Violin, the 'Duke of Alcantara'

A 1732 Stradivari violin, made in Cremona in the master's late eighties and named, on no documented basis, for an unidentified eighteenth-century Spanish nobleman. Donated to UCLA's Music Department in 1961 by Genevieve Vedder, widow of the oilman who had bought it, it disappeared from a graduate student's car in Pasadena on the evening of 2 August 1967 and was not seen again in public for twenty-seven years.

It resurfaced in January 1994 when its then-possessor, Teresa Salvato, sent it for repair and two Petaluma violin makers matched it, from a standard reference catalogue of Stradivari photographs, to the missing UCLA instrument. Between Salvato and the original theft lay an uncorroborated roadside discovery, a woman who kept it unreported for sixteen years, and a divorce settlement, none of it disputed as a sequence of possession, all of it thin as an account of how the object actually moved. A Los Angeles Superior Court settlement returned it to UCLA on 1 December 1995, along with the companion violin and bows stolen alongside it, for a payment to Salvato equal to roughly one seventieth of the instrument's appraised value.

UCLA still owns it. It lives in vault storage and comes out to be played by faculty and by student competition winners, a working instrument that happens to be one of 248 Stradivari violins known to survive, twice nearly sold off for budget reasons and twice kept.

A working violin, not a museum piece

The 'Duke of Alcantara' is a full-size violin, its one-piece maple back measuring 35.6 centimetres, its outline narrowing from a 20.8-centimetre lower bout through an 11.3-centimetre waist to a 16.9-centimetre upper bout. The top is carved spruce, the back and ribs are maple, the fingerboard and fittings are ebony, and the whole is finished in oil varnish over a ground, the standard Cremonese construction of Antonio Stradivari's workshop across five decades of instrument-making.

What separates it from most objects catalogued in this publication is that it is still, deliberately, a tool. It is not framed, glazed or displayed behind rope. UCLA keeps it in vault storage at the Fowler Museum and brings it out to be played, by faculty and by the winners of specific student competitions, several times a year. Any record of this instrument has to hold two facts at once: it is one of a documented population of Stradivari violins now numbering 248 worldwide by UCLA's own 2020 count, and it is also, day to day, a university's working teaching instrument that happens to be worth more than the building it is kept in.

A name with no name behind it

The violin is known by the nickname of a supposed former owner, an eighteenth-century Spanish nobleman referred to as the Duke of Alcantara. No source consulted names this individual, dates his ownership, or documents how the instrument came to be associated with him. The claim that it was later owned by Napoleon I of France in the early nineteenth century is reported in the same secondary literature with the same absence of documentation. Both attachments should be read as trade legend rather than established provenance, and this record grades them accordingly: unknown, not documented.

This is not a special defect of this instrument. Naming surviving Stradivari violins after a past owner, real or supposed, royal, noble or virtuoso, was and remains an ordinary practice of the violin trade: it gives dealers, insurers and scholars a stable handle for an otherwise anonymous object, and it does useful marketing work besides, lending an instrument a pedigree that is easier to remember and to sell than a serial number would be. The Duke of Alcantara is one particularly well-worn example of that practice. Where this record can verify an owner by name, from Albert Caressa onward, it says so and grades the claim documented; where it cannot, as with the Duke himself and with Napoleon, it says that plainly instead of repeating the legend as fact.

Stradivari at eighty-eight

Antonio Stradivari made this violin in 1732, by which point he was, by the most commonly used birth year of around 1644, approximately eighty-eight years old. That places it well outside the twelve years, roughly 1700 to 1720, that dealers and scholars have long singled out as his golden period, the run of instruments, including the 'Messiah' of 1716 and the 'Lady Blunt' of 1721, prized above all others for their broader plates, flatter arching and a particular translucent red-orange varnish. A 1732 instrument is, by definition, a late one.

Specialist assessment of the instrument itself reflects that. Some observers who have examined it describe the cutting of the f-holes and the handling of the varnish as comparatively clumsy set against Stradivari's earlier work, and there is speculation, argued rather than documented, that his sons Francesco (1671-1743) and Omobono (1679-1742), both long resident in his workshop, had a hand in its making. That speculation cannot be verified from any surviving contract, workshop record or signature; no source consulted claims otherwise. What can be said with more confidence is general and well established in the literature on Stradivari's late shop: from the later 1720s into the 1730s, the sons' involvement in instruments bearing their father's label becomes more visible to specialists than it is in work from two decades earlier, and a small number of instruments from this period even carry labels indicating they were made under Antonio's direction rather than solely by his own hand. Whether that is true of this particular violin has not been established by any technical study located for this record, and no dendrochronological, varnish-analysis or X-radiographic study of the Duke of Alcantara specifically appears in the sources consulted. That absence is itself worth recording, since it is exactly the kind of study that has settled comparable questions on other late Stradivari instruments.

Paris to Cincinnati: the documented chain before America

The first owner this record can name with confidence is Albert Caressa, a Paris dealer, who sold the violin to the Berlin collector Erich Lachmann. In 1925 Lachmann sold it on to a Dr. Steiner-Schweizer in Switzerland. In 1929 it passed to the Rudolph Wurlitzer Co., the New York dealing house that by then also operated out of Cincinnati, and it is Wurlitzer's own certificate, alongside Lachmann's, that anchors this stretch of the chain in the trade's paper record rather than in later retelling.

From Wurlitzer the violin went, by the mid-1940s, to Ilya Schkolnik, concertmaster of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Schkolnik had been a working violinist since childhood: born in Odessa in 1890 to a musician father who toured him through Europe as a boy, trained at the conservatories of Leipzig and Brussels, he had already held the concertmaster's chair of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra under its founding conductor Ossip Gabrilowitsch from 1918 before his later Baltimore appointment. This is, in other words, a professional orchestral instrument moving through a professional orchestral career, not a curiosity changing hands between collectors who never played it.

An oilman, his widow, and a university gift

When Schkolnik relocated to Los Angeles, the violin passed, in the late 1950s, to Milton Vedder, an oilman. No source consulted gives a fuller account of Vedder's business or his reasons for buying the instrument beyond the fact of the purchase. Vedder died not long afterward, and in 1961 his widow, Genevieve Vedder, donated the Stradivari violin to UCLA's Music Department.

The gift belongs to an ordinary and well-documented mid-twentieth-century American pattern: a widow disposing of a late husband's prized, illiquid, difficult-to-sell-well possession by giving it to a public institution, in this case a university department rather than a museum, in exchange for the object's continued use and a measure of donor recognition rather than a market price. UCLA's music faculty took Genevieve Vedder at her evident intention. Professor Marrocco Thomas performed on the violin as a working teaching and performance instrument through the six years the university held it before it disappeared, which is exactly the kind of active institutional use, rather than vault storage, that the object still returns to today whenever it is not locked away for security.

The evening of 2 August 1967

In 1967 the violin was on loan to David Margetts, a UCLA graduate student and the second violinist of the Feri Roth String Quartet, the string quartet in residence at UCLA. It travelled in a double case that also held a violin by the Bolognese maker Ansaldo Poggi, made in the 1950s, and two bows, one by Francois Tourte and one by Markus Fischer.

On the evening of 2 August 1967, after a rehearsal in Hollywood, Margetts stopped to buy groceries in Pasadena. When he returned to his car, the case was gone. By his own later account, repeated in press coverage of the case, he was never certain which of two things had happened: that the case had been stolen from inside the vehicle, or that he himself had set it on the car's roof, forgotten it, and driven off, letting it fall or be taken from there. Margetts is reported to have made diligent, repeated efforts afterward to locate the instrument. Police reports were filed and pawn shops were circulated with notices; none of it produced a lead. No source consulted describes a public reward, an insurance payout, or any specific police theory of the theft beyond the bare fact that it went unsolved. Whatever happened on that street in Pasadena, it left no trail for twenty-seven years, and the uncertainty over theft versus accident was never resolved, then or since.

Under a bed for sixteen years

Nadia Tupica, the owner of a local music store and a retired Spanish teacher, said afterward that she had found the double case on the shoulder of a Los Angeles freeway on-ramp later that month, having stopped believing she saw an abandoned infant only to find a violin case instead. That is her account, and it is the only account: no source consulted corroborates it independently, no witness or police report confirms it, and nothing explains why a music store proprietor, of all people, would hold on to an unidentified violin in a double case for a decade and a half without having it examined by a colleague in her own trade or reported to any authority. This record grades the finding story as an unverified claim by the person who benefited from it, not as documented fact, while treating her actual, sustained possession of the instrument from sometime in 1967 until her death in 1978 as established.

Under California law, failing to make reasonable efforts to identify or return a valuable found item, rather than simply keeping it, exposes a finder to the same legal consequences as a thief; this is the backdrop against which UCLA later pursued its claim, since Tupica's estate and heirs stood in no better legal position than she would have. She kept the case, reportedly under her bed, until her death in 1978, when it passed to her nephew, Jefferson Demarco.

A divorce settlement, 1993

Demarco held the violin from 1978 until his divorce from his wife, Teresa Salvato, an amateur violinist living in Riverside, California, who had reportedly played the instrument for roughly fourteen years during the marriage without either party learning what it actually was. In the divorce settlement of late 1993, the double case and its contents were awarded to Salvato. Nothing in the sources consulted suggests either Demarco or Salvato understood at that point that the violin was a Stradivari, let alone the specific missing UCLA instrument; the case had, by every account, been treated inside the family as an ordinary, somewhat valuable heirloom violin passed down from an aunt, not as a subject of concealment.

A luthier in Petaluma, January 1994

In January 1994 Salvato lent the violin to her teacher, Michael Sand, who took it north to Petaluma for maintenance work at the shop of Joseph Grubaugh and his wife Sigrun Seifert, both members of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. It did not take them long. Cross-checking the instrument against Herbert K. Goodkind's Violin Iconography of Antonio Stradivari, 1644-1737, the standard photographic reference catalogue of documented Stradivari instruments compiled specifically so that individual violins could be identified from their photographs and measurements after loss or theft, and against the Federation's own registry of instruments reported stolen, Grubaugh and Seifert matched the violin in front of them to the missing UCLA Stradivari and telephoned the university directly.

This is worth pausing on, because it answers a question a reader would otherwise be left with: what made identification possible at all, twenty-seven years and one unremarkable-looking repair job later? The answer is that Stradivari instruments have been documented this precisely, by photograph and measurement, for exactly this reason, because theft and loss are common enough in this market that the trade built its own identification infrastructure well before this case tested it.

The dispute, 1994-1995

What followed was not a quiet handover. UCLA's position, as its representative Ruth Simon put it to the press at the time, was unambiguous: 'Our goal is to get the violin back, our singular goal.' Salvato did not surrender the instrument immediately. Her attorney, Allen Hyman, argued a good-faith-purchaser theory, that a possessor who came into stolen property without knowledge of the theft could acquire ownership rights in it. Salvato herself, by press accounts, went quiet for months, ignored UCLA's calls, and at one point left home to stay in a hotel. In May 1994 campus police officers went to her home and threatened her with arrest. On 14 October 1994 UCLA's lawyers obtained a court injunction compelling disclosure of the violin's location; rather than face that order directly, Salvato agreed to surrender the instrument to UCLA's Fowler Museum, and on 17 October it was authenticated there and taken into the museum's keeping, unplayed, pending resolution.

Resolution took over a year more. On 1 December 1995 the Los Angeles Superior Court matter concluded: the Stradivari, the Poggi violin and the two bows would return outright to UCLA, and Salvato would receive a payment of $11,500. At the time of settlement the Stradivari alone was estimated to be worth at least $800,000, meaning Salvato's payment amounted to roughly one seventieth of the instrument's appraised value, a figure that reads far more like a negotiated nuisance payment to close out a claim UCLA judged it was going to win in any case than like a market price for anything. The case's full docket carries a second, related listing, a cross-action styled Margaret Coppin v. Teresa Salvato, et al., filed within the same Los Angeles Superior Court case number, BC 114151. No source consulted for this record explains who Margaret Coppin was or what she claimed, and this record does not guess.

What actually came back, and what did not

It is worth being exact about what the 1995 settlement returned, because the case is sometimes flattened in retelling into a story about a single violin. Two instruments and two bows had disappeared together in 1967 and all four came back together in 1995: the Stradivari itself; the Poggi violin, a mid-twentieth-century Italian instrument built on a Stradivari pattern by Ansaldo Poggi of Bologna, an entirely different maker working two centuries later, not a second Stradivari and not the same object under another name; a bow by Francois Tourte, the most celebrated of all bow makers; and a bow by Markus Fischer. The Poggi and the two bows are part of this same theft and this same recovery, not a separate case that happened to run in parallel.

They should also not be confused with an unrelated case that involves a different Stradivari entirely: the Ex-Davidoff-Morini Stradivari of 1727, stolen from the New York apartment of the concert violinist Erica Morini in October 1995, which as of the sources consulted here has never been recovered. The two cases share only a maker, a decade of press coverage, and the general fact of Stradivari theft; they are otherwise unconnected, and this record treats them as such.

Back in the vault, back on the stage

Since 1995 the Duke of Alcantara has stayed UCLA property, kept locked in vault storage at the Fowler Museum and brought out under supervision. It is not treated as untouchable: winners of the UCLA Philharmonia's All-Star Concerto Competition and the Atwater Kent String Concerto Competition earn the right to perform on it, a small number of students each year. Tiffany Wee, a UCLA violin student in the class of 2016, described months of practising on it before her own competition performance in terms that double as the best short account available of what the instrument still does at nearly three hundred years old: 'I had to learn how the Strad wanted to be played.' Alexander Treger, concertmaster of the Los Angeles Philharmonic and a UCLA professor, gave what appears to be its first public performance after the settlement, at a private recital at the UCLA chancellor's residence later in December 1995.

The university has twice come close to losing it since. One account states that UCLA put the violin up for sale during a round of budget cuts in the 1980s and, after roughly a year with no buyer, withdrew it from the market; a separate and more widely reported episode describes a 2006 proposal to sell the instrument for budget reasons, defeated after advocacy led by the UCLA cellist and faculty member Antonio Lysy, who argued for keeping it as a teaching resource rather than converting it to cash. The sources consulted do not make clear whether these are two distinct episodes eighteen years apart or a single episode reported with inconsistent dates; this record treats them as separate until a source resolves the discrepancy. In 2020 the university's holdings of historic instruments doubled in another respect when the Twiford Foundation, a foundation established by the family of the collector Lavern Twiford, donated a second Stradivari violin, a Sanctus Seraphin violin, and several historic bows, including work by Francois Tourte, Nikolai Kittel and W.E. Hill & Sons, to the Herb Alpert School of Music, giving UCLA two of the 248 Stradivari violins then known to survive.

A dukedom, a dictatorship, and the trade in reputation

There is no evidence in any source consulted for this record of a hidden iconographic or devotional programme behind this object, and none should be invented. A violin is a working tool built to a functional acoustic design, and the honest finding here is an absence: nothing about its form, its wood or its varnish encodes a belief system, and no contract, inventory or correspondence attaches a doctrinal or symbolic intention to its making. What the object does carry, well documented rather than invented, is a history of being used as a vessel for reputation, first the trade's own, then a nation's.

The naming convention itself, an invented or unverifiable noble owner standing in for a serial number, is a documented feature of how the violin trade has marketed and organised its most valuable stock since at least the nineteenth century; a Stradivari with a duke's name attached to it is easier to insure, catalogue, write about and sell than one with none. Separately, and on a larger stage, Stradivari's reputation was itself put to explicit state use in 1937, when the Kingdom of Italy, under the Fascist government, issued a 20-centesimo commemorative postage stamp bearing a framed portrait of Stradivari as part of a series honouring 'Uomini Illustri', famous Italians, holding him up as a national genius in the same register as the regime's other commemorated historical figures. No confirmed portrait of Stradivari made from life survives; the stamp's image, like other later 'possible' portraits circulating in archives today, is a retrospective invention rather than a documented likeness, which makes the stamp itself a small, clean case study in how a maker's fame is manufactured well after the fact rather than transmitted from any authentic image of the man.