Though shockingly underrated by the musical establishment today, he was an inspired and well-schooled composer whose innovative advances in violin technique couched in music of great drama and poetry remain his most significant contributions to the history of music. His effect on his contemporaries as a musician was equalled, perhaps surpassed, by the music he wrote. And it was a mere nine years later that he gave his final public performance.īut Paganini was more than just a great performing artist.
One of the most extraordinary things about Paganini is that in a concert career lasting forty-three years he did not play outside his native Italy until he was forty-five. Even during his lifetime, it was widely believed that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for preternatural abilities-and Paganini, shrewd businessman that he was, did not go out of his way to disabuse them, claiming that his gift had come from a guardian angel. ‘Paganini begins where our reason stops’, was the opinion of Giacomo Meyerbeer.Ī contemporary history of the violin reported that ‘his singular smile, sometimes bitter and convulsive, always strange, made up an aspect which approached nearly to the spectral’. Tall, emaciated, dressed in black with shoulder-length hair, he stood immobile as he bewitched his audiences-a showman, dare-devil and the greatest violinist who had ever lived. No musician of the first three decades of the nineteenth century so mesmerized the public as did Nicolò Paganini.
‘Virtuosity, far from being a monstrous excrescence, is an indispensable element of musical composition’ – Franz Liszt
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