A Brill Calendar: March 9

Pagianini's Performance

Few studies of the history of scholarship and science concentrate on the possibilities of their protagonists to travel and meet other people, and to discover other places.

The abundance of national, international and intercontinental seminars and conferences we know presently is the outcome of a long process; its origins comprise to all practical purposes the whole past of travelling and transportation. A classical masterpiece like Lewis Mumford’s ‘The City in History’ testifies convincingly to the all-important role of the world’s physical infrastructure as mankind built it.

It is no coincidence that recent chapters in that saga were written thanks to new grip of scholars and scientists on the physical world, Steam power, locomotion, electricity and the internal combustion engine wouldn’t have come in existence without the European ‘scientific revolution’ gaining strength during the 17th century and transforming itself during the 18th into an ‘industrial’ namesake, succeeding the Enlightenment.

In the story of how the world became a ‘global village’, it is seldom that the shift is illustrated better and earlier than by the extravagant musical performance on March 9, 1831 in the Parisian ‘Opéra’ by the Italian violin virtuoso Nicolò Paganini (1782 – 1840), up to then only famous in some Italian cities. The experience overwhelmed one of his breathless listeners, the young Hungarian pianist Ferenc Liszt (1811 – 1886). When the spell-bound audience exploded in rapturous admiration, the Demon with his Guarneri violin had sown the seed for determining the course of Liszt’s life.

Liszt could later claim to be the first performing artist who had all Europe as his concert-hall, not just the theatre of one Prince. And this claim was justified, mainly by train-locomotion. Just as experiences like Liszt’s changed musical cultures, ease of transportation transformed general scholarly perspectives.