Paganini Quotes

Rachmaninoff. The 18th Variation of a Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

I am not handsome, but when women hear me play, they come crawling to my feet.

Ich war zum ersten Mal in der Stadt der Lichter, und ich war endlich angetreten, dem Ruf zu folgen, den zu hören ich immer vorgeschützt hatte, um meinen Eltern meine Unsicherheit, meinen Freunden meine Unabkömmlichkeit, meinen Bekanntschaften meine Geistesabwesenheit zu erklären. Leider, und das war nun sehr offensichtlich, würde meine bloße Anwesenheit in Paris mich ebenso wenig zu einem Schriftsteller machen, wie mich ein Dirigent mit seinem Stab in Paganini verwandeln könnte.

It had been many months since I'd shed tears for Tomaso, but grief is like that. It's not a continuous process; it comes in waves. You can keep it at bay for a time, like a dam holding back a lake, but them something triggers an explosion inside of you, shattering the wall and letting loose a flood.

You’re so hungry for success, more. I can almost feel the crossroads looming... Do you know there’s a legend that certain musicians sold their souls to the devil for their skill? Johnson. Paganini.” Luiz laughed at the shift of Michael’s hips, the grind of Michael’s cock into his hand, released him to add, “And certain metal bands for money and fame.

In me . . . peace. (John 16:33) There is a vast difference between pleasure and blessedness. Paul experienced imprisonment, pain, sacrifice, and suffering to their very limits, yet through it all he was blessed. All the beatitudes became real in his heart and life, in the midst of his difficult circumstances. Paganini, the great Italian violinist, once stepped onstage only to discover there was something wrong with his violin, just as the audience was ending their applause. He looked at the instrument for a moment and suddenly realized it was not his best and most valuable one. In fact, the violin was not his at all. Momentarily he felt paralyzed, but he quickly turned to his audience, telling them there had been some mistake and he did not have his own violin. He stepped back behind the curtain, thinking he must have left it backstage, but discovered that someone had stolen his and left the inferior one in its place. After remaining behind the curtain for a moment, Paganini stepped onstage again to speak to the audience. He said, “Ladies and Gentlemen, I will now demonstrate to you that the music is not in the instrument but in the soul.” Then he played as never before, and beautiful music flowed from that inferior instrument until the audience was so enraptured that their enthusiastic applause nearly lifted the ceiling of the concert hall. He had indeed revealed to them that the music was not in his instrument but in his own soul! Dear tested and tried believer, it is your mission to walk onto the stage of this world in order to reveal to all of heaven and earth that the music of life lies not in your circumstances or external things but in your own soul.

Literally sold his soul? Like, ‘Devil Went Down to Georgia,’ Robert Johnson at the crossroads—” “Like Mephistopheles and your namesake, or the violinist Niccolò Paganini, or the Rolling Stones, yes, exactly.” She paused. “Forget I said that last one.

L'impazienza e l'avventatezza allontanano dal luminoso sentiero della Dea.

Ah, among the unhappiest blunders a man makes is this, that he childishly misjudges the value of the gifts that nature bestows on him most easily, and, contrariwise, considers most precious the endowments that come hardest. The precious stone buried in the earth's entrails, the pearl hidden in the ocean depths—these are what people regard as the greatest treasures; but they would look down on them if nature strewed them underfoot like pebbles and seashells. We are casual about our own excellences; we try to deceive ourselves about out weaknesses so long that we end up taking them for eminent virtues. Once, after a concert by Paganini, when I confronted the master with passionate praises for his violin playing, he interrupted me with these words: 'But today how did you like my bows, my genuflections?

The brilliant execution which they presuppose in the performer has a double function: it restricts the practice of music to the expert, and it deludes the layman. In the case of the virtuoso-composers, the prototype of whom is Paganini; the dazzling style is intended above all to flabbergast the listener, but with the real masters the technical difficulty is merely the expression of an inner difficulty and complication. Both tendencies, the enlargement of the distance between the amateur and the virtuoso as well as the deepening of the gulf between lighter and more difficult music, lead to the dissolution of the classical genres. The virtuoso mode of writing inevitably atomizes the big, massive forms; the bravura piece is relatively short, sparkling, pointed. But the intrinsically difficult, individually differentiated style, based on the sublimation of thoughts and feelings, also promotes the dissolution of universally valid, stereotyped and long-winded forms.

Lee Atwater, a Republican consultant and the Paganini of the modern political dog whistle, once explained the Southern Strategy, a ploy by which his party used coded racism to appeal to white voters. “You start out in 1954 by saying, ‘Nigger, nigger, nigger,’” Atwater said. “By 1968, you can’t say ‘nigger’—that hurts you, it backfires—so you say stuff like ‘forced busing,’ ‘states’ rights,’ and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract.

... sentivo che l’ignoto era il posto più sicuro per ritrovare me stessa".

Hello, listen, I’m on a field phone, do not speak until I say “over.” Repeat, don’t talk until I say “over.” Over. Do you understand, or was your silence intentional? Over. Northwest of The Seven Sisters, in a sort of bunker on stilts. Over. Last week I called in a cobra of smoke. I was packing my gear in a panic, when the next tower west confirmed it was only low cloud. Over. I get a crackling out of Alaska that sounds religious. Vladivostok. CBC. I’ve decided I like Paganini. Over. No, leave it, or throw it out, I won’t need it here. If ever. Over. When storms wander across the lower jaw of the coastal range, unloading their cargo here, it’s like being in the engine room of something metallic and massive. Over. My first grizzly passed within a stone’s throw, followed an hour later by the sucking thumps of a Parks chopper. Nothing since. Over. Days, I rearrange stones shoaled up at the base of the uprights and struts. Nights, I stab at imagining anything lovely, but end up laughing. Over. The forest goes quiet as if waiting for me to finish. Listens hard to whatever isn’t itself. Makes me anxious. I think of how we ever came to . . . [inaudible] given the arm’s length I kept joy at. Over. Affection stung like a rasp drawn over [inaudible]. I thinned the world of it. Don’t live as I did. Allow for terms of relief. The black maples aligned along streets, waddling skunks, their dark dusters through the foxglove, your shoulder bag, shoes, the faces of strangers; all may strike you as fibres of a tremendous sadness. That’s you in among the weave of it, new. Over. Is that important? I’ve been contracted to watch this horizon and will be here until something happens. Over. Tell them it will. Over.

O! Paganini był jedyny w swoim rodzaju i drugiego takiego już nigdy nie będzie. Mam oczywiście na myśli skrzypce. Nie będzie drugiego takiego dla skrzypiec. Bo dla fortepianu ktoś taki był. Frycek. W Warszawie grał jeszcze spokojne melodie, budzące dobrze skojarzenia, ale nosił już w sobie to coś — coś nadludzkiego — kiedy uderzał w klawisze. Odnosiłam czasem wrażenie, że jego z nami wcale nie ma. Że dopiero kiedy kończy grać, wraca i zaczyna dostrzegać, gdzie się znajduje, z kim i dlaczego.

Paganini’s Caprice No. 4,

This Satan who ruled over the lush dreams of the female sex.

Most likely, my film could have been compared to a highly sensible musical clip. An operatic musical clip. At that time, I had no idea of this expression. I did not puzzle my head over the form of my film, the structure arose, as I said before, from alone and urged me to commit this structure to paper. Indications, suggestions, just sufficed. The audience should have the liberty to keep on thinking, conceiving, living. My film had to remain a fragment. Abstract it its form. Yet harmonical and first hand. It would have never occurred to me to lash up what I wanted to express into a waist coat of idiotically trimmed up film plots for the audience: with their meticulous and dictarioral logic and continutity. The attempt to wedge Paganini into the usual form of a movie, would have resulted in immuring him alive. For he did live – in me.

In my fortress, in the Via Appia Antica in Rome, I wrote the first script for my film PAGANINI. It was not a script in the common sense. Not even a testament. And yet it was more than that: A shorthand note, which I had received on a wavelength of an earlier life over the distance of centuries away . For the time being, I did not require more. The structure of my film originated in the instinct: Notes. Notes of music. Notes of captured images (and dialogues). Notes of feelings. Everything else I would decide in the course of the actual shooting.

Six days and six nights I was writing in a paranoid impulse. Full of fear, that the commenced metamorphosis – the reincarnation of the spirit of a dead – might have been disrupted.