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Paganini caprice 12
Video by
paganini
7 minutes, 36 seconds long
Published 30 December, 2009
Keywords: Jack Glatzer [Music] This 12th caprice can be paired with number two as its also a study of undulating bow technique, moving from one string to the other. It's in a different way in this caprice, because the notes are slurred, they're played legato, many notes to a bow, sometimes like sixteen notes to a bow in fact and this gives a fluid quality and it helps the sombre, morose expression of the entire work. The left hand technique is even more extraordinary then in the second caprice because the stretches are indeed demonic. We have a stretch here of twelve notes, a twelfth, a tenth is considered the largest stretch a violinists hand is capable of and here we have a twelfth. It's painful, it's even dangerous to practise it too much and one has to be very careful with not exaggerating the desire to play such huge brinkmanship. [Music] It's been suggested that Paganini suffered from a disease called Marfan's syndrome and that this disease actually aided him in accomplishing his aims because he had such great suppleness as a result in both the right and left hands and arms. A very suggestive quotation from an American doctor, Dr. Schonfeld from the American Medical Association Journal of 1978. 'There is good reason to believe that Paganini was afflicted with or perhaps it would be more correct to say endowed with Marfan's syndrom. The long sinuous, hyper-extensive fingers of the left hand gave his fingers an extraordinary range of motion and freedom of independent movement on the fingerboard while the laxness of the wrist and shoulder joints of his right upper extremity gave him the pliancy required for masterful bowing. What would be a more likely explanation than that of the unique joint flexibility and unfettered spider fingers of Marfan's syndrome made such accomplishments possible.'. And while we think of Paganini and his relation to witchcraft and devils, isn't that a wonderful image 'spider fingers', there's even a medical term called aracnodactylis. [Music]
