Grandes Études de Paganini

One of the most influential figures behind the development of the high-romantic piano style was Niccolò Paganini, violinist and guitarist but by    no means a pianist. In comparison with some of his greatest admirers - like Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt - he was not much of a composer either. He was, on the other hand, a uniquely extraordinary musician, a virtuoso who transformed the technique of violin playing and whose enlargement of the instrument’s powers of expression was a revelation to the whole musical world, not only to the violinists in it. Of his pianist followers, only Liszt deliberately set out to do the same transcendental thing for the piano, but to all of them he was an inspiration.

Liszt first heard Paganini play at the Paris Opéra in April 1832, in a benefit concert for the victims of a cholera epidemic, and was thrilled by the experience. “What a man, what a violin, what an artist!” he wrote, “Heavens! What sufferings, what misery, what tortures in those four strings.” His immediate reaction was to torture himself at the piano - “I practise four to five hours of exercises (thirds, sixth, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas etc)” - in an effort to expand his already highly developed technique so that it would match Paganini’s not only in extent but also in content and in effect.

His first work conceived under the Paganini influence, La Clochette, was written in the same year. A bravura fantasy on the old Italian tune “La Campanella” used by Paganini in the last movement of his Second Violin Concerto, it bristles with virtuoso violin effects translated into piano terms and is so difficult that it is rarely (if ever) performed today. Liszt himself retreated from its excesses when, six years later, he shortened it and modified it as La Campanella, the third of his six Études d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini. Another thirteen years later he modified it again in the Grandes études de Paganini, a generally simplified and clarified revision of the Études d’exécution transcendante of 1838. It is in the more mature and more focused 1851 version that, as on this occasion, the six Paganini studies are now usually performed.

With the one exception of La Campanella, Liszt’s studies are based on Paganini’s 24 Caprices for solo violin. He was aware of course that Schumann, who had been bewitched by Paganini in Frankfurt in 1830, had already done something similar in his Paganini Studies Op3 and Op10. In fact, Liszt was so confident of the superiority of his own Paganini Studies - which he dedicated to Clara Schumann, by the way - that he had Schumann’s transcription of the Caprice No.6 printed alongside his version of the same piece. While Schumann’s treatment is more faithful to the original, Liszt’s is much the more sensational. In Caprice No.6 Paganini sets the violinist the problem of sustaining a melodic line above or below an unceasing tremolando accompaniment - which for a pianist with two hands is no problem at all. Liszt’s version, presented as the first of the six Studies (between introductory and closing flourishes derived from Caprice No.5) makes up for that by confining the first third of it almost exclusively to the left hand. The right hand then joins the left in an impassioned development of Paganini’s material, though not without contradicting its partner by falling a quarter of a beat behind from time to time.

In the main sections of Paganini’s Caprice No17 the violinist has to cope first with fitting rapid legato scales between the phrases of a theme harmonised in double stops and then with an extended episode of octaves. Liszt translates the first difficulty into keyboard terms by gradually elaborating the scalic element and the second by setting the octaves against counterpoints or by doubling them. La Campanella is a brilliant study in bell-like sonorities inspired by Paganini’s use of harmonics in the Rondo of his Violin Concerto in B minor and, by way of the most nimble of airborne acrobatics, creating a new sound for the piano. In the fourth Study Liszt takes the staccato arpeggios crossing the strings in Paganini’s Caprice No.1 and, except where he introduces a counterpoint, divides each phrase between the two hands (in this edition preserving the look if not the sound of a violin piece by setting it out on just one stave). The fifth Study, sometimes known as “La Chasse,” is scarcely less faithful to Caprice No.9 than Schumann’s version and, indeed, preserves Paganini’s colour requirements by instructing the pianist to imitate flutes and horns in the opening passage in simple outdoor harmonies.

The last of the Studies is based on the theme that has launched a thousand variations, notably by Brahms and Rachmaninov but by many others too. Liszt, however, presents no variation of his own until near the end, after his more or less straight transcriptions of the first ten of the eleven variations offered by Paganini himself in Caprice No.24. This does not preclude such resourceful ideas as counterpointing the triplet arpeggios of the first variation with the theme in its original shape or offsetting the lyrical line of the tenth with a prolonged, ecstatic trill. Liszt’s powerfully dramatic and eleventh variation, which has little in common with Paganini’s and has nothing to do with the violin, leads into a characteristically thunderous coda.