Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst : En stor violinist i skuggan av Paganini

Sammanfattning: Abstract Tobias Wilczkowski: Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst – A great violinist in the shadow of Paganini. Uppsala universitet: Institutionen för musikvetenskap, uppsats för 60p., 2005. As a boy, Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst adopted Paganini's virtuosic style. He became a popular violinist who later developed his own style. He used the potential of the violin to its extreme and explored new possibilities on the instrument. Later, however, Ernst was more or less forgotten as a violinist and today his contributions are neglected. This essay attempts to show that this is unfair to Ernst and that he today does not have the position he deserves: as Paganini's greatest successor and as an innovative composer who contributed valuable works to the art of violin. When I discuss Ernst's position as a performer among his contemporaries during his career, I use contemporary reviews, reports and articles. In the next section where I deal with Ernst's contribution to violin techniques, I analyse examples from compositions by Ernst and compare some of these with example from compositions by Nicolo Paganini. My conclusions are that Ernst was widely seen as the superior violinist of his time and Paganini's greatest successor and that he not only developed the polyphonic playing, but also discovered new idiomatic ways to compose polyphonically conceived violin music to a degree that is unprecedented to this day.