The Devil’s Violinist, Caught Singing

Track seven was an aria the whole world can hum. Track eight is by the one composer the whole world knows by name — attached to a piece almost nobody knows at all.

Say the name and watch what happens: Paganini. It doesn’t land like a composer’s name. It lands like a rumour. The fastest hands in history. The concerts people left convinced they had witnessed something unnatural. The whisper that followed him from city to city, the one he never quite managed to kill and maybe never quite wanted to: that nobody plays like that unless somebody down below has co-signed the contract.

The Devil has been in this series before, quietly. Two tracks ago we paused at Tartini, asleep in 1713, dreaming that the Devil picked up his violin and played a sonata too beautiful to be human. That was the legend. Paganini is what happened when the public decided the legend had come back — this time awake, on tour, and selling tickets.

So you press play on track eight braced for fireworks. And instead you get this: D major. A single long melody, unhurried, warm, leaning on the piano like a singer leaning on a railing. The manuscript carries one word of instruction, and it is not a dare but a confession: Cantabile. In a singing style.

No showers of harmonics. No left-hand tricks. No storm. The most feared violinist who ever lived, the man audiences checked for a shadow — and for four minutes or so, he simply sings.

And here is the detail that should stop you: as far as anyone can tell, this is the only piece Paganini ever conceived for violin and piano. Six concertos for himself and an orchestra. Twenty-four caprices for himself alone. Sonata after sonata for himself and a guitar. And exactly once, a piece for the most ordinary combination music owns — a violin and the instrument standing in every parlour in Europe. Once. And this is what he wrote.

Now look at the credit on the album, because — as this series keeps discovering — every word of it is working: Paganini: Cantabile in D Major, MS 109.

You’d read “MS” as manuscript. Everyone does. It isn’t. Those are two surnames: Moretti and Sorrento — Maria Rosa Moretti and Anna Sorrento, the two scholars who catalogued every piece of music Paganini left behind, in a volume the city of Genoa commissioned in 1982 for the two-hundredth anniversary of its most famous son. This series met a librarian of the violin two tracks ago. It turns out Paganini got two.

But here’s the thing: manuscript would have been the right word anyway. Because that is all this piece was — for nearly a century.

• • •

In his whole extraordinary lifetime, Paganini allowed almost none of his music into print: the 24 Caprices, published in 1820, and a handful of works with guitar. That’s essentially it. The concertos, the variation sets, the pieces that made halls across Europe lose their collective mind — locked away, every one.

Not out of modesty. Out of fear. Paganini guarded his technical secrets jealously, convinced that the moment his music circulated, his rivals would open the scores and take his magic apart note by note. His compositions weren’t works to him; they were trade secrets. Publishing them would have been a magician handing out the diagrams to his own tricks.

Sit with how strange that is. Every other composer in this series wrote music hoping it would outlive him. Paganini spent his life making sure his couldn’t. If immortality was on offer, he wanted it for the legend — not for the sheet music.

The Cantabile sat in that locked drawer with everything else. When did he write it? For whom? On which of his nights? The catalogue has no firm answer, and honestly, the not-knowing is the point. This wasn’t a piece he was saving for the world. It was a piece the world was never supposed to meet.

It finally did in Vienna, in 1922 — Universal Edition, edited by Georg Kinsky and Fritz Rothschild. Eighty-two years after Paganini’s death. Eighty-two years is a long time for a song to wait.

One more thing the paper says, quietly. You will find the Cantabile everywhere today with guitar accompaniment, and the story usually told is that he wrote it for his own second instrument. But the manuscript — it lives in the Biblioteca Casanatense in Rome — is scored for violin and piano. The guitar version, lovely as it is, is an arrangement. Even here, on his gentlest page, the legend and the paper disagree.

Nice, May 1840. Paganini is dying, and everyone knows it. A priest is summoned to his rooms. And Paganini — stubborn, sceptical, or simply not ready, no one can say — refuses the last sacrament. The refusal is duly reported to the Bishop of Nice. Three days later, on 27 May 1840, he dies of internal haemorrhaging, fifty-seven years old.

And the Church says no. No requiem, no consecrated ground, no Christian burial. Partly the refused rites; partly a lifetime of that whisper about the contract down below. For thirty years the devil story had been excellent box office. Now, at the one moment it mattered, somebody had taken it seriously.

What followed is one of the strangest afterlives any musician has ever had. It took four years and an appeal to the Pope before the coffin could even be moved toward Genoa — and still no grave. Where exactly it rested in the meantime, and for how long in each place, depends on which account you read; the stories multiply precisely because no one was in charge of them. What is certain is the arithmetic: the man died in 1840, and he was not laid in a proper grave until 1876, in Parma. Thirty-six years.

Even that wasn’t the end. In 1893 a Czech violinist, František Ondříček, asked to see him, and the coffin was opened one more time. In 1896 the body was moved again, to Parma’s new cemetery — where, at last, it stayed.

• • •

It is a strange thing to meet this man on an album called IMMORTAL. Because Paganini is the cautionary tale of the whole idea: he got immortality wrong in both directions at once.

He made two bets about what would outlive him. He bet the legend would — and fed it, or at least never starved it. He bet the music wouldn’t — and locked it away to make sure. Both bets failed, and they failed in opposite directions. The legend outlived him so well that it kept his corpse above ground for thirty-six years. And the music escaped anyway — the drawer opened, the Cantabile got out, and the tenderest thing he ever wrote turned out to be one of the most-played pages bearing his name. Immortality doesn’t take requests.

There was one bequest he did get exactly right. His violin — the Guarneri of 1743 he called il Cannone, “my cannon,” for the sound it made under his hands — he willed to the city of Genoa, to be kept forever. It’s still there, in a room in the town hall. Winners of the violin prize that bears his name are allowed to play it; a curator takes it out and wakes it regularly, because a violin that is never played dies in its sleep. And it was Genoa, too, that commissioned Moretti and Sorrento’s catalogue. The city keeps his violin and his ledger. Every time an album prints “MS 109”, that is Genoa, still doing its job.

Which brings us to the only violinist on this record with a personal stake in the name. In 2013, David Garrett put on Paganini’s coat — literally: he played him on screen, in Bernard Rose’s The Devil’s Violinist, and did what no actor could have done, performing the fireworks himself, with a score written alongside Franck van der Heijden. The same Franck van der Heijden who, thirteen years later, is one of the arrangers on IMMORTAL. The partnership that once rebuilt Paganini for the cinema is the one rebuilding him here.

And that’s what makes the choice on this album so eloquent. Garrett has spent half his career next to this name — the film, an entire album squared up against him, the Caprice 24 as a calling card. He knows every trick in the locked drawer. Handed twenty-five tracks to fill, he reached past all of it — every caprice, every dare — and took the page with no tricks on it at all. The one where Paganini stops proving anything.

This series keeps circling one question: what actually carries music past the people who made it? Track six’s answer was that immortality doesn’t even check the name on the door. Track eight’s answer is harder: immortality doesn’t take instructions from the person most concerned. Paganini tried to arrange his own — hid the music, groomed the legend, willed the violin — and posterity ignored the entire plan. It mislaid his body, embalmed his rumour, and published his secret.

Somewhere in a library in Rome there is a sheet of paper he never meant for you, marked with a single word telling the violin to do the one thing nobody ever asked of him. Sing.

When the long line begins on track eight, that’s the sound of the drawer opening.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — arrives 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, with pre-orders open now on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep counting the album in.

Sources & notes: the manuscript’s scoring for violin and piano, its home in the Biblioteca Casanatense and the first publication (Universal Edition, Vienna, 1922, ed. Kinsky and Rothschild) via IMSLP; “his only piece conceived for violin and piano” from the programme notes to a 2020 Signum recording; the Moretti–Sorrento catalogue, commissioned by Genoa in 1982 for the bicentenary; his lifetime publications and the guarding of his technical secrets from standard biographical references; the refused sacrament, the Bishop of Nice and the burial timeline (1840–1876–1896) from published accounts of his death and reburials; il Cannone and its home in Genoa’s town hall from the city’s records. Where accounts of the coffin’s wanderings disagree, the text says so instead of choosing. No composition date is asserted for the Cantabile: none is documented.