With Strings Attached: Putting a Price on That Stradivarius
4th June 2026
In March 2025, an anonymous buyer purchased the 1715 “Baron Knoop” Stradivarius for $23 million (U.S.), making it the most expensive violin ever sold. (The seller, the American stringed-instrument collector David L. Fulton, had purchased it for a more modest $2.75 million in 1992.) Previous record setters have included the 1721 “Lady Blunt,” which fetched $15.9 million in 2011, and the “Joachim?Ma,” which went for $11.25 million in February 2025.
All three of these models were made by Antonio Stradivari, a Cremonese luthier whose output in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is said to epitomize perfection in violin manufacturing. Depending on your point of view, they may indeed be examples of flawless human handiwork. Or they might be, as the fiction writer and journalist Ambrose Bierce once put it, objects that “tickle human ears by friction of a horse’s tail on the entrails of a cat.” Either way, where do these exorbitant value judgments come from?
Tom Wilder looks for the answers through the wider cultural world that brought the violin to prominence after its development in the sixteenth century and laid the stage for it to become the most iconic instrument of Western music: a physical manifestation of “taste, refinement, and wealth.” The guitar may exist on a similarly high level of symbolism, but the appraisal of an individual six-string turns more on its provenance and on any alterations by famous owners than on the maker. As two examples, an acoustic Gibson owned by John Lennon sold for $2.4 million in 2015, while the 1959 Martin D?18E that Kurt Cobain used on Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York album went for just over $6 million in 2020 (he had picked it up for just $5,000). Pricey, but not near the numbers a Stradivarius commands.