CAPRICCIO

(Italian: caprice), lively, loosely-structured musical composition often incorporating a well-known or popular tune. As early as the 16th century the term was occasionally applied to such seemingly eccentric novelties as canzonas, fantasias, and ricercari (often modelled on vocal imitative polyphony). Baroque composers from Frescobaldi to J.S. Bach wrote keyboard capriccios displaying strictly fugal as well as whimsical characteristics. Bach's earliest dated keyboard work is his Capriccio on the Departure of His Beloved Brother, which cites among other musical references a coachman's horn calls. Pietro Locatelli's 24 violin capriccios served as models for those of Niccol Paganini in the 19th century, when the genre enjoyed a certain vogue. Weber, Mendelssohn, and Brahms so entitled a number of pieces for piano, whereas Beethoven limited himself to the occasional addition of the adjective capriccioso to such standard tempo modifiers as andante and allegro. Later in the century Tchaikovsky wrote his Capriccio italien for orchestra and Rimsky-Korsakov his Capriccio espagnol. More recently, Igor Stravinsky conceived his Piano Concerto (1929) as a capriccio. Capriccio is also the title of Richard Strauss's last opera (1942).