Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) was a German composer in Romanticism Ages. He composed for piano, symphony orchestra, chamber ensembles, and for voice and chorus. Piano pieces played an important part in his creative life. Meanwhile, Brahms was a virtuoso pianist, he premiered many of his own works.

Brahms produced nearly 100 piano pieces, in which variations played quite a key role. During the middle period of his creative life, Brahms’s works were mostly variations. This paper aims to explore Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op.35. The main theme of this work came from the Caprice No. 24 in A minor, one of Niccolò Paganini’s (1782-1840) 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, Op. 1. The work consists of two books. Each book opens with the theme, Paganini''s Caprice No. 24 in A minor, followed by fourteen variations.

This paper has three Chapters. Chapter 1 introduces Brahms’s life story and all kinds of his critical works. Chapter 2 then discuss the definition of variation, and also reviews Brahms’s Variations. Finally, chapter 3 analyses the two books of Brahms’s Variations on a Theme of Paganini, Op.35, and examines the interpretation and technique of the work.