Benevento Walnut

“ Walnut Benevento ” ( Italian: Il noce di Benevento ) is a fantastic ballet by Salvatore Vigano to the music of Franz Süsmeier , which premiered at the La Scala Theater in Milan on April 25, 1812 .

The plot of the play is based on a folk legend about how witches arranged their coven around the walnut tree of the village of Benevento , which was considered a magic tree .

Created in the spirit of Gozzi’s dramatic tales, this ballet was a romantic piece, Stendhal called it “a feast of imagination” ^[1] .

Niccolo Paganini , who was present at one of the performances, was struck by the scene of the unbridled dancing of the sorceresses. Inspired, he wrote an essay that became one of the most famous in his work - Witches, a variation on the theme of the ballet Walnut Benevento for violin and orchestra (Variations on the Fourth String, op. 8).

Paganini first performed his work at a recital in La Scala on October 29, 1813 . The Milan correspondent of the Leipzig music newspaper reported on this event that the audience was deeply shocked: the variations on the fourth string amazed everyone so much that the musician repeated them at the urgent request of the public. Following this, Paganini gave eleven concerts in La Scala and in the theater “ ” for six weeks, and the variations called “Witches” were invariably particularly successful ^[2] .

In 1832, the composer Jean-Madeleine Schneichhoffer made a start from the Concert of the Witches performed by the author while creating the Sabbat, opening the second act of the ballet La Sylphide ^[3] .