Dr Wingfield spent six months researching Einstein’s musical interests, collecting everything the physicist had written or said about music.<\/p>\n
The drama premiered in Highgate, north London, in April and became a tribute to Mr Schwartz.<\/p>\n
“I dedicated the show to him because I wrote it for him, really, in retrospect,” he said, “He would have absolutely loved it.”<\/p>\n
But after one performance, Dr Wingfield received a message from an auctioneer which began with, “I’m not mad\u2026” and asked for help verifying a violin that could have belonged to Einstein.<\/p>\n
“I had a gut reaction when I first held it that it was genuine,” he told the BBC. <\/p>\n
“But that just makes me even more suspicious. So I had to go and look at all the documents, all the letters, scrutinise the violin and find details just to get every single element to make sure I thought it was his.”<\/p>\n
It had the inscription “Lina” – a name Einstein gave to all his violins. <\/p>\n
“He was 15 when he got this violin. That’s the sort of thing an adolescent might do, I suppose,” Dr Wingfield said. <\/p>\n
He even compared the inscription to Einstein’s school-age handwriting and found a match. <\/p>\n
One of the most striking details was the violin’s slightly longer body.<\/p>\n
“It would need somebody with quite a big left hand, which does all of the fingering on the strings, to be comfortable playing it,” he added.<\/p>\n
“Then I found X-rays and graphs of Einstein’s hands, and his left hand was indeed bigger than his right. That was quite an exciting discovery.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dr Wingfield spent six months researching Einstein’s musical interests, collecting everything the physicist had written or said about…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":196788,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[2302,90,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-196787","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-physics","8":"tag-physics","9":"tag-science","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196787","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/196788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}