Born in Genoa, Italy, Niccoló Paganini was given a violin by his parents. His father wanted to excel so badly that he locked him in a room for many hours and forced him to practice. At the age of 11, he made his first public performance and was already going on tour at thirteen. By the age of 16, he was already quite successful, yet he also developed a drinking habit that followed him throughout the rest of his life.
Niccoló Paganini is a perfect example of how making a child prodigy of your child is just a bad idea. Of course, there are a lot of children who have a natural talent at playing and compel themselves to make progress on the instrument, but in many cases, they are forced by the parents to be great on the instrument as a result of “hyper-parenting”. This term is used in psychology to describe what some parents, who would of course like their children to become great, do. This includes, for instance, forcing a child to take lessons on an instrument or forcing them to develop any such ability. Unfortunately, many parents nowadays do this because they believe that it is the only way to survive in our competitive world. In my own belief, it may make the child an incredible person that can do a lot of things, but the question is: Do they really enjoy it? Is it making their lives more wholesome? It is a debate that many will continue to have. There is no doubt that Paganini had a fascinating life… but at what cost?
At the age of 19 he moved to Lucca to become the leader of the new national orchestra. It was at this time that he started playing guitar on account of being talked into it by his lover at the time and wrote several compositions for it. Along with this, he wrote many things for the violin and even pieces for violin and orchestra. One of the most amazing things that he wrote were the 24 Caprices for solo violin. For a long time, the technical difficulties posed by these great works were thought of as only being able to be played by Paganini himself, whose technique was truly astounding. He was actually capable of performing entire pieces on the violin with the use of only one or two of its strings. He was known to be one of the greatest violinist ever in the history of the instrument, yet this cannot be proven, for there are no recordings of him.
At the age of 27, he left the city of Lucca and toured all over Italy, impressing with his amazing technique and his ability to sight-read just about any piece of music put in front of him. There was nothing to difficult! One of the most interesting facts about Paganini is that he had had a very scruffy appearance and kind of an evil glare. Due to this and on account of his amazing abilities on the violin, many used to think that he may have sold his soul to the devil and was give the name ‘il figlio del diavolo,’ a phrase in Italian that means ‘the son of the devil.’
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