The Paganini Genoa Festival

Created in 2017 offering a wide range of events of notable value, variety and of quality: concerts and conferences, workshops, violin master classes, guided tours, venues dedicated to study and research, events for children and young people.

Many compositions by Paganini have been performed: some famous ones, along with others that are less known or truly rare. Every year, a comprehensive and representative overview of Paganini’s entire creative range is presented. Among the venues for these initiatives, we mainly find places associated with Paganini’s life: churches, palaces, theaters that bear witness to significant moments of a legendary career, as well as extraordinary architectural monuments of artistic and historical importance.

But the ultimate goal of the Festival is to make known the inexhaustible and fascinating facets of a character who had no equal in his time, who captivated audiences throughout Europe, and who, thanks to exceptional entrepreneurial talent, revolutionized the way music was performed and organized. The depth of his humanity – attested to by those who knew him and by his own letters – and at the same time his great physical vulnerability, compensated by an incredibly strong character in pursuing artistic goals, the amalgamation of talents and flaws, make Paganini a modern artist, close to the sensibilities of our time. He is one of the greatest assets that Genoa can showcase on the stage of international visibility it strongly aspires to, and deserves, in the name of its universally admired son.

Paganini embarked on his career as a virtuoso performer, but soon his unique execution style and developed technique took on such a personal dimension that it called for pieces specifically composed to highlight his visionary instrumental conception and musical imagination shaped around his instrument and technique. From the early 1830s onwards, he performed almost exclusively his own compositions, at least in public appearances.Today, Paganini’s stature as a composer has been greatly reassessed, and critics have highlighted the far-from-superficial or modest value of his music, which was occasionally dismissed in the past as compositionally “weak”.

The extraordinary quantity of his composed works and their enduring success with the public, as well as the esteem of the greatest musicians, testify that his role as a composer was not a mere supplement to his performing activities, but rather the result of a creative necessity and a mind that thinks “as a composer”.

The Paganini Genova Festival, in properly recognizing and fully appreciating this aspect, has brought to the public an unprecedented quantity and variety of music composed by Paganini.