On Sunday, November 6, 1955, the music page of the Salt Lake Tribune carried news of a violin from Arbon Valley. Its owner, Clyde Jenson, was lending it to the concertmaster of the Utah Symphony, the orchestra's leading violinist, for a recital that afternoon and for a concert in the Salt Lake Tabernacle ten days later.
Clyde was then about fifty. He was the son of Joseph C. and Alice Jenson, who had homesteaded at Summit, the high part of the valley between Arbon and Buist, and after his father's death in 1929 he kept and enlarged the family's dry farm there. The column, which ran under Lowell Durham's byline, called his instrument a violin by Joseph Guarnerius "del Gesu" and counted it among "the finest violins in use today."
The name needs a word of explanation. Bartolomeo Giuseppe Guarneri, called "del Gesù" from the sacred monogram on his labels, made violins in Cremona, Italy, and died in 1744. His instruments are ranked with those of Stradivari, and some judge them the better of the two.
Two performances
According to the column, Jenson was letting Harold Wolf, the symphony's concertmaster and a member of the University of Utah music faculty, use the violin in two public performances. The first was at 3 p.m. that same day in the Union Building on the university campus. There Wolf and the pianist Gladys Gladstone, also of the music faculty, were to give a free sonata recital: Beethoven's "Spring" Sonata, Brahms's Sonata No. 3 in D minor and a sonata by Franck.
The second was the orchestra's next subscription concert, in the Tabernacle on November 16. Wolf and Harold Schneier, the principal cellist, were to be the soloists in the Brahms Double Concerto, a work the paper said was seldom heard outside the major music centers. Both men had played solos with the orchestra before, but this was to be the first time they appeared together. The rest of the announced program was Beethoven's overture to Fidelio, Shostakovich's Festive Overture, two Nocturnes by Debussy and Respighi's Pines of Rome.
Two photographs ran with the column. In one, Wolf admires the violin, "loaned him by Clyde Jenson." In the other, the conductor, Maurice Abravanel, goes over the score of the concerto with Wolf and Schneier.
The violin's travels
The column said the violin had "an interesting history," and it told that history as Jenson gave it. Before 1910 it had been played by the violinist who led a famous quartet bearing his name. A few years later a noted collector in Berkeley, California, acquired it. He kept it for 35 years and lent it to concert artists for their tours.
Mishel Piastro used it before he became concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic. Henri Temianka, first violinist of a string quartet, played it on a transcontinental tour. More recently the young violinist Camilla Wicks had played it on tour and as a soloist with the New York Philharmonic. The column does not say how or when the violin came to a farmer in Arbon Valley.
Stradivarius or Guarneri
Music ran deep in the Jenson family. The account of Clyde's life on this site, drawn largely from the 1982 book Bannock Valley, says Clyde's father made his own violins and organized the Jenson Orchestra, which played for valley dances. It also says Clyde disliked playing the violin with his father as a boy. When Clyde died in 1983, his obituary said he had graduated from the Virtuoso Music School in Buffalo, New York, in 1929. It named farming and music as the two main interests of his life and said he played the violin with the Cache Chamber Orchestra.
Family memory tells the violin story a little differently. In Bannock Valley a visitor who had known him since childhood remembered Clyde bringing out his Stradivarius at the Arbon ranch and playing it. The site's account of his life also says he was later a musician in the Utah Symphony. The 1955 paper names a Guarneri, not a Stradivarius. It describes Clyde only as the owner who lent the violin, and the orchestra his obituary names is the Cache Chamber Orchestra, not the Utah Symphony. Whether the family's Stradivarius and the Tribune's del Gesù were the same instrument, the records read here do not say. The column named the maker without saying who had identified the violin, and it gave the history on Jenson's word; no source found for this post tests either.
According to the Jenson family history, the Logan Herald Journal had reported in December 1954 that Wolf had already played the violin with the orchestra. No review of the November 1955 recital or concert has been found that mentions the instrument.
The story as reported
Salt Lake Tribune, November 6, 1955, page 74. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
SALT LAKE CITY — Over the next ten days, Salt Lake City audiences were to have two chances to hear a violin owned by Clyde Jenson, who lived in Arbon Valley, Idaho, played by the Utah Symphony's concertmaster.
The paper's music writer credited the instrument to Joseph Guarnerius "del Gesu" and called it one of the best being played anywhere at the time.
Harold Wolf, who held the concertmaster's chair and also taught on the University of Utah music faculty, had Jenson's permission to use it on both occasions.
Its first outing was a sonata recital at 3 p.m. on Sunday, November 6, in the Union Building on the university campus. Admission was free, and Wolf shared the program with Gladys Gladstone, a pianist who likewise taught in the music department; they chose sonatas by Beethoven, Brahms and Franck.
The violin's second appearance was to come on November 16, when the orchestra gave its next subscription program in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. That program featured the Brahms Double Concerto, with Wolf and the orchestra's principal cellist, Harold Schneier, taking the two solo parts and Maurice Abravanel conducting. The paper noted that the concerto rarely got a hearing beyond the big musical capitals. Wolf and Schneier had each taken solo turns with the orchestra in past seasons, though never side by side.
The violin's history, as the paper gave it, came from Jenson. In the years before 1910 its player had been the leader of a celebrated string quartet that carried his own name. Not long afterward it passed to a well-known collector living in Berkeley, California, who owned it for 35 years and often put it in the hands of touring concert players.
Mishel Piastro was one of those borrowers; he had the instrument in the years before the New York Philharmonic named him its concertmaster. Henri Temianka, who led a string quartet as its first violinist, carried it on a coast-to-coast tour. Lately it had gone on the road with Camilla Wicks, a young violinist, who also played it in her solo engagements for the New York Philharmonic.
The paper ran a photograph of Wolf examining the violin.
On this site: Clyde Jenson, his father Joseph Christensen Jenson, the Jenson family and the Summit area.