Baird, who had purchased the viola in 1957.

The Baird family, by selling the viola at less than its assessed value, was giving up a potential $10 million, making it an in-kind donation.

The gifts from the Fultons and Bairds mean the instrument will be preserved and publicly available to play in perpetuity, says Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, music specialist and curator in charge of musical instruments at the Library of Congress.

“This is a piece of cultural heritage and a record of the history of civilization that they have brought together to make available for not just the library and the United States, but the world,” she said.

The viola will continue to be based at the library, and Díaz and any number of other lucky violists will have a chance to play it, and even take it on the road.

Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) made an estimated 1,100 or so string instruments. Surviving are 450 to 500 violins. But the famed luthier made far fewer violas, and of those perhaps only 10 are extant, which is why they tend to fetch higher prices than the violins.

The Tuscan-Medici is “one of the better Strad violas in particular because it has been in somewhat regular use for some time,” said Philip J. Kass, the string instrument expert and appraiser based in Havertown who arrived at the instrument’s $30 million valuation.

“It’s really hard to establish relative pricing on these things,” said Kass, who reviewed a century’s worth of violin and viola sales records to establish a price.

Kass says he knows of no musical instrument that has sold for as much as $30 million. The highest price paid for a violin at auction was $15.9 million for the “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius, in 2011. The “Macdonald” Strad viola was offered for $45 million by Sotheby’s and Ingles & Hayday in 2014, but did not attract a buyer.

It’s ironic that Strad violas tend to have a higher valuation than Strad violins. The viola has a lower public profile than the violin — cast less often as the protagonist within an orchestral piece. It has fewer concertos written for it. Pitched lower than the violin, its alto voice is generally less penetrating than its soprano cousin, though it has a velvety glow. It is the Kathleen Turner of the string family.

The Tuscan-Medici viola was made for Ferdinando I de’ Medici, grand prince of Tuscany, to fill out a quintet of Strads, and from there it passed through various hands until 1924, when it was bought by Herbert N. Straus, the Macy‘s department store heir.

Baird, chairman of the music department at the State University of New York, Buffalo, bought it from Straus’ estate, but didn’t have long with the instrument before his death in 1960. His widow, Jane Baird, placed it on loan at the Library of Congress in 1977.

Among those who borrowed the instrument was Boris Kroyt, violist in the revered Budapest String Quartet.

“It’s so simple yet it’s so beautiful,” said Ward-Bamford, “the grain and the perfection, everything about it. You see this almost three-dimensionality from some of the grain in the maple, in the back. And then you can kind of get it — this guy, this maker, you know this is very special.”

Beauty and breeding, yes, but also brawn.

It produces an “incredibly resonant but kind of compact sound,” says Díaz. “It has a tremendous brilliance to it, and you can hear this. People call it the ‘Cremonese spin’ inside the sound, which is what makes the sound just kind of travel out into the hall.”

Even nonaficionados can tell the difference, Díaz says. He recalls a Curtis board meeting when he decided to demonstrate both the Strad and his own instrument, the ex-Primrose Amati, but playing them so the school’s trustees couldn’t see which was which.

“They were like, ‘We had no idea that two violas could sound so different.’”

Díaz first performed on the Strad in a recital at the home of Jim Kimsey, AOL cofounder and a member of the James Madison Council, the Library of Congress’ philanthropic group.

Philadelphians H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest and John J. Medveckis were both council members and Curtis patrons, and it was through discussions with them and Madison executive director Susan Siegel that the idea for the event emerged.

At a dinner after the recital, Díaz met Bridget Baird, one of Cameron Baird’s daughters.

“And she said, ‘You know, I’d love for you to just play on it, we want it to be heard.’ And so then one thing led to the next and then they helped with the commissioning of Jennifer’s concerto.”

Díaz continued to play the Strad, and has even placed it in the hands of his students. He remembers working on the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata in a lesson with violist Hae Sue Lee, talking about phrase endings, changing colors within a note and how to connect notes a certain way.

“And finally I said to her, ‘You know, why don’t you just play the exposition on the Strad,’” he said, and when she did,“it was just kind of like all of a sudden, all these doors opened [for her understanding of the piece].“

The Library of Congress has five other Strads donated by Gertrude Clarke Whittall in 1935 that are not permitted to travel. The Tuscan-Medici viola does leave the library, and that is when Díaz thinks carefully about the centuries-old artifact in his charge.

“You always feel a certain amount of anxiety about going through security at an airport, there’s a moment where you lose control of it,” he said. “You have to stay in certain types of hotels and things like that. I never leave it in a hotel room if I’m not there. If I go to a restaurant, I have it with me. And so it’s with you all the time. But it’s been amazing to have the opportunity to use it.”

Now, after 335 years, there’s a sense that the viola has finally realized its destiny — ”We balance preservation and performance,” says Ward-Bamford — and that destiny is now set in perpetuity.

To mark the new chapter, the instrument has been given a new name reflecting more of the hands through which it has passed: Antonio Stradivari, Cremona, 1690, viola, Fulton, ex Baird, Tuscan-Medici.

Díaz calls it a happy ending.

“Because a lot of times these instruments just get sold sort of secretly to the highest bidder, and people don’t even know where they end up.”

This gift, however, continues a spirit of generosity going back to when Jane Baird first put the viola on loan to the library. The wish, says Ward-Bamford, was to have it preserved and played, and the message was:

“Let musicians hear it and see it. Let researchers come and study it and understand it. That to me is pretty marvelous.”