Musical Trailblazers 1 - Paganini
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David Hackett15. July 2023
Never before had the world seen anything like Niccolò Paganini. Half performing genius and half freak show, his impact on 1830s Europe was so immense that he became something of a legend in his own lifetime.
The brand that Paganini created of himself largely shapes our image of him today – that of the tall, skeletal figure, usually dressed in black, with the unkempt, raven-coloured hair, sallow cheeks and intense, almost demonic eyes. He then picks up his violin and performs wondrous feats previously thought impossible for mortal beings.
During his headiest years of stardom, Paganini would regularly play to packed out concert halls, full of rapturous and sometimes screaming audiences. Offstage, he led a colourful life, falling prey to many of the vices associated with the archetypal “bad boy” rock-star – including gambling, heavy drinking, drug-taking and incessant womanizing. Many people (including several representatives of the Catholic church) thought he was in league with the devil.
His brilliance of the violin could partly be ascribed to exceptional natural talent and partly to back-breaking preparation. From a young age his father bullied him into long hours of practice and had sometimes withheld food if Niccolò hadn’t progressed sufficiently. As a result of this draconian regime, Paganini jnr was often practicing up to 15 hours a day during his youth.
The benefits of his hard work were soon evident, however, and by the age of fourteen Niccolò was already giving professional concerts and earning a wage. After five of years of employment at Lucca under the auspices of Princess Elisa Baciocchi – a sister of Napoleon, with whom Paganini would have the first of many illicit affairs – before launching himself on the world as a freelance soloist extraordinaire. Already well-regarded in Italy, rumours began to spread of Paganini’s extraordinary gift beyond his country’s borders, and it is surprising that for so long he resisted the siren calls to make his name on the biggest European stages. He was happy to bide his time, moving between Italian cities and making friends with many of Italy’s musical elite.
Paganini was already in his late forties by the time he decided to embark on his long-awaited European odyssey. But the whole venture would quickly confirm him as an international sensation and change his life forever.
His tour would take him to forty European cities, from Bohemia, Austria and Poland, to Germany, France and Britain. As his name and reputation soared, concert halls fell over themselves in their attempts to book him. In one year alone Paganini performed on no less than 151 occasions, while burning up more than 5000 stage-coach miles.
European music-lovers had of course encountered virtuosic performers before, only not quite like Paganini. Fully recognizing his box-office appeal, Paganini was completely unafraid of bringing large doses of showmanship into his virtuosic pyrotechnics. One of his favourite tricks was to sabotage the strings on his violin just before a performance, either by mistuning them or sometimes even breaking them. He would also deliberately snap strings mid-performance (to gasps from the audience), before proceeding to play the rest of the music on one remaining string.
He could use his instrument to suggest all manner of sounds. He loved to imitate birdsong and sometimes other instruments of the orchestra. something he coul do to uncannily good effect. On other occasions he would focus on farm animal noises or even on sounds of a more intimate variety (such as his Duetto Amoroso).
An important dimension to Paganini’s showmanship was his huge stage presence. He was one of the first instrumental virtuosos to perform without music, something that allowed him more scope for physical expression. He would make good use of his tall, long-limbed, double-jointed physique, allowing him to contort his body into unusual shapes (one of his nicknames was “Rubber Man”). His double-jointedness also directly benefited his playing capabilities, allowing him extra agility, while his wrist was so loose that he could move and rotate it in all kinds of directions.
The overall Paganini effect could be mesmerizing. As one contemporary historian wrote of him: “Audacious in his experiments on the capacity of his instrument, yet refined to the extreme of subtlety; scientific, yet wild to the verge of extravagance…his tall, gaunt figure, his long fleshless fingers, his wild eager and wan visage, his thin grey locks falling over his shoulders, and his singular smile sometimes bitter and convulsive, always strange, made up an aspect which approached nearly to the spectral.” One Berlin critic meanwhile dubbed Paganini the “incarnation of desire, scorn, madness and burning pain.”
But behind all the drama and technical pyrotechnics was always a serious artist with sound musical instincts. It was precisely these qualities that made Paganini the complete performer. When not dazzling his audiences, he could play simple melodies in such a soulful, tender way that he would quickly move his same listeners to tears.
It was Paganini’s half-decade of touring Europe in the late 1820s and early 1830s that made his name and cemented his place in musical history. For a time, he one of the most famous as well as most talked-about figures of his age. While endless concert reviews filled the newspapers, magazines gossiped about his lifestyle and top gastronomic chefs named delicacies after him.
Paganini himself was always savvy enough to see the lucrative potential of his burgeoning fame. A tour of Britain in 1832 would leave him particularly wealthy – in a personal accounts book he noted that he had made over £10,000 from 15 concerts between June and August of that year (about $2 million in today’s money). Nor were such earnings atypical for him at the time.
But while Paganini was good at earning money, he was equally good at squandering it. In his youth he had developed several extravagant habits, one of which was high-stakes gambling. Paganini’s regular losses in betting halls and casinos constantly threatened to destabilize his life and he once had to pawn his violin in order to save himself from a debtors’ prison. He was only rescued on that occasion by a wealthy admirer, who gifted Paganini his own violin, a very fine 1743 Guarneri del Gesù. It would become Paganini’s personal favourite and he would nickname it “The Cannon” for its powerful, versatile tone.
Paganini’s personal life was colourful and chaotic in other ways. Given that he often looked like he had spent the night in a hedge, he was an unlikely womanizer. But as he once boasted. “I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet.”
His various affairs could occasionally land him in trouble. While living in Parma in the 1810s he had shacked up with a teenage girl, whose father had then charged the violinist with abduction – Paganini ended up spending some days behind bars as a result.
A similar charge of abduction was laid against the violin virtuoso in the early 1830s, involving the teenage daughter of a pianist friend in London, with whom Paganini had eloped to Paris. When word got out, the story was a huge scandal in both the British and French press, and although Paganini avoided jail this time, he was forced to spend may hours desperately defending his actions in print.
The various dissipations of Paganini’s lifestyle were hardly a secret to the general public, and they would in turn fuel some decidedly darker rumours. One was that either he or his mother had sold his soul to the devil at a young age in exchange for his extraordinary talent. Those with more vivid imaginations helped popularize a myth that the virtuoso had once murdered a woman and used her intestines as violin strings.
Paganini was well aware of such gossip-mongering and always tried to pass it off good-humouredly. He once noted, “At Vienna, one of the audience affirmed publicly that my performance was not surprising, for he had distinctly seen, while I was playing my variations, the devil at my elbow, directing my arm and guiding my body. My resemblance to the devil was a proof of my origin.”
Despite the heady success of these years, Paganini eventually began to grow tired of touring life and longed to settle down. His health, never strong at the best of times, was also beginning to fail him: he had suffered from syphilis in recent years (which he treated with liberal quantities of mercury and opium), while in 1828 a series of dental operations had required the removal of most of his teeth. When he was then diagnosed with tuberculosis in 1834, he finally decided to scale back his performing commitments.
He set up a casino in Paris instead – the Casino Paganini – a venture that might have seemed ideal for him, but which sadly failed and cost him much of his fortune in the process.
His health progressively worsened, with throat cancer robbing him of speech for the last two years of his life. But even as he was dying, Paganini remained his usual hyperactive self. He moved to Nice (then in Italy) and became a dealer in musical instruments, buying and selling for high prices. It was in the same city that the end finally came for him in 1840, aged 57.
Even in death, Paganini managed to attract drama and controversy. Improbable as it might seem, the Catholic church did not want the maestro buried in consecrated ground, with both the bishops of Nice and of Genoa officially banning it. This was partly down to Paganini having refused his last rites – a priest had turned up about a week before Paganini’s death and the latter had turned him away, believing he might still recover. He also hadn’t helped his case by displaying, according to the same priest, “four obscene pictures” in the vestibule of his Nice apartment, including one depicting “a Venus in a most shameful and disgraceful posture.” It was only in 1844 that the pope intervened and allowed Paganini to be buried in Genoa. Even after that, his body was moved several more times before finding its final resting place in Parma, more than half a century later.
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com
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