Devilish Variations on Paganini's Caprice No 24
The Backstory

No royal bills to pay

When I began putting together my set of twenty-four caprices in Italy between 1802 and 1817, I was not trying to please a rich patron. Unlike composers who wrote to flatter a duke or a king, I built these pieces as studies to see just how far a solo violin could go. I worked on the collection in three separate batches of seven, five, and twelve pieces over those fifteen years. By the time I reached Caprice No 24 at the very end of the final group, I wanted a grand closing test that threw every trick I knew onto the page.

Working for the family

Right in the middle of those writing years, from 1805 to 1809, I lived in Lucca and worked at court for Felice Baciocchi and Napoleon's sister, Elisa Bonaparte. Serving as their court violinist and music director kept my days quite full, though I still found time to test out new ideas on the fingerboard. Even I cannot tell you the exact year I finished Caprice No 24 within that long stretch from 1802 to 1817, because the records do not pin it down. Creating a collection like that is a bit like building a house room by room whenever you happen to find a spare afternoon.

Giving away the playbook

People often noticed that I guarded the sheet music for my violin concertos like a jealous chef hiding a family recipe, so nobody else could steal my best stage tricks. With my Op. 1 caprices, however, I decided to be generous and let Giovanni Ricordi publish the whole set in Milan in 1820. Right at the top of the printed edition, I dedicated the collection broadly to the artists, which was really my way of daring my fellow musicians to try them. I handed them the exact notes I played, knowing full well that reading the ink and actually getting your fingers around it were two very different things.

Rumors from the cheap seats

Because I looked rather gaunt on stage and played things that seemed beyond normal human hands, people started whispering that I had sold my soul to the devil. That silly nineteenth-century rumor earned me the nickname The Devil's Violinist, though I can assure you that only endless hours of practice were involved. It is a funny thing how quickly people blame dark magic when they simply do not want to admit how much work goes into learning an instrument. Honestly, if I had made a bargain with the underworld, I would have asked for a much easier way to travel between concert halls.

A gift to myself

Many years after the first printing, between 1832 and 1840, I went back to my own personal copy of the score and wrote in specific names for each of the twenty-four pieces. When I got to Caprice No 24, I decided to dedicate that last one to myself, adding the dark little joke that I was regrettably buried. By then my health was giving me plenty of trouble, so a touch of gallows humor felt right at home on the page. After all, if you cannot leave a funny note for yourself in your own sheet music, where can you leave one?

Three trips to the same place

Some listeners assume my twenty-four caprices march neatly through every single major and minor key on the musical map, the way Bach or Chopin liked to organize their sets. In truth, I never bothered with that kind of strict geometry, and I simply repeated whichever keys suited the violin best. Caprice No 24 is actually one of three different pieces in the collection that I wrote in the key of A minor. I stayed in A minor through the theme and all eleven variations before finally letting the sun come out in A major for the continuous finale.

One violin, three jobs

Because the piece is written for a single unaccompanied violin, I had to make one small wooden box sound like a whole group of players. After the quick opening theme in 2/4 time marked Quasi presto, I used double and triple stops so the violinist is playing two or three notes at the exact same moment. In other variations I threw in broken octaves, parallel tenths, and rapid arpeggios that jump from the lowest string right up into the highest positions. Watching a player manage all of that alone is like watching someone juggle plates while simultaneously carrying on a polite conversation.

Never meant for the stage

Since I originally conceived the caprices as technical studies rather than public showpieces, I hardly ever played them in my own concerts. Because of that, nobody actually knows the exact date, city, or violinist for the first complete public concert premiere of Caprice No 24. Most violinists in 1820 took one look at the score and declared that no human being could ever pull it off in front of an audience. Later on, Ferdinand David brought out a major edited version of the set, helping a new generation of brave players figure out how to tackle it.

Helping out the neighbors

While violinists were still rubbing their sore fingers, piano composers like Franz Liszt and Robert Schumann fell in love with the collection and studied it closely. Robert Schumann even wrote a whole piano accompaniment to sit underneath my solo violin part, hoping to make the music easier for nineteenth-century ears to follow. Franz Liszt went a step further and turned my last caprice into a monstrously difficult piano piece of his own in his Grandes études de Paganini. It gave me a warm feeling to see pianists sweating over my tune just as much as the violinists were.

The tune that would not sit still

Over the decades, that restless little melody from Caprice No 24 became one of the most borrowed themes in the entire history of music. Johannes Brahms built a famous set of piano variations on it, and Sergei Rachmaninoff later wrapped a whole orchestra around it for his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini. Even in the twentieth century, composers like Witold Lutosławski and George Rochberg were still finding fresh ways to twist my notes into new shapes. I may have dedicated the piece to my own grave, but the tune itself clearly refused to lie down.