Metro Pulse/Gamut/Tree-Ring Circus

Music experts and scientists are trying to determine whether the most valuable Stradavari violin in the world is genuine, and a UT professor is caught in the middle.

by Matthew T. Everett

A sturdy glass enclosure in the music room of Oxford University's Ashmolean Museum protects the Messiah violin from the itchy fingers of curious observers and the scrutiny of admirers of fine musical instruments. And with good reason: the violin, long assumed to have been constructed by Antonio Stradavari in 1716, is worth an estimated $20 million. Since the mid-19th century, it's been commonly regarded by experts as one of the finest examples of Stradavari's craftsmanship. The Messiah has never been used in performance, and, over the last century at least, has only been played a handful of times, always under the close supervision of members of the esteemed British family that loaned the instrument to the Ashmolean Museum.

But the glass case hasn't protected the Messiah from speculation that it's a fraud. Over the last three years, a bitter public debate has erupted about the violin's authenticity. Music experts and scientists have argued back and forth in academic journals, newspapers, and at academic conferences whether the Messiah is really a Stradavari or an elaborate, well-made copy. It's been a surprisingly lively controversy, with public shouting matches and accusations of bad faith traded back and forth, particularly in the European press. It's drawn attention to the elevated, sometimes snooty world of music collecting, where people are willing to pay millions of dollars for an instrument they may never play. And caught in the middle is Dr. Henri Grissino-Mayer, a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee who specializes in dendrochronology, the arcane science of dating artifacts by measuring tree rings in wood.

At the center of the dispute are two competing sets of dates. The first, published in the Journal of the Violin Society of America in 1998 by Stewart Pollens, the curator of musical instruments at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, established that the earliest possible date that the spruce wood used for the front plate of the Messiah could have been cut down was 1738. That's a year after Antonio Stradavari died, meaning it's unlikely that he could have made the instrument. Pollens also cited glaring inconsistencies in the "provenance"—collector's jargon for the documented history of a particular instrument—that he says make the authenticity of the Messiah suspect, plus some significant stylistic differences between the Messiah and the violin patterns left by Stradavari after his death. But the 1738 date, determined by Dr. Peter Klein from Germany's Hamburg University in a blind study, was the crucial part of Pollens' argument.

Pollens' study was quickly refuted by John Topham, a professional violin maker who works outside of London. Topham's analysis of the Messiah front piece, published in March 2000 in the Journal of Archaeological Science, set the date at 1682.

Since then, Klein's findings have been supported by Dr. Peter Kuniholm of Cornell University, but Klein himself has retracted his own research and now says he can't give an opinion either way. Topham says the matter's been settled ever since his paper was published. Grissino-Mayer and Pollens say nothing's been resolved, and nothing will be until one of the dates—either Klein's or Topham's—is confirmed by one more independent study.

"The truth is still out there," Grissino-Mayer says. "The tree rings can have only one date assigned to them. For there to be two sets of dates isn't good for tree ring science, and it's not good for the Messiah violin."

The conventional history, or provenance, of the Messiah is that it was made by Stradavari in his workshop in Cremona, in northern Italy, in the early 18th century, and that he kept it until his death in 1737. Then it passed into the hands of his son Francesco, and then, upon his death, to Francesco's brother Paolo. Paolo sold the Messiah in 1775 to Count Cozio, a prominent Italian collector. From Cozio's hands, the violin was sold to Luigi Tarisio in either 1824 or 1827, or possibly even in the 1830s. Finally, after Tarisio's death in 1854, the Messiah ended up in the hands of Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume in 1855. Tarisio had apparently promised to deliver a perfect Stradavari to Vuillaume for several years, prompting Vuillaume's son-in-law to exclaim, "Truly, Mr. Tarisio, your violin is like the Messiah of the Jews in that one always waits for him, but he never appears."

Vuillaume, according to the accepted accounts, kept the violin in a glass case until he died in 1875, when it was passed on to his widow and then his children. The British family-owned firm W.E. Hill and Sons bought the violin in 1890, then repeatedly sold it and bought it back, finally acquiring it permanently in 1928. The family presented it to the U.K. in 1939, along with several other prized instruments, for permanent loan. It's been on display in the Ashmolean Museum since 1945.

There's been some speculation throughout the last 100 years that the Messiah isn't a genuine Stradavari, that it's a copy made by Vuillaume, who was known for his painstaking reconstructions of the works of other violin makers. The latest controversy began after Pollens was invited by the museum to examine and photograph the Messiah in 1998.

"I was delighted to see the instrument," he says. "No one had had permission to hold it and examine it, and it's hard to get a feeling for an instrument unless you tilt it in the light and even smell it."

While the violin was in his hands, however, Pollens noticed slight discrepancies between what he had read about the violin and what he actually saw—the wrong letter imprinted on the instrument to identify the pattern the maker had used, the shape of the decorative f-holes on the violin's front, the unusual color of the varnish, and the absence of repair patches described by Cozio in his own personal papers. To Pollens, the evidence he saw was proof that, at the very least, the violin he examined wasn't the one that Cozio had passed on to Tarisio, then to Vuillaume. "There was only one 1716 violin [Cozio] obtained that was made by Stradavari," Pollens says. "The one now in the Ashmolean is not it."

Pollens' suspicions that the Messiah isn't the Cozio violin, combined with the dendrochronological examination by Klein, seemed to him adequate proof that the Messiah isn't genuine. He published his results in late 1998. By the time his report was published, however, Klein had distanced himself from the matter, claiming that he couldn't make a definitive claim for or against the Messiah's authenticity.

Then, in March of last year, Topham published an article in the Journal of Archaeological Science that dated the wood used in the Messiah at 1682. His dendrochronoligical work was conducted with Dr. Derek McCormick, a scientist at the University of Belfast in Northern Ireland. Topham further argued that the style of the violin was similar enough to 30 other violins and string instruments included in his study to conclude it's a genuine Stradavari.

Grissino-Mayer joined the fray last fall at the annual meeting of the Violin Society of America in Cincinnati, which hosted a panel discussion on the Messiah with Grissino-Mayer, Pollens, London instrument dealer Charles Beare, and Topham. That's also when Pollens announced that he had asked another dendrochronology expert, Peter Kuniholm, to examine his photographs, and that Kuniholm had confirmed the 1738 date. Grissino-Mayer, who had read both papers but hadn't seen either Pollens' photos or Topham's measurements, was trapped in the middle.

"I wanted to analyze the Messiah violin so I could be informed and help resolve the controversy," Grissino-Mayer says. "I wrote to John Topham, who I'd known for a couple of years, and up until the conference considered a friend. I asked if he would share his measurements [of the violin, from his examination of the instrument] so I could do a quick analysis, and he wrote back that it would be 'inappropriate.' He said he had published his results and I would have to use that...The problem with this is that the foundation of science is the replication of experiments, duplicating what someone else has done before. All I intended to do was replicate what he had found."

Topham says Grissino-Mayer only contacted him a few weeks before the conference, too soon to turn over the data, but that he would have supplied it after the Cincinnati meeting. But since the meeting, he says, Grissino-Mayer has made comments in the press that he finds "disturbing"—like pointing out to the UT public relations department that Topham isn't a trained dendrochronologist. "I'm certainly not going to give my data that way," Topham says. "It's pointless behaving that way toward someone if you want data from them...I'm not interested in getting involved with them after the statements they've made. It's not particularly intelligent or adult of them."

Topham also defends the scientific rigor of his examination, and argues that his dendrochronoligical study is the only one of the three published in an academic journal. Klein's initial study was used by Pollens as the basis of his article but not printed independently, and Kuniholm's has not been published at all.

But Topham's reluctance to supply the information he based his conclusion on—combined with his lack of experience with tree-ring science—has made Grissino-Mayer suspicious of his findings.

"I can't comment on either set of dates, because I don't have the data," he says. "But keep in mind that you have two highly-respected, highly-trained dendrochronologists coming up with the same date versus a violin maker with no formal training who will not allow the replication of his experiment."

Now, more than a year later, there's still been no resolution. For Topham, nothing more needs to be done. "It's perfectly all right," he says. "The dendrochronology supports it, and there's no contradictory information. It's an odd fuss. It's perfectly fine. Just because someone in New York is saying otherwise, everybody must believe it, even though it's not supported by any evidence."

The consequences of the outcome are potentially enormous. In a profile of Pollens last month, a Forbes magazine writer estimated that the high-end music instrument industry is worth as much as $50 million a year. Pollens says that industry insiders—represented by Topham and dealers like Charles Beare, who has also insisted the debate is finished—are trying to protect their own reputations as the arbiters of value, as well as the reputation of the Hill family and the Ashmolean Museum. If the standards of expertise they've set are undermined, so is the entire validity of the fine instrument market. There's considerable money on the line for the people defending the Messiah's authenticity.

"There's a lot at stake—the traditional form of expertise and authority of a very, very, very small group of violin experts who are allowed to establish what is authentic and what's not," Pollens says. "There's hardly any dealer in New York who can sell without Charles Beare's nod...When I see pictures in Grove's Music Encyclopedia on the histories of violins, or when makers make trips to Oxford to make authentic copies of these things, I find it disturbing. Our sense of history, our appreciation for music, is affected. It's poisoned and cheapened when fakes are held to be true."

Grissino-Mayer, who still hasn't been granted access either to Topham's measurements of the Messiah or to the violin itself, hints that some resolution may come soon. He's still not taking sides with either Pollens or Topham, though he remains suspicious of Topham's scientific credibility. (Grissino-Mayer tried to match the graph produced by Topham's measurements, reprinted in his Journal of Archaeological Science article, to existing graphs of tree-ring dates, but couldn't.) "The science is incomplete," he says. "I can't accept one hypothesis when another one is floating around. What I'd like to know is when do the tree rings date? There's only one correct answer. Topham could be right, or Pollens could be. It could be neither."