Solving the Violin Mystery
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The “Messiah Violin” was the most expensive violin in the world. But it had been called a fake. The famous tree detective, Dr. Henri Grissino-Mayer, was on the case.
The violin was worth $20 million because the master instrument-maker Antonio Stradivari crafted the instrument more than 200 years ago. Or did he?
A scientist who studied violins and another scientist who studied tree rings claimed that Stradivari did not make the violin. It was not possible, they said, because the last ring in the violin’s wood had grown in 1738. That was the year after Stradivari died. Could Dr. Henri find the truth . . . also by using tree rings?
One new ring grows in a tree trunk every year. When a tree is cut into boards, the dark and light lines of the rings show in the surface of each board as the grain of the wood. The Messiah Violin is covered with these lines. Like fingerprints, patterns made by these lines offer important clues.
The Detectives Arrive
Dr. Henri flew to England with a duffle bag containing 100 pounds of
equipment. He had a microscope, measuring tools, and a laptop computer.
The computer held measurements of tree rings from hundreds of trees
in the Alps mountains. That is where Stradivari got the wood to make
his violins. The measurements would be the key to solving the case.
Dr. Henri and two other tree-ring scientists arrived at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, England, where the Messiah Violin is kept in a special glass case. The case would be opened for only the fourth time in a hundred years.
“The museum was closed down for the night,” Dr. Henri
said. “There was added security all around. We had to put on white
gloves, and the curator opened
the case. That was an exciting moment.”
Studying the Violin
The curator set the brilliantly glowing reddish-orange instrument
on velvet and removed the strings so that all the tree rings on top
could be seen. Then he handed the violin to Dr. Henri.
“I was really careful with the violin,” Dr. Henri said. “That was strange, holding something worth twenty million dollars. We put it underneath the microscope on a measuring system, and we measured the tree rings.”
Later, he compared those measurements to those of tree rings in other instruments made by Stradivari.
Some rings were narrow because the weather had been
dry or cold during the years they grew. Other rings were wide because
the weather during those years had been sunny with a lot of rain. The pattern
made by wide and narrow rings—a pattern that looks a lot like a fingerprint—was
important.
The Mystery . . . Solved!
Dr. Henri was ready to solve the mystery. He compared the tree-ring
patterns the way other detectives compare fingerprints. But instead
of identifying a person, he wanted to identify a period of time.
He knew that during any year, all of the trees from the same area grew about the same amount. The pattern of wide and narrow rings on the violin matched the pattern of measurements from other trees from the Alps for the years 1577 to 1687. That one-of-a-kind pattern showed that the rings in the violin grew during those years. The experts claiming that the violin could not have been made by Stradivari were proved wrong.
“It was definitely not a fake,” Dr. Henri said. “We were able to prove that.”
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