Princess Elisa Bonaparte’s waltz

This tune is the second part of one of Paganini’s numerous “Lucca” sonatas for violin and guitar, Sonata #6 in E of Set #6. The Paganini Catalog reference is M.S.13/6.

Paganini dedicated Set #6 to Princess Elisa Bonapart, one of Napoleon’s sisters, of the Court of Lucca where Paganini worked as a young musician; hence the name I’ve chosen for a tune that he called “Valz galante” - a fairly generic description.

The original was in Emajor/minor and 3/8 time, so I have transposed it down to Amajor/minor to make it accessible to more instruments, both in range and key, and rewritten it in 3/4 for ease of reading. I chose A rather than keys such as G or D in order to retain the open strings and open 5ths that Paganini evidently intended to be characteristic of this tune — see for example bar 4 of the A-part, bars 2 and 4 of the B-part, and the prevalence of the open E in the C-part (in the original it is a very obvious high B). Fiddlers who can manage higher position shifts will, I think, enjoy playing this tune a fifth higher in the original key of E.

Paganini in his many pieces for violin and guitar tended to use the higher register of the violin in the A and E strings, not very often going down to the D and G. I believe this was because he wanted a definite pitch separation between the two instruments, bearing in mind that the guitar part in these duets consists almost always of broken chords or arpeggios interspersed with scale runs and even an occasional short tune fragment. Nevertheless, these duets work nearly always work quite well for the solo violin.