in the kagayama interview Troy says that someone said that Paganini was thought as a ‘circus act’…I have read several biographies and never read that. Every single major musician and composer who saw Paganini playing was blown away. Louis Spohr didn’t like Paganini’s music, but he was a major composer himself and an exception. Schumann heard Paganini and loved Paganini’s music, as many other composers of the time did. Liszt heard Paganini and met him, and because of the experience he decided to become the best pianist in the world.
Paganini sometimes did funny stuff like imitating the sounds of animals. Paganini was a great showman, but I really doubt anyone thought it was a ‘circus act’. Even the most staunch haters, after hearing him, changed their tune. Some musicologists said he was a ‘charlatan’. Every major virtuosos of the time had to be a charlatan, i.e. create drama around their fgure. You could not be a virtuoso without a dose of ‘charlatanism’, but it doesn’t mean these people could not play their butt off 
When Paganini published his Caprices, no one believed it was possible to play them, until they saw the man himself playing them.
What’s more, an illustrious composer and historian of the time who saw Paganini, Fetis, wrote that not only the Caprices were absolutely insane and that one must examine the scores to understand that, but also that for Paganini the Caprices were MERE TRIFLES. They were nothing, Paganini played them like a joke. No one ever saw Paganini practice. In the UK, he had a secretary who spied on him from the keyhole to find out how Paganini practiced. He said he never saw or heard him practice, and he could not believe that someone like that could play like this in his concerts and not practice, AT ALL. He said that only once he saw Paganini in his room getting the violin out of the case to quickly check with the hands a sort of distance between the nut and the bridge, but he did not play it, and he just put the violin back in the case. After several week, the secretary was so frustrated that he just left.
So there’s some food for thought…