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Paganini caprice 3
Video by
paganini
10 minutes, 9 seconds long
Published 2 January, 2010
Keywords: Jack Glatzer The opening and closing parts of the third caprice are some of the most moving and tragic writing of Paganini, in fact of any writing for the violin that I know. We have octaves ending in double trills and after each phrase a long long period of silence, what we might even call silent music. And in performance you can see the bow drawn slowly over the strings and almost feel the silence being produced by this, almost mystical moment in music. [Music] At the end of the first section and and the end of the entire caprice there is something written in the music which is impossible to perform or at least I find it and I think most violinists find it impossible. The fingers are stretched in a unison, the third and the first finger very very far apart and one is required to trill on top of that with the second and fourth and this is very rarely even attempted by violinists so we have something of Paganini that's impossible. If Paganini really played this unplayable stretch on the violin I think he must have suffered from an advanced stage of Marfan's syndrome or maybe he actually had the devil helping him. [Music] This beautiful opening and closing part is associated in my mind with the legend of Paganini imprisonment. He was imprisoned for a week it's true, for some rather sordid affair with a young lady when he was young man in Italy. But Europe forgot this and they said that he had killed his mistress or that he had killed a clergyman and was imprisoned for not one week but for five years, ten years, even twenty years and in the prison he only had a violin with only one string on he acquired that great technique by playing for so many years. In any case Louis Boulanger, a very significant French painter and graphic artist made a picture of Paganini consoling himself by playing in a lonely prison cell. And Paganini discovered in a shop in Paris that there was a crowd of people looking at a picture and he was bewildered to see that it was a picture of himself in prison. He was really aghast and upset that Boulanger had done this, I wish he knew the sensitive writing of Boulanger that explains and reinterprets Paganini's whole affair with the prison. Boulanger says 'Paganini like Tarso is sadly seated in a dungeon alone with his great thoughts sublime, shining in the shadows.' and then Boulanger speaks of Paganini pale brow marked with sorrow and he wonders 'If a fateful destiny had not pressed its iron hand on that burning soul to make it pay for receiving too many gifts and shining more brightly than others, or it some bitter memory had not darkened that severe head.'. The middle section of this caprice is a delightful contrast is in the major key, it's brighter, the notes flow by very quickly with the left hand fingers and with very slow bow strokes, so that there are many many notes written to a bow stroke. [Music] The whole thing has beautiful scintillating modulation's which give us a relief from the morose quality of the beginning and the end. [Music]
