I have a full-length daguerreotype of Paganini taken when he was forty years of age. No one ever asked this man, "Kind sir, are you anybody in particular?"
Paganini was tall and wofully slim. His hands and feet were large and bony, his arms long, his form bowed and lacking in all that we call symmetry. But the long face with its look of abject melancholy, the curved nose, the thin lips and the sharp, protruding chin, made a combination that Fate has never duplicated. You could easily believe that this man knew all the secrets of the Nether World, and had tasted the joys of Paradise as well. Women pitied and loved him, men feared him, and none understood him. He lived in the midst of throngs and multitudes—the loneliest man known in the history of art.
Paganini, when he had reached his height, played only his own music; he played divinely and incomprehensibly; next to his passion for music was his greed for gold. These three facts sum up all we really know about the master—the rest fades off into mist—mystery, fable and legend. We do know, however, that he composed several pieces of music so difficult that he could not play them himself, and of course no one else can. Imagination can always outrun performance. Paganini had no close friends; no confidants: he never mingled in society, and he never married.
At times he would disappear from the public gaze for several months, and not even his business associates knew where he was. On one such occasion a traveler discovered him in a monastic retreat in the Swiss Mountains, wearing a horsehair robe and a rope girdle; others saw him disguised as a mendicant; and still another tells of finding him working as a day-laborer with obscure and ignorant peasants. Then there are tales told of how he was taken captive by a titled lady of great wealth and beauty, who carried him away to her bower, where he eschewed the violin and tinkled only the guitar the livelong day.
Everywhere the report was current that Paganini had killed a man, and been sentenced to prison for life. The story ran that in prison he found an old violin, three strings of which were broken, and so he played on one string, producing such ravishing music that the keepers feared he was "possessed." They decided they must get rid of him, and so contrived to have him thrown overboard from a galley; but he swam ashore, and although he was everywhere known, no man dared place a hand on him.
A late writer in a London magazine, however, has given evidence of being a psychologist and man of sense; he says, and produces proof, that after the concert season was over Paganini withdrew to a monastery in the mountains of Switzerland, and there the monks who loved him well, guarded his retreat. There he found the rest for which his soul craved, and there he practised on his violin hour after hour, day after day. All this is better understood when we remember that after each retreat, Paganini appeared with brand-new effects which electrified his hearers—"effects taught him by the devil."
Constant appearing before vast multitudes and ceaseless travel create a depletion that demands rest. Paganini held the balance true by fleeing to the mountains; there he worked and prayed. That Paganini had a soft heart, in spite of the silent, cold and melancholy mood that usually possessed him, is shown in his treatment of his father and mother, who lived to know the greatness of their son. He wrote his mother kind and affectionate letters, some of which we have, and provided lavishly for every want of both his parents. At times he gave concerts for charity, and on these occasions vast sums were realized.
Paganini died in Eighteen Hundred Forty, aged fifty-six years. His will provided for legacies to various men and women who had befriended him, and he also gave to others with whom he had quarreled, thus proving he was not all clay.
The bulk of his fortune, equal to half a million dollars, was bequeathed to his son, Baron Achille Paganini. And as if mystery should still enshroud his memory and this, true to his nature, should be carried out in his last will, there are those who maintain that Achille Paganini was not his son at all—only a waif he had adopted. Yet Achille always stoutly maintained the distinction—but what boots it, since he could not play his father's violin?
Yet this we know—Paganini, the man of mystery and moods, once lived and produced music that, Orpheus-like, transfixed the world. We are better for his having been and this world is a nobler place in that he lived and played, for listen closely and you can hear, even now, the sweet, sad echoes of those vibrant strings, touched by the hand of him who loved them well.