Stolen strings

Michael White tells how a violin, cruelly confiscated by the Nazis but now recovered, has inspired a new work by Huw Watkins about its heroic owner

- By Michael White

Take Stravinsky's Soldier's Tale, which offers you the image of a violin as a human soul, bartered and coveted by both its owner and the devil. And it's no coincidence that the small wooden soundpost hidden in the body of a violin is called an 'anima' by the Italians or an 'âme' in French. They both mean 'soul': something that lives on when the flesh gives way. And modern history is full of real-life stories about violins that live to tell a tale, as witnesses to things past. Often things that people might prefer forgotten.

One such story came to light this summer, with peculiar impact, in a tiny German town called Freden you're unlikely to have heard of. Halfway between Hanover and Göttingen, but otherwise the middle of nowhere, it's a place of near-asphyxiating uneventfulness and quiet. There's an unmanned station where most trains don't stop, a church and one or two not very useful, generally closed shops - among them an old-fashioned cobbler who makes orthopaedic shoes, with wooden casts of long-dead clients' feet displayed in his shop window.

But curiously, the town has an annual music festival: a serious, successful, hugely enterprising one run by an English violinist whose father-in-law happens to be the orthopaedic shoe-maker. A story in itself.

Some 35 years ago, Adrian Adlam-who would go on to be a longtime member of both the London Symphony Orchestra and Oxford Philharmonic - was playing with the Luxembourg Philharmonic alongside a violist, Utz Köster, who had been born and raised in Freden. Between them they set up the Freden Music Festival designed to flood this little place with big ideas and new commissions.