Nicolò Paganini (1782-1840)
Guitar Music
Nicolò Paganini was music’s first superstar. His career
as a violinist was attended by inflated concert prices,
mass enthusiasm, even hysteria, rumours of supernatural
powers, a pact with the devil, all supported by a superb
violin technique, a capacity for daring innovation and a
genuine musical gift. All very unlike the quiet life of a
classical guitarist.
Yet Paganini was a guitarist too, and a very good
one. He wrote: ‘I love the guitar for its harmony; it is
my constant companion in all my travels’. He also said,
on another occasion, ‘I do not like this instrument, but
regard it simply as a way of helping me to think’. It is
not a real contradiction: even the most constant of
companions can be irritating at times. He chose not to
exploit the guitar in the same way as he exploited the
violin. Had he done so, the advances in technique the
guitar has seen during the last two or three generations
might have come a great deal sooner. Only recently has
the full extent of Paganini’s guitar compositions been
revealed. Few of them were ever published, and when
the Italian government was offered the collection, they
turned it down. The guitar remained out of fashion for a
long time, and Paganini’s connection with it was all but
forgotten. Our modern age is to a large extent concerned
with discovery and revival, and it was inevitable that
Paganini’s work should come under scrutiny sooner or
later. Because the guitar compositions do not contain
the brilliance that we find in the Caprices for violin, it
is easy to dismiss them as inferior, in the sense of ‘not
so good’. You might as well say that Snowdon is
inferior to Mount Everest: it is true only in the literal
sense of one mountain being lower than the other, but
they are both mountains, the chief difference being that
one can be approached for a pleasant afternoon’s walk
and the other cannot.
Paganini left a large amount of chamber music that
includes the guitar, still to be thoroughly explored.
Meanwhile, the music for solo guitar is readily
accessible, and guitarists are discovering it with
pleasure. Why has it taken the best part of two centuries
to bring this attractive music to light? Apart from the
fact that most of the guitar pieces were never published
– though it is worth noting that of his compositions that
were published during his lifetime, all but the 24 Caprices
for solo violin include the guitar – Paganini had built up
such a huge reputation as an innovative violinist of
unprecedented brilliance that it was hard to believe that
he played the guitar at a similarly high level. Then, too,
the guitar suffered a decline during the nineteenth
century. Only recently, fuelled by the record industry’s
insatiable demand for new music, has a culture of
research grown up in which unheard music by old
composers is dragged out of its obscurity, dusted down
and found to be not only tolerable but very often good
music and well worth reviving.
One of the fascinating things about Paganini is the
interaction between his violin technique and his guitar
technique. He frequently played both instruments
during his musical sessions with friends, even (as an
eyewitness has recorded) putting the violin between his
knees so that he could pick up the guitar and continue
playing without interrupting the flow. We may infer
from this that his left hand approached each of the two
fingerboards in much the same way, and the guitar
music supports this idea: linear rather than vertical
harmony, arpeggiated chords aiding the forward
movement of the melodic line.
Both violin and guitar are integral parts of
Paganini’s unique personality. It is no longer possible to
think of one without thinking of the other. The links
may not at first be obvious, given that the violin music
was for public consumption, with all the superficial
display that the public demanded, while the guitar was
for music at home among friends. It remains music
created by the same man, and that makes a good
starting-point. Though his friend Hector Berlioz, who
knew something about the guitar, paid tribute to
Paganini’s guitar ability, it was his violin that people
wanted to hear, and his extraordinary success with it
made him a legendary figure in nineteenth-century
music. Would his guitar compositions ever have
aroused a paying audience to the raptures that his violin
brilliance did? We can only guess what might have
happened if Paganini had never discovered what he
could do with a violin, if he had concentrated his efforts
entirely on the guitar. It is not impossible that we would
have had a set of Caprices written for the guitar and no
less difficult. This is perhaps one reason why his guitar
music, on a first hearing, does not glow with the fiery
brilliance of those extraordinary pieces for violin, but
there is plenty of good music there, as guitarists and
their audiences are discovering.
The Grand Sonata originally included a violin part
of extreme simplicity, because it was the custom for
Paganini to exchange his violin for the guitar of Luigi
Legnani at the end of one of their joint recitals. Legnani’s
violin playing did not approach the level of Paganini’s
guitar playing, however, and the part had to be written
accordingly. Its meagre proportions often lead guitarists
to dispense with it altogether, apart from incorporating a
few of the violin’s notes where appropriate. The rich
substance of the guitar part, requiring a virtuoso’s
technique, which Paganini had on both instruments,
more than makes up for the loss of the violin. The first
movement, a free and flowing Allegro risoluto in sonata
form, is followed by the endearingly melodic Romance
in a slow 6/8 tempo. The Andantino variato is a theme
and six variations that becomes more and more
technically demanding as the work reaches its stirring
conclusion.
The Ghiribizzi (whims, fancies or caprices) seem to
have been written in or around 1819. The composer
wrote in 1824 that they were for ‘a little girl in Naples’,
and that he wanted to scribble (scarabocchiare) some
popular tunes rather than compose something more
serious. Like many such sketches, written impulsively
without careful planning and construction, they have
their own unique charm and freshness. No. 16 uses the
aria In cor più non mi sento (In my heart I feel nothing
more) from Paisiello’s opera La Molinara, No. 37 is
based on a melody from La gazza ladra, with Rossini’s
Allegro ingeniously remodelled into an Adagietto.
Melodies by Mozart (Don Giovanni), Süssmayr and
Paganini himself appear among the total of 43, an
irresistible collection of melodies in a playable form not
needing the highest of guitar techniques, though, as
always, a high level of musical understanding. The
Ghiribizzi are Paganini’s Album for the Young.
Unlike the Grand Sonata, most of Paganini’s
sonatas are in two-movement form, generally a minuet
followed by a waltz, an allegretto or even an allegretto
scherzando, both movements in the same key. The
minuets inevitably conjure up the eighteenth century
from time to time, yet they never fail to convey the
essence of Paganini’s essentially Romantic music.
The 24 Caprices for unaccompanied violin are
Paganini’s most celebrated compositions. Exploiting
the violin in daring, exciting and entirely new ways,
they changed the image of the violin for ever. Yet
Paganini himself never played them in public, though
he dedicated them to the artists (agli artisti). It is
perhaps strange that, with a few exceptions, guitarists
still seem more ready to tackle the extreme technical
difficulties of the violin Caprices than to investigate
music that Paganini actually wrote for the guitar. That is
partly because the guitar music is now virtually part of
‘Early Music’. The Caprices have never remotely
approached that status, and are genuine classics, neither
ancient nor modern but sublimely timeless.
Colin Cooper