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Nicolò Paganini (Genoa, 1782 - Nice, 1840) is universally renowned as the greatest violin virtuoso of all times and as a huge innovator of violin technique. But the sources reveal that Paganini, besides being an extraordinary and eccentric virtuoso violinist, able to thrill the first half of the 19th century public in Italy and in the rest of Europe, was also a very skilled guitarist, even though his performances with this instrument happened only in private occasions; in fact, we don't have any testimony of public guitar executions. Paganini himself, in his autobiography tells about his relationship with plucked instruments, a relationship that started at a very young age. We are around the year 1795-1796 when Paganini started being interested in the guitar, so from that moment on, until the year 1804, we would compose the main corpus of his guitar works, consisting in 37 sonatas for guitars (M.S. 84) and the 5 sonatinas (M.S. 85) that are the object of the present recording in which the Italian guitarist Massimiliano Filippini plays a wonderful guitar made by Gaetano Guadagnini in Turin in 1823. Paganini wrote these words to his friend Luigi Guglielmo Germi, on January 7th, 1824: "I'm writing to you because a lady is looking for a beautiful, but most importantly, fine guitar. If she finds it here, let me know, otherwise, ask my brother, meaning to demand him to inquire from my copyist where or in which village of Piemonte lives that fellow whose name I don't recall, but who is an excellent artist for guitars, and commission him a good instrument, well refined and well-sounding. Please take care of this." Therefore, Paganini knew about a great Piedmontese artisan, an "excellent artist for the guitar"; he perhaps heard about the fantastic acoustic results of the new model of guitar made by the young Gaetano Guadagnini? We don't know, but this is a suggestive hypothesis that makes even more coherent his choice of using a Guadagnini guitar of the year 1823 to record the Paganini Sonatas for guitar.
Niccolò Paganini (1782-1840)