This may have been the concert at which, according to a lithograph,[58] Paganini received "the homage of five thousand persons after having pocketed £2,000 for two hours' performance." While the great world showed their appreciation of his playing in this way, and Royal patrons delighted to invest him with noble orders, the more humble admirers of Paganini caused medals to be struck in his honour. One of these, a tribute from the city of Vienna, has already been referred to; another very fine medal, struck in Paris during Paganini's first visit there in 1831 is reproduced here. The inscription round Paganini's head fills one with a strangely ironical feeling, when one remembers that the fame of Paganini did but survive to lead to the homage of exhumation.

True, the world has remembered him sufficiently to place memorial tablets on the houses where he was born and died. Fifty years after his death a tablet was affixed to the house wherein he breathed his last, and at the centenary celebration of his birth the following inscription was placed on the house wherein he first saw the light: "A great honour fell to the lot of this modest house, in which, on the 27th October, 1782, Nicolo Paganini, unsurpassed in the divine art of tone, was born, to the glory of Genoa and to the delight of the world." At present one may enquire in vain of most Genoese people as to the position of Paganini's birthplace, and chance alone will direct one, who trusts to them for the information, to the slum quarter and the narrow street where the building stands. Difficult though it may be, however, to find this spot, it is an easy task to find the Palazzo Municipale where reposes the famous Guarnerius violin of Paganini.

This superb instrument, bequeathed to the city of Genoa by Paganini himself, has been most carefully preserved by the civic authorities. It has only twice been heard in public—once at the 1882 celebrations—since Paganini's death, and on both occasions it was played by his favourite pupil Sivori. It was carefully examined and photographed by Mr. Edward Heron-Allen in 1885, and a very interesting account was given by him[59] of the manner in which the violin was worn away by Paganini's peculiar method of playing. After describing its general condition he says, "The patch by the side of the tailpiece and the large wear on the back tell of the force with which he held the instrument in those high and pizzicato passages, which account for the long groove down the side of the fingerboard and the broad patch at the side of the neck, on the table of the instrument. The wearing away of the edges in the curves of the instrument bear a striking testimony to the force with which he sawed the gut in his bravura passages on the first and fourth strings." In the same glass case as the violin is placed the medal presented to Paganini by the Decurional Council of Genoa in 1834. On the reverse it bears this inscription:—

Nic. Paganino, Fidicini, cui nemo par fuit civique bene mecrenti A.D. MDCCCXXXIIII.

Such outward honours as the world gives to its dead have indeed been offered to the memory of Paganini; but it is doubtful whether the higher honour of a frank recognition by the musical world of the work that he did for it, has ever been his. Unlike the great composer the instrumentalist leaves behind him no visible proof of the part he has played in the development of his art. And the world has easily forgotten that from the day of Paganini not only was the violin transformed into a new instrument, not only were its capabilities, previously undreamt of, newly revealed, but also in other branches of musical art, in orchestral music especially, a fresh field was opened up before the composer. It is scarcely too much to say that the scores of Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss could not have been written, had Paganini never lived. We do not desire to see another Paganini, so complete a slave to his instrument, albeit its master; we do not desire to see another such life, with bodily health and moral vigour sacrificed to so absorbing a devotion to one single end. We would fain believe that Nicolo Paganini did not live in vain, that like a real artist he had and fulfilled his mission, that the evil he did died with him and that the good lives on to benefit the world.

The End.

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