Antonio Stradivari - in Fiction

In Fiction

In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories, Sherlock Holmes owns and plays a Stradivari violin.

In The Simpsons episode Homer's Barbershop Quartet the family is at a flea market where Homer is looking through a box. He stumbles upon a Stradivarius and then remarks "Strada-who-vius?" before tossing the instrument aside.

In 1987, the Soviet detective television mini-series Visit to Minotaur used Stradivari's life story as a parallel to the main storyline, which featured an investigation into the theft of a Stradivari violin in Moscow in the early 1980s. The original Stradivarius violin that appears in the series belonged to David Oistrach. Coincidentally, in May 1996, nine years after the series was made, this violin was stolen from Moscow's Museum of Musical Culture. It was successfully recovered in 2001.

The James Bond film "The Living Daylights" (1989) portrays the female lead (Maryam d'Abo) as owning a Stradavari-made cello named "Lady Rose". She poses as a KGB sniper to convince Bond of the supposed defection of her lover, KGB General Koskov. The cello's purchase links the villains (Koskov and arms dealer Whitaker) together for Bond's investigation. The Bond short story "The Living Daylights" (1962) appeared in The Sunday Times paper and contained a female cello player acting as a KGB sniper. One of Ian Fleming's relatives, Amaryllis Fleming, may have owned a Stradivarius cello.

The 1989, Italian TV movie biopic, Stradivari, was filmed in Cremona, directed by Giacomo Battiato, and starred Anthony Quinn as Antonio, Lorenzo Quinn as Young Antonio and Stefania Sandrelli as his second wife Zambelli.

The film The Red Violin was inspired by one of Stradivari's violins, the Red Mendelssohn (1721), which is currently played by Elizabeth Pitcairn, heiress to the PPG Industries fortune, whose grandfather purchased it for her 16th birthday for $1.7 million at auction at Christie's London. She is one of the few soloists who performs the Red Violin Chaconne composed for the film by John Corigliano. The notion that the fictional violin is red because it is painted with the blood of the maker's wife, who died during childbirth, is a creation of the filmmaker and is yet unsubstantiated. The real violin is called "The Red Mendelssohn" because of a unique red stripe on its top right side, but how the stripe came about is unknown.

In the Broadway musical Urinetown, a Stradivari instrument is briefly mentioned in a single line, "Play it on your / Stradivari / He's not sorry / Not a shred!" as a high-status, political symbol.

In the second installment of the Final Fantasy Tactics Advance video game series, Final Fantasy Tactics A2: Grimoire of the Rift, Stradivari is a wood used to create the items Edaroya Scriptures, Sage's Robe, and Faerie Shoes.

In the video game Fallout 3, the player is tasked with retrieving the Soil Stradivari (Itzhak Perlman's current violin) from a vault.

The "McGuffin" in Augusta Huiell Seaman's "The Inn of the Twin Anchors" is a Stradivarius violin named "Rossignol" (Nightingale).

Episode 36 of the anime series Detective School Q deals with a mystery involving a violin, which is mentioned to be 'Superior to the famed Stradivarius'.

Episode "Pulling Strings" of the television series White Collar has Neal Caffrey searching for a missing Stradivarius violin.

Episode "The Scheherazade Job" of the television series "Leverage" has Alec Hardison play a Stradivarius violin.