Kurt Cobain’s Guitar, the Priciest Ever Sold, Finds a New Home

The world’s most expensive guitar, played by Kurt Cobain in his final public performance, has been donated to London’s Royal College of Music.

In November 1993, the lead singer of Nirvana took up his 1959 Martin D-18E, a rare electro-acoustic model that had been modified to suit his left-handedness, and played it on MTV Unplugged. Recorded in a single take, the New York performance was raw, intimate, and vulnerable—a distillation of Cobain’s appeal. According to his wife, Courtney Love, the Martin was the last guitar he used before he died by suicide in April 1994.

The guitar then disappeared for two decades. His daughter, Frances Bean Cobain, inherited the Martin and kept it in a Seattle vault, along with many other of Cobain’s belongings. In 2018, however, it was handed over to Isaiah Silva, Frances Bean’s ex-husband, as part of their divorce settlement. Two years later, it was sold for $6 million at Julien’s Auctions to Peter Freedman, the founder of Røde, an Australian audio technology company.

Since its purchase, the Martin has been displayed at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney and the Royal College of Music, where it was the centerpiece of the “Kurt Cobain Unplugged.” It was the institution’s first rock-focused exhibition and ran from June to November this year, drawing an estimated 15,000 visitors. Freedman has now made the loan permanent.

“I am delighted to gift this iconic guitar to the Royal College of Music so that they might realize the guitar’s value and profile for the benefit of young musicians at the RCM and reach people around the world,” Freedman said in a statement.

Cobain’s last guitar will join a remarkable collection of more than 1,000 historic instruments at the college. This includes the earliest stringed keyboard, known as a clavicytherium; an early 16th-century harpsichord by Alessandro Trasuntino who pioneered the instrument; and the earliest dated guitar, which was made in Lisbon, Portugal, in the 1580s.

Following the gift, the Royal College of Music said it intends on sending “Kurt Cobain Unplugged” on an international tour in 2026. In addition to the Martin guitar (and the pictures that were found inside its case), the show displayed the olive-green mohair cardigan Cobain wore during the MTV performance, which sold for $340,000 in 2019, as well as Nirvana memorabilia and archival footage that brought the band to life. One of the curators, Gabriele Rossi Rognoni, said the exhibition was part of an effort to create new links between historical and contemporary music. That legacy is now set to continue.

“This remarkable donation brings one of the most significant artifacts in rock music history into the Royal College of Music,” the Royal College of Music said in a statement. “This asset opens future opportunities to share the ‘Kurt Cobain Unplugged’ exhibition with an international audience.”