Paganini: 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 ca