On Tour with Paganini and Baillot in 1833

On 9 August 1833 the Shrewsbury Chronicle announced a coup for the market town. Niccolò Paganini, whose exhibitions of technical virtuosity had brought him fame and fortune across Europe, was to perform at the Lion Hotel ballroom. With near-London ticket prices, a programme of self-penned works and a date that was ‘positively the only time’ a concert could take place, the Italian supremo created a typically self-promoting and lucrative event.

One month later, a Genevan musical society played host to Pierre Baillot, an internationally-regarded violin teacher at the Paris Conservatoire. In his correspondence, ticket prices and concert date are left to the society’s discretion, with none of his compositions included in the programme.

Why were these two concerts organised so differently? The simple answer is that Baillot was not, like Paganini, a performer ever thought to be gifted with divine (or diabolic) inspiration. Via his association with the Paris Conservatoire – a ‘network of means’, to borrow historian Jerrold Seigel’s term (2012) – he could, however, access resources and connections to create something that Paganini, in his willed isolation, could not – a future for French violinists in a patron-less, post-Revolutionary era. I will thus argue, taking a stance against a commonplace of music history, that Baillot, not Paganini, had the more significant impact on nineteenth-century violin performance.