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Paganini Project at the Library of Congress

From 2009-2012 Peter Sheppard Skaerved worked with the instrument and paper holdings of the Music Division of the Library of Congress, Washington DC. Following the lecture-recital 'The Revolutionary Violin' given in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library in the Summer of 2009, the Music Division invited Sheppard Skaerved to bring his Paganini research/performance to bear on the resources of the institution. He was given access to the broad cross-section of holdings relating to Paganini, alongside the instruments (in this case, the Brooking Amati, the Betts Stradivarius and the Kreisler Del Gesu). The paper materials included playbills, letters, recipes, manuscripts, and most excitingly of all, Paganini's 'Red Book' a memorandum book given to him in 1828 in which he documented a welter of minutiae concerning his 1828-1831 'Grand Tour'.

This led to a lecture recital in the Coolidge Auditorium in 2013, bringing together performance of rediscovered and new works, along with Sheppard Skaerved’s research into some of the figures and issues to be found in the 'Red Book'. In the Summer of 2013, this material was made into a one hour film for the Music Division, in which the objects, the images and the instruments are explored. This was shot in the Whittall Pavilion of the Library, on three cameras, and streams live from the L.O.C. Website. Consequently the US-based 'Strings Magazine' invited Sheppard Skaerved to write the article 'My Year with Paganini' documenting his Paganini work in Europe and the US, which appeared in their April 2013 issue.