The complete idiot's guide to classical music (25 page)

A century and a half before The Rolling Stones came on the scene, Niccolo Paganini (1782–1840), perpetually clad in black with a gaunt, cadaverous look and seemingly supernatural skills, accentuated his persona as a Satanic Majesty. Actually, he was pretty strange as a kid, too: He would go into fits of ecstasy at the sound of cathedral bells, tremble all over when the organ sounded in church, and the first time he tried out his older brother’s violin, he fainted dead away and lay in a trance for two days.

Just as Beethoven’s father had high hopes of turning his son into a money-making prodigy a la Mozart, Paganini’s dad tried the same stunt with Niccolo, locking him up the practice room for hours at a time and thrashing him or taking away his supper if he hadn’t worked hard enough. In one way, Papa’s plan worked; in another it didn’t. Paganini indeed became the greatest violinist of his time (possibly of
all time
), but not at the hoped-for age of seven or eight. He was an old-timer of 12 by the time he gave his first recital, and almost out of his teens when he took the first of several orchestral positions. His fame as a vagabond virtuoso would not be attained for another ten years or so, but once he began touring, his fabled prowess became the talk of Europe, his playing exciting audiences beyond belief.

 
Important Things to Know
Paganini rewrote the book on violin playing, innovating the left-hand
pizzicato
. He made the violin imitate animal cries and human speech, achieving unexpected effects through unorthodox tunings. A favorite Paganini concert stunt was cutting through three of his strings with scissors so that he could play the most wildly brilliant passages on the remaining one. Which proves that he was just a 150 years or so early in the modern trend toward hard rock guitar-smashing and other on-stage demolitions.

 
Music Words
Pizzicato
, like so many musical terms, comes from the Italian, meaning “pinched.” It’s an indication that notes on bowed string instruments are to be plucked by the player’s fingers, not stroked with a separate bow.

Staccato
, from the Italian, meaning “detached,” indicates that a note is very short, and not connected to the note before or after it. On the violin, a staccato can be produced by a very quick bow stroke (with the right hand) or a fast plucking of a string with the left.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
As it was, rumors followed Paganini wherever he went: people whispered that the souls of his mistresses were locked inside his violin; that he could move the bow so fast because he had filled it small leaden bullets; that his tone was so exquisite because the fiddle strings had been spun from the intestines of his murdered rivals; that he had sold his soul to the devil in exchange for his incredible technique. Paganini once had to publish a letter from his mother, just to prove he really had human parents.

His popularity reached unprecedented heights. People flocked to buy Paganini fans, Paganini perfumes, and Paganini walking sticks; you could eat marzipan Paganinis and Paganini rolls, baked in the form of little violins. Unfortunately, the violinist was stricken with a number of illnesses that forced him into semiretirement for the last years of his life. In 1838, he developed cancer of the throat, and he died the following spring. Paganini’s legacy, though, will live forever, both through modern performances of his five concertos and dozens of other shorter works for the violin, and in the virtuosic showmanship that quite possibly will never again be replicated.

They weren’t all Italian, needless to say. Belgium’s greatest violinist was Henri Vieuxtemps, and Poland gave us Henryk (or Henri) Wieniawski, who succeeded Vieuxtemps as professor at the Brussels Conservatory. Both men toured the United States in the mid-19th century and both composed concertos and shorter works that remain to this day in the repertoire of virtually all violinists.

Brahms’ friend Joseph Joachim (for whom he wrote the Violin Concerto in D) was another highly regarded touring performer; and Norway boasted Ole Bull, who once gave 274 concerts in a single season (1836–37).

Spain had Pablo de Sarasate, who put Pamplona on the map long before Hemingway came along. He wrote dozens of showpieces in the Spanish style, and premiered concertos written for him by Saint-Saens, Lalo, and Bruch, among others.

 
Music Word
Unlike most of us, whose calendars run from January through December, and corporations, whose “fiscal years” can start and end at whatever month the treasurer deems best, concert
seasons
are usually reckoned from the fall through the spring. Most orchestras and opera houses begin their subscription programs in September or October, and wind them down in April or May. (There are also summer seasons, of course, but they will normally be specified as such.)

The Austrian-born Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962), who reigned as one of the most popular musicians of the first half of the 20th century, was not so much a virtuoso as a deep-feeling musician for whom technical problems did not seem to exist. He could read music at the tender age of three, and at seven entered the Vienna Conservatory, winning prizes there and later in Paris, then making his American debut in 1889 (with the Boston Symphony, no less). Kreisler’s interests extended far beyond the violin, however: He was a superb pianist, an accomplished painter, a linguist, an author, a composer, and a book collector. He gave up music for a time to enter medical school, then became an officer in the Austrian Army. “In my youthful days,” he said, “I had some very weird thoughts about my future career. I envisaged myself operating on a patient in the morning, playing chess in the afternoon, giving a concert in the evening, and winning a battle at midnight.”

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
During World War I, Kreisler rejoined his regiment and was wounded in action. He chronicled some of those military impressions in a slim volume called
Four Weeks in the Trenches: The War Story of a Violinist
.

Kreisler’s burnished tone, exemplary technique, and elegant phrasing made him one of the most admired violinists of his time, but perhaps the most enduring part of his legacy rests on a modest bit of deception. At a concert in 1905, he introduced three warm-hearted encore-type pieces, “Liebesfreud” (The Joy of Love), “Liebesleid” (The Pain of Love), and “Schon Rosmarin” (The Beautiful Rosmarin), explaining that they were by one Joseph Lanner, a Viennese composer who had died half a century earlier. Gradually, he introduced other works as transcriptions of music by Pugnani, Dittersdorf, Porpora, and sundry other earlier, if minor, masters.

Actually, it was Pugnani who blew his cover. In 1935,
The New York Times
critic Olin Downes, unable to track down the original source of the “Preludium and Allegro,” called the violinist for the information; thus cornered, Kreisler confessed that it—along with all those other wonderful miniatures—were in fact his own compositions. Why had he done it? “I wanted to enlarge my programs,” said the always modest Kreisler, “but I found it tactless to repeat my name endlessly. . . .”

Aside from a few critics, who were angered at being taken in by the violinist-composer’s little white lies, audiences were even more enchanted with his new-old miniatures than they had been in the first place, clamoring all the louder for them at every Kreisler concert.

You can enjoy Kreisler’s compositions in recordings by Itzhak Perlman and many other contemporary admirers. But try to hear Fritz Kreisler himself on one of the vintage CD reissues: Perhaps you’ll sense the old-world elegance that was so much a part of his magic as a performer. When the violinist was given a testimonial dinner by the Musicians’ Emergency Fund in 1950, Bruno Walter summed up Kreisler’s musical sorcery with his own touch of eloquence: “He did not only play the violin,” said the famed conductor, “he became the violin. Or better, the violin became him. To make music is for Fritz Kreisler what flying is for the birds, what swimming is for the fish. . . .”

Somebody has to lead the musicians, so enter the conductor, a virtuoso of a different stripe who has to know what every instrument in the orchestra is doing at every moment, yet lead the performance in silence (except at rehearsals, of course). In the early days, the conductor was almost always the composer or a member of the orchestra (usually the harpsichordist or first violinist). This had its drawbacks.