Dietmar Machold

It now comes to light that Dietmar Machold, a respected dealer in fine instruments is under investigation for supposedly dealing fraudulently with buyers and sellers.  He had offices all over the world and was well-known among high-end dealers.  He was known as Mr. Stradivarius and had built his business very quickly.  His father used to be a violin maker.  Spiegel Online has a rather comprehensive article about Machold's troubles, if you can make time to read it.  I wrote a story about Joseph Tang a few months ago and mentioned at that time that his victims had at least not suffered huge losses because they had not dealt in high-end instruments.  Dietmar Machold appears to be the Major League version of Joseph Tang.  He has been accused of perpetrating frauds to the tune of $35,000,000, selling fakes or inflating prices, or simply not paying owners for instruments he sold which had been placed with him on a consignment basis.  Some sources speculate that the swindles were in excess of $100,000,000.  I wouldn’t know.  The New Jersey Symphony was allegedly one of his victims.  A European bank made him loans of more than $4,000,000 which were secured by instruments purportedly worth a lot more than $4,000,000 but whose real value was closer to $5,000.  By the way, I am still very much of the opinion that the so-called Messiah Stradivarius is a fake.  It sits in a British Museum (the Ashmolean) away from any and all scrutiny.  I have very little respect for dealers who have everything to gain by issuing certificates of authenticity and giving opinions of value on violins they sell.  In fact, I prefer new violins to old, be they Guarnerius, Stradivarius, or Guadagnini. Fritz Reuter knows. 

I told you so

The following is an abstract from an article which appeared earlier this month in some journal of the academy of science. The New York Times said something about it too.  It testifies to something I have been saying for years. New instruments are just as good, if not better, than old ones. Anyone spending a million dollars on an old violin is just wasting their money, unless they are buying it as an investment, the way one would buy an antique.  If you just want a violin to actually play on, buy a new one.  You will save a bundle.  By the way, the exact same thing applies to bows.  “Most violinists believe that instruments by Stradivari and Guarneri “del Gesu” are tonally superior to other violins - and to new violins in particular.  Many mechanical and acoustical factors have been proposed to account for this superiority; however, the fundamental premise of tonal superiority has not yet been properly investigated.  Player's judgments about a Stradivari's sound may be biased by the violin's extraordinary monetary value and historical importance, but no studies designed to preclude such biasing factors have yet been published.  We asked 21 experienced violinists to compare violins by Stradivari and Guarneri del Gesu with high-quality new instruments.  The resulting preferences were based on the violinists’ individual experiences of playing the instruments under double-blind conditions in a room with relatively dry acoustics.  We found that (i) the most-preferred violin was new; (ii) the least-preferred was by Stradivari; (iii) there was scant correlation between an instrument's age and monetary value and its perceived quality; and (iv) most players seemed unable to tell whether their most-preferred instrument was new or old.  These results present a striking challenge to conventional wisdom.  Differences in taste among individual players, along with differences in playing qualities among individual instruments, appear more important than any general differences between new and old violins.  Rather than searching for the secret of Stradivari, future research might best be focused on how violinists evaluate instruments, on which specific playing qualities are most important to them, and on how these qualities relate to measurable attributes of the instruments, whether old or new.”  

Violin Labels and PayPal

You may have read the story about an “antique violin” and PayPal recently.  It appears that a lady named Erica sold a violin (advertised on Ebay) worth approximately $2,500 to a buyer in Canada.  The buyer used PayPal to pay Erica for it.  However, Erica never got the money because, before PayPal paid her, the buyer claimed the violin was a fake, even though it was accompanied by a certificate of authenticity by a well-known Australian expert.  PayPal agreed to return the money to the buyer but insisted that he destroy the “fake” violin (above shown) before it did so.  The buyer then obediently destroyed the violin and subsequently got his $2,500 returned to him.  Erica, of course, will never see her violin in one piece again.  To be fair, PayPal said it was merely applying its policies in this matter, even if they did immediately side with the buyer and not the seller who had actual proof that the violin was genuine.  Erica was quoted as saying that "In the violin market, labels often mean little and there is often disagreement over them.  Some of the most expensive violins in the world have disputed labels, but they are works of art nonetheless."  Even if Erica’s violin was a very, very cheap violin by professional standards, she was lucky the disputed label was not attached to a Strad – not that anyone would sell one through Ebay or transact the payment through Paypal, of course.  Cheap as it was, I hope Erica’s violin was insured. 

The Strange Case of Joseph Tang - the conclusion

While it appears that Joseph Tang got away with a lot, it could have been much worse - he never dealt in really pricy violins ($250,000 and above), though perhaps he did want to get to that top tier.  His downfall came as a result of his effort to fool everyone all the time.  Tang should have known it cannot be done.  Many people are attracted to beautiful masterpieces, be they paintings or violins or jewels or books or furniture.  Some take that appreciation for beauty to the level of an obsession.  They will do almost anything (that does not involve violence) to acquire a masterpiece – one or several.  There are many forgers too, who are gifted at replicating exact copies of instruments or paintings or anything worth the trouble.  They sell the copies in lieu of the originals or simply fabricate new works (forgeries) and masterfully antique them.  Elmyr de Hory, David Stein, and Han van Meegeren were three such artists.  They fooled the world’s greatest experts.  This is, of course, the key.  If you can’t fool an expert, then what’s the point?  Imagine discovering an old manuscript by Vivaldi or Bach or Mozart.  Who would authenticate it?  No one would call Jean Baptiste Vuillaume a forger, though he could replicate a violin so perfectly even the owner could not tell the difference.  As early as 1685, none other than Tomasso Antonio Vitali (the assumed composer of the famous Chaconne in g minor – the authenticity of the piece itself is very much in question) claimed to have been fooled by a violin dealer, Francesco Capilupi.  He purchased what was supposed to be a Nicolo Amati violin which turned out to really be a Francesco Ruggieri.  The dealer had placed a false label right on top of the real one and Vitali claimed he paid four times as much as the violin was really worth because he thought it was an Amati.  (Interestingly, today, those violins are of almost equal value.)  Nonetheless, labels are not the only things that can be faked - well-trained violin makers can artificially distress the varnish, simulate wear patterns, insert neck grafts for purported proof of conversion from baroque fingerboards and necks to a more modern neck length, and create strategically placed repaired cracks with interior studs and patches.  In 1997 and 1999, the estate of Englishman Gerald Segelman (who died in 1992, leaving a large collection of rare violins), alleged that several violin dealers and investors defrauded Segelman's charitable trust by providing low appraisals of the instruments (in the collection) before purchasing them from the estate, then selling the instruments to one another at steep markups.  Some of the transactions involved highly reputable dealers in London and Chicago (who need to remain anonymous.)  The estate claimed that investors made six and seven-figure profits on individual Segelman instruments.  In one instance, one dealer allegedly acquired a Guarnerius violin from Segelman for $950,000 and quickly resold it for $2.3 million.  Shortly after the start of the London trial in 2001, one dealer settled, agreeing to pay the estate $4.5 million.  By 2004, every single case had been settled out of court.  Nobody pled guilty and nobody went to jail.  However, not every case of this sort has a happy ending.   In November, 2008, a violin teacher in Rome who was caught selling fake antique violins to his students for vast sums, hanged himself in his apartment.  Sergei Dyachenko, the teacher, had already confessed that he had bought violins at a flea market in Rome and sold them to his students at hundreds of times their true value.  One of his students had bought a violin from him for $830,000.  Dyachenko claimed the instrument had been made in Italy in 1784.  Experts found that the violin was a much newer German model, worth only $3,800.  In addition to all this chicanery, there are also several very valuable stolen violins out there which have never been recovered.  When a valuable instrument is stolen, the insurance company will cover the loss but it will never forget.  Such a thing occurred when the famous Gibson Stradivarius (1713) was located in 1987, after having been stolen in 1936.  The insurance company initially paid the owner $30,000 for the loss but, in 1987, again had to pay a $263,000 finder’s fee in order to acquire it.  They could have paid a lot more but they didn’t.  In 1988, after the instrument had undergone some minor repairs, the company sold it for $1.2 million.  In 2001, violinist Joshua Bell paid $4 million for it.  Had Joseph Tang worked himself up to this level of dealing, he may well have made himself a fortune.  Instead, he decided to cheat a little girl out of $1,250. 

The Strange Case of Joseph Tang

On the evening of November 28, 2007, Joseph Tang, twenty-something Canadian violinist, played a concert (featuring some of Beethoven's most heroic music) at Beall Hall in Eugene, Oregon.  When he got done, he was arrested backstage, though not for playing out of tune or playing too many wrong notes.  Tang, a sometime student at San Francisco State University and the University of Oregon, was arrested on federal fraud charges for cheating several violin collectors and dealers out of thousands of dollars in the sale of violins from April, 2002 through December, 2006 – ten counts in all.  Each count carried a maximum 20-year sentence – a total of 200 years.  There were actually more victims involved than those of record but several dealers and buyers could not press charges because there was no documentation for their transactions.  Some of San Francisco’s well-known violin dealers were among those strung along by Tang, as well as people from as far away as Japan, Germany, England, and Sweden.  A single collector (who should remain anonymous) lost close to $150,000, according to his own estimate.  For centuries, in the violin trade, dealers, buyers, and brokers, when engaged in a potential sale, have trusted each other implicitly and violins have been borrowed, lent, and played without so much as a tiny, dated receipt changing hands.  So it went with Tang.  He accepted many instruments on consignment (bows, too), sold them, and ran with the money.  It took one irate client to bring Tang down.  The instrument in question was a cheap, $1,250 violin.  The victim was a retired police officer who wanted the violin for his little daughter.  The officer said the violin was not what Tang claimed it was.  He wanted his money back but Tang ignored him then disappeared.  The officer complained to the U.S. postal inspector.  The inspector investigated then pressed charges.  After making a court appearance, Tang was released on bail.  Many people claimed he actually stole more than a million dollars, though most of it (of course) could not be substantiated.  A retired math professor who invested all of his savings in violin acquisitions claimed Tang took everything he had.  Some time later (2008), Tang pled guilty and was sentenced to 37 months in jail and ordered to pay more than $400,000.  He is due out in November, 2011.  (to be continued)