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The Music at Tippet Rise
NICOLÒ PAGANINI (1782–1840) Sonata for Solo Violin in A Major
As Liszt was the Paganini of the piano, Paganini was the Liszt of the violin. Marfan syndrome (or spider fingers) likely ensured that his long and bony fingers were double-jointed, and could do contortionist things that no one else could do. Locatelli had written 24 Caprices for the violin with the same innovations which Paganini, by showmanship, later owned with his own 24 Caprices. Critics had ostracized such technical progress precisely because of the difficulties which later made them famous, once the public espoused them. When he was 13, Paganini went to study in Parma, where the teachers decided they could do nothing to improve him.
After Biber, Bach, Corelli, Vivaldi, and Tartini, it was Paganini who added Locatelli’s tricks to the history of violin technique. The secret seemed to be not so much the notes as wearing black, being very thin, having syphilis, playing very fast, and affecting satanic mannerisms. Rumors of him hav- ing sold his soul to the devil and having spent time in prison for murder were helped by the way he held his bow high up in the air before bringing it down on the strings. He would also cut the strings so he was forced to play on two or even one string. To this day breaking a string in Carnegie Hall is a great way to make a career. He developed the ricochet, where the bow bounces from one side to the other of the finger- board. Feigning insane energy to the point of craziness is its own technique, as half your energy goes into the theatrics, making it harder to play well.
Adapting Locatelli’s Caprices brought Paganini his signature success, as he turned the pieces into extraordinary fantasies of scales, pizzicatos, double stops, in between which he inserted the beleaguered themes. Both Pablo
de Sarasate and Eugène Ysaÿe based their virtuosic compositions and displays successfully on Paganini’s. Despite his tricks, which in a later age would have guaranteed him failure in front of competition juries, he
could play very movingly with an operatic bel canto breadth, although accusations of schmaltz would today fail to move the critics (although audiences have always responded to
it; witness David Garrett, André Rieu, Vanessa-Mae, and Lindsey Stirling).
During the period of his conquest of the heights with the Caprices, when he was appointed court violinist at Lucca by Napoleon’s sister, he also wrote his very simple sonatas for violin and guitar accompaniment (Paganini also played the guitar and the mandolin brilliantly).
Here the concept of human speech, of breathing, of letting melodies flex, rather than metronomically rhyme, reveals his own book of longing. One often suspects during the slow movements of his Concertos, or in the Caprice No. 5, or in these sonatas, that, like Rachmaninoff, Paganini developed his technique so that people would listen at last to his soul.
Both the Telemann and the Paganini A-major sonatas seem to be calmed by the key itself, although I myself have always thought of A Major as a somewhat militaristic mode, as in Chopin’s “Military” Polonaise. But Liszt’s Concerto No. 2 in A Major starts with a yearning oboe theme, accompanied by slow tzigane Lisztian arpeggios in the piano. Liszt simplified it in 1861, as he did in his Transcendental Etudes, realizing that his sensibility lay in simplicity. As Pope said, “simplicity is the mean between ostentation and rusticity.”
EUGÈNE YSAŸE (1858–1931)
Sonata for Solo Violin No. 5 in G Major, Op. 27
Ysaÿe came from the Franco-Belgian school of violin playing, epitomized by Henri Vieuxtemps and Henryk Wieniawski, under both of whom he had studied. Ysaÿe taught Josef Gingold, Nathan Milstein, and the violist William Primrose,