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      Jorja Fleezanis, Violinist and Pioneering Concertmaster, Dies at 70

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      “Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she once said, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Jorja Fleezanis, a dynamic violinist and dedicated teacher who was one of the first women to serve as concertmaster of a major symphony orchestra in the United States, died on Sept. 9 at her home in Lake Leelanau, Mich. She was 70.The Minnesota Orchestra, in which Ms. Fleezanis played from the first chair for two decades, said the cause was “a cardiovascular event.”The concertmaster holds a key position with an orchestra, with considerable responsibility for defining its sound. Ms. Fleezanis was “a cornerstone player” in the Minnesota Orchestra, Osmo Vanska, its music director from 2003 to 2022, said in a phone interview.“You need to be hearing the whole score and acting as second in command to the conductor,” Ms. Fleezanis explained to The Boston Globe this year. “You need to understand all the possible interpretive ways the conductor can go at that moment, so you’re prepared to make a sharp left, or a gentle left. And you create that unification, that sense of ensemble, almost instantaneously.”Concertmasters often take solo turns, too, playing concertos with their own orchestras. Ms. Fleezanis used those opportunities to advocate for works that audiences were otherwise unlikely to hear from guest violinists — by Benjamin Britten, say, or Roger Sessions — and to promote new scores. She gave the premiere of John Adams’s Violin Concerto, in St. Paul in 1994, collaborating on a pathbreaking piece that won the Grawemeyer Award for composition a year later.For much of the history of the professional orchestra, the post of concertmaster had been reserved for men. Ms. Fleezanis, a “rebel with a violin,” as The Pioneer Press of St. Paul called her, sought to change that from early in her career.“Being a concertmaster is terribly demanding,” she told The Cincinnati Post in 1976, “but women can handle the job as well as men can. I know that.”Ms. Fleezanis at first looked likely to break barriers at the San Francisco Symphony, which she joined as a second violinist in 1980, becoming its associate concertmaster in 1981. Sharing the first stand with Raymond Kobler, she played so “splendidly,” the critic Robert Commanday wrote in The San Francisco Examiner in 1988, that she struck observers “as the stronger of the two, and often the real leader of the section.”In a decision that Mr. Commanday described as “not very defensible,” the San Francisco Symphony’s music director, Herbert Blomstedt, stuck with his man, even after it became clear that the cost would be Ms. Fleezanis’s departure. She accepted the overtures of Mr. Blomstedt’s predecessor, Edo de Waart, who was eager to bring her to his new ensemble, the Minnesota Orchestra.Hired as acting concertmaster in 1988, she was technically not the first woman to hold the full title of concertmaster at a major orchestra; by the time her position was made permanent early in 1989, Emmanuelle Boisvert had begun work as the concertmaster of the Detroit Symphony. But Ms. Fleezanis was a trailblazer at a time when the gender composition of American orchestras was starting to become more equitable.With her frank personality and her palpable intensity onstage, she was in large part responsible for the resurgence of the Minnesota Orchestra, which came to be widely regarded as one of the finest in the nation early in Mr. Vanska’s tenure, not least for the crisp precision and risk-taking sensibility of its strings. Like its concertmaster, the orchestra performed “with the kind of furious finesse that every composer prays for,” the critic Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker in 2005.“Early in my career I was told, ‘If you play like that in every concert, you’ll burn out,’ but I knew that wasn’t right,” Ms. Fleezanis said when she left the orchestra to become a professor at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in 2009. “Playing with full commitment gives back: It revitalizes me.”Ms. Fleezanis during a rehearsal for a weeklong Minnesota Orchestra program in 2006 presenting the work of then-emerging composers. Missy Mazzoli, left, was one of them. Greg Helgeson for The New York TimesJorja Kay Fleezanis was born on March 19, 1952, in Detroit. She was the younger of Parios and Kay Fleezanis’s two children. Her parents, who were Greek immigrants, were not musicians but loved music.She began learning violin at age 8, studying in Detroit with Ara Zerounian and Mischa Mischakoff, the former concertmaster of Arturo Toscanini’s NBC Symphony. She later attended the Cleveland Institute of Music, where she played for the young James Levine in his University Circle Orchestra, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music.It was still rare for women to be admitted to major orchestras when Ms. Fleezanis finished her studies. The Chicago Symphony’s music director, Georg Solti, required her to win three separate auditions and to play concerts right under his eye before he was willing to hire a “girl,” as he called her, for his second violin section in 1975. Her kinetic style did not match the staid demeanor of her colleagues, though, and she was all but alone among men. She left after a single season.“A solid musician with a big sound and surprising reserves of energy,” as The Cincinnati Enquirer described her in 1976, Ms. Fleezanis returned to Ohio to lead the newly formed Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra. There she founded the Trio d’Accordo, a string trio. She later started the FOG Trio with the cellist Michael Grebanier and the pianist Garrick Ohlsson. An inspirational pedagogue, she held posts at the San Francisco Conservatory, the University of Minnesota and a variety of other institutions. She retired from the Jacobs School in 2020.While at the San Francisco Symphony, Ms. Fleezanis met Michael Steinberg, a former critic for The Boston Globe who was that orchestra’s publications director and artistic adviser. They married in 1983; he died in 2009. She is survived by her brother, Nickolas.In a 2009 conversation with Sam Bergman, a Minnesota Orchestra violist, Ms. Fleezanis said her husband had stoked her interest in unusual and new works. She recorded Beethoven’s Violin Sonatas, but she also recorded pieces by Stefan Wolpe and Aaron Jay Kernis. Nicholas Maw wrote a sonata for her, and John Tavener made her the “Divine Eros” in his vast, mystical “Ikon of Eros,” written for the Minnesota Orchestra’s centennial in 2002. After her husband’s death, she started a commissioning fund in their joint names.“There is a huge body of genius out there,” Ms. Fleezanis told Mr. Bergman, reflecting on the repertoire as she found it. “It’s just a question of how limited you want to choose to be.” More

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      Tree Rings Shed Light on a Stradivarius Mystery

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      Analyses of 17th-century stringed instruments suggest that a young Antonio Stradivari might have apprenticed with a particular craftsman.History is revealed in tree rings. They have been used to determine the ages of historical buildings as well as when Vikings first arrived in the Americas. Now, tree rings have shed light on a longstanding mystery in the rarefied world of multimillion-dollar musical instruments.By analyzing the wood of two 17th-century stringed instruments, a team of researchers has uncovered evidence of how Antonio Stradivari might have honed his craft, developing the skills used in the creation of the rare, namesake Stradivarius violins.Mauro Bernabei, a dendrochronologist at the Italian National Research Council in San Michele all’Adige, and his colleagues published their results last month in the journal Dendrochronologia, and their findings are consistent with the young Stradivari apprenticing with Nicola Amati, a master luthier roughly 40 years his senior. Such a link between the two acclaimed craftsmen has long been hypothesized.In the 17th and early 18th centuries, Stradivari created stringed instruments renowned for their craftsmanship and superior sound. “Stradivari is generally regarded as the best violin maker who ever lived,” said Kevin Kelly, a violin maker in Boston who has handled dozens of Stradivarius instruments.Only about 600 of Stradivari’s masterpieces survive today, all prized by collectors and performers alike. A Stradivarius violin currently on the auction block — the first such sale in decades — is predicted to fetch up to $20 million.An 18th-century depiction of Antonio Stradivari, the Italian crafter of instruments.World History Archive/AlamyStradivari likely learned his craft by apprenticing with an older mentor, as was customary at the time. That could have been Amati, who, by the mid-17th century, was well established and also living in Cremona, a city in what is now Italy.“Some people assume that because Stradivari was Cremonese and he was such a great violin maker, he must have apprenticed with Amati,” said Mr. Kelly, who was not involved in the new study.But evidence of a link between Stradivari and Amati has remained stubbornly tenuous: One violin made by Stradivari bears a label reading “Antonius Stradiuarius Cremonensis Alumnus Nicolaij Amati, Faciebat Anno 1666.” That wording implies that Stradivari was a pupil of Amati, said Mr. Kelly, but it was the only label like it that has surfaced.With the goal of shedding on this musical mystery, Dr. Bernabei and his team visited the Museum of the Conservatory of San Pietro a Majella in Naples and analyzed the wood of a small harp made by Stradivari in 1681. Using a digital camera, the researchers precisely measured the widths of 157 tree rings visible on the instrument’s spruce soundboard.A small harp by Stradivari from 1681.DeAgostini/Getty ImagesThe pattern created by plotting the width of tree rings, one after the other, is like a fingerprint. This is because the amount that a trees grows each year depends on the weather, water conditions and a slew of other factors, Dr. Bernabei said. “Plants record very accurately what happens in their surroundings.”The researchers compared their measurements from the Stradivari harp with other tree ring sequences measured from stringed instruments. Out of more than 600 records, one stood out for being astonishingly similar: a spruce soundboard from a cello made by Nicola Amati in 1679. “All the maximum and minimum values are coincident,” Dr. Bernabei said. “It’s like somebody split a trunk in two different parts.”The same wood was indeed used to make the Stradivari harp and the Amati cello, Dr. Bernabei and his colleagues suggest. This was consistent with the two craftsmen sharing a workshop, with the elder Amati possibly mentoring the younger Stradivari, the team concluded.Perhaps that is true, said Mr. Kelly, but it is not the only possibility. Instead, Mr. Amati and Stradivari might simply have purchased wood from the same person, he said. After all, luthiers in 17th-and 18th-century Cremona belonged to a small community, said Mr. Kelly. “They basically all lived on the same street.” More

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      A Violin From Hollywood’s Golden Age Aims at an Auction Record

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      Played in “The Wizard of Oz” and other classic films, Toscha Seidel’s Stradivarius could sell for almost $20 million.Rare violins once owned by famed virtuosos like Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz and Yehudi Menuhin have sold privately in recent years for up to $20 million. The instruments they played typically bear their names, like the “Earl of Plymouth” Stradivarius, which to burnish its reputation, mystique and market value is now also referred to as the “ex-Kreisler.”Can Toscha Seidel work the same marketing magic — even though his fame came mostly from Hollywood rather than the concert hall?Musicians and collectors will know soon. After a global tour currently underway, the violin Seidel owned and played, the “da Vinci” Stradivarius from 1714, will be sold by the online auction house Tarisio, from May 18 through June 9. It is the first Stradivarius from the so-called golden age of violin making to be auctioned in decades.Unlike most musical instruments, over time all Stradivarius violins have acquired names, some rather fanciful, like “the Sleeping Beauty.” The famed virtuoso Paganini called his “Il Canone.” The “da Vinci” has no connection to Leonardo. As a marketing tactic, a dealer who sold three Stradivarius violins in the 1920s named them all after famous Renaissance painters: in addition to the “da Vinci,” the “Titian” and the “Michaelangelo.”The violin itself is naturally the most important factor in determining its value, with instruments made by the Stradivari, Amati and Guarneri families of Renaissance Italy commanding the highest prices. Condition is another crucial consideration. But so, too, is the identity of its prior owners — its provenance.Toscha Seidel, right, in 1918.Genthe photograph collection/Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs DivisionFew may recognize Seidel’s name today. But he was so successful by the 1920s that he was able to buy the “da Vinci” for $25,000 (over $400,000 today), a sale featured on the front page of The New York Times on April 27, 1924. Seidel said at the time he wouldn’t trade the violin “for a million dollars” and considered it his most treasured possession, adding, “The tone is of outstanding power and beauty.”Seidel was so well known in his heyday that George and Ira Gershwin wrote a comic song about him and three of his Russian Jewish peers: “Mischa, Sasha, Toscha, Jascha.” (“We are four fiddlers three.”) Seidel and Heifetz were both born in Ukraine; both studied in St. Petersburg with the eminent teacher Leopold Auer; and both emigrated to the United States after the upheavals of the Russian Revolution. They made their concert debuts at Carnegie Hall within months of each other, to critical acclaim.Albert Einstein took violin lessons from Seidel, and together they performed Bach’s Double Concerto for a fund-raiser. They sported thick shocks of unruly hair that reinforced the caricature of the long-haired musician, like Liszt.Both Seidel and Heifetz settled in Los Angeles, where the burgeoning movie industry paved the way for Seidel’s success. By the 1930s, he was surrounded there by a crowd of mostly Jewish exiles from Nazi Germany and war-torn Europe. Among them were the composers Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg and Erich Wolfgang Korngold.Seidel played the principal violin part in many of Korngold’s celebrated film scores, which included “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “The Adventures of Robin Hood” (for which Korngold won an Academy Award) and “Anthony Adverse” (ditto). The two men recorded a violin and piano arrangement of Korngold’s suite for “Much Ado About Nothing,” with the composer at the piano.Music directors and composers sought out Seidel’s warm, rich tone. He was the concertmaster for the Paramount Studio Orchestra and played the violin solos for MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz” and David Selznick’s “Intermezzo,” in which a famed violinist (played by Leslie Howard) falls in love with his accompanist (Ingrid Bergman).“That we largely associate love scenes or depictions of the less fortunate in films — or any scene evoking tears or strong emotions — with the sound of the violin is largely due to Seidel,” Adam Baer, a violinist and journalist, in a 2017 article for The American Scholar. (Baer’s violin teacher studied with Seidel and insisted that his pupils listen to recordings of Seidel performances.)Seidel’s violin playing was sought out for its warm, rich tone.Andrew White for The New York TimesThough best known for his movie work, Seidel also played standard classical repertoire, soloing with orchestras and touring in recital. In the 1930s, he was heard by millions of radio listeners as the musical director and a frequent soloist with CBS’s symphony orchestra. In 1934 he had his own weekly broadcast on the network, “The Toscha Seidel Program.” (Several recordings showcasing his lush sound are on YouTube, including a 1945 recording of Chausson’s “Poème” with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra led by Leopold Stokowski.)“He was a singing violinist, influenced by the cantorial tradition,” Baer said in an interview. “He played with as much depth of tone and emotional intensity as anyone I’ve heard on disk.”But Seidel never achieved Heifetz’s enduring international fame. In Los Angeles, Heifetz often called on Seidel to play with him in string quartets, literally assuming the role of second fiddle.As the golden age of Hollywood faded, the studios abandoned their in-house orchestras, relying instead on freelancers. And as he aged, Seidel developed a neurological condition that gradually diminished his playing. This once-eminent violinist ended up in a pit orchestra in Las Vegas before retiring to an avocado farm in California. He died in 1962, at 62, with his violin by far his most valuable possession.That violin last sold at auction in London in 1974 for 34,000 pounds (over $3 million today). It is currently owned by the Japanese restaurant chain magnate Tokuji Munetsugu, who has amassed a collection of rare string instruments and sponsors an international violin competition in Japan. (Munetsugu, 73, has not said why he is selling it.)Film music has been making its way into concert halls, and the “Star Wars” and “Jaws” composer John Williams is arguably the most popular living American composer. But movie scores and their mostly anonymous players have long been largely shunned by the classical music elite.Could the “da Vinci” sale nevertheless set a record?The “Lady Blunt” Stradivarius, once owned by the granddaughter of Lord Byron, holds the current record for a violin sold at auction. (Its 2011 sale, for $15.9 million, was also handled by Tarisio.) Like the “Messiah” Stradivarius now owned by the British Museum, the “Lady Blunt” was hardly ever played, and remains in pristine condition.Carlos Tome, a violinist and a co-owner of Tarisio, said the auction house has not published an estimate for the “da Vinci.” Citing its rarity — a Stradivarius from the golden period — its fine condition and its “unique Hollywood provenance,” he said he expects it to sell in the $15 million to $20 million range.“It could set a record,” he said, noting the emergence of a class of wealthy collectors since the sale of the “Lady Blunt” a decade ago. (Other dealers say there have since been multiple private sales at prices over $20 million.)Baer dismissed the notion that the Hollywood pedigree of the “da Vinci” might curb its value at auction. While he conceded Seidel did not record the most intellectually rigorous music, he added that “the fact he was a Hollywood performer shouldn’t diminish the value at all.”“He was a great classical musician before he came to Hollywood,” Baer added. “And ‘The Wizard of Oz’ is a pretty big deal.” More

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      How Do You Write Down a Scratching, Crunching Violin ‘Chop’?

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      The chop turns string players into beatboxers. After it developed organically over decades, musicians are making new efforts to notate it.Change is hard. All the more so for an old, set-in-its-ways instrument like the violin.But it happens. And in the hands of the five-string fiddler Casey Driessen and the jazz violinist Oriol Saña, change sounds like an unexpected crunch. A scratch. A drag of the bow on the string that ramps up to build an intricate undercurrent of rhythm.How to describe it? “Like a DJ who scratches records,” Driessen offered in an interview. “A little chunky,” Saña said.This small revolution is known as “the chop,” a percussive technique that opens up a new world of rhythm and groove for the bowed string player. The chop turns a violinist into a beatboxer. To play it is to break basic conventions of what most listeners expect from a typically sweet, melodic instrument.For over half a century, musicians around the world have brought the chop to different genres, including bluegrass and jazz, Celtic and funk, far-flung regional traditions and beyond. Composers like Kenji Bunch, Jessica Meyer, Daniel Bernard Roumain and Mimi Rabson have featured it in new works. With all this activity, it has evolved into its own percussive language. This naturally raises the question: how does it get written down?It’s been a long path to trying to notate and codify the chop. “It’s not that often that somebody creates a whole new instrumental technique for the violin and that it actually becomes widespread,” said Laura Risk, a fiddler and assistant professor of music and culture at the University of Toronto Scarborough, who has documented the chop’s diffusion across North Atlantic string communities. “With the chop, it’s so recent and it’s so unusual that we can trace it.”In 1966, the bluegrass fiddler Richard Greene invented the basic chop and put it to work as a showpiece while soloing. It passed to the violinist Darol Anger, who developed it as a tool for backup in the Turtle Island Quartet, a genre-bending jazz group. The chop offered a way to mimic a full rhythm section using only string players.In 1973, Bill Keith, Clarence White, Richard Greene and David Grisman in the bluegrass band Muleskinner.via Richard GreeneIt’s in this form that the technique took off — “dangerously,” Anger has said. “I feel like Oppenheimer sometimes. I’ve released some kind of monster.”He recalls a watershed moment at a music camp in the 1990s, when he offered “Darol’s Chop Shop” to a group of virtuosic young fiddlers eager to discover new sounds. Among them were Driessen and Saña, who have since made chopping central to their musical lives. Driessen has extended the chop’s vocabulary through new moves, even introducing the “triple chop,” which makes a tsk-tsk-tsk triplet, as if calling to a stubborn cat; Saña has brought it to string communities in Europe; and both have passed it on through performance, workshops and online instructional videos.The chop’s spread has been raucous, organic, primarily learned player-to-player; at first glance, inventing a written form for it might seem strange or sacrilegious. Notation is a deliberate act of definition. It’s a bet on standardization in exchange for dissemination. Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Written down, a musical idea can be captured, preserved, studied and recreated.Casey DriessenAnger and the Turtle Island Quartet used a simple “x” or a slash in place of the standard notehead to mark different flavors of chop. When the group started publishing their own arrangements, those symbolic choices became quasi-codified, establishing a baseline notation. Two years ago, Saña and Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language. The project is a multimedia mixture of musical glossary, historical record and pedagogical tool.Of course, there is a tension in writing something down. Is a notation a description of a particular musical personality? A set of instructions for someone to follow? “With a score, there is usually leeway for interpretation,” Risk said. “That’s where your own sense of musicality, the style and genre, that’s where all of that comes in.”For Anger, writing at an earlier point in the chop’s development, the simplicity of the symbols was crucial. In its arrangements, the Turtle Island Quartet opted to use the minimal amount of information possible to make space for the somatic experience of the music: listening and feeling. They worried too much detail would muddle the groove, leaving players “dreading their way through a thicket of squiggles,” said Anger.Two years ago, Oriol Saña and Casey Driessen started The Chop Notation Project, an effort to recognize the technique on the page and create a shared language.Laura RuizDriessen and Saña debated how to express for players both the location and movement of the bow with precision, while still having the symbols be legible. For composers, software loomed large, with the two men choosing to favor readily available symbols in popular typesetting programs like Sibelius. Elements of taste also shaped how to visually represent a sound, often leaving them comparing which symbols felt “stronger,” “more intuitive” or “crunchier.”Given that the chop was already in widespread use, Driessen and Saña involved the musical community, too, including Greene, Anger and string faculty members at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. One important line of edits came from cellists like Natalie Haas and Mike Block, who pointed out aspects of the notation that they thought were too violin-centric. Driessen and Saña felt things had truly clicked when a colleague told them “it looks like it sounds, which is exactly the way notation should be.”The duo’s notation features a language of compound symbols. Different noteheads mark the quality of the percussive sound, including slashes of varying size for hard and soft chops, and an “x” for the subtle melodic hint of ghost notes. Signifiers for where to chop on the instrument (relative to the player’s body, at the midpoint or beyond the instrument’s bridge) combine with directions for how to move the bow vertically.Other modern chopping moves received their own written forms, taking cues from their corresponding sound and motion. For example, parallel scrapes (which often make a pitchless drag noise) use a headless stroke with a modified arrow indicating their duration and direction of attack. Circular bow scrapes (which sound like a chunky record scratch) resemble an altered “c” to show whether the rotation should be clockwise or counterclockwise.Will writing further spread the chop? The Chop Notation Project has already ended up in the textbook Berklee Contemporary Music Notation, and has been shared with students at gatherings like the Barcelona Fiddle Congress and online. Other chop notation systems continue to circulate, too, which make different choices about the exact information captured in writing and left up to the player.The chop is primarily a “living and evolving aural language,” said Driessen, but both he and Saña believe a standard notation will help find new exponents for its still-transgressive joys.“I teach chops with students who are four years old,” Saña said. “The first time when you teach it, they say, ‘I can do that with my fiddle?’” More

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      Rare Violin Tests Germany’s Commitment to Atone for Its Nazi Past

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRare Violin Tests Germany’s Commitment to Atone for Its Nazi PastThe instrument’s holders refuse to compensate the heirs of a Jewish music dealer, jeopardizing a system for restitution that has been in place for nearly two decades.The 1706 violin from the workshop of Giuseppe Guarneri at the center of the restitution dispute in Germany.Credit…Elke Richter/picture allianceJan. 25, 2021BERLIN — No one knows why Felix Hildesheimer, a Jewish dealer in music supplies, purchased a precious violin built by the Cremonese master Giuseppe Guarneri at a shop in Stuttgart, Germany, in January 1938. His own store had lost its non-Jewish customers because of Nazi boycotts, and his two daughters fled the country shortly afterward. His grandsons say it’s possible that Hildesheimer was hoping he could sell the violin in Australia, where he and his wife, Helene, planned to build a new life with their younger daughter.But the couple’s efforts to get an Australian visa failed and Hildesheimer killed himself in August 1939. More than 80 years later, his 300-year-old violin — valued at around $185,000 — is at the center of a dispute that is threatening to undermine Germany’s commitment to return objects looted by the Nazis.The government’s Advisory Commission on the return of Nazi-looted cultural property determined in 2016 that the violin was almost certainly either sold by Hildesheimer under duress, or seized by the Nazis after his death. In its first case concerning a musical instrument, the panel recommended that the current holder, the Franz Hofmann and Sophie Hagemann Foundation, a music education organization, should pay the dealer’s grandsons compensation of 100,000 euros, around $121,000; in return, the foundation could keep the instrument, which it planned to lend to talented violin students.An undated photo showing Felix Hildesheimer’s music store in Speyer, Germany. The store occupied the first floor of the building, and the Hildesheimers lived on the floors above.Credit…via David SandBut the foundation is refusing to pay. After first saying it couldn’t raise the funds, it is now casting doubt on the committee’s ruling. In a Jan. 20 statement, the foundation said “current information” suggested that Hildesheimer was not forced to give up his business until 1939, instead of 1937, as previously thought. So, the statement added, “we should assume that the violin was sold as a retail product in his music shop.”Last week, the Advisory Commission lost patience and issued a public statement aimed at raising pressure on the Hagemann Foundation to comply with its recommendation.“Both sides accepted this as a fair and just solution,” the statement said, accusing the foundation of not showing a “serious commitment to comply with the commission’s recommendation.” The efforts to contest the recommendation — four years after it was issued — by suggesting that the Jewish dealer sold the violin under perfectly normal conditions mean “the foundation is not just contravening existing principles on the restitution of Nazi-looted art,” the panel said, “it is also ignoring accepted facts about life in Nazi Germany.”The foundation’s refusal to pay is jeopardizing a system for handling Nazi-looted art claims that has been in place for nearly two decades and has led to the restitution of works from public museums and, in 2019, two paintings from the German government’s own art collection.Lawmakers set up the panel in 2003, after endorsing the Washington Principles, a 1998 international agreement calling for “just and fair” solutions for prewar owners and their heirs whose art had been confiscated by the Nazis. The families of Jews whose belongings were expropriated rarely succeed in recovering looted cultural property in German courts, because of statutes of limitation and rules that protect good-faith buyers of stolen goods. So the Advisory Commission, which arbitrates between the victims of spoliation and the holders of disputed cultural property, is often claimants’ only recourse.But the commission is not a court and has no legal powers to enforce its recommendations, explained Hans-Jürgen Papier, the panel’s chairman and a former president of Germany’s Constitutional Court, in an interview.“Instead it has the function of a mediator,” he said. “So far we have been able to count on public institutions to submit to the commission’s processes and implement its recommendations,” he added. “If that doesn’t work anymore, it’s unacceptable from our perspective.”After Hildesheimer’s purchase, the Guarneri violin’s tracks disappear until 1974, when it resurfaced at a shop in the city of Cologne, western Germany, and was purchased by the violinist Sophie Hagemann. She died in 2010, bequeathing it to the foundation she had set up to promote the work of her composer husband and support young musicians.The Hagemann Foundation, which has since restored the violin, began to investigate its prior ownership after her death. On noting the provenance gap from 1938 to 1974, it registered the instrument on a German government database of Nazi-looted cultural property, in the hope of finding more information about the Hildesheimer family. An American journalist tracked down the music dealer’s grandsons, and the foundation agreed to submit the case to the Advisory Commission.An undated photograph from the mid-1930s showing Felix Hildesheimer, right, playing piano accompaniment for his younger daughter, Elsbeth. Credit…via David SandWhen the commission ruled, in 2016, that the violin was likely to have been sold under duress, or seized after Hildesheimer’s death, the Hagemann Foundation accepted its terms and also promised that the students to whom it lent the violin would give regular concerts in Hildesheimer’s memory.But the Advisory Commission’s statement last week said it detected no “serious will” on the part of the foundation to raise the €100,000 compensation. The foundation’s continued description of the Guarneri violin as “an instrument of understanding” on its website is “particularly inappropriate,” the panel said, given its refusal to pay the heirs.The foundation’s president, Fabian Kern, declined an interview request, but issued a statement saying that the foundation had “undertaken countless efforts over several years to implement the commission’s recommendation.”David Sand, Hildesheimer’s California-based grandson, said in a telephone interview that the family had been “very accommodating, and even offered the foundation assistance with fund-raising in emails back and forth over the last four years.”“If the commission can be defied with no consequences, I don’t see how these cases can be dealt with in future,” he added.David Sand, a grandson of Felix Hildesheimer, in Los Angeles on Jan. 22. “If the commission can be defied with no consequences, I don’t see how these cases can be dealt with in future,” he said.Credit…Elizabeth Weinberg for The New York TimesPapier, the committee chairman, said he hoped the panel’s decision to tell the media about the foundation’s noncompliance would raise awareness among lawmakers and the public of the issues at stake. While the Hagemann Foundation is a private entity, it has close connections with the Nuremberg University of Music, which is owned by the German state of Bavaria, he said.He said he has already sought support from the Bavarian government, “but in the end nothing happened. Perhaps some political pressure will arise to ensure that this settlement, which was viewed by all involved as fair and just, is finally implemented.”But a spokeswoman for Bavaria’s Culture Ministry said it was “up to the private foundation to address the recommendations of the Advisory Commission. The state of Bavaria has no legal basis to influence private owners.”A spokesman for Germany’s federal Culture Ministry echoed these sentiments. The ministry has “no tools available to compel a private foundation to implement a recommendation by the commission,” he said.All this leaves the commission “standing high and dry,” said Stephan Klingen, an art historian at the Central Institute for Art History in Munich.“The commission’s only options are to hope that politicians somehow get them out of this mess, or to resign en masse,” Klingen said. “This puts the commission’s future on a knife edge. If there is no political support, then German restitution policy has reached the end of the line.”“If heirs can’t have faith in the implementation of the commission’s recommendations,” he added, “then why would they take their cases to it?”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More