August Wilhelmj: The Man Two Legends Called the Next Paganini
When the soprano Henriette Sontag heard a seven-year-old August Wilhelmj play violin, she reportedly predicted he would become "the German Paganini." Nine years later, at sixteen, Franz Liszt heard him and delivered nearly the same verdict, calling him the "future Paganini." Two of the era's most demanding musical judges independently reached for the same comparison, and Wilhelmj spent his career living up to and complicating it — becoming, by the account of at least one later assessment, less a second Paganini than "the last great violinist in the German style."
An Early and Endorsed Prodigy
Wilhelmj was born September 21, 1845, in Usingen, in the Duchy of Nassau. He gave his first public concert at eight, in Wiesbaden, and his talent drew serious attention early — Sontag's prediction came the same year he began performing publicly. He trained formally at the Leipzig Conservatory under Ferdinand David, one of the era's most influential violin pedagogues, from 1861 to 1863, studying music theory and composition alongside Moritz Hauptmann, and continued his composition studies under Joachim Raff in Frankfurt in 1864. It was in 1861, during this formative period, that Liszt heard him play and pronounced him the coming Paganini — an endorsement from arguably the most famous instrumentalist alive at the time, and one that followed Wilhelmj for the rest of his career.
Concertmaster at Bayreuth
Wilhelmj's most historically significant professional appointment came in 1876, when he served as concertmaster — leading the first violins — at the inaugural Bayreuth Festival, for the premiere of Richard Wagner's complete *Der Ring des Nibelungen*. It placed him at the center of one of the defining events in nineteenth-century music, working directly under Wagner's supervision at a production that reshaped German opera and established the festival that still bears the composer's name. The posting reflected not just Wilhelmj's technical standing among German violinists of the period but the trust Wagner's circle placed in him to lead an orchestra through an unprecedented, technically demanding new work.
An International Touring Career
Wilhelmj toured widely through the following decades, including a tour of Australia in 1881 and a notable 1885 invitation to perform for the household of the Ottoman Sultan, a mark of his international reputation reaching well beyond European concert halls. He built a significant London following after being introduced there by the celebrated soprano Jenny Lind in 1886, another endorsement from a major musical figure that helped cement his standing in Britain, where he eventually settled. That pattern — one internationally famous performer after another vouching for him, from Sontag in childhood to Liszt in adolescence to Lind in middle age — runs through the entire arc of his career and is one of the clearest signs of how consistently the era's most demanding listeners rated him. In 1894 he was appointed professor of violin at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, a post he held for the rest of his career, training a new generation of players that included Nahan Franko, Aylmer Buesst, and the Grimson siblings.
The Arrangement That Outlasted the Performer
Wilhelmj's most widely recognized legacy today has little to do with his own performing career and everything to do with a single arrangement: his transcription of the second movement of Bach's Orchestral Suite No. 3 for violin and piano, published in 1871 and popularly known as "Air on the G String" because Wilhelmj transposed the melody so it could be played entirely on the violin's lowest string. The arrangement became, and remains, one of the most frequently performed and recorded short classical pieces in the world — far outstripping the fame of nearly everything else in Wilhelmj's own catalogue of compositions and transcriptions. He also re-orchestrated Paganini's Violin Concerto No. 1 in 1883–1884, a project that put him in direct dialogue with the very composer he had been compared to since childhood. He performed on a succession of prestigious instruments over his career, including a 1725 Stradivari, a 1785 Guadagnini, and an 1843 Pressenda.
Family
Wilhelmj's family remained connected to music after him: his sister-in-law, Maria Wilhelmj, was herself a composer and singer, and his son, Adolf Wilhelmj, went on to teach violin at the Belfast Conservatory and the Royal Irish Academy of Music in Dublin, extending the family's presence in European violin pedagogy into the next generation.
Why August Is Called a Genius
The genius attributed to Wilhelmj is a specific, well-documented case of prodigious technical and interpretive skill on his instrument, certified early and repeatedly by figures with no motive to flatter a middling talent: Henriette Sontag's "German Paganini" at age seven and Franz Liszt's "future Paganini" at sixteen were both offered by performers operating at the top of their own fields, comparing Wilhelmj to the single figure Western classical music treats as the benchmark for violinistic virtuosity. That comparison, though, is also the honest limit of the claim. Paganini's reputation rested partly on radical technical innovation — bringing playing techniques into the mainstream repertoire that had barely existed before him — and nothing in Wilhelmj's own record suggests he matched that kind of technical invention; a later assessment more carefully calls him "the last great violinist in the German style," a description of superb, disciplined mastery within an established tradition rather than a claim to have expanded the tradition itself. His most durable contribution to musical history, ironically, was not virtuosic performance at all but an arrangement — "Air on the G String" — a work of transcription and adaptation rather than composition or radical technique. The honest account, then, credits him with extraordinary, critically validated playing and a lasting editorial contribution to the repertoire, while noting that the "next Paganini" framing was more a measure of the era's highest available praise than a claim that Wilhelmj matched Paganini's specific historical impact.
Legacy
Wilhelmj died January 22, 1908, in London, and was buried at the Nordfriedhof in Wiesbaden, near where his career had begun. His teaching at the Guildhall School shaped a cohort of London-trained violinists into the twentieth century, but it is his 1871 Bach transcription that carries his name into concert halls and recordings today, performed by violinists who may know nothing else about the man who once stood at Wagner's side at Bayreuth.
