A Visionary's Violin

Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski on Wikimedia

When you hear the name "Albert Einstein" you probably think of his Theory of Relativity, or E=MC², or maybe that photo of him with his tongue out if you can't wrap your head around his scientific contributions (we don't blame you). However, Einstein was also a keen musician who learned the violin from age 4.

Einstein was self-taught and wrote in his journals that if he were not a physicist, he would probably be a musician. His favorite composers were Mozart and Bach. Last month, one of the Nobel Prize-winner's violin sold for a record-breaking £860,000 ($1.1 million) in auction. 

The 1894 Zunterer violin was among the first that Einstein owned. Nicknamed 'Lina', Einstein acquired it before moving from Munich to Switzerland as a teenager. Amidst the rise of Antisemitism and Nazi persecution in the early 1930s, Einstein fled Germany for America. Not wanting his beloved violin to come to any harm, Einstein entrusted it to his friend Max von Laue. Von Laue kept the violin safe through World War II, eventually gifting it to an Einstein fan, whose family kept it safe for 70 years.

Once commission is added to the sale, the final price will be over  £1 million, the highest price for a violin that wasn't owned by a concert violinist or made by the famed house of Stradivarius. The previous record belonged to a violin that went down with the Titanic, which sold for £900k in 2013.