Paganini's Ghost (24 page)

Viotti is not a name with which most nonmusicians are familiar. Even musicians would be hard-pressed to tell you much about his life. His works are rarely heard on the radio, and hardly ever in the concert hall. Yet he wrote twenty-nine violin concertos and is known as the father of modern violin playing.

He was born in northern Italy in 1755, twenty-seven years before Paganini, and, like Paganini, showed a precocious talent for the violin. He went to Turin at the age of eleven and became a pupil of Gaetano Pugnani, another legendary violinist, whose fame today rests almost entirely on a musical hoax perpetrated by Fritz Kreisler, who wrote several pieces for the violin in the early twentieth century, claiming that they were the work of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century composers such as Vivaldi and Tartini. One of the pieces was a “Praeludium and Allegro”—familiar to every student of the violin—which was attributed to Pugnani. Years later, Kreisler came clean and admitted that all these “long-lost” compositions were, in fact, his own work.

Pugnani is little more than an obscure footnote in history now, but in his day he was a musical giant, celebrated for his eight operas, seven symphonies, and innumerable other pieces. He was also much in demand as a soloist, and in 1780 he went on a tour of Switzerland, Germany, Poland, and Russia. He took with him his star pupil, Viotti, who was then an unknown twenty-four-year old with limited concert experience.

In Saint Petersburg, both men performed for Catherine the Great, and—as Rupert Rhys-Jones had said—the empress was so captivated by Viotti that she kept him on in the capital and he became her lover. The affair lasted a year before petering out, allowing Viotti to return to
Italy. It must have been an amicable end to the relationship, for Catherine's parting gift of the jewel-encrusted gold violin was fabulously generous, even by her standards.

Exactly what happened to the violin after that was a mystery. The biography I was reading mentioned the gift in passing but made no further reference to it. It was a book about Viotti the musician and its focus was on his career as a violinist and composer. A piece of jewellery, no matter how distinguished its provenance, was of little interest to the author.

But as I read the pages that dealt with Viotti's return from Russia and his brief stay in Italy before he went to Paris for the triumphant debut that was to make him a celebrity overnight, I began to construct a theory about the gold violin—a theory based on the flimsiest of evidence but which, as I refined it, seemed to have an appealing plausibility.

I was still thinking about it when the phone rang. It was Guastafeste. He was back from Paris, catching up with his colleagues at the
questura
.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. “I'd prefer not to do it on the phone.”

“Give me an hour and I'll be there,” Guastafeste said.

“Have you eaten?”

“No, but . . .”

“When did you last eat?”

“Gianni . . .”

“When?”

“Breakfast.”

“I'll make you something.”

“You don't need—”

“Don't argue, Antonio. I'll see you in an hour.”

I went into the kitchen and made a simple pasta sauce with olive oil, onions, garlic, and tomatoes. By the time Guastafeste arrived, there were ham and black olives and a bottle of red wine on the kitchen table and a pan of boiling water on the hob. I added a few handfuls of conchiglie to the water as Guastafeste walked in, then poured us both a large glass of wine.

“Help yourself to the ham and olives.”

“You shouldn't have, Gianni,” Guastafeste said. “It's not necessary.”

“You look tired and hungry,” I said. “I can't do anything about the fatigue, but I can certainly feed you. You're overdoing it; I can tell. You've got to take a break occasionally, you know. Look after yourself better.”

“I'm fine,” Guastafeste insisted, but he wolfed down a slice of ham and some olives in quick succession, then took a long gulp of wine.

I gave the pasta a stir and joined him at the table.

“What news from Paris?” I asked. “You stayed on longer than you expected.”

“I was waiting for the pathologist's report on Alain Robillet. It
was
Robillet, by the way. His wife formally identified him. He was killed by a heavy blow to the head.”

“Like Villeneuve.”

“There were differences. Villeneuve was hit with the lamp in his hotel room. Robillet was hit with something much nastier—a hammer or a wrench, the pathologist reckoned. And hit with enough force to leave a hole in his skull.”

I grimaced.

“They didn't find the weapon?”

“It wasn't at the scene,” Guastafeste said. “They've been searching the surrounding area to see if the killer dumped it somewhere, but they've found nothing so far.”

“Motive?”

“Nothing obvious. It might have been robbery. There was a shop full of antiques downstairs. It was well secured, but Robillet had the keys to the locks. They were in his jacket pocket. It's possible that the killer took the keys, went into the shop and stole something, then returned the keys.”

“Was anything missing?”

Guastafeste shrugged.

“You saw the place. There must have been thousands of items. There's no way you could tell if anything had been taken, not unless
you cross-checked everything against an inventory. And Robillet and Villeneuve, according to Inspector Forbin, were not the kind of men who kept inventories. Their business affairs were, let's say, somewhat less than transparent. Half the stuff in their shop was probably stolen in the first place.”

Guastafeste helped himself to another couple of olives.

“Forbin said they mixed with some pretty unsavoury characters. Violent, ruthless characters who wouldn't think twice about smashing in someone's head with a hammer.”

“Forbin knows who these people are?”

“It's a long list.”

I went to the stove and tested the pasta. The conchiglie were just al dente. I drained off the water and put the pasta into a bowl with the tomato sauce. I placed the bowl on the table in front of Guastafeste, then brought grated Parmesan from the fridge.

“You said you wanted to talk to me,” Guastafeste said.

“Yes. I think I know what was in the gold box.”

Guastafeste paused, a spoonful of Parmesan half-sprinkled over his pasta.

“Go on,” he said.

I told him about my meeting with Rupert Rhys-Jones. Then I showed him a colour photocopy of the jewelled violin that Rhys-Jones had had done for me before I left his office. Guastafeste studied the photocopy in silence for a long time.

Finally, he said, “How much is it worth?”

“A lot. Twenty million dollars, Rhys-Jones reckoned.”

“And this is what Elisa Baciocchi gave to Paganini?”

“It has to be.”

“Where did she get it?”

“I don't know for certain, but I have an idea. Viotti, as I said, was given it by Catherine the Great, as a memento of their affair.”

“He must have been one hell of a lover.”

“Perhaps. But Catherine wasn't the first woman he loved. There
was another woman—in Turin, where Viotti lived before he went to Russia. Her name was Teresa Valdena, the daughter of a wealthy cloth merchant. Teresa was seventeen when Viotti met her, Viotti twenty-one. They fell in love and wanted to get married, but Teresa's father disapproved of the match. Viotti, a penniless music student with few prospects, was not the kind of son-in-law he wanted. Valdena forced his daughter to break off the engagement and forbade her from any further contact with Viotti.

“Viotti went off on his tour of Europe with Pugnani and was away for eighteen months. When he returned to Turin, he found that Teresa's father had sent her away to a convent after she refused to marry the young nobleman he had chosen to be her husband. The convent she went to was at Montecatini, in Tuscany.”

“So Viotti never saw her again?” Guastafeste said.

“Just once. He went to visit her in the convent. No one knows what passed between them. Perhaps he entreated her to leave, to come away with him and be his wife. Perhaps she wanted to but couldn't. Perhaps she had already decided to devote herself to a life of religious contemplation. Whatever the truth, the fact is that Viotti went away without her. He returned to Turin, then left Italy for Paris.”

“And the gold violin?”

“He gave it to Teresa.”

“This is guesswork?”

“Yes. But it fits what happened years later—about 1806, 1807, when Elisa was princess of Piombino and Lucca. It's documented in a book I've got about Elisa. Napoléon was running short of cash to keep his war machine going. He ordered Elisa to dissolve all the religious institutions in her principality and confiscate their lands and assets—which would have been quite considerable. Montecatini is near Lucca. Teresa's convent is one of the institutions that would have been closed.”

“So the gold violin—if it was there—would have been confiscated by Elisa's soldiers,” Guastafeste said. “But not sent to fill her brother's war chest.”

“That's consistent with Elisa's character. She went through all the assets that were seized from the convents and monasteries and kept some of the loot for herself. The gold violin must have been hard to resist. A beautiful piece of jewellery like that. And she was in the middle of a passionate love affair with Paganini. Who better to give the violin to than him?”

Guastafeste scooped up a forkful of pasta and chewed pensively.

“It's only a theory,” I said. “But it fits the facts. How else did Elisa get the violin?”

Guastafeste nodded.

“It has the ring of truth about it,” he said. “Catherine the Great gives it as a love token to Viotti, he gives it as a love token to Teresa, and then Elisa gives it as a love token to Paganini. And yet not one of those loves endured. That says something about human nature, doesn't it?”

Was he right? I wondered. Certainly about Catherine and Elisa and Paganini. All moved on to other lovers without much difficulty. But Viotti and Teresa? That was a different matter. No one knows what became of Teresa. Her life was lived away from the public gaze. But Viotti was one of the greatest musicians of his day, his achievements recorded for posterity.

He was a complex man. His first appearance in Paris, playing one of his own concertos—only months after that final meeting with Teresa—caused a sensation. His audience clamoured for more and every concert he gave thereafter was a sellout. But eighteen months after that glorious debut, he walked away from the concert platform and devoted his time to teaching—without remuneration—and composition, his violin concertos being performed, but not by him.

A brief spell running one of the Paris opera houses with the help of Marie Antoinette's coiffeur put him in jeopardy after the French Revolution and he fled to London, where he resumed his career as a soloist. But that revival was cut short when he was accused of revolutionary sympathies and expelled by the English. Three years of exile in Germany followed, during which time he composed but did not perform,
and when the expulsion order was revoked and he was permitted to return to London, he rejected any notion of playing in public again and became a wine merchant. Business was clearly not his forte, however, for in 1818 he went bankrupt. He went back to Paris to run the Royal Opera House, but that was not a success, either. When he died, in 1824, he had large debts, which even the sale of his Stradivari violin could not cover.

He was an enigmatic man—kind, generous, and modest, but difficult to fathom. He was renowned in his time as both a composer and performer, but he had the misfortune to be living in an era of great change. With the rise of Romanticism, his concertos, hugely popular before 1800, were soon regarded as old-fashioned, and his classical style of playing was superseded by the flashy virtuosity of which Paganini was the foremost exponent. Viotti's real legacy was not his music, but the pupils he taught—Rode, Baillot, and Kreutzer, who went on to dominate the nineteenth-century French school of violin playing, their influence continuing on into the twentieth century through Massart, Wieniawski, and Kreisler.

Now, as I reflected on Viotti's life, one particular fact stood out: He never married. Was he still carrying a torch for Teresa Valdena? I don't generally subscribe to the concept of a broken heart. An aching heart, yes. We have all suffered from that. But a heart so shattered by lost love that it never fully recovers from the blow? That is much rarer. We are a resilient species. If we were not, how would we survive the vicissitudes that life throws in our paths? The pain, the grief, the misery—they would all overwhelm us and we would just curl up and die. But we cope. We endure. We lose one love, we mourn for a period, and then we move on. In the flash of a star that comprises our life span, it will only be an instant before we, too, are gone.

Did Viotti never recover from the loss of Teresa? Did he carry her memory with him for the rest of his life, a memory so intense that no other woman could erase it? I pictured that final encounter at the convent at Montecatini, Teresa in her nun's habit, Viotti sitting beside her. What did they say to each other? Did they touch hands? Was there a
last kiss before they parted? I saw Viotti reasoning with her, perhaps pleading with her to come with him, Teresa shaking her head. Then I saw him giving her the jewelled violin he had brought home with him from Russia. A gift from one woman who had loved him, which he was now giving to another woman who had loved him, but who would never be his. There was something poignant about that.

“So the question now,” Guastafeste said, scraping up the last few conchiglie from his bowl, “is what did Paganini do with the violin? Did he keep it for the rest of his life? Did he give it away, perhaps to another woman?”

“Coffee?” I said.