Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst: Nocturne, Op. 8 no. 2
Tim Rufus McCullough and Francis Liu
Ernst was born in Brno (then the capital of Moravia; now the second-largest city of the Czech Republic) in 1812, and educated in Vienna by a colleague of Beethoven and a teacher of Joseph Joachim. From the age of 17 he was a pan-European touring virtuoso, based mostly in Munich until 1844 when he transferred to London.
So there was not much Italian about his life apart from retiring to the Franco-Italian city of Nice (Nizza) when a nerve injury forced him to give up performing; he died there in 1865. But there was something very Italian in his artistic life: at the age of 16 he heard Niccolò Paganini - over and over - and he was obsessed.
The Genoese virtuoso gave fourteen concerts in Vienna in 1828. Ernst played for him and received encouragement and recommendations, and for years he made a point of trying to book concerts in cities where his idol would also be playing. In Marseilles he even managed to rent a hotel room next to Paganini’s, hiding there day and night to eavesdrop on his practicing. In Frankfurt in 1830 he astonished audiences by playing Paganini’s intricate variations on “Nel cor più non mi sento” - purely by ear, as the composer had not allowed publication or even hand-copying of the music. On one of his visits to Paganini in a hotel room, the latter immediately got up to hide his newest composition under the bed-sheets.
Ernst in the 1850s (photograph by L. Angerer)
Paganini - Engraving as "The Modern Orpheus," London 1831
The younger composer’s Nocturnes Op. 8 were written at the peak of his Paganini mania, and are pure translations of Italian Bel Canto as transmitted by the native model. Modeling - learning through emulation - is the main way musical style is passed from one person or generation to another, and performers eager to recover 19th-century style are now able to emulate the performers trained in that century who lived to make primitive recordings early in the 20th. Of course, mere imitation is insufficient - you have to reach an understanding of why the thing is the way it is, so as to make it natural to yourself and carry it into other pieces of music in which you are not imitating anyone. But it is a starting point - in fact it is how everyone starts learning (imitating a teacher).
For this recording, Francis Liu made a close study of one by Hugo Heermann (1844-1935), the earliest-born violinist to make a surviving record of the Nocturne. The “singing” violin in those days meant fingerings and rubatos extremely different from what would soon be taught in the age of Stravinsky and the modernizing virtuosos of the middle 20th century. Exploring this terrain is where musical research and creativity meet.
Hugo Heermann - Postcard portrait, Frankfurt, early 20th century