“Caprices” for Solo Violin – Paganini
by richibi
“Musical Fête“ (1747)
____________
though by now you must be assuming
that Beethoven had been defining the
entire early Romantic Period all by
himself, 1803, let’s say, to, say, 1810,
when Schubert, 13 by then, started
kicking in, however immaturely, with
his D1 – D1, note, not D960, over a
thousand compositions later, a work
imbued, so early, not unexpectedly,
with the irrepressible spirit of Mozart,
and therefore, by then, incidentally,
audibly outdated – but you would be,
we would be, overlooking the extraordinary
influence of a maverick, a relic of the
earlier Italian domination of the arts,
from the Renaissance, at least, on –
Paganini – the wizard of the
violin, who’d sold his soul, like Faust,
to the devil, it was susurrated, for his
extraordinary gift
Bach had not only changed the course
of musical history, in the early 18th
Century, but shanghaied the very
language of art as oracular expression,
and substituted music as the voice that
spoke for the people, music will define
henceforth, for a time, the period
there is the Italian Baroque, of course,
utterly masterful paintings, sublime
even, see above, but it has been
supplanted in our 21st-Century
popular imagination by the Baroque
of the German nations, their music,
Bach’s, transcendental then, though
ever so intricate, descriptions of his
particular epoch
this dominance will migrate to Paris,
eventually, and back to art, painting,
after over a hundred tumultuous,
and impermeable, years, with the
Impressionists, in the late 19th
Century
meanwhile, Paganini will get in the
way, 1780 – 1840, an exact, more or
less, contemporary of Beethoven,
1770 – 1827, and show off what
Romantics can do, unleashed,
before a newly enfranchised, and
thrilled, as you will surely be,
audience
R ! chard
psst: the “Caprices“ are essentially
cadenzas, the improvised solo
sections in concertos, where
instrumentalists get to show
off their stuff, and riff, however
exponentially, on their subject
Paganini, makes an art form
of that, as do others, whom
I’ll bring up, trust me, later
stay tuned
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