Niccolò Paganini

No violinist before Niccolò Paganini had made the instrument itself an object of public fascination. Born in Genoa in 1782, he started on the mandolin under his father, moved to the violin, studied with local musicians and then in Parma, and soon outran anything his teachers could set him. After years of work in northern Italy he took the career abroad — Vienna, Paris, London — where the playing drew serious admiration and a mythology of supernatural assistance that he did little to discourage. He enlarged the physical vocabulary of the instrument: rapid shifts of register, left-hand pizzicato, harmonics, multiple stopping, unusual bow strokes, whole passages confined to a single string. In the best of the music these serve melody and drama rather than display; the concertos marry bel canto lyricism to spectacular solo writing, and the Twenty-Four Caprices remain the measure by which violinists test both technique and character. He also left a substantial body of chamber music with guitar, an instrument he played well and largely in private. He died in Nice in 1840. His concert at the Scala in Milan in 1813 brought forty more appearances in that season alone, and the tour that made his European name ran from Vienna in 1828 through Germany, Poland and Bohemia to Strasbourg in 1831, with France and England after it, until cancellations and ill health closed the concert career in 1834. A casino venture in Paris two years later ruined him and forced the sale of his instruments. The Church refused him burial in Genoa, and only years afterwards was he laid in the cemetery at Parma; Berlioz wrote Harold in Italy for him.