Niccolò Paganini (1782 – 1840): Pepetuela
“It was very beautiful and seemed as though he was plumbing the depths of his soul and yet simultaneously ripping the heart out of the poor violin… He was the embodiment of the devil.”
FANNY MENDELSSOHN ON PAGANINI, 1829
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 deemed almost impossible for any other mortal being.
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.
So who exactly was this brilliant but outlandish man?
The violin, as it turns out, was not Paganini’s first instrument. Growing up in the north Italian city of Genoa, he initially learned the guitar and would retain a deep affection for it for the rest of his life – the instrument, he later said, became a “constant companion on all my travels.”
He only started learning the violin two years later, aged seven. But he made such rapid progress on it that he was soon far outstripping all his teachers. A resigned “I’ve taught the boy all I know” was a common refrain from tutors during these years, on each occasion leaving the Paganinis to search ever more desperately for a suitable replacement. When they travelled to Parma to seek out the great violin and viola virtuoso, Alessandro Rolla, the latter passed his young student on to his teacher Ferdinando Paer, who in turn passed the youngster onto his own teacher, Gasparo Ghiretti – at which point, it appears, Paganini finally got some lessons.
But Paganini’s astonishing progress wasn’t simply a gift from God – from a young age his father had bullied him into long hours of practice and had sometimes withheld food if the boy hadn’t progressed sufficiently. As a result of this draconian regime, Paganini 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. At this early stage, his activity was mainly restricted to northern Italy, and it was in the Tuscan town of Lucca that he would land his first (and, as it would turn out, last) steady job. In 1805 he was appointed Lucca’s director of music by Princess Elisa Baciocchi – a sister of Napoleon, who had just been made the town’s governor. Elise would soon become infatuated with her young violinist and it is widely believed they had an affair, despite the presence of Elisa’s husband, who even took some violin lessons from Paganini*.
*Elisa was there with the French troops who had occupied the town during these years. Her liaison with Paganini would mark the start of the latter’s romantic entanglement with several women closely linked to Napoleon. Aside from Elisa, Paganini was later involved with the emperor’s other sister Maria Anna: a wash drawing survives showing Maria lying in bed, apparently bewitched by the Svengali-like Paganini, who stands at the foot of her bed playing his violin. In the 1830s, Napoleon’s widow Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, would become equally besotted with the violinist, and shower him with gifts and general adoring support.
In all, Paganini would stay in his Lucca post for around five years before resuming his career as a freelance performer, now a little more mature and worldly. Already well-regarded in Italy, rumours began to spread of the violinist’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 fellow musicians, including Gioachino Rossini – Paganini would once step in to direct one of the operatic maestro’s works, after the original conductor had suddenly dropped dead.
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, through countries such as 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 5,000 stage-coach miles.
European music-lovers had of course encountered virtuosic performers before, only not quite like Paganini. And just as many of Paganini’s technical innovations had their origins in the eighteenth century – having been pioneered by the now semi-forgotten names of Giuseppe Tartini (1692 – 1770) and Pietro Locatelli (1695 – 1764) – he would nonetheless take them levels never seen before.
Fully recognizing his box-office appeal, Paganini was completely unafraid of bringing large elements of showmanship into his concerts. One of his favourite tricks was to sabotage the strings on his violin just before he started to play. He would either mistune them, or sometimes even deliberately break them 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 could apparently do to uncannily good effect). On other occasions he would focus on farm animal noises or even (in pieces like his Duetto Amoroso) on sounds of a more intimate variety.
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 much 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 this 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 £1.5 million in today’s money). Nor were such earnings atypical for him at the time.
But just as 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 own personal favourite and he would nickname it “The Cannon” for its powerful, wide-ranging tone.
Paganini’s personal life was colourful and chaotic in other ways. Given that he often looked like he had just spent the night in a hedge, he might have appeared 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 in a jail 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 then 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 closest Paganini ever came to a steady relationship was with a singer named Antonia Bianchi, who would bear him a son, Achilles in 1825. The latter would become a great favourite of his father, often accompanying him on later tours.
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 enough. 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.”
When Paganini wasn’t practising, performing or getting up to no good, he made time to write a reasonably substantial body of music, most of which – concertos or solos – was directly tailored to his own performances.
His best-known work is probably his 24 Caprices, of which number 24 (in A Minor) is particularly famous, having been used as a variation subject by several composers, from the likes of Brahms to Rachmaninov. He also wrote six violin concerti, of which the First in D Major is probably the finest. Having grown up in the time of Haydn and Mozart, Paganini’s orchestral accompaniments are usually classically proportioned and fairly conventional, in contrast to his much more expressive and innovative solo lines.
Although Paganini’s mature compositions did not develop in the way Franz Liszt’s did, there are still many who find them interesting and inventive in their own way. Rossini, for one, once claimed that Paganini was a deeply underrated melodist and that if he had ever decided to write operas, he would have “knocked out all of us.”
Paganini’s short Perpetuela for violin and orchestra, written at the very height of his career in 1832, offers a glimpse of his virtuosic stage persona. While the orchestra provides a lightweight and tuneful accompaniment, the soloist is tasked with playing a continuous stream of very fast semi-quavers for more than three minutes – 1,928 notes in all! The work is closely related in style and concept to Paganini’s more famous Moto Perpetuo from 1835, which is often used as a crowd-pleasing encore.
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.