Paganini in the UK
Andrew Green traces the virtuoso’s scandal-hit tours
Imagine an international superstar such as Chinese pianist Lang Lang – or, say, Romanian soprano Angela Gheorghiu – signing up for concerts not just in London, Manchester and Edinburgh, but also Chichester, Lincoln, Shrewsbury, Kilmarnock and Uxbridge. With all due respect to these fine cities and towns, you wouldn’t think it likely. Yet these and many other less musically celebrated locations were on the itinerary of arguably the greatest violinist of them all, Niccolò Paganini, during his cluster of visits to Britain in the early 1830s.
Yes, the genius who defined the very idea of the modern virtuoso travelled far and wide on those trips, including to Ireland – and at a time when the railway age was barely under way. But why this criss-crossing of the nation? Money, of course. This was late-career Paganini, his powers on the wane if still formidable, seeking to fill his boots in previously untapped territory.
He certainly cashed in. To the tune of many millions of pounds in today’s values. But there was controversy about that right from the start. Tickets for the his first ever London concerts, in June 1831 at King’s Theatre, were priced at double the usual rates. Londoners were scandalised, their views summed up in one pithy published triplet: ‘What are they who pay three guineas To hear a tune of Paganini’s? Echo – “Pac o’ninnies”’.
Paganini announced he was ill, took stock, then recanted. And duly wowed his audiences. However, the press – as prying and prurient then as so often today – were now eager to pick up further evidence of financial chicanery. We find this and so much else concerning Paganini’s UK travels reported in the fabulous archive of newspapers of the day – many from London, of course, but papers as widely scattered as the North Devon Journal and the Caledonian Mercury, with hundreds and hundreds of reports, articles and tit-bits reflecting Paganini’s presence in Britain. (This, incidentally, was an era in which newspapers brazenly lifted reports wholesale from each other, making it sometimes hard to establish today where they first appeared.)
The primary interest here must be in the eyewitness descriptions such publications offer of Paganini the performer. So we learn from a variety of concert reviews that, for instance, ‘The artist is tall, and the frailest and most attenuated being that can be conceived. The expression on his face is singular but benevolent… The hands of this artist are large, bony and dry’ (The Atlas, London); that he had ‘…a head of unusually large proportions, with a high forehead; add to this, an expressive, well-featured countenance of an unnatural paleness, with long black hair falling over his shoulders…’ (The Scotsman); and that ‘…his gaunt and extraordinary appearance [is] more like that of a devotee about to suffer martyrdom than one to delight you with his art’ (North Devon Journal).
There are copious vivid impressions of his playing to be found in UK newspapers, not least this memorable description from the Hull Packet: ‘To aim at a description of his manner we should say that you would take the violin to be a wild animal which he is endeavouring to quiet in his bosom, and which he occasionally, fiend-like, lashed with his bow; this he dashes upon the strings tearing from the creature the most horrid as well as delightful tones.’
And, of course, reporters who were keen-eyed students of the violin were ready to explain
where Paganini was breaking completely new ground in terms of technique. A reviewer for The Times gave a list of his innovations, including: ‘A succession of chords, in thirds, sixths and octaves, in plain rhythm, and in semi-tones, in the quickest measure over the whole extent of the instrument.’
Add to this the renowned Paganini showmanship – not least the party-piece across his UK tour of performing one of his various pieces written to be played on one string only – and audiences of course went wild. When Paganini appeared in Dublin in September
1831, his reception even before playing a note was remarkable: ‘Loud and general applause continued for several minutes…’ reported the local press; ‘numbers rose in the pit and galleries to give greater vent to their feelings.’
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Even when he returned to the Continent between UK visits, Paganini was monitored in the press
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So anything about Paganini made good copy for newspaper editors up and down the land who, as already pointed out, happily cannibalised each other’s material. Even simpering doggerel like this, printed in the Cork Constitution newspaper, warranted a column inch or two: ‘Of all the beasts which Nature made / With just no other view / Than to surprise our mortal eyes, / And show what she could do; / Of monsters in the air or deep, / Four-footed, furr’d, or finny, / There’s none to be compared at all / To Signor Paganini.’
Paganini fever even made its way into the sports reports of the Wolverhampton Chronicle and Staffordshire Advertiser: a greyhound competing at the Patshull coursing meeting was named, yes, Paganini. The same name graced a winning horse at the Curragh meeting near Dublin in June 1834. But there was also, of course, a taste for gossip. And scandal. There were the rumours that singer Miss Charlotte Watson, who appeared as one of the batch of supporting artistes in Paganini’s concerts, was more than musically in communion with him. But it was evidence of Paganini’s avarice that most regularly made it into print. In March
1832, for instance, the Oxford University and City Herald reported an indignant comment from a Winchester concert-goer that ‘Paganini was not occupied more than twenty-eight minutes in the performance for which he was paid the sum of two hundred pounds’ (around £22,500 today).
Even when he returned to the Continent between UK visits, Paganini was monitored in the press. News reached London from Paris that Paganini had declined to take part in a charity event there for ‘distressed English actors’, resulting in one correspondent to the London Evening Mail insisting that ‘his behaviour is mean, ungrateful and disgusting.’ The same newspaper featured an alleged boast of
Paganini’s while in Paris: ‘I will shortly visit England again, to pluck those foolish [John] Bulls; I despise them as much as I like their guineas. I want 300,000 francs to make up my two millions and I know that John Bull has got them for me.’
So what better than to read that Paganini’s Scrooge-ism had been tested in a court of law? In November 1833 the London Morning Chronicle reported the case of Freeman v Paganini heard in the Sherriff’s Court, Middlesex. ‘Mr Freeman’ claimed not to have been fully paid by Paganini for acting as his UK manager, his lawyer stating that his client was ‘extremely sorry that the defendant [Paganini] whose services in this country had been rewarded by a sum of £30,000 in two years [well over £3m today] being at the rate of some £200 per hour, should have dragged the plaintiff into a Court of Justice to establish his claim to the palltry sum of thirty guineas.’ The jury swiftly found for Freeman.
Britain’s passion for Paganini seems to have subsided as swiftly as it became enflamed. His final visit in 1834 met with diminished interest, especially from the provinces. Perhaps it was because, for all his unique brilliance, Paganini was a novelty performer – and novelty soon wears off. It can’t have helped that he rotated exclusively his own music: it was Paganini plays Paganini – or nothing.
During his 1934 visit, the novelty he came up with was the unveiling in London of the Paganini Viola – presumably the Stradivarius for which he had commissioned a new work from Berlioz (whose resulting Harold in Italy did not meet with approval from its recipient). Paganini of course wrote his own music for this instrument, duly performed at the Hanover Square Rooms in May 1834. One critic commented that ‘some of the passages on the lower strings had an exceedingly rich and mellow effect and the arpeggios were very beautiful.’
However, the biggest Paganini story by far for British newspapers was saved until the very end: an elopement! It was reported everywhere. In June 1834 The Sunday Times had its readers coughing into their coffee with the news that: ‘Paganini stands charged with having induced Miss Watson, a girl of 16, to quit her father’s house to accompany him to the Continent.’
Yes, the very same Charlotte Watson who had been singing as part of Paganini’s supporting musical troupe had followed him across the Channel. Her distinguished musician father duly enlisted the support of the British and French authorities and travelled to Boulogne for the denouement. Paganini’s valet was about to gather Charlotte up when ‘the police and gens d’armes beat the fellow out with their staves and muskets and, covered with bruises, he sneaked away.’
Ms Watson duly returned to London, apparently penitent. And so ended the Paganini Progresses around Britain. He had just six years to live, years of illness and decline. His last public appearance on the concert platform came in
June 1837, at the age of 55. To many of us today, Paganini’s legacy is more reputational than musical, perhaps… but at least the good people of Chichester, Lincoln, Shrewsbury, Kilmarnock and Uxbridge can bask in the knowledge of their bit-part in violin history.