The mystery of a stolen rare cello has a surprise ending
It was Sept. 14, 2013, when a mysterious email bearing the subject line “Is this your first cello?” landed in Christine Walevska’s inbox.
More than just her first cello, “it was my first love!” And she had grieved its loss as one does; she never forgot it. Christine Walevska with her father, Hermann Walecki, who was her first teacher. He gave her the rare, one-eighth-size Bernardel cello. Walevska is lean and elegant with expressive hands. A tempest of enthusiasm, she can be disarmingly charming and startlingly blunt. Her thoughts open up like an accordion, expanding into tales of a life spent circling the globe with a cello case in one hand, a suitcase full of concert dresses in the other.
Hermann, the son of a royal cabinetmaker from England, had opened Westwood Musical Instruments in 1947 and catered to its diverse and luminous population of professionals and students.His arrival coincided with a golden age in classical music in Los Angeles.
When Ennio Bolognini, the great Argentine cellist, and his wife heard Walevska play, she whispered in his ear, “This little girl is going to be a great cellist.” He whispered back, “She already is.” When Hermann died in 1967, Fred took over the music shop and transformed it into a rock ‘n’ roll mecca — the place that everyone from the Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones went to buy guitars and have them repaired.
“My mother died in 1990 and she always prayed that this cello would be found,” she lamented. “I prayed to St. Anthony,” the patron saint of lost and stolen articles, “for years.”Christine Walevska Despite the family’s modest finances, when Starla turned 4, her parents began searching for a fine, antique one-eighth-size cello. The Breshears refused to settle for a Chinese, factory-made one. “Everybody just thought I was ridiculous,” Dustin recalled.After a year of searching, Julie heard from a Los Angeles dealer named Georg Eittinger, who said he had just the instrument, but he wasn’t particularly keen to part with it.
Eittinger once again expressed his wariness; he didn’t even let his son, who played the cello, run a bow across the Bernardel. Julie found the label intriguing. “I thought it was crazy that this belonged to a countess and nobody knows about it.” So she searched the internet looking for clues. When she typed in “Bernardel” andshe came across an interview that Christine Walevska had done with the Internet Cello Society.It was shortly after Walevska’s birthday, March 8, 2014, when she spoke to the Breshears.
It didn’t take long for Walevska to come to a decision. She told the Breshears that Starla should continue to play the Bernardel until she was ready to move on to a larger instrument. Once that day came, she would contact the police. Until then, she cautioned everyone to keep its existence to themselves.
Undeterred, Walevska embarked on a letter-writing campaign, blanketing the LAPD, including then-Chief Charlie Beck. On Feb. 18, 2016, he responded, cautioning her that this would be tough sledding: “Your case has legal hurdles that first must be overcome.”Walevska needed to show that the cello was indeed the same instrument stolen from Westwood Musical Instruments. Secondly, she had to prove she was its legal owner. Beck informed her that he had assigned Det.
“With good quality photos of the instrument showing the actual grain of wood, it can almost be used to ID an instrument like a fingerprint,” he explained. “I’ve had a lot of luck in recovering musical instruments.”“I had to reconstruct a crime that occurred 40 years ago when nothing from the original crime exists anymore,” said Hrycyk, who often salts his conversation with old-timey phrases like “he’s into skullduggery” or “they were hoodwinked.
She recalls seeing the cello there displayed with other rare and unusual pieces. “It was a unique enough cello, hard to not notice it,” she said. “The first time I saw it, I remembered thinking, ‘what maker would go to that trouble for a children’s cello’? Then I saw the label and thought, ‘oh, it was made for royalty.’”Although Shipman knew of Westwood Musical Instruments, Shipman said she had no idea that the Bernardel was stolen until Hrycyk contacted her.
The detective also didn’t put a lot of stock in Walevska’s theory that her father‘s and Weisshaar’s rivalry might have played a part. “I think that if he had any crooked intentions he wouldn’t have prominently displayed it at his violin shop,” he said. Dustin recalled seeing Walevska with the Bernardel. “I thought she might cry, but she didn’t get emotional, it was like they’d never been apart.”
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