Concert and war secret. Did the audience hear a Stradivarius stolen from the National Museum?

The French organization Musique et Spoliations, which investigates the fate of instruments stolen during World War II, has reported in recent days that, according to its assessment, at the concert in Colmar in the Upper Rhine department, the violinist played a Stradivarius instrument stolen in Warsaw in 1944.

It is a copy called “Leuterbach”, deposited in 1939 with the National Museum in Warsaw after the death of its last pre-war owner – Henryk Grohman, an industrialist from Łódź. The case was recently described by the newspaper “Le Parisien”, which wrote about the search for this violin a few years ago.

The head of the Musique et Spoliation organization, Pascale Bernheim, drew attention to the program of the festival in Colmar in eastern France. During the concert, the young musician Emmanuel Coppey performed violin pieces on four different unique instruments. Bernheim is convinced that one of them was the “Lauterbach” violin, whose value is estimated at EUR 10 million. The organizer of the concert, Emmanuel Jaeger, told “Le Parisien” that the copy presented in Colmar was not “Lauterbach”.

In 2022, the Musique et Spoliation organization also reported suspicions that the Stradivarius found in France, in the hands of a private person, was a violin belonging to Grohman. Now “Le Parisien” has contacted the industrialist's descendants living in Austria. – This Stradivarius is a legend in our family – one of them, Georg Formanek, told the daily.

“Lauterbach” is believed to have been made in 1719. Its name comes from the name of the German virtuoso Johann Christian Lauterbach, who owned the instrument in the 19th century. Previously they were owned by, among others, Michał Kleofas Ogiński.

In Poland, “Ruch Muzyczny”, describing the history of the violin, stated that Grohman bought it in 1900. They tried to hide it in the National Museum during the Warsaw Uprising, but the Germans discovered and took the instrument. A few years after the war, this particular Stradivarius was probably found and confiscated by the Americans in the house of former SS member Theodor Blank. Then the violin went to West Germany. “Le Parisien” states that they appeared in 1989 in a luthier's workshop in East Berlin, from where they came to Strasbourg.

From Paris Anna Wróbel (PAP)

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