Paganini, Niccolò

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PAGANINI, NICCOLÒ

PAGANINI, NICCOLÒ (1782–1840), Italian violinist and composer.

Niccolò Paganini's astonishing bravura and compositional originality on the violin enabled him to carry out, in the years 1812–1834, the most successful concert career of any instrumentalist before him. He brought audiences all over Europe to frenzies of enthusiasm and earned numerous honors and titles. His twenty-four Caprices for solo violin, first published in 1820, have formed a central foundation of violin technique since the mid-nineteenth century.

Paganini was born in Genoa and spent his entire life in Italy until 1828. He received training in violin and composition from several musicians, among them Alessandro Rolla. From 1801 to 1809 he lived in Lucca, serving from 1805 in the orchestra of Prince Felice and Elisa Baciocchi. Here he first explored the possibilities of writing for the G-string alone, producing the Sonata Napoleone. Temperamentally unsuited to the restrictions of the court, he left Lucca, and from 1810 to 1827 led an itinerant life as a concert violinist, interspersed with periods of relative inactivity due to illness, amorous affairs, gambling, and dissipation. A series of concerts in Milan in 1813, featuring his new variations on Le streghe, established him as the leading violinist of his age. In the following years he developed a close association with Gioacchino Antonio Rossini (1792–1868), whose melodies he favored as themes for concert variations and whose opera Matilde de Shabran he conducted in 1821. In the early 1820s his health showed a precipitous decline, apparently from venereal disease, that plagued him the rest of his life and left his body emaciated. He nevertheless continued to concertize, often with his lover, the singer Antonia Bianchi, who gave birth to his son and only child, Achille, in 1825.

In 1828, armed with two newly written concertos, Paganini launched his legendary European tours with a wildly successful series of concerts in Vienna. Over the next six years he concertized constantly in Bohemia, the German Confederation, Poland, France, and England, accompanied only by his son, whom he adored and treated with immense affection, and occasionally by a travel companion who kept track of his books. He earned enormous sums of money. His concerts usually featured one of his lengthy concertos, one or two of his variation sets with orchestra, and an extended work for solo violin, intermingled with short orchestral fillers and arias by guest singers. His reclusive lifestyle, ravaged body, dark looks, and his unusual performing posture, together with the sometimes bizarre sounds he was able to call forth from the instrument, gave him a mysterious, demonic presence on stage that riveted audiences and led to a whole series of rumors about his past and personal life. Journalists steeped in the literary style of Romanticism, especially in Germany, invented fantastic tales and constructed his image as the protopyical Romantic virtuoso. An amorous scandal in England provoked Paganini to retreat from public concerts in 1835, and he remained between Italy and France until his death five years later. At Parma he reorganized and conducted the ducal orchestra for a short period, and in 1837 he tried to establish in Paris, together with an entrepreneurial friend, a "Casino Paganini," but it soon foundered.

Paganini's compositional output can be divided into three categories: the twenty-four Caprices for solo violin; concert pieces for violin and orchestra, including both concertos, variation sets, and solo violin pieces; and chamber music for strings and guitar or mandolin. The Caprices, dedicated "to the artists," constitute his main compositional legacy, although he considered them studies and did not play them in public. They are indispensable builders of technique for aspiring

virtuosos, and as prototypical character pieces they influenced later composers such as Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), Franz Liszt (1811–1886), Robert Schumann (1810–1856), Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), and Sergei Rachmaninov (1873–1943). The concert works feature an extremely high level of virtuosity and usually assign a minimal role to the orchestral part. The chamber pieces are mostly for amateurs and accordingly are light and pleasant in tone.

Paganini's playing combined the fire and virtuosity of the Italian virtuoso school with the elegance and melodic focus of the French violin school. His principal technical innovations in writing for the violin include the extensive use of harmonics (high-pitched tones produced by touching the strings lightly rather than pressing them against the fingerboard), left-hand pizzicato (plucked notes), the polyphonic mixture of pizzicato, legato, and harmonic tones in rapid alternation, composition for the G-string (the lowest-pitched one) alone, and a bowing technique that helped project a strongly impassioned or tragic melody. His legacy was taken up most explicitly by the violinists Ole Bull (1810–1880), Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1814–1865), and Henri Wieniawski (1835–1880).

See alsoLiszt, Franz; Music; Opera; Romanticism; Rossini, Gioachino.