Michael Barenboim

“What is the Highest Virtue of Art?”

Violin Music by Tartini, Paganini, Berio, and Sciarrino

Wolfgang Stähr

A Dream of a Sonata

“And as with all music, the final aim and reason for the basso continuo is nothing but the glorification of God and the recreation of the spirit. Where this goes unheeded, the result is not true music, but an infernal babbling and noise.” Johann Sebastian Bach dictated these drastic words to his students: as a rule and admonition “for the four-part playing of basso continuo or accompaniment.” Soli Deo Gloria: only for the glory of God was music to resound— anything else was considered evil deception of the worst kind and the devil’s work. How might Bach have judged the ambiguous and confounding Violin Sonata in G minor of his contemporary Giuseppe Tartini, first written in 1713 but later refined and perfected and published posthumously with the epithet “Le Trille du diable” (“The Devil’s Trill”)? The Italian Tartini was a supremely gifted violinist, primo violino e capo di concerto at the Basilica di Sant’Antonio in Padua, founder of a scuola delle nazioni for young European violinists, and also a music theorist with a combative bent— and it was Tartini himself who first put about the legend of his G-minor Sonata having been dictated to him in a dream. The devil supposedly played it for him, with compelling intelligence and perfect execution, music of such beauty and peculiarity as he had never heard, let alone composed, neither before nor after. Upon waking, he claimed to have tried to write the incomparable work down immediately, reconstructing it from memory and committing it to paper for posterity.

This fascinating tale (which may not be vero but is certainly ben trovato), but especially the fiendishly beautiful—and fiendishly difficult—sonata itself contributed heavily to the long-overdue Tartini renaissance of the late 19th century. The cream of violin virtuosi included the ravishing “Devil’s Trill” Sonata in their active repertoire; several masters of their art, such as Joseph Joachim, Leopold von Auer, Fritz Kreisler, and Jan Kubelík, also took it upon themselves to increase the technical challenges of the piece, which was already excruciatingly difficult, to ensure even greater brilliance. The intended effect on the hearts, minds, and senses of the mesmerized audience never failed. All this, merely “infernal babbling”? God forbid!

“Sorrow, Genius, and Hellfire”

Practice makes perfect. This adage also entails that those who have attained mastership think up exercises for those aspiring to follow in their footsteps: strict, systematic guidelines, lessons, curricula. Whether one chooses to adopt the student’s perspective or the master’s, however, this golden rule of artists and artisans alike clashes with the image of the unfettered Romantic genius. Especially when that genius is Nicolò Paganini, the “devil’s violinist” who crisscrossed Europe in his travels, from concert to concert, celebrated by his admirers in Milan and Paris, London and Vienna— admirers who would often escort him to his hotel by the hundreds after performances. High society, the nobility of birth, money, or intellect, fawned upon him, glorifying (or demonizing) him as a figure from another, not necessarily better world, as a fallen angel, a Byronic hero. “His bow glints like a blade of steel, his face is as pale as crime itself, his smile as enchanting as Dante’s inferno, his violin weeps like a woman,” the magazine L’Entr’acte wrote after Paginini’s Paris debut. And this virtuoso assoluto should need to practice? A higher being playing scales and working on his (perish the word!) technique?

Yes, Paganini practiced, and his 24 Capricci for solo violin, which he published as his Opus 1 in 1820 (they seem to have been written quite a bit earlier, presumably around 1805) and dedicated alli artisti, “to the artists”, were indeed esercizi, exercises that he consequently never performed in concert, when his violin “wept like a woman.” Although their name suggests that these caprices were the whimsy of a high- spirited virtuoso, they are still exercises, albeit some that can only be attempted by violinists who have already attained a supreme level of mastery. Brilliance in the highest notes, the surreal sphere of flageolet, left-hand pizzicato, the interweaving of tremolo and melody, bow strokes of all kinds: singing ones, leaping, bouncing and percussive ones, double stops in thirds, sixths, octaves, and tenths, staccato and spiccato, arpeggios, trills, passages, breathtaking speed, presto, prestissimo—these and other artful skills are demanded by Paganini’s Capricci, which is to say they are treated as already accomplished and then perfected. Exercises for masters.

During Bach’s day, the term Übung, or “exercise,” stood for a holistic educational ideal: composition and performance, teaching, craft, art, and science, all under one roof. Only when technical progress conquered music, and with it the middle-class notion of social advancement, did specialization also spread in music education, causing an over emphasis on manual perfection. Instead of the “recreation of the spirit” prescribed by Bach, daily exercise routines, humor less diligence, and relentless self-discipline became the norm. Consequently, the 19th was the century of etudes and exercises. It was with a great deal of ambivalence that a discriminating contemporary such as Robert Schumann observed the ever-growing stacks of mechanical and didactic literature: “All this studying might ultimately prevent anyone from become a master.” Practice preventing perfection?

Even virtuosic public performances threatened to turn into an apotheosis of the etude: playing became demonstrative, a competitive exhibition. On the other hand, the audience did not storm the concert halls to witness displays of mere diligence. It was not the master they craved, but the wizard, the virtuoso who feared no difficulties and respected no boundaries. Although the Italian adjective virtuoso originally means “virtuous,” the devil was expected to put in an appearance when Paganini commanded the strings or Liszt the keyboard. Demonic enchantment was not a question of practice. And that was the all-encompassing contradiction of the 19th century, that era of disillusionment and enchantment, of proficiency (another translation of virtuoso) and transcendence. Concertgoers demanded value for money, and at the same time they wished to be morally “uplifted,” as in a temple; they wanted to admire technical perfection, yet be transported to heavenly spheres (or to infernal underworlds), to higher regions of the spirit, of the soul, and of taste—to states of exaltation, rapture, mental extremes.

“His long black hair fell to his shoulders in twisted curls, forming a dark frame for the pale, corpse-like face, where sorrow, genius, and hellfire had engraved their indelible signs,” as Heinrich Heine described the “horribly bizarre appearance” of the most famous of all violinists and most virtuoso of virtuosos. Nicolò Paganini’s Capricci, however, transcend and reverse any “triumph of technique.” Nor can their idiosyncratic lyricism be compared to Franz Liszt’s expansive Études d’exécution transcendante (for piano)—instead, it aims for a future in which virtuosity was to stand mainly for the overcoming of borders, excursions into the subconscious, alienation and revelation: for a perfection that bears its opposite within, proving the absurdity of the world in its very supposed immaculateness. Thus the black-haired, romantic, diabolic violinist reveals himself as a post-Baroque and pre-modern artist, at home somewhere between Vivaldi and Ligeti, with a sense of the bizarre, of self-enamored, completely pure musical art, possessing fathomless experimental imagination and a subversive tendency to unleash sheer chaos within perfect order.

Idea and Instrument

Which is why the avant-garde of all eras loved him. Or did it? “I have every respect for virtuosity,” the Italian composer Luciano Berio declared. “Virtuosity often springs from a conflict, a tension between the musical idea and the instrument. One all too familiar aspect of virtuosity comes about when technical preoccupations and performance stereotypes prevail over the idea, as is the case with Paganini, whose works, much as I love them, did little to disturb the history of music, but did contribute to the development of violin technique.” Over the years, Berio, who passed away in 2003, wrote a total of 14 Sequenzas, each for one single instrument (if one considers the human voice an instrument). He explained the name of the series as a “sequence of harmonic fields” that determined the end and continuation of the works, as well as their melodic development. The Sequenzas depend upon extreme virtuosity, which Berio, however, did not consider a continuation of Paganini’s

Capricci, but rather in a line with Bach’s violin partitas or Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, “where the novelty and complexity of the musical thought require a change in an instrument’s treatment, offering pathways to new technical solutions at the same time.” In this spirit, virtuosity is the most striking characteristic of the Sequenzas, through which Berio explicitly meant to celebrate the felicitous harmony between composer and performer: “as witness to a situation among people.”

Berio said that for him, composing Sequenza VIII in 1976 was “like paying a personal debt to the violin, which I see as one of the most enduring and complex instruments in existence. Sequenza VIII leans constantly upon two notes (A and B) which, as in a chaconne, provide a compass for the work’s rather diversified and elaborate progress, in which polyphony is no longer virtual, as in other Sequenzas, but real. And it’s through this that Sequenza VIII also becomes, inevitably, a homage to that high point of music, the Chaconne of the Partita in D minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, in which violin techniques of the past, present and future coexist.”

That same year of 1976, another Italian composer, Salvatore Sciarrino, completed his Six Capricci for solo violin, which pay explicit and unmistakable reverence to Paganini’s Opus 1, starting with their very title—even though the reference turns out to be somewhat ambiguous and colorful, somewhere between homage and persiflage. Sciarrino, born in Palermo in 1947, considers a capriccio a “virtuosic, acrobatic exercise,” in keeping with the historical significance of Paganini and his less gifted successors, but also “a whimsy or witty invention imitating an inspiration.” The fundamentally artificial, completely unreal state of Paganini’s Capricci with their comical and uncanny bent is further radicalized by Sciarrino: he exaggerates technical and acoustic specialties, namely the pre dilection for glassy, whistling, buzzing flageolets, to the point of excessiveness; he also transforms the irritating alienation of sound from an exception to a state of normalcy. Heard blindly, one might mistake the result for the soundtrack of a science fiction or animated film, a reaction to Japanese music, or a plethora of other things: the possibilities are endless, including those in the listener’s mind.

“Paganini never had a student, nor could he have had one, for the best he knew, the highest virtue in art, cannot be taught or learned. What is the highest virtue of art?” asked Heinrich Heine. “That which is highest in all other manifestations of life as well: self-conscious freedom of the spirit.”