a locked door. At a time of great musical and social upheaval, Rode was the star pupil of Viotti, and from the age of eighteen he had a glittering virtuoso career-triumphant concerto performances, and an appointment as solo violinist to Napoleon, with whom he supposedly shared a mistress (the singer Madame Grassini). He travelled to Russia to play for the Tsar and enjoyed great success both artistically and financially. Upon his return to France in 1808 aged thirty-four, however, his former admirers found him greatly changed. Audiences missed his once energetic performances; the 'perfect violinist' had become 'cold and full of mannerism', in the words of Louis Spohr (quoted in Arthur Pougin's Notice sur Rode, violiniste français (1874); translated and with a foreword by Bruce R. Schueneman as The Life and Music of Pierre Rode (Kingsville: The Lyre of Orpheus Press, 1994), 11). Rode spent the rest of his life a semi-recluse, residing in Berlin and then Bordeaux, occupying himself with married life, playing chamber music with the Mendelssohn family among others, composing and teaching-and planning his comeback. His last public concert in Paris, in 1828, was supposedly 'such a fiasco that some commentators believed it hastened his death' (according to the liner notes to the present disc, page 2); he had a stroke in 1829 and died the following year. Pougin suggested that he suffered from debilitating nervousness that compromised his bowing and intonation (Life and Music of Pierre Rode, 44). It just so happens that 1828 was Paganini's break-out year-the beginning of his conquest of Europe, starting with Vienna and extending to Paris, where he arrived the year after Rode's death. Paganini performed his own music almost exclusively, but in the early days of his tour, before he had composed enough concertos to fill up his programmes, he also played Rode's concertos (No. 1 in D minor and No. 7 in A minor)-thus making Rode one of the very few other composers whose works he ever played in public. Paganini may have been the one to capture the zeitgeist-combining musical virtuosity, personal eccentricity and opportunistic entrepreneurship into one enticing celebrity package-yet Rode's own considerable virtuosity is evident from his oeuvre of concertos (thirteen in all), quartets, airs variés and other pieces. The twelve études on this CD were composed much later than the Twenty-Four Caprices (which date from the early 1820s), and in fact were not published until after Rode's death (by Launer in Paris). They are closer to Kreutzer's forty-two études than to Paganini's Twenty-Four Caprices in that they serve better the needs of the student rather than of the stage. Each étude is designed, as one would expect, to exercise a particular technique or set of techniques, including double stops, chromatic scales, arpeggios, spiccato, bariolage, upbow staccato, and speed in both hands. (Numbers 1-10 stand alone; number 11 leads straight into number 12 without a break so that the C major Fantasia is followed by an A minor Allegro.) The ...
