In Search Of The Messiah

Antonio Stradivari instruments have the unique capacity to produce sound so intensely beautiful and powerful that 350 years after their creation they remain one of the only objects in our cultural history to be unrivalled by anything modern technology and science can produce.

But an absurd situation is now arising in which the world’s greatest instruments are no longer accessible to the world’s greatest players, having been inflated in price by auctioneering and prospecting by hyper-wealthy collectors.

What right, if any, will musicians have to play these unique instruments in the future?

In Search Of The Messiah follows the Classical BRIT Award-winning violinist Ruth Palmer as she circumnavigates the globe in search of an instrument to play, and we hear the magic of Stradivari in the hands of the world’s greatest musicians including Joshua Bell, James Ehnes, Heinrich Schiff, Natalie Clein and Steven Isserlis.

Inspired by the most perfectly preserved Stradivari violin in existence, 'The Messiah', the film profiles the history, folklore and exquisite craftsmanship of Stradivari violins. A miracle of engineering is revealed, and a rare and exclusive world is exposed of devilish attraction, fierce rivalries and denigrating whispers, revealing a history of fraud and fakery dating almost to the inception of the violin itself.

The Messiah is displayed in a glass case at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum and was donated with the condition that it must never be played again.