Books › Old violins and violin lore, 1900 › scan 12
Scan 12
Old violins and violin lore, 1900
10 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1PRELUDE
3Has it ever occurred to you, my reader, how differently the same piece of music, or, for the matter of that, the same violin, sounds in the hands of two different players?
5A few of Paganini's solos were written down, and Sivori, who passed as his only pupil, was in the habit of playing some of them; yet no one was ever wrought to frenzy or melted into a passion of tears by that elegant performer. I have often heard him. The gentlemen in the orchestra remained calm, and listened with admiration and approval. But when Paganini played, the drummer on one occasion so shook with excitement that he was utterly incapable of playing his part at all, and Professor Ella, then a violinist at the first desk, went up and did it for him, whilst the other violinists were so lost in wonder that they could hardly concentrate their attention sufficiently to come in at the "tutti."
7When Paganini raised his bow on high, it came down on his four strings with a crash. What made it sound like thunder? It was the thunder in his soul! When his violin wailed with sweetness long drawn out, why did the tears roll down the faces of hardened orchestral veterans, and even great virtuosi like Lindley and Dragonetti? Why did the people just go off into fits of laughter when a comic vein seized the prodigious Maestro in the midst of his variations on the Carnival de Venise?
9I have heard Wieniawski play his since much hackneyed "Legende"—it may have been somewhere
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