Caprice No. 24 in A minor is the final caprice of Niccolo Paganini’s 24 Caprices, and a famous work for solo violin. The caprice, in the key of A Minor, consists of a theme, 11 variations, and a finale. His 24 Caprices were probably composed between 1802 and 1817, while he was in the service of the Baciocchi court. Paganini was born in Italy in 1782 and started playing the mandolin when he was five years old, but by the time he was seven he had moved onto the violin. He was so good at playing the violin that he started performing solo for audiences when he was eleven! In fact he was so good at playing the violin that some people even thought he might be using dark magic to help him!
It is widely considered one of the most difficult pieces ever written for the solo violin. It requires many highly advanced techniques such as parallel octaves and rapid shifting covering many intervals, extremely fast scales and arpeggios including minor scales, left hand pizzicato, high positions, and quick string crossings. Additionally, there are many double stops, including thirds and tenths.
Violin recordings of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24 are legion. Heifetz probably did more to promote the work in the 20th century than anyone, starting with public performances in Russia at age nine, playing the Auer arrangement with piano accompaniment. His mastery was committed to disc in a seminal 78 rpm recording made in London in 1934 and subsequently captured on film in a later live performance.
The Caprice has provided unprecedented scope for multifarious composers and performers to exercise their compositional and transcriptional imaginations. The theme has proven to be popular among other composers; Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Lutosławski, and many more have written their own pieces based around it. Piano adaptations abound. They open a whole new universe of harmony, counterpoint and rhythmic embellishment of Paganini’s original theme and variations. In the process these keyboard creations have stretched the concept far beyond anything that Paganini could have imagined.
he TV show The South Bank Show used the theme song of Paganini’s Caprice No. 24. Andrew Lloyd Webber also used the theme in his 1977 album Variations, which was originally written for cello and a rock band.
