Albert Einstein's violin has been identified by Dr Paul Wingfield, composer of a musical drama about Einstein's life as a violinist.
I had collected details of everything Einstein is known to have said or written about music, as well as of the violins he owned
Paul Wingfield
Albert Einstein famously remarked that, had he not been a physicist, he would have been a musician. He said "I know that most joy in my life has come to me from my violin"; and his wife, Elsa, claimed that she fell in love with him "because he played Mozart so beautifully on the violin".
Dr Paul Wingfield, Director of Studies in Music at Trinity College, has now helped to identify an 1894 German violin as having belonged to Einstein. On 8th October 2025, the instrument will be auctioned by Dominic Winter Auctioneers in Cirencester. When the hammer falls, this will be the end of a remarkable 18-month journey for Dr Wingfield.
In March 2024, Wingfield was at the wake of his brother-in-law, Joseph Schwartz, a lifelong Einstein enthusiast and co-author of the 1979 book Einstein for Beginners. A copy was on a table next to a family photograph album containing a 1912 picture of a small boy playing the violin.
Wingfield says: "This juxtaposition sparked in my mind the idea of composing a musical drama, Einstein's Violin, in which Einstein tells the story of his life, not as a physicist, but as a violinist, to the accompaniment of music for violin and piano."
"Researching, scripting and composing this show took me six months, by which time I had collected details of everything Einstein is known to have said or written about music, as well as of the violins he owned, and of the concerts in which he played."
Einstein's Violin was premiered in April 2025 in Highgate by distinguished actor Harry Meacher, Newnham alumna Leora Cohen on violin and Wingfield himself on piano. After a performance at the Highgate Festival at the end of June, the theatre manager handed Wingfield a message that began 'I am not mad…'!
"Reading this message proved to be one of the most exciting, if surreal, experiences in my life, Wingfield says. "It was from an auctioneer who had been commissioned to sell a violin that had purportedly belonged to Einstein, and who was asking for my help in checking the instrument's provenance."
Einstein bought the violin in Munich in 1894, before he left for Switzerland. He played it throughout the period in which he developed his theory of relativity and received his Nobel prize, buying a new violin in Berlin in 1920. In 1932, just before he fled Nazi Germany for the US, he gave the Munich violin, along with a bicycle and two books, to his friend and fellow Nobel Laureate in Physics, Max von Laue. The books and the bicycle's saddle will also be sold on 8 October. Twenty years later, von Laue gifted the violin and other items to a friend, Margarete Hommrich, whose great-great-granddaughter is the current owner.
Wingfield says: "I am of course not an expert on nineteenth-century violins but, by a quirk of circumstance, my extensive research into Einstein's musical life made me the obvious person to investigate the owner's narrative."
"Over the summer I have thus been deploying all the historical skills that I have amassed over the years, in examining correspondence and a wide range of other documents, critically appraising witness testimonies, mapping Einstein's movements over a forty-year period and even analysing his school-age handwriting."
The 1894 violin has an inscription of the name 'Lina', which Einstein bestowed on all of his violins.
"Along the way, I have acquired knowledge about topics that were previously a closed book to me, such as nineteenth-century varnish, the precise measurements of Einstein's hands and even inter-War Belgian customs regulations. I am now as sure as anyone could be that this violin was indeed once owned by Einstein. It would seem that, just occasionally, life does imitate art."
Paul Wingfield's research focuses primarily on Czech music and music theory and analysis. He has published on Janáček, Martinů and nineteenth-century sonata form, and he has recently written a chapter on Joseph Joachim's Violin Concerto no. 1 for a CUP book on the nineteenth-century violin concerto. His musical drama, Einstein's Violin, received its premiere on 27 April 2025 at Upstairs at the Gatehouse in Highgate. He is currently composing a new musical drama, Mademoiselle Adagio, about the nineteenth-century violinist, Teresa Milanollo.
This story is adapted from a Music @ Cambridge: Research blog post
