Paganini's 1 00th

Broadway would have called him a sockeroo. He would have had a radio spot, performing more astounding feats on the fiddle than Alec Templeton's on the piano. He would have found a way of getting the jitterbug trade as well as the longhairs. Hollywood would have carpentered movies to fit his gaunt, satanic countenance, his lean frame, his wild dark hair which he did up in curlpapers.

As it was, pious folk a century ago believed that Nicolo Paganini was in league with the Devil; some swore they had seen Old Nick at the Italian violinist's side as he fiddled like the very devil himself. No one before him, and few after, could do what he did with a bow -- extra long, for his abnormally long arm -- and four strings. A haughty showman, he employed unusually thin strings, not only to produce extremely delicate harmonics (overtones two octaves higher than normal), but also, said some, so that he could break a string, use the remaining three as makeshift. To the fiddler's bag of tricks, Paganini contributed the left-hand pizzicato (plucked note), the double harmonic, the staccato in which the bow is bounced on the strings. He could fiddle a barnyard scene, once awakened an inn with a lifelike rendition of a baby crying.

Few people ever heard Paganini practice; he boasted that the rigors of his early training (he had been a prodigy) entitled him to rest. He let little of his work be published, let as few people as possible see the scores from which he and his orchestra played in concert. At a rehearsal, he would indicate tempi, toss off a few notes of a cadenza, infuriate everyone by remarking "Et cetera, Messieurs," and knock off. During Paganini's life, the only way a fiddler could learn anything about his style was to listen in a concert hall. This was not much help: not for many years could anyone figure out how to play his best-known, most difficult works, the 24 Caprices.*

Alternately greedy and generous, Paganini made and spent a deal of money, slept in many an illicit bed, achieved the patronage of Napoleon's sister Elisa (Princess of Lucca and Piombo). Burned out in his early 50s, Paganini died in Nice at 58, a century ago last week. Few men have been so widely buried. For his sins, the Catholic Church declined to give him holy ground. Nice, Cannes, Antibes, St. Raphael refused him space. Three years later, when the Church changed its mind, Paganini was dug up from the wastes next to an olive oil factory, moved to his son's estate near his native Genoa. Later he was taken to Parma, where he occupied successively three different graves. Finally in 1926 Genoa got him back. Last week that city gave its fiddling son a memorial celebration.

*Today these are within the range of virtuoso violinists. This month Victor is issuing Volume I of a complete recording of the Caprices, by Ossy Renardy, 19-year-old Viennese prodigy.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.