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Paganini caprice 2
Video by
paganini
7 minutes long
Published 30 December, 2009
Keywords: Jack Glatzer [Music] The second caprice is marked moderato and I feel that it is often taken too quickly and the musical meaning therefore is lost and it is made simply an exercise. I think it's much more than an exercise, and Paganini here goes through feelings of melancholy and jubilation, back and forth. Above all it's a study of bowing technique, of how to move the bow gracefully and elegantly from one string to the other. But not only adjacent strings, lets say moving from the third string to the first, or even the fourth string from the G to the first. When the bow moves quickly it must be very carefully moved so that the intervening strings are not sounded or then there's no clarity. In order to play this the right hand and wrist, arm, elbow all has to be so relaxed and so supple that the normal way in which one studies the violin does not suffice. Even the fingers have to be trained to be so loose, and critics and the time noted this. A French critic called Castille Blaas said, and I think very well, 'Joints that connect arm and wrist are so supple that I can only compare them to cloth fluttering in the wind at the end of a stick.'. [Music] Paganini might have suffered from Marfan's syndrome and that might have been one of the reasons that he could play this with relative ease. But for the violinists nowadays, not only the forearm has to be developed carefully but also the elbow, the upper arm and even the fingers in this suppleness. But at the same time this caprice is a study for the left hand in very great stretches and in the ability to put the finger absolutely accurately on high notes, which are very very far from the low notes and huge stretches of tenths are often seen. There's great music in this caprice, it's not only a study for a bow and the left hand, but we have modulation's of great interest chromatic wise. We have deep melancholy, deep expression at the beginning, bursting in jubilation at the middle and then again into a rather morose ending. [Music]
