The Infant Paganini: The Story of Giulio Regondi

Around 1830, audiences in Paris came to see a boy of seven or eight who played the guitar like a grown man.

It was a time when the guitar was fashionable, and its greatest masters, Fernando Sor, Carulli and Carcassi, lived and performed in that very city. And yet the critics were writing about a child. They called him the “Enfant Paganini”, the infant Paganini, after the most famous virtuoso of the age.

The boy’s name was Giulio Regondi.

A blurred past

Surprisingly little is known about his beginnings. He was born in 1822, in Geneva or perhaps Genoa; the sources do not agree. His mother, a German woman, probably died giving birth to him.

He was raised by an Italian man who presented himself as his father. Some say he truly was; others believe he was only a guardian or a foster father. He was a musician himself, a guitarist and baritone, and he saw very early what a talent the child had.

He put him on stage at the age of five.

Sor’s young friend

In Paris, little Giulio caught the attention of a man who was not easily impressed: Fernando Sor, the most respected guitarist and composer of the time.

In 1831, when Giulio was only nine, Sor dedicated a piece to him: the fantasia “Souvenir d’amitié”, “A Token of Friendship”. For a great master to dedicate a work to a child was a rare gesture. In effect, it said that Sor saw him as an equal.

London

That same year, father and son arrived in London. Their success was enormous. They performed across England, Scotland and Ireland, and the halls were full. Giulio even played in duet with another child prodigy of the guitar, Catherina Pelzer, who would later become one of the leading guitarists of Victorian England.

The money followed. Thousands of pounds, a fortune for the time.

Then one day, around 1835, the man who called himself his father placed a five-pound note in the boy’s hand.

And vanished with all the rest of the money.

The boy who stayed

Giulio was about 13, alone in a foreign country, with five pounds in his pocket.

It would have been easy for the story to end there. Many child prodigies of the time disappeared without a trace as soon as they stopped being children.

Giulio kept playing.

He grew up, learned a new instrument as well, the concertina, a small hexagonal squeezebox fashionable in England, and became one of its greatest virtuosos. He toured Europe, performing on both instruments.

In 1841, in Leipzig, in the famous Gewandhaus concert hall, the young Regondi took the stage alongside Clara Wieck, the future Clara Schumann, one of the greatest pianists of the century.

The abandoned child with five pounds in his pocket was now playing beside the finest musicians in Europe.

What remains

Regondi spent the rest of his life in London as a respected musician and composer. His works for guitar, his études and variations, are today considered among the most beautiful pieces of the Romantic guitar repertoire, and they are played in concerts and conservatories around the world.

The world discovered him as a child prodigy. He chose to remain a musician.

GuitarStory — The stories behind the strings.

Sources

Naxos – Giulio Regondi: https://ml.naxos.jp/artist/2599

MusicWeb International – Giulio Regondi: https://musicweb-international.com/classrev/2001/Aug01/Regondi.htm

Wikipedia – Giulio Regondi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giulio_Regondi