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We have a select supply of quality vintage violins and violas. Most of these instruments have been thoroughly restored by myself or by other luthiers to be the best instruments they can possibly be. For the most part, vintage violins and violas from France and Germany begin at $2500.00, with some exceptions for especially good sounding older, lower grade instruments. Some shops will sell old instruments that are in bad structural or cosmetic condition for a low price simply because they sound good. I believe this practice is counterproductive to one’s long term reputation, so I avoid it. It is my belief that you will find a better value below $2500 in a recently made instrument. Beyond that price, older is very often better. Text continues after instrument descriptions. Click on the name and bring up the photo.
This great sounding violin would be perfect for a fiddle player. It has a great open played-in sound. It's perfect for a fiddler because the fingerboard is 10mm too short, and to play comfortably in the higher registers the overstand (that's the distance from the edge at the top of the violin to the bottom of the fingerboard) should be raised. Most fiddle music is played in first position, and sometimes in second and third. This violin shows its age naturally--there has been no artificial aging.
This is a violin that would usually be called a "Dresden School" instrument--not because it was made in Dresden, but because the usual fake label inside said "Dresden." These instruments were made in Markneukirchen and were often designed to look French. This one is in very good cosmetic condition and has a great sound for such a reasonable price.
Heberlein made many models, and this one is somewhere in the middle. If features highly flamed maple, shaded varnish, and the typical meticulous Heberlein workmanship.
This instrument is in almost perfect original condition, with beautifully flamed maple and tastefully shaded varnish. It has a rich and complex sound that needs to be developed by some vigorous playing, because it has seldom been played in the last 50 years.
Mr. Matsuda is one of today's finest makers. I visited the Lee workshp around the time that this violin was made, and for all I know, this was the violin Tetsuo was making. It's an unantiqued strad model with very clean workmanship and high quality wood. Having not been exersized since 1986, it awaits an enthusiastic new owner.
After many years of storage or disuse, vintage instruments often need a significant amount of work. The higher quality items are well worth the investment in time and materials. This is the area where the great Markneukirchen and Schonbach (both German) violins from 1880 to 1940 are found. Also in this category are violins from Mirecourt (France). They feature terrific wood and workmanship. Unfortunately it’s in the wood where the problem lies: there’s too much of it. For whatever reason, the average Heberlein or E.H. Roth violin is twenty to forty percent too thick, and the necks need to be cut down to the proper size. This is a time consuming process because what we are doing is completing the job that the original makers started. And don’t think for a minute that we are altering an original work of art. As Hans Weisshaar said in his book Violin Restoration, they could have been “sold more advantageously by the pound than by the sound.” These instruments are the 1930’s versions of the semi-mass-produced “intermediate instruments” described elsewhere on this site. That’s what they were then. Today the quality of the wood, the varnish, and the workmanship make them much more.
In order to enhance the sound, we also need to bring the instrument to the best possible structural condition as is possible. We stand behind what we sell, and to do this with older instruments we have to make sure that there will be no problems. Besides conservatively graduating the plates to normal thicknesses and replacing the bass bar, the neck is often removed and reset, peg holes bushed, fingerboard replaced, cracks artistically repaired, edges replaced, varnish retouched, etc. Instruments much more than 125 to 150 years old have many more restoration issues than described above.
Not all instruments of that era need that amount of work—there are many that only need to be cleaned and set up. Sometimes we get lucky.
The potential quality determines whether it’s worth it to perform what amounts to $1500 to $3000 of work on an instrument. The quality of today’s instruments has already determined that a whole class of instruments that sold for $500 to $2000 twenty years ago no longer measure up to the current products.
So as I have said many times in the past, it is unusual to find a good looking, good sounding vintage violin for less than $2500.00. The average price for a typical pre-war Markneukirchen, Schonbach, or Mirecourt violin that has been “brought up to speed” is $3000 to $5000, with the more desirable “name” instruments, like high end Heberlein’s and Roth’s, thousands more.
Let me make one thing clear: it is never permissible to alter the graduations or to remove original varnish on an instrument that has been made by an individual master maker. The instruments described above were still semi-mass-produced, just at a much higher level and with higher quality wood than what we see today. And we haven’t even approached the level of what fine professional-level vintage instruments can cost, and how much it can take to restore them for modern playability.
