Musical Ontology in the Instance of the Camilo Sivori Cylinders: Acoustemology, the Work Concept, and Witchcraft

Thanks to Andrew Krastins (2024), the musicological community now has substantial evidence to suggest that, in 1894, days before his death, Paganini’s only pupil, Camillo Sivori, gave posterity at least seven wax cylinders preserving his performances of Paganini’s “Le Streghe, Op. 8”, and his unpublished Second Violin Concerto. Once thought to be recordings of August Wilhelmj, the wax cylinders containing his performance of “Le Streghe,” labeled, “The Witch’s Dance, - a Song of the Old Woman under the Walnut Tree, as played by Paganini” (Summers, 2010), can provide astounding insight into 19th-century performance practice and shed profound light on musical ontology through their implications on the “work concept” and acoustemology.

Given Sivori’s legendary pedigree, why might the recording at hand sound so odd to the modern ear? Before listening to this recording of “Le Streghe,” it bears mentioning that Sivori interprets the score of this piece so liberally at times that it raises questions as to whether the work instantiated in these recordings is still essentially Paganini’s. According to Laurenz Lütteken (2015), a musical work “is not the sum of its phenotypes, but is contained in them. (p. 56), which would indicate the music contained in this recording is still ostensibly “Le Streghe,” despite the broad interpretive license that Sivori takes. However, when Sivori was active, performances like the ones contained in these cylinders had “assume(d) a work-like character in (their) own right” (Lüttken, 2015, p. 65), making the case that the “work-concept” of the music in the recording belongs more to Sivori than Paganini. To resolve these conflicting models, one can merely shrug off this dialectic because “authorship stands as a secondary and comparatively recent determinant of the work concept (Lütteken, 2015, p. 59),” meaning that for most of history, musicians and listeners considered a performer’s phenotypical expression of a piece of music as an artistic work in its own right that both incorporated, but was not solely a mediation of a static musical idea conceived of by a composer.  

It also bears noting that there is a possibility that Sivori’s idiosyncratic realization of Paganini’s written score in these cylinders is not primarily a consequence of his own accretions and that, given their inscription and his close knowledge of his teacher’s performance practices, these recordings might well be a sonic codification of some of the ways “the witch master” (Kawabata, 2007, p. 67) himself chose to manifest his score in sound, given how much Paganini (and many other virtuosi throughout the 19th century) incorporated improvisation in his performances (Gooley, 2018, p. 16). However, because of how widespread this tendency was as compared to today, Sivori too would have had a “performance-centered musical ontology” (Gooley, 2018, p. 7), meaning the provenance of his deviations from the score may never be ascertained.

The extent to which certain instances of the performative licence Sivori expresses here could be purely attributable to the technical limitations of the cylinder format is also an open question, given that their playing time was constrained to between two and four minutes, which frequently resulted in musicians having to truncate their performances in ways that had little to do with volitional artistic processes (Kolkowski et. al, Section 1, 2015). This tendency is a curious reflection of the current mean time for musical recordings, which has reverted to this timespan despite the comparative lack of technical impositions (Hesmondhalgh, 2022, p. 15). This trend raises questions about the extent to which recorded music can never fulfil the ideal of unmediated artistic expression that Glenn Gould believed musicians could be afforded the with the unprecedented "editorial control" that even now-obsolete recording technologies such as tape splicing entailed (Gould, 1966, p. 339). In this way, the difficulty of determining whose "voice" is being expressed in these recordings is confounded even more.

  Turning now to the actual content of the deviations from Paganini’s (1851) transcription of “Le Streghe” for violin and piano that Sivori makes, the reader is encouraged to now listen to these recordings (Paganini, 1851). Sivori begins by playing Paganini’s transcription fairly faithfully (albeit with the interpolation of several melodic figures found in the right hand of the piano part) up until the fermata in bar 18 at 0:49. However, he then proceeds to jump to the first statement of the thema on page four, followed by a direct restatement of it and, at 1:35, a passage so free that it is challenging to know if there is any textual basis for it at all. Following a restatement of the theme at 1:55, played on a “witch trill” (more on this in a moment), Sivori returns to the written material in the 17th bar of page four at the 2:16 mark, playing through to the beginning of Variation One to conclude the first cylinder.

At the onset of the following cylinder at the 3:12 timestamp, Sivori then appears to adapt the thematic material in Variation One, with its use of high and low double stops in rapid octave displacement, followed by passages with fast upward runs -- neither of which appear in Paganini’s score as Sivori plays them. However, he also freely juxtaposes this with some of the material from Variation Three, which consists of the thema played in various harmonic permutations, complete with impressively executed harmonic tiple stops. This cylinder is the most enigmatic of the three, though, given that its material adheres almost not at all to the score and jumps around the piece’s sections in such a confounding way.

The listener is granted a brief reprieve from formal confusion when the third cylinder starts at 5:57, as Sivori then goes back and performs the beginning of Variation Two almost entirely come scritto, save for some minor amendments. At the fermata in the 12th bar of page seven, he proceeds to play the theme as written (ornamented with his witch trill) and then continues to play what’s notated until the 7:23 mark, whereupon he jumps to the Finale material in the 17th bar of page ten. He concludes the piece by thereafter sticking to the score for a few bars before more or less freely improvising in preparation for the final cadence. These choices are all in stark contrast to an account like Ruggero Ricci’s which, aside from starting at bar 19 of Fritz Kreisler’s now-ubiquitous transcription, adheres with astonishing accuracy to the score, albeit with the occasional omission of a few bars (Paganini, 1905) -- typifying one significant facet of the marked shift in performance practices that took place between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries.  

  Returning to the aforementioned "witch trill:" this is perhaps the most sensuously striking feature of these recordings. To throw one last ontological wrench into this discussion, these sounds have striking parallels with the work of Delia Casadei and Marina Romani, who explore the acoustemological implications of discourse surrounding witches in Abruzzo. According to the subjects of their ethnography, encounters with witches occur "at a place and time when one cannot see but only hear: the open countryside at midnight" (Casadei & Romani, 2024, p. 7), and their communications are sometimes "deemed strange… (partly) because  (they have) no indexical referent" (Casadei & Romani, 2024, p. 26). These characterizations are remarkably apropos of this trill that Sivori executes, as his decorations of the thema with it are not notated anywhere in Paganini's score -- nor, for that matter, are his interpolations of the thema itself throughout the recording. Because both instances have no recourse to the “decisive (visual) materialization” (Lüttteken, 2015, p. 57) of this piece of music in the form of its score, they exist solely in sound like these witches' communications and can therefore be conceptualized as acousmatic.

Additionally, Casadei and Romani (2024) note that the witch "takes the form of sounds whose  source… is semiotically unplaceable" (p. 25), which similarly characterizes the “acousmêtre” that is this trill, as it, at least in this author’s opinion, uncannily approximates a human voice completely stripped of all semantic content, given that it occurs in the context of what would traditionally be characterized as "absolute music." This ventriloquistic effect may even have been a technique that Sivori picked up from his teacher, as the historical record is littered with accounts of listeners attesting that Paganini's violin "spoke," "wept," and "sang" (Kawabata, 2007, p. 90). Some even went so far as to claim that his instruments were "'ensouled'… with the spirits of dead women… whose voices could be heard emerging from the instrument in tortured wails" (Kawabata, 200", p. 94), lending an even more morbid, but historically nested valence to this instance of the "acousmêtre."

  In closing, the multifarious voices instantiated in this remarkable recording, whether those of Sivori, Paganini, or "the witch," demonstrate that it remains an essential task to consult the “resonant tombs” (Sterne, 2003, p. 287) of early sound recordings for windows into the performance practices and ontological frameworks of earlier musicians. Not least because, without doing so, "These witches are going to end, (and) Once the elders die, the young ones will never hear about witches" (Casadei & Romani, 2024, p. 9).

Works Cited

Casadei, D., & Romani, M. (2024). The Acoustemology of the Witch: Hearsay, Sound

Recording, and Zaccheo Tapes. Sound Stage Screen, 3(2), 5–45.

https://doi.org/10.54103/sss22961

Gould, G. (1966, April). The Prospects of Recording. High Fidelity. https://www.sfu.ca/sonic-studio-webdav/AudioMedia/Readings/Alphabetical/Gould-Prospects_of_Recording.pdf.

Gooley, D. (2018). Prelude: the virtue of improvisation. Fantasies of Improvisation: free playing in nineteenth-century music (pp.1-25). Oxford University Press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/fantasies-of-improvisation-9780190633585?cc=gb&lang=en& 

Hesmondhalgh, D. (2022). Streaming’s Effects on Music Culture: Old Anxieties and New Simplifications. Cultural Sociology, 16(1), 3-24. https://doi.org/10.1177/17499755211019974 

Kawabata, M. (2007). Virtuosity, the Violin, the Devil . What Really Made Paganini "Demonic"?. Current Musicology, (83). https://doi.org/10.7916/cm.v0i83.5088 

Kolkowski, A., Miller, D., & Blier-Carruthers, A. (2015). The Art and Science of Acoustic Recording: Re-enacting Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra’s landmark 1913 recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Science Museum Group Journal. https://doi.org/10.15180/150302 

Krastins, A. O. (2024, September 18). Sivori is Dead! Viva Sivori!: The haunting recorded legacy of Paganini’s only pupil, Part 3. Sound and vision blog: Sound and moving images from the British Library. Retrieved March 10, 2025, from https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2024/09/sivori-is-dead-viva-sivori-the-haunting-recorded-legacy-of-paganinis-only-pupil-part-3.html 

Lütteken, L. (2015). The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music (J. Rodin & A. M. Busse Berger, Eds.; J. Steichen, Trans.). Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHO9781139057813 

Paganini, N. (1851). Le Streghe, Op. 8. Arranged for Violin and Piano by Paganini, N. Ricordi. https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/3/3b/IMSLP29589-PMLP08755-Paganini_Le_Streghe.pdf.

Paganini, N. (1851). Le Streghe, Op. 8. Arranged for Violin and Piano by Paganini, N. [Recorded by Camillo Savori & Unidentified Pianist]. (1894).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HieMjSSUsVU 

Paganini, N. (1905). Le Streghe, Op. 8. Arranged for Violin and Piano by Kreisler, F. Ernst Eulenburg. https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/d/de/IMSLP283389-PMLP08755-Sibley1802.3583.Streghe.pdf.

Paganini, N. (1905). Le Streghe, Op. 8. Arranged for Violin and Piano by Kreisler, F. [Recorded by Ruggiero Ricci & Louis Persinger]. (1954). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwVOSou1r1Y 

Sterne, J. (2003). The audible past: Cultural origins of sound reproduction. Duke University Press. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/kcl/detail.action?pq-origsite=primo&docID=1167834# 

Summers, J. (2010, July 1). Recording of the Week: Unique 110-year old Wilhelmj violin recordings. Sound and Vision Blog: Sound and moving images from the British Library. Retrieved March 10, 2025, from https://blogs.bl.uk/sound-and-vision/2010/07/recording-of-the-week-unique-110-year-old-wilhelmj-violin-recordings.html