SECRETS AND LIES

While Arthur Abell had a taste for high society, his brother Edward became a recluse – but both had a penchant for fine violins and a cavalier attitude to the truth, as Clifford Hall reveals

Arthur M. Abell

Edward W. Abell

EDWARD ABELL PHOTO VIOLIN SOCIETY OF AMERICA/ H.K. GOODKIND COLLECTION, OBERLIN CONSERVATORY LIBRARY

Arthur and Edward Abell, two sons of a 19thcentury, sixth-generation Connecticut farmer, had humble roots but big dreams. Almost impossibly, Arthur (1868–1958) went on to study violin with Joseph Joachim’s student Carl Halir (at Joachim’s recommendation) at Berlin’s Königliche Akademische Hochschule für Musik and became one of the more prominent music critics of the 20th century. Edward (1864–1957), after his father put him out to work on a farm at only 14 years old to help support their large family, managed to graduate from Yale University. But instead of following his dream, he turned down a chance to gain a doctorate in astronomy to resign himself to a mid-level job at an electric company for practicality’s sake.

As Arthur exchanged letters with Richard Strauss, Edward toiled in near obscurity. Though they had quite divergent career paths, one common frontier they shared was a lifelong love of the violin and each had access to their own violin collections: one very public (2022 being the 100th anniversary of the somewhat scandalous sale of this assemblage) and the other extremely private.

This is the story of how they ruthlessly dismissed both truth and family loyalty in pursuit of their musical passions.

The brothers were born in Freedom, Minnesota, but their rambling father Ira Abell moved the family, after 17 years of roaming the Midwest, back to their ancestral home of Norwich, Connecticut. Their roots in this area were deep, Abells having lived in this town since 1630. Though Edward thrived at Yale, Arthur only lasted a year there as he followed his passion to study music in Berlin.

In Germany, Arthur lived quite the storied life. Initially travelling there to study violin with Halir (paid for by his elder brother Edward), he abandoned that career as he became the Berlin correspondent for New York’s Musical Courier from 1893 to 1918. Here he found the trappings of a celebrity journalist, as he hosted fabulous weekly salons that attracted the likes of violinist Fritz Kreisler and composer Engelbert Humperdinck.

Arthur wrote for various magazines and the brothers corresponded about the subject. Edward dabbled in journalism as well but was far less productive. He wrote a 1917 article in The Violinist: ‘Yesterday I received a letter from my brother, Arthur M. Abell, now in Amsterdam, Holland, saying that Mr Alfred Hill, of London, whom he knows well, recently sold the “Messie” Strad for 5,000 pounds (nearly $25,000). Mr Hill told him there are now only about 70 genuine Joseph Guarnerius del Jesu violins in existence, and some 650 Strads.’

In 1910 Arthur married Adeline Partello, daughter of the wealthy Dwight Partello Sr. Marrying into this family would give Arthur access to the collection of 26 valuable violins (including four Stradivaris), which Partello bequeathed to the Smithsonian in 1922. The donation itself made national headlines as this was to be one of the first of its kind in America. Arthur Abell made sure that did not happen.

Partello was a Washington diplomat who spent 25 years as consul to Germany. Appointed by President Grover Cleveland in 1885, Partello used his time abroad to curate a worldrenowned assemblage of violins (including the ‘Bergonzi’ Stradivari) that he proudly exhibited in the World’s Columbian Exposition, celebrated at Chicago in 1892–93.

After returning to Washington in 1916, he began in earnest to find a final destination for his collection. Although New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art offered him $125,000 in 1915, his plan shifted as he began corresponding with officials at the National Museum in Washington (now more commonly known as the Smithsonian). Concurrently, Partello renewed his friendship with Washington socialite Flora B. Thompson, as the Evening Star reported that on 11 February 1917 ‘a delightful musical was given by Mrs John W. Thompson at her residence in I Street recently, when instruments from the famous collection of D.J. Partello were used.’ One year later, Partello had changed his will so his collection of art and instruments could go to ‘the nation’ by bequeathing them to the Smithsonian.

While dining at Thompson’s house on 13 August 1920, Partello fell ill and died. In just a few weeks, Washington newspapers reported that Partello gave Thompson $10,000 in his will, whereas he only gave $5,000 to each of his daughters. The real drama, however, started unfolding in January when it publicly emerged that Partello was leaving his entire collection of violins to the Smithsonian. In response, Arthur mobilised an army of famous musicians, including violinists Fritz Kreisler and Jan Kubelík, to speak out in newspapers against this potential ‘life sentence’ for the violins.

Richard Aldrich, the New York Times music critic, wrote in March, ‘Take the Partello Collection, bequeathed to the National Museum in Washington. As was before observed in this column, what gets into the National Museum never gets out again. Nobody has any authority to lend violins that are a part of the collection.’

To ratchet up the pressure even more, the Abells wrote a letter in April 1921 to Smithsonian president Charles Walcott:

You no doubt are wholly unaware of the magnitude of the storm that is brewing… thus far, we have kept these letters out of the press, but the demand for their publication is becoming more and more insistent… In his old age, however, he came under the influence of a woman [Thompson] here in Washington who was thoroughly unmusical, and who worked upon his vanity, persuading him that it would be a grand thing to keep the violins together in the Museum and thus perpetuate his own name. He finally yielded to this influence and made the mad bequest.

Arthur’s influence was evident in that he wrote in the New York Times in 1926: ‘I wish to state that the museum authorities are wholly innocent and that the undue influence was exerted from quite another quarter.’ The Smithsonian was unmoved as it denied Abell’s request in May 1921.

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

A selection of letters received by the Smithsonian regarding the Partello bequest. Top Fritz Kreisler cites the case of Paganini’s ‘Il Cannone’ in Genoa Middle Jan Kubelík refers to the bequest as a ‘musical outrage’ Bottom Writing in Italian, Arturo Toscanini argues that ‘violins that are not used are subject to rapid deterioration’

More letters to the Smithsonian: Clockwise from top left Leopold Stokowski calls the scheme ‘an irreparable loss’; Eugène Ysaÿe calls on the Smithsonian to ‘follow the example of other prominent museums and reject the gift’; Jacques Thibaud and his accompanist Harold Bauer rail against ‘the doom of eternal silence and early deterioration’

In August a ship ported in New York from Germany with the Baroness Carita van Horst (Adeline’s sister) aboard. She arrived with a suspiciously timed bill of sale from 1914. It seemed Partello had sold the violin collection to his daughter Carita for $10, which led the district attorney’s office to drop the case.

This was a strange development considering Adeline had written to Walcott only months earlier (without presenting this key evidence), saying that ‘my father was a man of limited means. He could not afford such luxuries as these expensive violins, and in order to purchase them he deprived his family of many needed things. When my mother and we children remonstrated with him, he always said, “When I die I shall leave the whole collection to you, my children, and you can sell the violins and profit by the investment, as the instruments are continually appreciating in value.”’

The daughters successfully intimidated the Smithsonian to refuse the bequest and, by July of that year, the violins had been sold to the dealers Lyon & Healy for $250,000 (about $4 million in today’s currency).

As to the fate of these instruments, Ernest Doring lamented in his 1945 book How Many Strads? ‘had the terms of Partello’s will been carried out, the precious things to which he devoted a lifetime in accumulation would not, as they are now, be widely distributed throughout the land; the thought that they are affording their present owners pride and delight may be some consolation but there are certain specimens which, to my knowledge, show all too plainly the results in injudicious practice; a few are heard played upon in our concert halls, but the majority are in private possession.’

Partello’s daughter Carita produced this bill of sale, in which he gave her ‘all my personal property’ for a mere $10, to support the family’s claim to the violin collection

ALL PHOTOS COURTESY SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

THE DAUGHTERS INTIMIDATED THE SMITHSONIAN TO REFUSE THE BEQUEST, AND BY JULY THE VIOLINS HAD BEEN SOLD FOR $250,000

Adeline Abell and Carita von Horst, seated, sign the contract while Arthur Abell (far left) and John R. Dubbs and Hermann H. Kroeplin, both of Lyon & Healy, look on

Even a century later, this turn of events continues to leave its mark. ‘The Partello gift – if it had gone through – would have been the earliest collection to go to an American museum. I posit that the controversy around the gift itself, and then the court case, played out in such a public way that it may have inspired others to give violins to the nation’s great museums,’ says Jayson Dobney, the Metropolitan Museum’s musical instruments curator. ‘The Met received our two Strads in 1933 and the Library of Congress received its famous Whittall collection in 1935.’

Three years later the daughters (with Arthur Abell) attempted to file a lawsuit against the widow of Partello’s son to break another contract in which Partello Sr had willed the family farm in Iowa to his son’s widow. These petitioners submitted as evidence a letter from Partello Sr in which he attested the gift of the deed was only to be transferred if the son outlived the father. The Emmetsburg Democrat, the local Iowa paper, reported on 12 November 1924 that the case was dismissed because ‘Judge Coyle decided the signature to the supposed letter was a forgery, that the contents of the letter showed that it was a fabrication.’

This was not the last time Arthur Abell was charged with deceit. Thirty years later, as his literary career had wound down, the octogenarian Abell wrote about his experiences in Germany in his youth. Talks with Great Composers was published at the end of an accomplished career as a music journalist (whose publicising of the eleven-year-old Jascha Heifetz was mentioned in The Strad ). Although he had spoken with such musicians as Puccini, Strauss, Humperdinck, Bruch and Grieg, the crux of the book is based on a three-hour conversation about spiritualism and the compositional process he had with Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms (who stipulated that the interview not appear in print until 50 years after his death).

‘THE SCENT OF FRAUD HANGS ABOUT A BELL’S “INTERVIEW” WITH BR AHMS’

‘At the beginning of my Brahms research I eagerly seized on it and sketched a chapter based on it,’ says Jan Swafford, author of Johannes Brahms: A Biography (1997). ‘I thought this was a revelatory thing about Brahms, because at this point I had read at least a couple of other biographies and they’d never mentioned this. I said, “This is fascinating.” But again I read it and at some point I just began to say, “Wait a minute.”’

Although the book was initially well received and is still in print, modern scholars such as Swafford have found the book strains credibility due to its ‘manifestly bogus’ portrait of Brahms as a believer in spiritualism.

‘For me, as a composer, it would be utterly futile to enter into that hypnotic state that Daniel Home was when he accomplished those feats that so astonished the world,’ Abell recalled Brahms saying. ‘In that condition I would have, no doubt, wonderful revelations and ideas far more inspired than were ever vouchsafed (verliehen) to any other composer, but it would be quite in vain because I could not bring those secrets back to me.’

Daniel Home was a 19th-century Scottish psychic medium who claimed, among other parlour tricks, that he could levitate objects. Although Home was thoroughly debunked during and after his life, Abell portrays Brahms as being in his thrall when he quotes him as saying: ‘Home’s feats confounded the atheists. I know several young composers who are atheists. I have read their scores, and I assure you, Joseph [Joachim], that they are doomed to speedy oblivion, because they are utterly lacking in inspiration… No atheist has ever been or ever will be a great composer.’

Swafford is not convinced of the veracity of these recollections. ‘I think that Brahms is in some way talking about his own creative process, and it’s sort of accurate because it had been in print. It’s what he told George Henschel [first conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra]. He’s basically saying there can’t be any inspiration without hard work,’ says Swafford. ‘The citing of spiritualist Daniel Home is total horseshit.’

In 1906 Arthur Abell organised a soirée for composer Engelbert Humperdinck (seated, with dark beard). Abell is in the front row, second from left.

EDWARD’S EXTENSIVE WOR K TR AVELS HELPED HIM TO AMASS HIS OWN NUMEROUS AND UNIQUE ASSEMBL AGE OF VIOLINS

Realisations like this caused Swafford to write in his 2001 paper ‘Did the Young Brahms Play Piano in Waterfront Bars?’ that ‘the scent of fraud hangs about the “interview” with Brahms.’

Edward Abell also had an obsession. ‘Those who happen to have seen the Violinist’s Guide of 1920 may have noticed that I am listed there as a violin expert and connoisseur,’ he wrote in 1926. ‘Writing along this line of research for different magazines has been another source of enjoyment. I have collected some very rare books on the subject, obtained chiefly from England.’ Also unearthed from a fragment of his notes and a private library tag in an old violin case from Wilmington, Delaware, a cache of documents exposed a century-old collection. Edward’s extensive work travels had helped him to amass his own fairly numerous and unique assemblage, filled with fine examples he claimed were by makers including Rugeri, Panormo, Landolfi, Tononi, Lupot, Cuypers, Testore, Pique, Girolamo Amati, Santo Serafin, Benjamin Banks and Matthew Hardie.

However, most of these instruments were unlabelled, ‘and those that did have were wrongly labelled’, as Edward admitted in a letter to Dwight Partello Sr in 1915 (found in the Edward W. Abell Papers, 1909–28, Violin Society of America/H.K. Goodkind Collection, Oberlin Conservatory Library). ‘I have never asked anyone to see them and have kept these “finds”, if so they are, a strict secret. But you understand that one sometimes longs to show such things to those who appreciate them, and know whether they are genuine or not. You are sometimes in Philadelphia. I very much wish you would come and look these instruments over. I’m sure it would afford you real pleasure and to me it would be an epoch as you, who know the enthusiasm of a connoisseur, can much appreciate.’

Violin expert Philip Kass has his doubts about these ‘finds’: ‘I find it highly unlikely that any of these were authentic. Partello, who was shopping at the premier dealerships, knew that it was rare to be offered a really good instrument without a label, and that any instrument that was truly good would receive some sort of a label from the seller. If that Panormo were truly authentic, it would not have come here and been abandoned in Bristol, PA. Panormos were already highly regarded back in England, and if someone brought one over, they were careful with it. Most of what might already have come here would have been in New York, Chicago or Cincinnati, where there were major dealerships that handled such instruments. By 1916 Wurlitzer, Lewis & Son and Lyon & Healy were already issuing catalogues and were assigning inventory numbers pasted inside what they sold,’ says Kass.

A 1928 letter to Edward Abell from The Strad editor Emily Lavender

VIOLIN SOCIETY OF AMERICA/H.K. GOODKIND COLLECTION, OBERLIN CONSERVATORY LIBRARY

‘I’ve seen far too many of these sorts of collections with unidentifiable instruments either bearing fake labels or with vague “attributions” applied to them, so I take all such fiddles with a heavy spoonful of salt.’

Although the brothers shared this passion, one critical way they diverged was their approach to the world. Arthur, with his penchant for hosting celebrity parties and extensive letter writing, was a classic extrovert who followed his vocation until the end of his life. In stark contrast, his brother Edward begrudged his choices as recounted by his son Richard G. Abell in his 1977 self-help book Own Your Own Life. Intellectually stultified and resentful, Edward ‘was, in fact, a recluse. Except for his business, he had cut himself off from the outside world. He would come home from work, eat in solitary silence, and retire to his room to read and study. Sometimes he would repair second-hand violins that he bought at pawn shops for five or six dollars,’ wrote his son. ‘He loved his old violins. I wanted him to love me.’

In the end, both of these collections were scattered to the wind, with only their words remaining. And so the Brothers Abell, long though they lived both in passion and in purpose, silently left their marks on the violin world.