The theme of this week’s Smart and Soulful blog is…Music for the hunt! In Wisconsin, where I live, Thanksgiving week always coincides with deer hunting season, and there are just frequent general reminders of the beloved pastime throughout the fall. It often feels like one of the exclusive official state activities so I know a lot of hunters. Hunting, or “The Hunt”, has been a prevalent image in music for centuries. If you do a quick search you can easily find music from all the great masters, and many lesser ones, that seeks to portray it or has been shaped by it in some way.
Day 1 – Caprice Op. 1, No. 9 by Niccolo Paganini
Have you ever heard one violinist sound like two?
There are many, many classical pieces about the hunting. European musicians must have had quite a bit of experience with the thrill of the hunt and It seems that whenever they needed to fill out a set of pieces, or were in search of a theme for a large-scale instrumental work, it was a handy reference to turn to. The general aristocratic package that accompanied the sport during Western music’s common era had numerous sonic elements, imitation of which could be gracefully integrated into musical works. Probably the most recognizable, and easily transcribed, were the calls played by the hornists of the hunting party that served to communicate important information between the hunters and even to cue the dogs to certain behaviors. I wonder if the orchestral horn in classical music was an outgrowth of the more practical hunting horn. Perhaps musicians began to write parts in their orchestral works for hunting hornists to play onstage with the official players and then they began to develop their own instrumental technique, culminating into the instrument we know and love today. I would imagine the same is true of the military bugle as it relates to the concert trumpet, as well as certain percussion instruments.
With few exceptions, you can find music related to the hunt from all the best-loved classical composers, covering genres from opera to cantata, symphony to string quartet, piano sonata to art song and more. The most common type of music illustrating the hunt, at least as far as I can tell, is what came to be known as the romantic character piece, intimate miniature works for solo instrument, usually found as part of a larger set, written by nineteenth century composers that seek to convey various moods or images in service to some kind of unifying cyclic goal.
Today’s featured piece is one example of a miniature work that has a hunting theme that fits into a larger set of related pieces. It opens with an unmistakable imitation of 2 hunting horns. That’s actually kind of extraordinary right there, because it is a piece for solo violin, which is usually assumed to play single melodic lines. But in a fair amount of virtuosic violin music the violinist is called upon to play multiple lines on their primarily single-line instruments. This is true of the solo parts in concertos, but there is also a rather significant body of music written for the solo violin without any accompaniment. These works by J. S. Bach, Ysaÿe, and a few others exploit the technical mastery of highly virtuosic players, demanding them to pull dense polyphonic musical realizations from an instrument that is not so naturally suited to it. But it is possible to play multiple simultaneous lines on a violin in a way that it is not on woodwind or brass instruments. You could never ask an oboist or trombonist to play 2 notes at the same time (well, aside from multiphonics, but that’s a horse of an entirely different color!), but a violinist can, and even 3 or 4. A violinist can also create the sense of 2 continuous melodic lines sounding together simultaneously, although it takes considerably advanced technique to execute convincingly, but many violinists are capable and many composers have asked that it be done.
One composer and violinist who was indeed quite capable of creating intricate polyphonic textures on the instrument, and who wrote pages of music demanding it, was the 19th century virtuoso Niccolò Paganini. Probably the first great instrumental virtuoso of the romantic age, the Genoese Paganini took Europe by storm, devoting the majority of his vital middle years to touring from major city to major city. Europe had known virtuoso violinists before (Antonio Vivaldi is a great example, but check out this list for a whole bunch of names I bet you haven’t heard of!). Beyond his “conventional” virtuosity, Paganini would perform showy and over-the-top stunts like cutting strings on his violin (sometimes as many as 3 of the 4) and concluding his concert on the remaining string(s). In addition to his virtuosity, he obviously had a sense of showmanship and this inspired the next generation of instrumental virtuoso, most notably the pianist Franz Liszt, who is known to have written in glowing terms about watching Paganini perform in Paris during the early 1830s and attributed much of the inspiration that fueled his own virtuoso career to that experience.
For a significant episode of his early career, before he set off to dazzle Europe as a touring performer, Paganini was part of an entourage who traveled with Napoleon’s sister, Elisa Baciocchi (née Bonaparte – she married a Corsican aristocrat and captain named Felice Bachiocchi). Living in Lucca, Italy, which became occupied by France and ruled by Elisa as princess, Paganini found his way into her service. He performed for the court and even instructed Felice in violin technique. This station suited him for half a decade or so, but he eventually tired of it and left to freelance, and then to tour. But it is thought that his 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, Opus 1, may come from this time in his life.
The 24 Caprices are sort of like a catalog of exercises and techniques for a supreme virtuoso violinist (see the table attached to this article with a precise layout of exactly which skills each caprice exercises). Listen to any of them and you will probably find yourself amazed that all of the notes you are hearing have been produced by only one violin. This writing is constantly dense with chords, polyphonic techniques, multiple lines, intricate voice leading, all of it masterfully worked out by Paganini to be playable by a single violinist. Well, they sure don’t play themselves, but they are possible, as numerous violinists since Paganini have proven. Paganini deemed this set to be worthy of his label Opus. 1 (for further reading on musical opus, read this post), as if he knew it would be his first major contribution to the history of music. And he decided this before he became famous throughout Europe, so I think it is fair to say that he knew which direction the wind was blowing.
Listening to an accomplished violinist play any of the twenty four Caprices will make your jaw drop to the floor at the skills you will hear executed, and we’re going to listen to number 9, nicknamed “The Hunt”:
Did you hear the hunting horns in that opening section? Listen again up to 0:24. Paganini actually describes this opening as a dialogue between flutes, played on the A and E strings – the first music you hear – and horns, played on the G and D strings, which sounds in response. The writing on the G and D is bonafide hunting horn music, shot through with “horn 5ths”, a common way of harmonizing scalar melodies derived from horn writing. Horn 5ths are also present in the main theme of this piece, which I’ll bet you have heard at least once or twice:
The horn 5ths are right at 0:09, when the melody begins. Just try to ignore the busy bass line and listen to the upper two voices. The play exactly the same harmonization as Paganini’s two violin strings, with the notes of the melody presented in a slightly different order, and different rhythm. But it really is the same.
Paganini fills out this caprice with a few other episodes, less hunting-horn related, but necessary to give the piece a sense of balance.
The 24 Caprices must give us a small taste of what it was like for European audiences to behold a virtuoso of Paganini’s strength and to witness him set the pace for later virtuosos who would take musical technique to even dizzier heights. In performing these concert bon-bons his listeners must have been delighted whenever they heard echos of a hunting trip, or any other little stories or extra-musical associations that Paganini playfully embedded within his incredibly virtuoso showmanship.
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