PAGANINI

Evening Star, Issue 22573, 15 February 1937, Page 7

PAGANINI

THE LEGENDS AND THE MAN Reviewing ‘ Paganini, the Romantic Virtuoso,’ by Jeffrey Pulver, Dr J. M. Bulloch writes in the London 1 Sunday Times ’;— Four strings and a hank of horsehair. That, in Mr Pulver’s phrase, was the spell by which Nicole Paganini brought, the world to his feet. There was. even less in it than that, for one string', the G, *was enough for him at times, and with two strings he could do marvels. But, although _ho calls for no ■ elaborate psychological analysis, there was also more in it all, for he possessed dramatic and emotional power and versatility' as well, and he will be matched only when a personality like his appears, endowed with - his physical, mental, and spiritual attributes, Mr Pulver, as a professional violinist, knows what he is speaking about, when he says this. But the tragedy of all actors and musical artists is that their gift vanishes with them, and we can judge of them merely by reading of the impression they made on those who actually heard them, though in Paganini’s case we have the scores of the very difficult music he composed to show what he could achieve in point of technique. What Mr Pulver, therefore, has been mainly content to do is to present him largely in the terms of his background, which explains and excuses much of his amazing musical achievement and his character as a man. Mr Pulver is peculiarly wellequipped for the survey, for he has already given us, inter alia, a dictionary of old English music and also a biography of Brahms, while his general intelligence helps him to interpret the complexities of Europe’s psychology in one of the most pregnant phases of the world’s history. Between the day in 1782, not 1784 as usually given, when Paganini was born in Genoa, and 1840 when he died at Nice—and between then and 1926 when his mortal remains were brought back to be buried at Genoa—the world changed almost out of recognition, in striking contrast to the permanence of his fame. Even in his own early years there were enough changes, including the escape from Napolconism. to make it seem a new place, and to account in its clamour after liberty for much in Paganini’s complete unconventionality as a man. and as a musician. His nondescript father, Antonio, kept him at it when as a mere child he began to play. He had several teachers, but Mr Pulver decides that he - was self-made and self-taught “Aided by his natural aptitude, he leaped over three or four stages of normal development and reached the zenith of his power a century before his time.” His emotional adventures make a movie, but certainly not a moving picture in the big sense, beginning seriously and valuably with his, three years with' the gentlewoman “ Dida,” whose identity, to his credit, he never disclosed. Then came the three years at the,, court of Napoleon’s difficult sister Elise, grotesquely created Princess of Lucca, for whom he composed a sonata, on the G string alone, on the Corsican—though he was not the first composer to use one string. He found his greatest difficulty with Antonia Bianchi, “the singing spitfire,” whom he ultimately paid off.

.The portrait .of Paganini bequeathed by tradition pictures a sort of desperado skeik, for, as Mr Piilvcr says, it asks us to regard him as incurably dissipated, an inveterate gambler, eccentric, selfish, cruel, morbid; avaricious. It declares be led a band of brigands, that he seduced any maid whose eye chanced to meet his glance, and that he adbucted noble women and killed their husbands; last of all, that he secured his mastery of mankind and his pre-eminence' in his art from the devil in exchange for a soul already sufficiently blasted and damned, TRIUMPHS OUTSIDE ITALY. . As a matter of fact, beyond his “ affairs,” his career makes rather drab reading, till he got out of Italy for the first time by capturing Vienna, which ho did not do till he was 46 in the spring of 1828. Mr Pulver’s description of his reception in the Imperial Redoubtensaal gives us a vivid idea of Paganini’s magnetic appeal:— The silent mass of spectators, as , if released from a spell, burst into spontaneous applause before they heard a single note. With one glance at that queer figure, that immobile and expressionless face, these dull and seemingly dead eyes, every soul present felt that here was a man from whom marvels could be legitimately expected. When he began to play he became transfigured. The expressionless face became alive. The dead eyes gleamed, now jolously, now with sorrow. He was not playing music; he was living it. Here, perhaps, is the secret of Paganini’s mesmeric power over his audiences. Like the exceptional actor who lives his part, Paganini was for the time being the incarnation of the music itself. For the next nine years his triumphs lay outside Italy, for in turn he conquered Prague, various German towns, Paris, and London, which he first visited in May, 1831, “ preceded by the speedy post-horses of scandal and the glamorous expresses of Satan.” The talk of the high prices for his concerts made him a marked man whenever he showed himself in the street;— People followed him, crowded before him and behind him, so that often he could not move at all; they spoke to him in English, of which he understood not one syllable; they even touched his clothes and pinched his arms to make sure that he was real. He made a fortune in our midst on this and other occasions, and, having ended his professional career at Turin in July, 1837, indulged in bis old passion for gambling in building a casino in Paris, which was refused a license and failed. The phthisis which affected his larnyx grew worse and worse, and at Inst he flickered out in 1840 at Nice, a shadow of his former self. WHERE PAGANINI SCORED. Although, as noted, Mr Pulver is a professional violinist, he has reserved till the last chapter, headed ‘ For Violinists Only,’ his estimate of Paganini’s contribution to violin playing. He knows how difficult it is to decide who “ invented ” certain features of music, but he decides that ’ he added new effects to the violinist’s materia tochnica in the domain of bowing, left hand pizzicato, and single and double harmonics. It is very much to _ be doubted if his marvellous technical facility was, to as great an extent as is generally supposed, the result only

of frantic practising, which, by the way, few people ever heard him do. What was of even greater aid to him was “ the peculiar adaptability of Ins body, the suitability of his organs, and the ease with which his mental processes and his physical reactions collaborated.” Dr Francesco Bcnnati, the physiologist who examined . him thoroughly, pointed out that Ins left shoulder 'was higher than the other. His hand was no larger than the normal but thanks to the elasticity peculiar’ to all its parts, his span was doubled. But that means he could bend the upper joints of the fingers of his left hand in a lateral direction, and with the greatest ease and rapidity.