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Scan 95
Cyclopedia of music and musicians, 1888
2 lines. Read by computer on 11 September 2026. Printed page 65. See the scan on archive.org.
1court virtuoso. From Vienna he continued his tour through several cities, playing in March, 1829, for the first time in Berlin. On March 9, 1831, he appeared in Paris and on June 3 in London. His concerts in Great Britain and Ireland during this visit, and two more he made in the following year, were so successful, financially, that in 1832 he returned to the Continent with a large fortune, mainly invested in landed estates. He spent the winter of 1833 in Paris, and in January, 1834, asked Berlioz to write a viola concerto for him, which request resulted in the composition of Harold en Italie. He passed most of the next two years at the Villa Gaiona, near Parma. But his bent for making money would not let him rest long in retirement. In 1836 he was induced to embark in a dubious speculation in Paris, the Casino Paganini, a fashionable club-house, ostensibly for concerts, but really chiefly for gambling. But the gambling license was refused, and the concerts alone could not float the undertaking. Paganini went to Paris to do his best to save the enterprise by appearing at the concerts, but he was too ill to play. The company went into bankruptcy, and his personal loss was 50,000 francs. He staid in Paris during the winter of 1838, and it was in this year that he gave Berlioz the so much talked of present of 20,000 francs as a mark of admiration for his Symphonie fantastique. But this apparent piece of munificence was in reality by no means what the world took it to be for many years. Ferdinand Hiller relates, on the authority of Franz Liszt, who was in Paris at the time, and was intimate with all the parties to the transaction, that the splendid gift was a mere advertising dodge, suggested by Jules Janin to Paganini, whose well-known miserliness had made him unpopular with the Parisian public, and that the 20,000 francs did not even come out of Paganini's purse. But Berlioz never knew the truth about the matter, and always supposed the gift to be from Paganini himself. Paganini was, and always had been, miserly and grasping in money matters, and it was this insatiable thirst for money which probably lay at the bottom of his ruinous passion for gambling. His chagrin at the failure of the Casino aggravated the laryngeal phthisis from which he had been suffering for some time; he stayed a few months at the house of a friend in Marseilles, but, getting no relief, went to Nice for the winter of 1839, and died there in the following May. Paganini's genius was epoch-making in the history of violin-playing. Both his technique and his whole style of performance were original. But marvellous and novel as were his feats of virtuosity, his immense hold upon his audiences was chiefly due to his impressive individuality and the passionate warmth of his playing. He was a romantic virtuoso rather than a classical player, and he never attained to that highest distinction of the violinist, of being a fine, or even a good, quartet-player. As a composer, his reputation was purely ephemeral, and his once famous violin caprices now live only through Schumann's and Liszt's pianoforte tran-
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