Paganini: Down to the Crossroads

I am realizing that I am immediately drawn to solo pieces whether they are contemporary or 100’s of years old. Somehow much of what I have started off listening to has been solo music. Yo-Yo Ma, Glenn Gould and some Erik Satie. My father recommended Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices performed by Itzhak Perlman.

Reading up on Paganini I learned that he was a native of Genoa and that Mandolin was his first instrument. More interestingly, he had refused the Last Rites and as Wikipedia puts it: It was on these grounds, and his widely rumored association with the devil, that his body was denied a Catholic burial in Genoa. It took four years, and an appeal to the Pope, before the body was allowed to be transported to Genoa, but was still not buried. His remains were finally put to rest in 1876 in a cemetery in Parma. I like to think of this like as a Faustian tale, where Paganini’s virtuoso skills were acquired just like Robert Johnson down at the crossroads. The Devil went down to Georgia 200 years after he did some business in Genoa.

As with Yo-Yo Ma, I can hear the intense execution of each note. This sometimes sounds like gun-to-the-temple stopwatch execution. If you could film it and play back in slow motion, we would be dazzled and amazed at the lightening fast reflexes of Itzhak Perlman. Still, I find it all a bit exhausting. Maybe it’s too much to try and listen to or take in all at once. I feel I can draw a direct comparison to a jazz improvisation like a Max Roach solo, where the musical mind drives the machine. Point and counterpoint are hammered home, and each note clear whether it has a full second or 1/1,000^th to make itself heard. I imagine Paganini with his fathers mandolin, plucking the tunes his father taught him fits at 1 and ½ speed, then two and three times faster, then backwards, or moving all the notes several octaves lower. A virtuoso, bored with convention and preparing for his deal with the devil.