WRONA'S HOUSE OF VIOLINS
907 Escarpment  Drive
Lewiston,  New York
716-297-2263

How Much Is My Anthony Wrona Violin Worth?

I am often asked this question about my fathers work, and because of certain circumstances surrounding this issue have felt compelled to make a statement here on the web.

     Before becoming a soldier in WWII Tony had made a few amateur violins. After his injury he spent almost three years at veterans hospital on Staten Island. There he encountered a woman working as a volunteer, who was a noted violinist in the NYC area, who also happen to know the renowned Simone Sacconi. Subsequently, she spoke to him about a boy at the hospital she had met who wanted very much to learn violin making. Sacconi decided to visit my father, and upon inspecting one of his amateur instruments, saw potential, and took my father on as a student. (I could talk about Sacconi for an hour. He was not only an elegant renaissance man but a possible saint. If you have only read about him you do not understand how he approached his art, he was the greatest maker of the Twentieth Century.) They setup a work bench in the basement of the hospital, and Sacconi started visiting my father once or twice a week. Times my father would have surgery and could not work, he would bring some treasure out of the Wurlitzer vault, get on the subway, take a long lunch, and discuss the subtitle nuances of some master makers violin. This was certainly a different world than we live in now. Although Sacconi asked to join him at Wurlitzer, Tony decided life in a wheelchair in NYC would be too hard, and returned to the relative obscurity of Buffalo. Growing up, it was normal for our family to drive to New York once or twice a year, to let Sacconi examine my father’s latest work. They would talk on the phone once a month. My dad considered him a father figure, I think more than his natural one. 

     Back to the point, if one starts to compile a list of violinmakers who would call themselves students, disciples, or greatly influenced by Sacconi, I would include  people who would be happy to be on that list those such William Carboni, Louis Condax, Mario D’Alessandro, Dario D’Attili, Mario Frosali, Erwin Hertel, Vahahn Nigoghossian, Frank Passa, Haim Rapoport, George Schlieps, Hans Weisshaar, Thomas Bertucca, and I am sure I forgotten a few. I have seen examples of most of these violinmakers over the course of my life. As an appraiser, objectively and removing nepotism from the equation, I feel the instruments produced by Tony compare quite favorably to them both in workmanship & acoustics. Thus the  value of his violins should properly be judged in terms of the benchmarks associated with this circle of makers.

   Before my dad passed away he was very excited one of his early violins was to be sold at a Skinner auction in 1994. It sold for $460.00 (Red Book) and he was crushed. Tony went to the grave with this, not knowing what had happened. Years later I met someone who said, “hey I bought one of your father’s violins”. It turned out to be the one from the auction. If you go back to the Skinner Catalogue  it gave the violin a one or two line description not saying anything about condition. The violin had been “sat on”.

I was contacted by a gentleman who had seen a listing for a “Wrona” violin on the website of a company called Elderly Instruments, which I believe is in Michigan. A couple of other people had seen the listing, and mentioned it to me. So I was aware of it, as a very early instrument, being sold very cheap. Being a busy guy I did not check it out myself.

As a man who had previously owned a Wrona violin, the gentleman who had seen it said how much he would like to own another. He had seen the Elderly listing, and contacted me to ask what I thought about it. I admitted to not having had a chance to look at the violin on-line, but thought even for a early instrument it’s a bargain for the price they were asking, and Elderly must be going by an uninformed Red Book kind of value in setting an asking amount for it.

He subsequently bought it, and sent it to me for minor maintenance. When the violin arrived at my shop I was shocked. First, the instrument had been significantly damaged in shipping, and UPS is giving the owner a hard time about compensation, for reasons that are not justified or that motivate you to buy insurance anyway. But that’s not the story here. What so surprised me personally was that the violin was not in fact my father’s work, but his father’s work.

I had only heard my father mention it in passing, that after he returned from New York City, and set up a shop. His father asked if he could try at making a violin, and made two before becoming discouraged. The instrument that had been sent to me was labeled “A. Wrona”(1950), unlike my dad who always signed his work Anthony T. Wrona, and was a horrible & crude violin. Compared to a 1948 example of an instrument by my dad, my father’s workmanship would have had to have taken a major step backwards. Also, it was shocking to see some of deficiencies in workmanship & style in the violin that my father wouldn’t have stood for even in the first violin I made. I understand why Elderly was asking what they were for the instrument on its merit, but it was the work of Anthony F. Wrona, not Anthony T. Wrona.