24 Caprices

The 24 Caprices, as mentioned above, did not provoke any particular reaction in the European musical world when they were first published. At the moment, there are no known reviews in foreign press. It was only with Paganini's European tour from 1828 to 1834 that they came back into the limelight and attracted the attention of young musicians such as Schumann and Liszt. Through the enthusiastic reception and transcriptions of these composers, they ended up exerting more influence abroad than in Italy, offering stimuli and suggestions above all to pianists, before and even more than to violinists (also because on the violin it would have been very difficult to go further, or even simply emulate what Paganini had written). Schumann transcribed and adapted as many as twelve of them for the piano, in the two collections Op. 3 (1832) and Op. 10 (1833); not content with this, in his last days he also wanted to add a piano accompaniment to the violin original. Liszt also used five Paganini caprices for his Six Études d'exécution transcendante d'après Paganini. These piano etudes, published for the first time in 1838, were then revised by the author and reprinted in a second, drastically simplified version in 1851; the first edition was so difficult that only very few people were able to play it. Much more than the concertos for violin and orchestra - which are relatively traditional in terms of both formal arrangement and harmonic structure - it was the Caprices that received the greatest tribute from the Romantic musicians, who saw in them the sign and manifestation of a new and original will, of a force destined to upset the tranquil progress of musical things, wreaking havoc and introducing chaos into the order. In the Caprices the virtuoso and the composer go hand in hand from beginning to end; and in this inseparable unity of musical and instrumental suggestions they retain the deepest motivations for their lasting influence on the musical events of the nineteenth century.