On a cold day last winter, an ailing Bernard Greenhouse, wearing an elegant bathrobe and attached to oxygen, was wheeled into the living room of his Cape Cod home, which was festooned with paper cutouts of musical notes. Relatives and students, locals and caregivers had gathered to celebrate the 95th birthday of one of classical music’s most respected cellists, a founding member of the famed Beaux Arts Trio and a beloved teacher. Young cellists performed for him, and then Greenhouse indulged in a martini and a plate of oysters. Thus fortified, he decided he wanted to play for the company. He picked up his cello and, though a bit wobbly, soulfully rendered “Song of the Birds,” a Catalan folk melody transcribed by Pablo Casals, with whom he studied many years ago.
Selling a 300-Year-Old Cello
Bernard Greenhouse with his Stradivarius cello in 1975
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
Published: January 13, 2012
Abelardo Morell for The New York Times
The Countess of Stainlein cello, one of the few remaining Stradivariuses.
“And then he laid down the bow and praised the cello for its beauty,” Nicholas Delbanco, Greenhouse’s son-in-law, recounted. “He said it had been his lifelong companion and the darling of his heart.” Indeed, the instrument, known as the Countess of Stainlein, ex-Paganini of 1707 — perhaps the greatest surviving Stradivarius cello — had been with Greenhouse for 54 years. It was his voice on numerous recordings and a presence at up to 200 concerts a year. Toward the end of his life, Greenhouse asked his nurses to lay the instrument next to him in bed.
But in a twist of exquisite poignancy, Greenhouse was not actually playing his precious cello that day on Cape Cod. It was an exact replica that was made especially for him, a beautiful instrument but not the Strad. As they listened to him talk of his love for the cello, his daughter Elena Delbanco and her husband grieved that he could not tell he was playing the substitute. “We knew that this was the beginning of the end,” Nicholas Delbanco said. Five months later, Greenhouse died.
Despite saying that he wanted to sell his cello while he was still alive so that a worthy young musician might benefit from it, Greenhouse was unable to part with it. Now his family has entrusted the sale of the Countess of Stainlein to the Boston violin dealer Christopher Reuning, who this week will open sealed bids starting in the millions of dollars.
Much attention in the music world is given to the sale of Strads and other rare string instruments. The numbers are tallied up like baseball records: $15.9 million for the 1721 Lady Blunt Stradivarius violin this year; more than $10 million for the Kochanski Guarneri del Gesu in 2009. Reuning expects that the Greenhouse cello will match or exceed the previous record of $6 million for a cello. Behind the dollar figures, though, is a story of possession and loss, of performers giving up the instruments that have defined their artistic and emotional selves.
“It was the pride of his life,” Elena Delbanco, a lecturer at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan, said of her father’s Strad. “It was his soul mate. Until the day he died he could not bear to part with it.
“I would like him, were he around, to think that we did the right thing and be happy where the cello went,” she continued. “I would like it to be loved as much by its next owner as it was by my father.”
The master makers of bowed instruments flourished in northern Italy from about 1550 to 1750, when supreme craftsmanship, superior woods and varnish, enduring models and a highly developed apprentice system centered on a few families. The best-known were located in Cremona and included Amati, Guarneri and Bergonzi. But the greatest acclaim has belonged to Antonio Stradivari, or Stradivarius, as he was also known. Only about 600 instruments attributed to him are still in existence, including 20 of his prime cellos — made after 1707 in a slightly smaller size, called Forma B, and more adapted to solo playing. The Countess of Stainlein is the earliest known Forma B.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 13, 2012
An earlier version of the headline with this article misstated the age of the cello. It is 300 years old, not 400.
