Niccolò Paganini
Composer

Plucked Before I Could Read

I came into the world in Genoa in 1782, where my mother Teresa Bocciardo and my father Antonio Paganini raised me near the busy port. My father worked at the harbor and traded goods, and since he loved playing the mandolin and the violin himself, he handed me a mandolin when I was five and a violin at seven. Before long I had learned everything the local teachers in Genoa could show me, so I traveled to Parma to study with the violinist Alessandro Rolla. Rolla took one look at what I could already do with a bow and sent me straight to Ferdinando Paer and Gasparo Ghiretti to learn how to write music instead.

Taking the Show on the Road

Playing for one polite drawing room was never going to be enough for me, so in 1809 I left my regular post to travel on my own. I played across Italy in cities like Milan, Venice, Rome and Naples, and people packed into the halls just to see how my fingers moved. My left hand could pluck the strings while my bow kept playing, and I tuned my violin in unusual ways to hit notes nobody expected to hear. By the time I took my concerts abroad to Vienna in 1828 and then on to Paris and London in 1831, audiences looked at me as if I had just stepped out of a storybook.

A Princess for a Boss

Before all that wandering, I spent a few steady years starting in 1805 working in Tuscany. I was hired by Elisa Bonaparte Baciocchi, the Princess of Lucca and Piombino, to serve as her court soloist and music director. Having a princess in charge of your schedule keeps you on your toes, like cooking dinner for someone who owns the kitchen and all the pots. Still, those years at her court gave me the room to test out new tricks on the violin before I ever showed them to the rest of Europe.

Four Strings and a Little Bell

Between 1802 and 1817 I poured my favorite violin inventions into my 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, Op. 1, which Includes Caprice No 24 right here on this site. That piece takes a short, catchy tune and puts it through every test a single violin can survive, from rapid jumps to plucking the strings with my left hand. When I wanted a full orchestra behind me, I wrote pieces like my Violin Concerto No. 1, Op. 6 and my Violin Concerto No. 2 in B minor, Op. 7. The final part of that second concerto is called La campanella because I make the violin chime right alongside a little bell, sounding bright and clear from the back of the hall.

Rumors and Bad Medicine

Because I had unusually long fingers and flexible joints—which some doctors much later guessed might have been a condition like Marfan syndrome or Ehlers-Danlos syndrome—people made up wild stories about me. Gossips swore I had made a deal with the Devil or learned to play on a single string in prison after a murder, and I spent years telling anyone who would listen that neither tale was true. My real troubles were much less magical, starting with a syphilis diagnosis in 1822 that doctors treated with heavy doses of mercury and opium. To make matters worse, I lost a fortune in Paris in the late 1830s when a gambling and concert house called the Casino Paganini went belly up, proving I was much better with a bow than with a balance sheet.

Quiet Days in Nice

Through all the noise and travel, the greatest comfort of my life was my son Achille Ciro Alessandro, who was born in 1825 during my long relationship with the singer Antonia Bianchi. I made sure to get sole custody of the boy and have him legitimized, and he stayed right by my side as my health gave out. Historians still debate whether it was tuberculosis of the throat, syphilis, or all that mercury from my doctors that stole my voice and wore me down at the end. I died in Nice in May 1840, and because the church held onto its old suspicions for years, it took a long time before I was finally laid to rest at the Cimitero della Villetta in Parma.

Leaving the Cannon Behind

Before I went, I left my favorite 1743 Guarneri del Gesù violin to my hometown of Genoa. I always called that instrument Il Cannone because it had a big, booming voice that could fill a theater without breaking a sweat. My music and my way of playing also stayed behind and caught the ear of younger musicians who wanted to push their own instruments further. Composers like Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Sergei Rachmaninoff all took ideas from my work and built their own music around them.

Sparks from the Wood

When you listen to my music today, I do not want you to worry about how hard the notes are to play. A violin is really just a small wooden box with four strings stretched across it, but in the right hands it can laugh, sigh, and race like a horse. I wrote every fast run and high whistle to wake people up and make them lean forward in their seats. If my tunes make your heart beat a little faster and leave you smiling at the sheer fun of the sound, then my work is done.