A Stradivarius violin crafted in 1714 sold for $11.25 million (£9.1 million) at a New York auction on Friday, missing the world record for a musical instrument that some predicted it might break, but still securing a solid financial future for a new generation of performers, Report informs via The Guardian.
The 311-year-old instrument, listed by Sotheby’s of Manhattan as “a masterpiece of sound”, once belonged to the celebrated 19th-century Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, a close friend of the composer Johannes Brahms. It was gifted to the New England Conservatory in 2015 following the death of its most recent owner, a former student, Si-Hon Ma, with the understanding it would one day be sold to fund musical scholarships.
The winning bid for the so-called Joachim-Ma Stradivarius was almost $5 million short of the record $15.9 million (then £9.8 million) paid in 2011 for the Lady Blunt Stradivarius named for Lord Byron’s daughter, a boundary it had been expected to test.
