Sign Up To Receive 5% Off!
The World's Most Expensive Musical Instrument
When we wonder about what the most expensive musical instrument might be, people tend to fall into two camps. Those that say "A Stradivarius violin" and those that say "Eric Clapton's guitar" or perhaps another musician. In fact, its neither.
To date, guitars haven't yet broken the million mark. In 2004, Eric Clapton's famous "Blackie" Stratocaster sold for $959,500. It could be expected that this instrument might fetch more today (or maybe not, due to the recession) and a few others might command even higher prices if they were sold, such as Paul McCartney's bass he used with The Beatles, but even with the huge market for that type of memorabilia these instruments still cannot compete with high-end violin prices.
For those that think Stradivarius is the winner, unfortunately, they are mistaken. But they do play second fiddle, with a violin named "Lady Tennant" having sold at Christie's in 2005 for a whopping $2.03 million. If Antonio Stradivari had known his violins would be worth so much when he made them in the early 18th century, he might have built more of them. Alas, he only made about 1100, with only 650 believed to exist today.
But there is one instrument that is even rarer, and recently sold for much much more than any Stradivarius ever has. Chances are, unless you're a violinist, you've never heard of it or its maker.
Guiseppe Guarneri del Gesu was a contemporary of Antonio Stradivari, and in fact worked in the same town of Cremona, Italy. His violins are more rare than Stradivari's, and seem to have been even better made. Nothing else sounds like them, and the most recent price for one at Sotheby's set a new precedent for violin prices. It fetched a whopping $4 million. Nothing else in the music world can compete with that, at least for now.
But there may be one other. The ancient and now only partly functional Midmer-Losh theater pipe organ in the Atlantic City Convention Hall. This is, or at least was, the largest and loudest musical instrument ever made. It has 33,144 pipes, with the largest measuring in at 64 feet long. It builds so much air pressure that problems were encountered in keeping its smaller pipes from flying through the roof. To restore this instrument completely would probably cost more than a Gaurnerius del Gesu, and to construct a new one from scratch would be far, far more.
So in the end the highest price paid for a musical instrument goes to an obscure violin that is not a Stradivarius, and the highest price possible goes to a behemoth pipe organ that is now, sadly, silent.
