The Story Of A Cambridge Lecturer Successfully Authentication Violin Albert Einstein To Selling IDR 16.4 Billion

JAKARTA - Dr. Paul Wingfield, a composer and director of music studies at Trinity College, Cambridge, never expected that he would authenticate the violin previously owned by legendary physicist Albert Einstein.

Meanwhile, the unexpected story began when Wingfield attended the funeral ceremony of his brother-in-law, Joseph Schwartz. At that time, he saw a copy of the book Einstein for Beginners which was co-written by Joseph Schwartz alongside a photo of the family of a boy playing violin.

The moment also sparked the creation of a drama called Einstein's Violin a work that reimagined Einstein's life through music. In order to write the drama, Wingfield spent six full months researching Einstein's interest in music. He collected everything the physicist had ever written or said about music.

The drama itself was finally featured for the first time last April at Highgate, north London, and is dedicated as a tribute to Schwartz.

"I dedicated the show to him because I actually wrote it down for him, in retrospect. He will definitely love it," Wingfield said, citing the BBC, Tuesday, October 14.

But after one of the shows, Wingfield received a message from an auctioneer that started with the sentence, 'I'm not crazy...' and asked for his help to verify the potentially Einstein-owned violin. When he first held the violin, he admitted that he had a strong feeling.

"I had an impulsive reaction when I first held on to it that it was genuine," he said. But it actually made me even more suspicious. So I had to go and see all the documents, all the letters, examine the violin, and find details just to get every element, make sure that I thought it belonged to him.

During the examination, the lecturer found a "Lina" carving on the instrument "the name Einstein gave to all of his violin. "He was 15 years old when he got this violin. That's something a teenager might do, I think," he said.

He even compared the carvings to Einstein's handwriting while still in school and found a definite match. One of the most striking details of the instrument is a slightly longer badam violin.

"It would take someone with a fairly large left hand, who puts all the fingers on the strings, to be comfortable playing them," he added.

The checks continued on Einstein's X-ray discovery and handgraph, which confirmed that his left hand was indeed bigger than his right hand. It was quite an interesting discovery," he said.

Furthermore, the 1894-made Zunterer van that Einstein once owned was auctioned off at Dominic Winter Auctioneers, and sold for a very high price.

Initially, the violin was estimated to sell only around 300,000. However, the instrument was finally sold well above expectations at a price of 860,000 pounds (around Rp. 16.4 billion)

"We were all a little surprised in the end when the hammer was finally tapped... it was a pretty emotional moment, but I'm very happy to have held it in my hands, got involved with him and his life, and I hope one day someone else will play him," Wingfield concluded.