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Paganini caprice 24
Video by
paganini
7 minutes, 25 seconds long
Published 6 January
Keywords: Jack Glatzer The 24th caprice is undoubtedly the most famous of all Paganini's caprices and this masterpiece has inspired composers for almost 200 years. To name only a few of those composers we could say Rachmaninoff and Liszt, Schumann and Brahms, Lutoslawski and Boris Blacher and George Rochberg and Andrew Lloyd Webber. It's even part of jazz culture and popular music, I heard it even on steel drums once in a magnificent performance in Trinidad, and I'm sure many people are familiar with the great Paganini theme and don't even know that it was written by Paganini. [Music] It's a triumphant theme filled with heroic rhythmic vitality and I think that it relates to the personality of Paganini who was heroic who did triumph over the alienation of his youth, over his dreadful illnesses over the fact that people were so miserable to him and tried to take advantage of him. What happens in the variations is we have a review of the entire book of caprices because this is the last caprice and it's as if he's looking back and saying 'This is what I have achieved.'. It's a new technique that was invented and discovered by Paganini and has never been surpassed. We have the flying staccato, we have undulating change of bow from one string to the other, we have macabre octaves, we have very rapid chromatics, then scales and thirds and then with the great stretch of tens and then the three string chords played almost viciously and then picking at the strings the left hand pizzicato, which resembled a guitar and amazed audiences in Europe. Then that serene tenth variation on the highest strings of the violin, so poignant, such a melancholy aria. And then the great finale, almost orchestral on three enforced strings with huge rocket-like passages from the lowest to the highest notes. But more important than all of this technical display, I think is the underlying character of this caprice. There's a restlessness and a melancholy which really connects us to the soul of the great Niccolo Paganini. [Music]
