Niccolò Paganini. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Niccolò Paganini died in Nice on 27 May 1840, in a room overlooking the harbour, without the sacraments. In his last days, eaten away by the throat disease that had taken his voice, he sent the priest away more than once: he did not think he was dying, said his family; he did not want to die a penitent, said everyone else. The bishop of Nice chose the second version and refused burial in consecrated ground. So began the most grotesque journey in the history of music: that of the corpse of the greatest violinist who ever lived.
The embalmed body stayed for months in the house in Nice, then in a lazaretto, then in a cellar, and popular legend began embroidering at once: fishermen spoke of lamentations at night and a violin playing from underground. His son Achille, who gave half his life to his father, moved it to Villefranche, then towards Genoa, then to the villa at Gaione, near Parma, chasing for years an ecclesiastical permit that never came. Only in 1876, thirty-six years after his death, did the Church grant a religious burial, and in 1896 Paganini found his final place in Parma’s monumental cemetery, beneath a mausoleum fit for a statesman.
The bishop’s refusal was the final payoff on an investment Paganini himself had tended throughout his career: the legend of the pact with the devil. Tall, cadaverous, dressed in black, with those impossible fingers that modern medicine explains as probable ligament hyperlaxity, he had gladly let the rumours run: that his mother had consecrated him to the devil, that the fourth string was the gut of a murdered woman, that in certain halls someone swore to have seen the Evil One whispering the bowing to him. The marketing of the supernatural filled the theatres of Europe at prices never seen before. But myths do not switch off on command: when a funeral was needed, the devil presented the bill.
One detail completes the portrait better than any legend: in the very years when Europe took him for a sorcerer, Paganini gave twenty thousand francs to a struggling colleague named Hector Berlioz, with a note declaring him Beethoven’s heir. Monsters, up close, often do things like this. For a death without obsequies, the history of music already had an illustrious precedent; but Vivaldi at least was buried at once. Paganini, who never played the same concert twice while alive, made one last tour in death: the longest, and the only one he had not asked for.