Paganini’s Wooden Shoe Concert

Paganini is often painted as a musical miser, but this story shows him in a kinder light. One morning in Paris his maid came to him in tears: her lover had been conscripted and sent to war, and she was too poor to buy a substitute for him.

Paganini decided to help—and did it in the most theatrical way imaginable. He procured a wooden shoe and had it altered so it could be strung and played like a fiddle. Then he advertised a concert in which he would play five pieces on the violin and five on a wooden shoe.

The bizarre announcement, of course, drew a packed house. Paganini had given the girl tickets, and when the concert was over he went to her and poured twenty thousand francs into her lap. With that, he told her, she could purchase a substitute for her sweetheart and, with what remained, set up housekeeping.

He also gave her the wooden shoe that had brought her such fortune and told her to sell it. The curious “instrument” fetched a good sum as a souvenir, and she added that money to the fund that was meant to secure her domestic happiness.