The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code (35 page)

Beyond being flexible, his fingers were deceptively strong, especially the thumbs. Paganini’s great rival Karol Lipi
ski watched him in concert one evening in Padua, then retired to Paganini’s room for a late dinner and some chitchat with Paganini and friends. At the table, Lipi
ski found a disappointingly scanty spread for someone of Paganini’s stature, mostly eggs and bread. (Paganini could not even be bothered to eat that and contented himself with fruit.) But after some wine and some jam sessions on the guitar and trumpet, Lipi
ski found himself staring at Paganini’s hands. He even embraced the master’s “small bony fingers,” turning them over. “How is it possible,” Lipi
ski marveled, “for these thin small fingers to achieve things acquiring extraordinary strength?” Paganini answered, “Oh, my fingers are stronger than you think.” At this he picked up a saucer of thick crystal and suspended it over the table, fingers below, thumb on top. Friends gathered around to laugh—they’d seen the trick before. While Lipi
ski stared, bemused, Paganini flexed his thumb almost imperceptibly and—
crack!
—snapped the saucer into two shards. Not to be outdone, Lipi
ski grabbed a plate and tried to shatter it with his own thumb, but couldn’t come close. Nor could Paganini’s friends. “The saucers remained just as they were before,” Lipi
ski recalled, “while Paganini laughed maliciously” at their futility. It seemed almost unfair, this combination of power and agility, and those who knew Paganini best, like his personal physician, Francesco Bennati, explicitly credited his success to his wonderfully tarantular hands.

Of course, as with Einstein’s violin training, sorting out cause and effect gets tricky here. Paganini had been a frail child, sickly and prone to coughs and respiratory infections, but he nevertheless began intensive violin lessons at age seven. So perhaps he’d simply loosened up his fingers through practice. However, other symptoms indicate that Paganini had a genetic condition called Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. People with EDS cannot make much collagen, a fiber that gives ligaments and tendons some rigidity and toughens up bone. The benefit of having less collagen is circus flexibility. Like many people with EDS, Paganini could bend all his joints alarmingly far backward (hence his contortions onstage). But collagen does more than
prevent most of us from touching our toes: a chronic lack can lead to muscle fatigue, weak lungs, irritable bowels, poor eyesight, and translucent, easily damaged skin. Modern studies have shown that musicians have high rates of EDS and other hypermobility syndromes (as do dancers), and while this gives them a big advantage at first, they tend to develop debilitating knee and back pain later, especially if, like Paganini, they stand while performing.

Widely considered the greatest violinist ever, Niccolò Paganini owed much of his gift to a genetic disorder that made his hands freakishly flexible. Notice the grotesquely splayed thumb. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

Constant touring wore Paganini down after 1810, and although he’d just entered his thirties, his body began giving out on him. Despite his growing fortune, a landlord in Naples evicted him in 1818, convinced that anyone as skinny and sickly as Paganini must have tuberculosis. He began canceling engagements, unable to perform his art, and by the 1820s he had to sit out whole years of tours to recuperate. Paganini couldn’t have known that EDS underlay his general misery; no doctor described the syndrome formally until 1901. But ignorance only heightened his desperation, and he sought out quack apothecaries and doctors. After diagnosing syphilis and tuberculosis and who knows what else, the docs prescribed him harsh, mercury-based purgative pills, which ravaged his already fragile insides. His persistent cough worsened, and eventually his voice died completely, silencing him. He had to wear blue-tinted shades to shield his sore retinas, and at one point his left testicle swelled, he sobbed, to the size of “a little pumpkin.” Because of chronic mercury damage to his gums, he had to bind his wobbly teeth with twine to eat.

Sorting out why Paganini finally died, in 1840, is like asking what knocked off the Roman Empire—take your pick. Abusing mercury drugs probably did the most intense damage, but Dr. Bennati, who knew Paganini before his pill-popping days and was the only doctor Paganini never dismissed in a rage for fleecing him, traced the real problem further back. After examining Paganini, Bennati dismissed the diagnoses of tuberculosis and
syphilis as spurious. He noted instead, “Nearly all [Paganini’s] later ailments can be traced to the extreme sensitivity of his skin.” Bennati felt that Paganini’s papery EDS skin left him vulnerable to chills, sweats, and fevers and aggravated his frail constitution. Bennati also described the membranes of Paganini’s throat, lungs, and colon—all areas affected by EDS—as highly susceptible to irritation. We have to be cautious about reading too much into a diagnosis from the 1830s, but Bennati clearly traced Paganini’s vulnerability to something inborn. And in the light of modern knowledge, it seems likely Paganini’s physical talents and physical tortures had the same genetic source.

Paganini’s afterlife was no less doomed. On his deathbed in Nice, he refused communion and confession, believing they would hasten his demise. He died anyway, and because he’d skipped the sacraments, during Eastertide no less, the Catholic Church refused him proper burial. (As a result his family had to schlep his body around ignominiously for months. It first lay for sixty days in a friend’s bed, before health officials stepped in. His corpse was next transferred to an abandoned leper’s hospital, where a crooked caretaker charged tourists money to gawk at it, then to a cement tub in an olive oil processing plant. Family finally smuggled his bones back into Genoa in secret and interred him in a private garden, where he lay for thirty-six years, until the church finally forgave him and permitted burial.
^*
)

Paganini’s ex post facto excommunication fueled speculation that church elders had it in for Paganini. He did cut the church out of his ample will, and the Faustian stories of selling his soul couldn’t have helped. But the church had plenty of nonfictional reasons to spurn the violinist. Paganini gambled flagrantly, even betting his violin once before a show. (He lost.) Worse, he caroused with maidens, charwomen, and blue-blooded dames all across Europe, betraying a truly capacious appetite for fornication. In his most ballsy conquests, he allegedly seduced two of
Napoleon’s sisters, then discarded them. “I am ugly as sin, yet all I have to do,” he once bragged, “is play my violin and women fall at my feet.” The church was not impressed.