By Tom Shroder
Sunday, June 29, 2008

WHEN MY DAUGHTER STARTED NINTH GRADE, her orchestra teacher flatly informed her that the $500 violin she'd played in middle school was barely worth practicing with, and by no means appropriate for high school performances. The minimally acceptable instruments started at $2,000.

My initial response as an enlightened, education-promoting parent: No freakin' way!

But reason -- or what passes for reason in the Washington suburbs -- prevailed. Soon my daughter had her new violin, which, I had to admit, turned her scratch and squeak into something approaching music. And it came in a very cool velvet-lined case. I never could have imagined that this same velvet lining would one day swaddle a violin worth more than fifteen-hundred times Emily's bank-breaker.

It came to pass a little more than a year ago, when Gene Weingarten persuaded Joshua Bell, one of the world's top violinists, to attempt an experiment in aesthetics: play incognito outside a Washington Metro station and see if passersby bothered to stop, even briefly, to hear some of the greatest music ever written played on one of the greatest instruments ever made. The night before the surprise concert, I got a call from Gene. Turns out that Josh transports his priceless Stradivarius in a box, not a violin case of the sort a street musician would leave open to encourage tips. Could he borrow my daughter's case?

The next morning Emily met Josh surreptitiously inside the Metro station to hand him her case. The Strad fit perfectly. It looked, to my crude eye, surprisingly like her violin. But even I could hear the magnificence of its tone when Josh plucked it from the case and played. I soon learned that it cost more than $3 million, and had a unique history: Created in 1713, it was stolen at least twice, most recently in 1936, when it disappeared from a Carnegie Hall dressing room. It was recovered only because the thief -- who'd fiddled the masterpiece for decades as an itinerant musician -- confessed on his deathbed a half-century later.

That's a lot of musical history to hold in a young woman's violin case. But when Josh stopped playing after 45 minutes, autographed Emily's case and insisted on handing her the $50 plus change in tips for "rent," I knew that the musical history she'd witnessed herself that morning was almost as priceless as the Strad.

What I didn't know was that another bizarre twist to the story would come to light a year later, after Weingarten collected a Pulitzer Prize for his story on the stunt. To find out what it is, turn to Page 32.

Tom Shroder can be reached at shrodert@washpost.com.