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Tartini therefore abandoned the rowdy muddles that
deafen the ears and bewilder the brain,
which, imported into Italy the Teutonic craze to ruin good
taste, to this very day enjoy, by
what blindness or fanaticism I know not, so much applause
in the Academies… 1.
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October 1994, I seem to be dreaming: I read these phrases written a year after Tartini’s
death 223 years ago and they appear to be so profoundly topical… The musical world of
today is convinced that it knows everything, or almost everything – at least the essentials –
about the musical culture of the 17th and 18th centuries and a great relapse is taking place:
here and there one finds a return to the performance of this music on modern instruments
according to nineteenth century interprative precepts, disdaining the painstaking labour of
research and experimentation undertaken with real instruments of the periods and based
on ‘certitudes’ (and insensibilities) that are, to say the least, questionable on an artistic
ans aesthetic level.
And yet enormous gaps, which are far from being filled in, continue to exist. GiuseppeTartini,
his history, his music, the man and the cult surrounding him constitute one of these
gaps. Indeed, very few have an even superficial knowledge of the man whom Charles de
Brosses (the President of the Parliament of Burgundy, while travelling in Italy) had already in
August 1739 qualified as ‘le premier violon d’Italie’, the composer of more than 130 violin
concertos, about 200 sonates for violin solo and numerous other works, most of which
remain unpublished to the present day. Many are still ignorant of the enormous extent of
Tartini’s influence wherever the violin was played: for over forty years students came from
all over Italy, from France, Holland, Germany, Sweden, Bohemia…and even from the island
of Java to study in his school in Padua. From the four corners of the globe princes sent their
court virtuosi to perfect their techniques under the guidance of the Istrian violinist who had
already been remarked upon in Prague in 1723-26 (furing the celebrations on the occasion
of the coronation of Charles VI as king of Bohemia), and had established contact with the
composers Fux and Caldara.
Leopold Mozart was undoubtedly extremely envious of the didactic supremacy Tartini enjoyed
on the German-Bohemian scene. There can be no other explanation for the fact that he
copied entire paragraphs from the manuscripts in Tartini’s school and then published them
in his own ‘Violinschule’ without even mentioning their true author…Thus the 20th century
would come to know the editions meticulously printed by Leopold, but was for a long time
ignorant of the Paduan manuscripts, simple lecture notes dictated by a Master whom his
contemporaries qualified as ‘Il Maestro delle Nazione”.
On travelling to Pirano d’Istria, where Tartini was born in 1692, one finds a magnificent
little country town perched across the ridge of a peninsula overlooking the sea. This remote
corner of the Venetian Republic remained indelibly engraved in the composer’s memory
(‘Listen to the sea…’, ‘The wave that murmurs from shore to shore …’, ‘Friend, fate leads
me into port…’ are some of the verses illustrating the movements of his sonates) which,
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throughout his life, was inspired by the sea and by the music of its people: the songs of
the Venetian gondoliers and the folk melodies of the east play an important part in Tartini’s
musical world.
Tartini’s imagination had a particular bent in the representation of the variety of the ‘affetti’
(state of the emotions); the special ‘voice’ of the Tartinian touch derived from a totally
interior attitude that conferred on the act of writing an unprecedented fantastic quality.
Tartini exploited certain imaginative features drawn from his frequent readings of the poetry
of Petrach, Ariosto, Tasso and Metastasio. Devices, isolated words, fragments of phrases
and scraps of verse taken from the works of these poets are scattered throughout his
autograph manuscripts. Usually placed as headings, they are sometimes found between
the staves.
This is a cryptography that speaks volumes on the domination of the passions exercised by
Tartini in his solitary Paduan auto-analytic discipline: no longer the Devil of the famous ‘Trillo’
(pray, let us not speak of it for a while!), but Clorinda, the shepherds, Alcina, the nymphs,
Argante and Tirsi and Clori. A reincarnated world. The refracted echoes of the operatic
theatre, as befitted the Maestro de’ Concerti of the Venerated Basilica of St. Anthony in
Padua, are reviewed and filtered through an inner solipsistic conceit.
At times the thematic melodies are conceived and written by following exactly the metric
scansions of the poetic versification; the brilliant individuality of the Tartinian themes is
an intellectual outcome of a pronounced inner fire: the finality of his union with poetry is
much more evocative than what Tartini himself had attempted to make one believe with his
disconcerting account of the dream of the Devil of Assisi…
It is necessary to be hot-blooded to love and to play this music, but even this is not enough
if it is not united with a knowledge of the poetics of the ‘Bello naturale’ (naturally beautiful)
of which Tartini was a fervent adept. The fundamental postulate of this aesthetic attitude is
the recognition of the natural elements of the Beautiful in the most elementary instrument
at man’s disposal: his voice. For Tartini, therefore, it is the task of every good composer to
imitate in each one of his works the taste, the feeling, the inner vibrations of the voice, to
understand and to render its suggestive qualities. Tartini’s precepts, ‘to play well one must
be able to sing well’(quoted by Bartolomeo Campagnoli in his treatise on the violin that
appeared in 1791, the year of the death of the young Mozart), thus proves to be the ultimate
stage in Italian musical thought whose roots are founded in the baroque aesthetic of G. B.
Doni, the first expounder to compare the sound of the violin to that of the human voice2.
In Tartini, the last but one of the great Italians of the Golden Age (the last was to be the
gentle and melancholy Boccherini), melody, extremely simple and perfectly intelligible in its
charge of abstract sentimentality, was to receive the last impulses of the sophisticated violin
tradition in Italy thanks to the use of ornaments used not as embellishments, but rather as
functional ‘affective’ elements distilled from jealously guarded inner myths. It is interiorized,
private music written at a period characterized by profound changes in taste and avoided
taking refuge in settings for several parts in order to emphasize the purity of the melody
instead:
‘There are those who accuse him of excessive parsimony in the accompaniments, and, to
be sure, if in this particular respect one compares his compositions to those of others, the
difference is all the more obvious; but this defect rapidly disappears as soon as one stops
for a moment to reflect that the Tartinian style, with its extremely delicately tinted colours,
would lose all of its gracefulness if one were to add too great a number, or too densely
charged chords to it, as if a painter were to overlay the neat charm of Albani’s little putti with
Giulio’s bold strokes, or if the open-hearted distinctness of Tasso’s Aminta had to express
itself in the emphatic and powerful style of Alessandro guidi or Frugoni…’3.
At a period when pure and simple melody was regarded as a symbol of inventive genius and
freedom, in contrast to harmony, which was that of tradition and the monarchy, Tartini won the
esteem of D’Alembert and of Rousseau, an esteem he neither solicited not sought, seeing
that Tartini’s writings issued from a Neoplatonic substructure that revived and deepened the
speculations on the relationships that united music and the scientific disciplines, in contrast
to the brazen pragmatism of the Metastasian opera composers, and, on the other hand,
by no means irreconcilable with the theories of Rameau, who was harshly criticised by the
Encyclopédistes.
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It is difficult today to listen to the music of the ‘Master of Nations’. It is difficult not only
because no one – or virtually no one – plays it in public concerts, but also because nowadays
musical performance is linked mainly to the compact disc and video recordings, to solitary
and aseptic enjoyment. But the music of Tartini is a mediumistic creation to restitute it
in a living and palpable manner among people, as in the Basilica of the Santo when he
played his concertos himself – a ceremony within a ceremony, a special event charged
with spirituality – and captivated everyone present by his sweet but powerful tone, and his
prodigious virtuosity. Where have these collective ecstasies gone, where is that religious
sentiment that permeated the composition and the execution of music? What has happened
to those encounters in the ‘Academies’ that inspired so much music?
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‘Our Antonio played the violin, taught him by Giuseppe Priuli, called Romanino, and practised
in the Academies of Music, daily playing many hours on his own, and very often together
with his inseparable friends, Count Niccola Mussati, an excellent performer on the viloncello,
and the celebrated Abbé Vincenzo Rota who, in the year 1764, to please our Sberti, made
thirty-six concertos by Tartini into Sonatas of three or of four obbligato parts, which he
called ‘most faithful Metamorphoses’, to most excellent effect and the satisfaction of Tartini
himself, who, in the very same year, was pleased to send the sketches to Sir Richard Winne
in England, the which sketches were completed in the year 1766 by the aforementioned
Abbé Rota’4.
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‘I have received the score from Sig. Tartini and (would he believe it?), during the long silent
hours, for my relief, have not only rewritten, but also entirely recopied this Metamorphosis
and revised and patched together all the others, in such a manner that this Twelfth will have
achieved its exact corrected form, and I will not touch it again. I shall later, at my leisure,
glance at the others and if it seems necessary, modify them, which will also be a diversion
to me. At present I comfort myself and am pleased beyond measure that my example has
moved others to render the works of Tartini playable and popular. May my valiant Giulietto
[Giulio Meneghini, Tartini’s favourite pupil and successor] indefatigably continue the task
indertaken and complete it, so that he will have treated at least twelve concerti grossi. In
addition to the advantages, he will earn the approbation of the whole philharmonic world…
I have finished working for our Academy and shall never again, as long as I live, become
entangled in such a thicket of junipers. I have paved the way for others, now it is for them
to rack their brains’5.
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So it was that the excellent Giulio Meneghini transcribed the first six sonatas of Tartini’s
Opus I in concerto grosso form for the use of Abbé Rota’s ‘Accademia degli Imperterriti’
(Academy of the Imperturbables), and in these compositions Tartini’s first manner is brought
back to life, a manner which is connected with the classical style of Corelli. During the
1740s, however, our composer changed his style in quest of a musical idiom that was not
‘arabesque and merely artful’, but ‘sentimental’ and limpid, closely following the nature of
human song. In the last part of his life he wrote numerous sonatas for violin solo whitout
continuo; in reality in these compositions the violin often makes use of bichords, producing
that third sound discovered by Tartini himself and, united with the two principal sounds,
ideally forms a complete chord symbolizing the Divine Trinity.
In my opinion it is not easy to revive this music today, since it demands the greatest attention
and sensitivity from musicologists, researchers, performers and from everyone who wishes
to know and to listen to music; none of the ‘baroque’ and ‘late baroque’ stereotypes that fill
our ears apply to Tartini. In 1770 Charles Burney wrote that his merits as a composer and
a virtuoso were too generally acclaimed for him to praise them [in his book]. He adds that
he would limit himself to remarking that he was one of the few composers of the century
endowed with genius and originality and that he drew his inspiration from within himself. His
melody was full of fire and fantasy and his harmony, learned as he was, remained simple
and pure 6.
The naturalism of Rousseau and Rameau tended in Tartini towards the adoption of an
emotional temper shared with Veracini. It happens that these two Italians were the precursors
of an epoch that was to bear the seeds of a new sensibilility far beyond the borders of the
peninsula.
Enrico Gatti
Translated by Derek Yeld
1. ‘Saggio sopra la scienza armonica del defunto Sig. Tartini’ by Abbé Anton Bonaventura Sberti, in ‘L’Europa latteraria’,
November 1771.
2. G. B. Doni, ‘Annotazioni sopra il compendio de’ Generi e de’ Moda della Musica’, 1640.
3. Esteban de Arteaga, ‘Le rivoluzioni del teatro musicale italiano dalla sua origina fino al presente’, 1783-85.
4. ‘Memorie intorno l’Abate Antonio Bonaventura Sberti Padovano, Scritta da lui medesimo, in novembre 1814’ (Mss.
Padua, Biblioteca del Museo Civico).
5. Francesco Fanzago, ‘Memorie intorno alla vita e agli ameni studi dell’Abate Vincenzo Rota Padovano’, 1798.
6. Charles Burney, ‘The Present State of Music in France and Italy…’ Ch. XII, 1771.
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