Stradivarius viola valued at US$30 million could be the world’s most expensive instrument
The 335-year-old Tuscan-Medici viola has been on loan to the US Library of Congress for decades, but now it has become a gift to the nation

At the US Library of Congress in Washington in May, Roberto Díaz was playing on an exceedingly rare viola. What did not cross his mind, he says, is just how much the maple and spruce instrument clutched beneath his chin was worth.
Which is perhaps a good thing.
The Tuscan-Medici viola from the workshop of Antonio Stradivari was recently valued at US$30 million, likely making it the most expensive musical instrument in the world.
“You know, it’s funny, I never really thought about it that way,” Díaz says a couple of days after the concert. “The price tag is so surreal in the sense that it almost doesn’t really register.”
Díaz is president and chief executive of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, in the US state of Pennsylvania, and through Curtis he has developed a relationship with the viola, performing on it from time to time beginning nearly 15 years ago. It was on this instrument, made in 1690, that Díaz recorded Jennifer Higdon’s Viola Concerto, an album that won two Grammy Awards in 2018.
So it was natural that Díaz, along with a handful of Curtis students, was onstage for the Library of Congress concert, organised to celebrate a new milestone in the instrument’s 335-year journey: its donation to the Library of Congress as a gift to the nation.
