It was long before lockdown that my good friend Andrew Krastins swore solemnly swore me to secrecy during one of our periodic meet-ups at Rules or Simpson’s in the Strand – the world’s most appropriate places to enthuse about the nineteenth century world of the violin. His remarkable investigations on the British Library’s wax cylinders which were previously assumed to be recordings by August Wilhelmj had drawn two conclusions. The first, that they could not possibly be recordings of Wilhelmj. The second related to the burnign question – then who? Andrew proposed an astonishing prospect that they were recorded in Genoa by Nicolo Paganini’s only pupil, Camillo Sivori (1815-1894) shortly before his death. Back at the time it was truly exciting to hear him put the evidence together and everything felt plausible, reasonable and compelling. It was just a matter of filling the gaps, and discovering how watertight the argument could be. Over a series of essays for the British Library’s Sound and Vision blog, Andrew has put the full story together.
Amongst the cylinders there is a recording over four cylinders of Paganini’s “Le Streghe,” or “Witches’ Dance” which is as puzzling as it is tantalizing: “The Witch’s Dance, – a Song of the Old Woman under the Walnut Tree, as played by Paganini. During the dark ages, the Walnut Tree was believed to be the trysting place of witches. Hence the Old Woman’s Song.” possibly suggesting Sivori’s dedication to playing the work as he had been taught to by Paganini himself. The recordings have much to be desired for modern ears, but we should think of them more as a way for the musician to express their musical intentions, having use to other musicians, and produced at a time when the idea of a recording as a substitute for live performance was at best a wild and impractical figment of the imagination of it’s inventors.
“Now he is dead. And the most bitter regret that, of so much artistic value, there remains only a memory, such being, unfortunately, the fate of the great performers: to survive only by the virtue of tradition, also fallacious and dying.” Such was written in the Supplemento al Caffaro di Genova, February 19, 1894, announcing the death of Camillo Sivori earlier that morning, but in this case Sivori and a glimmer the ghost of Paganini may have come back from the dead. The first of Andrew’s blogs can be found here. More to come…
