Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, op. 43

Rachmaninoff wrote the Rhapsody between 3 July and 18 August 1934 at Senar, the villa he had built above Lake Lucerne and named from the first syllables of Sergei, Natalia and their surname. Its subject is the twenty-fourth caprice for solo violin of Paganini, a theme already used by Liszt, Brahms and Ysaÿe before him and by Lutosławski, Blacher and others since. He first called the piece Variations on a Theme of Paganini. The Dies irae threads through the twenty-four variations; the eighteenth turns the theme upside down.