Bull of Bergen

Next to the late great Nicolo Paganini, the most famous violinist of the 19th Century was a fantastic Norwegian named Ole Bull. Ole (rhymes with Cafe au lait) took scarcely a violin lesson in his life. His brilliant playing was always eccentric in technique and in emotion it was usually the most sumptuous ham. But big, courtly, iron-muscled Ole was the most assertive personality in Norway and one of the most assertive personalities outside it. Last fortnight the first full-length biography of Ole Bull was published by his granddaughter's husband, Mortimer Smith of Sandy Hook, Conn. (The Life of Ole Bull; Princeton University Press for the American-Scandinavian Foundation; $3). It is a fine, factual account of a large-gestured exhibitionist.

The musical world never forgave Ole Bull for his ready attention to the lower musical tastes. One of the most phenomenally gifted fiddlers who ever lived, he ignored the classic repertory with a persistence that drove critics to fury. He liked to offer his own grand fantasia on Yankee Doodle, playing with a rapt expression ''as though," remarked one critic, "he were wrestling with the inward spasms of a Pythian frenzy." He liked to astound his audiences by performing on all four strings at once, a trick he managed with the aid of a special flat-topped bridge.

Ole Bull received 50-odd years of public homage. Statesmen like Henry Clay, authors like William Dean Howells, Mark Twain and Thackeray basked in his companionship. Longfellow and Joaquin Miller wrote poems about him. Women begged for samples of his bath water. Sixteen-year-old Queen Isabella of Spain offered him a generalship in her army.

Elegant Form. It was Ole's life and character which inspired Ibsen with the lurid idea of Peer Gynt. Born in 1810, brought up by prosperous parents in the little provincial fishing town of Bergen, Ole Bornemann Bull flatly refused to obey his childhood violin teachers. At 23 he was playing quartets in many prominent European salons, carousing and dueling on the side. In Paris he met 14-year-old Felicie Alexandrine Villeminot, daughter of a French official. After four years he married her. Then he spent years trying to convince her that she should live permanently in Norway while he roamed the world. She finally consented and settled down with their four children. Sometimes he did not see her for years at a time.

In 1843 Ole Bull arrived in the U.S. Pushed the New York Herald's critic: "This extraordinary being--this Ole Bull--will produce an excitement throughout he Republic unlike anything that ever took place in our day. He is young--unmarried [sic]--tall and elegantly formed --as beautiful as the Apollo. . . ." One reporter asked Ole what master he had studied under. Said Ole, with a serene stare: "God, the Infinite!" At a Washington concert a Congressman from Alabama rose in the midst of one of Ole's improvisations and shouted: "None of your highfalutin, but give us Hail Columbia, and bear hard on the treble!"

Impossible Farm. Ole Bull's most spectacular U.S. venture was the purchase of 11,140 acres of rocky, mountainous country near Coudersport, Pa. There he proposed to establish a farming utopia called Oleana for Norwegian settlers. More than a hundred Norwegian immigrants sent there from New York at Ole's expense found that it was impossible to plow most of Oleana's crags. Ole then became a Manhattan opera impresario, giving the U.S. premiere of Verdi's Rigoletto. It was a flop. A few months later Bull sailed back to Europe. But not before he had paid $50 for a rock in the mouth of Massachusetts' Taunton River which a salesman had convinced him was the original landing place of the Vikings in America.

While Ole Bull was passing through Paris on another European concert tour, he heard that his wife had died in Norway. This bereavement attached him to Norway--for several years. Then he made another trip to the U.S., married one Sara Thorp, daughter of a lumber magnate of Madison, Wis. In 1880, mortally ill, Ole Bull returned to Norway. On his deathbed he motioned Sara to an organ near by. It was no time for ham. He asked her for the opening strains of Mozart's Requiem.

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