Flying is a Nightmare, especially if You Have a 19th-century Violin

By Jonathan Edwards / The Washington Post

14:40 JST, September 13, 2024

A lot of passengers bring equipment they need for work aboard flights – laptops, cellphones, notepads. But when professional musician Esther Abrami brings hers on an airplane – a violin made in the 19th century by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume – she’s carrying a precious artifact.

“The violin is a piece of art,” she told The Washington Post. “It’s as if I was traveling with a Picasso painting.”

Abrami, 27, tried and failed Tuesday to take her Vuillaume, which have sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, aboard Ryanair Flight No. 3389 from her home in Marseille, France, to Berlin where she was scheduled to record her third studio album for Sony Classical. Despite having flown with Ryanair hundreds of times over more than a decade, nearly all of them with a violin, Abrami said a gate agent told her the instrument was too big to carry on and would need to be checked. After missing her flight, Abrami said she’s criticizing the airline in the hopes that not only Ryanair but the airline industry as a whole is more accommodating of professional musicians.

Ryanair did not respond to specific questions about the incident but said in an email to The Post that “violinists travelling with Ryanair have to obey the same rules as everyone else; if it fits it can go onboard, but if it doesn’t it goes in the hold.” Abrami’s violin is just over 22 inches long, about a half-inch beyond Ryanair’s limit for carry-on items.

Abrami is part of a small fraternity of professional musicians who make their living traveling with prized instruments that could double as museum exhibits.

In 2013, a German cellist said airport workers abused his cello case, snapping his $20,000 bow in half. Two years later, a cello player from Tennessee checked his $45,000, 75-year-old instrument, which airport workers put under a set of golf clubs, snapping its neck. And in 2018, a Brazilian-Israeli musician reluctantly allowed her viola da gamba to be put in the cargo hold on her flight from Rio de Janeiro to Tel Aviv only to find it had been had been broken into pieces.

Those kinds of horror stories have congealed into an unwritten rule in the industry: Never trust an airline with your instrument. At the same time, musicians find themselves forced to navigate myriad luggage rules that vary between airlines while trying to figure out how strictly each of those are enforced.

“We feel so misunderstood,” Abrami said.

Abrami has been playing the violin since she was 10. At 14, she moved from Marseille to Manchester to study at the Chetham’s School of Music for four years before attending the Royal College of Music in London.

Because she studied abroad for eight years and took up a solo career that’s taken her around the world, Abrami has flown with her violin hundreds of times over the course of 13 years. Most of those have been through Ryanair because it’s the only airline with direct flights from Marseille to Manchester and from Manchester to Berlin, home to Sony Classical’s European studios where Abrami records.

Abrami has to keep her violin on her person or at least close by, she said. It’s a delicate instrument that could break if thrown in the cargo hold and left to jostle with suitcases. If it does break, “you will never get a similar one,” because modern violin makers don’t know how to re-create those made by 19th-century masters.

“We don’t have the secrets to that today,” Abrami said.

Her instrument was created in 1857. It’s owned by an international society which loaned it to Abrami when she started her professional career on the condition that, among other things, she can’t put it in an airplane cargo hold.

“My violin is everything to me,” she said.

Abrami said she occasionally has to explain how delicate and precious her instrument is but has never had a problem until this week.

On Tuesday morning, Abrami arrived at the Marseille airport where a Ryanair employee at the check-in counter was “a little dubious” of her violin, warning her that she might have to buy an extra seat to bring it on board, she said. Abrami said she told the Ryanair employee she would if need be.

When she tried to board at the gate, Abrami was met with an agent who “straightaway talked quite aggressively,” scolding her for not buying an extra seat, she added. Abrami said she offered to do so but was told it was too late. Abrami said she offered to take the violin out of its case and hold it during the flight. The agent made her try to fit the violin in an apparatus for measuring luggage and when it came in one centimeter over the 55-centimeter limit, Abrami said, she was again told she would have to check it. Ultimately, she resorted to begging.

“This is the first time I have experienced such rudeness and public humiliation,” she said Tuesday in a post on Facebook, adding in an interview with The Post that she “really tried to find a solution.”

Abrami was told to stand aside to let other passengers board, and after an interaction lasting a total of about 10 minutes, she left the Ryanair gate defeated to book a last-minute flight with Lufthansa for 500 euros. She had no problem carrying her violin on board, but it cost her more than five hours since that trip had a layover in Frankfurt and didn’t arrive in Berlin until 4 p.m., allowing her to barely make her recording session.

“Not every musician can have this opportunity,” she said in the Facebook post. “Missing a flight often means losing a vital work opportunity, whether it’s a gig, a recording session, or an important meeting. In an industry where every opportunity counts, such an incident can have a ripple effect, impacting reputation and future prospects.”

Abrami said she won’t fly Ryanair again unless they let her bring her violin into the cabin. But she hopes she can talk with the airline higher-ups to work something out. She said she can wrangle her fellow classical musicians, who have all had problems flying with their instruments, to perform a private concert “to show the importance of what we do … and how important it is for culture to keep this music alive.”

Abrami’s first instinct was to keep quiet about what happened but reversed course at the prodding of other classical musicians who have “suffered in silence” to use the opportunity and her platform to try to make things better. Her goal is not to bad-mouth the airline per se, but to push the industry to create rules that are fair to classical musicians flying with expensive, delicate equipment on which their livelihoods depend.

“I’m just trying to make a positive change,” she said.