Niccolo Paganini, born on October 27, 1782, was not a child prodigy treated kindly by his parents and society, and his musical talent was revealed at a relatively late age.
He was already forty-six years old when he left Italy for the first time in order to go on the conquest of world fame.
Indeed, he brought Europe to a real ecstasy. His outstanding talent and mysterious personality hypnotized the public and asked the experts riddles that remain unexplained today.
Apparently, part of the answer to Paganini's riddle is contained in the unusual anatomy of his body, the design of which was ideal for playing the violin. All the doctors who examined the violinist confirmed his unique anatomical predisposition to playing this instrument.
He had abnormal shoulders that did not match his frail body. The left side of the chest was wider than the right side and sunken at the top; the left shoulder is much higher than the right, so that when he lowered his arms, one of them seemed shorter than the other; spider-like hands and fingers acquired such flexibility that they allowed him to perform the most incredible movements and combinations.
The violinist's left ear could hear much sharper than his right, and the eardrum was so sensitive that he felt severe pain if someone spoke loudly nearby. At the same time, he was able to pick up the quietest sounds from a great distance. But apart from anatomical predisposition, Paganini certainly possessed an innate musical genius.
In addition, much indicates that Paganini had a completely new technique of playing, which he never revealed to anyone. It happened more than once that curious violinists from the orchestra tried to play Paganini's violin. And with considerable surprise, they discovered that she was completely upset, and it was impossible to play on her.
It is believed that the violinist invented his own tuning of the strings, which allowed him to easily play the most difficult chord progressions that could not be performed with ordinary string tension. On this occasion, many argued that the maestro could rearrange the strings of his instrument in one fell swoop while playing.
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The power of his game over the audience was truly demonic. After all, it was not for nothing that already at his first concert in Vienna, one music critic who was present there seriously claimed that during the witch's variations he saw a living devil standing next to the violinist on the podium.
Even Heinrich Heine, after attending one of Paganini's concerts, wrote: "Maybe at the end of the game he is no longer a living person, but a vampire who has risen from the coffin, sucking blood from our hearts with his game?"
Franz Liszt was so shocked by the devilish genius from Genoa that after one of Paganini's concerts he was seized with a nervous fever, and he was convinced that the magician with the violin was a demon himself. He even believed that Paganini had killed his mistress and for this many years languished in a dark dungeon, where he made himself a violin with a single string and thus mastered the magical art of playing the G string. Moreover, Liszt even claimed that Paganini made this string from the gut of a girl he strangled.
However, not only Liszt believed this. From time to time a rumor arose that Paganini had spent many years in prison for taking the life of his beloved: either he killed, or poisoned, or stabbed. Many lithographs sold throughout Europe represented the genius violinist in the dungeon at the time of the murder.
Of course, Paganini suffered greatly from these rumors and tried everything to dispel them. For example, in Vienna, he even persuaded an Italian ambassador to openly declare that he had known Paganini as a noble man for more than twenty years. And in Paris he turned in an open letter to Professor Fethis, the publisher of the Review Musical, where he made an attempt to reduce the rumor about the prison to a ridiculous misunderstanding.
But people did not believe him. And they even found, it seems, compelling arguments for this. So, about an interval of six years, that is, the period when he fled from his parental home and was accepted for permanent service at the court in Lucca, almost nothing is known. Although the rest of the violinist's life is scheduled almost every day. Where did Paganini spend these six years? - unknown. And one more thing: when he reappeared in the world, his game really reached perfection inaccessible to mere mortals.
On May 3, 1831, Paganini's letter to the Review Musical was answered in the same magazine by the musicologist and librarian G. E. Andre. “If you wish the bad rumors about you to subside,” he wrote, “and every decent person felt disgust for these conversations as for pathetic slander, try the easiest and most effective means: light up the darkness of these years and tear the ground from under the gossip!” Paganini did not answer this challenge. And, naturally, his silence was taken as an admission of guilt.
And the rumor of people never ceased to say that Paganini sold his soul to the devil. Nothing else could be explained by his contemporaries for the maestro's virtuoso possession of the violin. And many added: "And after death he will not find peace!" These turned out to be absolutely right: the coffin with the body of the great musician was buried more than ten times and pulled out again. The posthumous journey lasted … fifty-seven years - almost as long as Niccolo Paganini lived on earth …
The famous violinist died of consumption in Nice in May 1840 at the age of fifty-eight. His body was embalmed, exposed for goodbye, and thousands of people came to say goodbye to the brilliant musician.
A grandiose funeral was planned, but unexpectedly for everyone, the Bishop of Nice forbade the burial of the heretic Paganini in the local cemetery, which he informed the grief-stricken son of the musician Achilla.
I had to urgently look for a place for burial. We decided to deliver the musician's body to his hometown - Genoa. The luxurious walnut coffin was secretly loaded onto a ship and taken to the Genoese port. But the local governor refused even to let the ship into the harbor - a black ingratitude on the part of Paganini's fellow citizens, to whom, by the way, he bequeathed his amazing violin.
Be that as it may, the ship stood in the Genoese roadstead for three months. The team claimed that from the hold where the coffin was located, the sounds of a violin and sorrowful sighs were constantly heard.
In the end, the violinist's influential friends managed to get permission to transfer the remains to the basement of a castle. But even there the coffin did not last long: the servants, one after another, began to demand calculation, claiming that it flickered in the dark with a devilish light, and strange and eerie sounds rushed from it.
I had to send the coffin to the morgue of the local infirmary. But even there, the seemingly accustomed employees rebelled: Paganini's body inspired an indescribable horror on them, and sighs and sounds of strange music were still heard from the coffin.
It was only in 1842 that the violinist's body was finally buried - though not in a cemetery, but on a deserted promontory at the foot of an ancient tower. But two years later, the remains were dug up again and transported to Nice, hoping to still bury them in the cemetery.
And again nothing came of it - they had to put the coffin in the basement of a country villa of one of Paganini's friends. He stood there until 1876 (fortunately, no one lived in the villa), and only then was it possible to obtain permission for burial in a Christian way at the local cemetery.
Alas, the posthumous wanderings of the maestro did not end there. In 1893, the coffin was dug up again, as rumors spread that strange sounds were coming from the ground. The exhumation was carried out in the presence of Paganini's grandson, Czech violinist Frantisek Ondřicek.
The musician's body has practically decayed, but the head is in a mysterious and incomprehensible way perfectly preserved. The coffin was closed and … four years later they dug it again to bury it in some little-known cemetery. And only then, in 1897, Niccolo Paganini's "posthumous odyssey" ended.