Customer Reviews

Paganini (Illustrated Lives of the Great Composers Series)

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If you're looking for a scholarly work on the life of Paganini, don't buy this book; it's nothing more than a regurgitation of information and quotes from other articles and biographies on Paganini. The author fails to properly quote all of his sources and frequently interjects his own tedious opinions, which I found to be trite and irrelevant.

While the book is fairly well written and offers some insight into Paganini's life, it is simply a previously published book ("Niccolo Paganini: Supreme Violinist or Devil's Fiddler") now pubished under a different title. Since there seems to be a dearth of material on Paganini, this makes it even more disappointing.

I bought this book over 20 years ago, and finally have the time to sit down to read it from cover to cover.

Sugden included a lot of photographs, maps, and manuscripts which made the book visually pleasing. But reading the text was a nightmare. Each chapter went from start to finish without a break. The use of sub-headings would help the reader immensely. His writing was also not very well organized. He had the tendency to either go off tangent, or assert his own opinions. Details pertinent to Paganini's early career were not mentioned until in the chapter concerning his death. Other minor trivial information (such as LeRoy's miracle cure) was mentioned almost every other page.

If one has the patience and persistence to put up with this seemingly random pile of text, it can be informative, and provided additional insights to the life of Paganini beyond his obvious accomplishments.