Liszt assembled the first version of this set of six pieces in 1838 when he composed five works based on Paganini's 24 Caprices for solo violin, Op. 1. He added a sixth, the so-called Grand fantasia de bravura sur la clochette (1831-1832), after being inspired by Paganini's concert appearances in Paris in 1831. This piece was placed third in the collection and given the nickname "La Campanella." It is based on the last movement of Paganini's Op. 7 Violin Concerto, in B minor.

In 1851 Liszt reworked the six pieces and designated them the Grandes etudes de Paganini. Because of its popularity and grandstanding potential, it brought Liszt both fame and scorn. It was music like this that had damaged the reputation of Liszt as a composer, yet he never intended it to be anything more than light, entertaining music that would dazzle audiences owing to its great difficulty. Liszt dedicated this collection to the virtuoso pianist and composer, Clara Wieck Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann.

The first item, Preludio et Etude, features many scales, arpeggios, and tremolos to showcase the colors of the various performance techniques. For all its obvious virtuosic demands, the piece does have thematic charm. The next item, La Capriciosa, is based on Paganini's Caprice No. 17 and features all manner of pyrotechnics, including cadenza-like writing, with octave passages and scales in tenths played with hands crossed. The theme is a sort of nonchalant, simple one, delivered by jaunty chords, whose regular pauses are filled in with a healthy dose of acrobatics.

La Campanella (The Little Bell) is the third item here and probably the most popular of the six. In the 1838 version, it was written in A flat minor, but Liszt enharmonically respelled it to G sharp minor. Its busy theme, enmeshed in nearly continual filigree and devilish difficulties, has a charm in its fantasy-like atmosphere and bell-like sonorities. Liszt demands much subtlety in the dynamics to capture the delicacy and color of the source music. The fourth, in E major, is a study in arpeggios that also features many trills. Delicacy and nuance of dynamics, in fact, are also key elements in bringing this piece off effectively. The next, La Chasse (The Hunt), is based on Paganini's Caprice No. 9 and quite vividly paints the picture its title suggests, replete with horn calls and a sense of adventure in its joyful theme. The sixth, in A minor, features the famous melody found in the Caprice No. 24 that Rachmaninov used in his popular work for piano and orchestra, Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, and Brahms used in his Variations on a Theme of Paganini for piano. Here Liszt presents the theme, then offers some variations to display additional pianistic challenges. It must be said that his variations are not particularly distinctive, even as light music. Still, there is no short supply of color and Lisztian flair here.

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3.La Campanella II, in G#-

This 1851 edition of the Paganini Grand Etudes is a considerably simplified reworking of the 1838 - 1839 set entitled Études d'exécution transcendante d'après Paganini (Transcendental Studies After Paganini). The delightfully seductive minor-key tune theme of this third étude is a quote from Paganini's B minor Violin Concerto and was first treated to the variation method in the appreciably more difficult La Clochette Fantasy of 1831 - 1832.

The sound of the "small bell" of the title is introduced by bare octaves in the opening, followed by a long pause. Although this piece is a bravura work, the dynamic is kept at a delicate, colorful, and tastefully restrained piano until the sudden impressive coda. Likewise, the Allegretto tempo should be very flexible, the listener being teased with tinkling arpeggios before each re-entrance of the melody. The melody is first heard in the lower of the right hand lines, accompanied by the staccato bell sound on a high D sharp, with the hand having to skip intervals as wide as two octaves in a fairly quick motion. The left hand offers simple harp-like ascending arpeggios. The melody also contains vocal-like grace notes that add to its charm. The contrasting second subject follows in B major with swift turns, more wide interval skips, and the foreshadowing of more elaborate descending chromatic figures. There are some ear-tickling upper-register octaves exchanged between the left and right hands as the music turns toward the varied recapitulation of the first theme. This variation has the melody in the left hand with the right in a flashy display bouncing off three D sharps spread over two octaves. The melody soon returns to the right hand which switches to guitar-like sixteenth-note triplets. The line eventually climbs chromatically and is suddenly silenced in the highest register. Another pregnant long pause grips the listeners. The second subject returns, but with considerably more subdivisions of the rhythms and the use of chromatic figures. These turn into brilliant arcs, cascades, and eventually ascend with jet-like speed to usher in the theme. The first subject is now surrounded with trills and octave skips creating Impressionist patches of tone color. The secondary theme similarly receives its most spectacular treatment up to this point with a roaring crescendo of contrary-motion chromatic octaves that calls forth the final Animato coda. The music bursts forward, fortissimo, with an impassioned end-of-the-dance fanfare over an insistent bass figure and ever-widening crashes in both hands.

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5.Allegretto in E

Diabolism is a constant where artists assume the role of magician—certainly it was one of the animating elements of Romanticism, essayed in works such as Byron's "Manfred," Goethe's "Faust"—and more pointedly, meltingly, lyrically in Nikolaus Lenau's "Faust"—or Lewis' novel The Monk. It was, after all, Lenau's "Faust," rather than Goethe's, that prompted Liszt's Mephisto Waltzes. Meyerbeer's Robert le diable, with its chorus of dead nuns diabolically summoned, proved so popular that it revived the fortunes of the moribund Paris Opéra. Berlioz flirted with diabolism in the final "Black Sabbath" movement of his Symphonie fantastique. But Paganini was the musician in whom Byronism, personal magnetism, the illusion of magic, and the imputation of diabolical trafficking became incarnate. If Paganini's technical innovations are today the property of nearly all serious violinists, in the first third of the nineteenth century they loomed as superhuman. And of the many influences shaping the young Liszt's character and persona, the example of Paganini was catalytic. Amid a superabundant and chaotic compositional efflorescence, Liszt extended an already nonpareil technique into the realm of the fabulous—a realm only he and perhaps Adolf Henselt, Anton Rubinstein, or Charles-Valentin Alkan inhabited—by the invention of pianistic equivalents for Paganini's effects. The works composed before his Weimar period (1848-1958) are best grasped in the light of two of William Blake's "Proverbs of Hell": "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough" and "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom." The initial versions of the Transcendental and Paganini etudes—both 1838—proved so overloaded with technical difficulties that they must have taxed Liszt himself, while even today hardly any pianist attempts them. Much of their fulsomeness was enabled by the clarity and lightness of even the most powerful instruments of the 1830s and '40s, and was partially a prestidigital compensation for their weak sustaining power. Adapting Paganini's Caprice No. 9 for solo violin, Liszt imitates the sounds of flute and horn flushing game in La Chasse, the chase, shots fired, fluttering wings. Where the 1838 version is cumbersomely heavy, Liszt's 1851 revision—made at the beginning of his Weimar years when he began to put the works of his Wanderjahre in order—possesses a lightness and charm in which the pictorial elements transparently stand out. It is still a virtuoso piece, but in comparison one hears how the initial complications clotted the vignette with useless detail.

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