Giuseppe Tartini
Encyclopedia
Baroque music
Baroque music describes a style of Western Classical music approximately extending from 1600 to 1760. This era follows the Renaissance and was followed in turn by the Classical era...
composer
Composer
A composer is a person who creates music, either by musical notation or oral tradition, for interpretation and performance, or through direct manipulation of sonic material through electronic media...
and violin
Violin
The violin is a string instrument, usually with four strings tuned in perfect fifths. It is the smallest, highest-pitched member of the violin family of string instruments, which includes the viola and cello....
ist.
Biography
Tartini was born in PiranPiran
Piran is a city and municipality in southwestern Slovenia on the Gulf of Piran on the Adriatic Sea. It is one of the three major towns of Slovenian Istria. The city resembles a large open-air museum, with medieval architecture and a rich cultural heritage. Narrow streets and compact houses give...
, a town on the peninsula of Istria
Istria
Istria , formerly Histria , is the largest peninsula in the Adriatic Sea. The peninsula is located at the head of the Adriatic between the Gulf of Trieste and the Bay of Kvarner...
, in the Republic of Venice
Republic of Venice
The Republic of Venice or Venetian Republic was a state originating from the city of Venice in Northeastern Italy. It existed for over a millennium, from the late 7th century until 1797. It was formally known as the Most Serene Republic of Venice and is often referred to as La Serenissima, in...
(now in Slovenia
Slovenia
Slovenia , officially the Republic of Slovenia , is a country in Central and Southeastern Europe touching the Alps and bordering the Mediterranean. Slovenia borders Italy to the west, Croatia to the south and east, Hungary to the northeast, and Austria to the north, and also has a small portion of...
) to Gianantonio – native of Florence
Florence
Florence is the capital city of the Italian region of Tuscany and of the province of Florence. It is the most populous city in Tuscany, with approximately 370,000 inhabitants, expanding to over 1.5 million in the metropolitan area....
– and Caterina Zangrando, a descendant of one of the oldest aristocratic Piranian families.
It appears Tartini's parents intended him to become a Franciscan
Franciscan
Most Franciscans are members of Roman Catholic religious orders founded by Saint Francis of Assisi. Besides Roman Catholic communities, there are also Old Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, ecumenical and Non-denominational Franciscan communities....
friar and in this way he received a basic musical training. He studied law at the University of Padua
University of Padua
The University of Padua is a premier Italian university located in the city of Padua, Italy. The University of Padua was founded in 1222 as a school of law and was one of the most prominent universities in early modern Europe. It is among the earliest universities of the world and the second...
, where he became skilled at fencing. After his father's death in 1710, he married Elisabetta Premazone, a woman his father would have disapproved of because of her lower social class and age difference. Unfortunately, Elisabetta was a favorite of the powerful Cardinal Giorgio Cornaro
Giorgio Cornaro
Nobil Huomo Giorgio Cornaro, called "Padre della Patria" , Cavaliere del Sacro Romano Impero, Patrizio Veneto, Podesta of Brescia in 1496, Procurator of San Marco....
, who promptly charged Tartini with abduction. Tartini fled Padua to go to the monastery of St. Francis in Assisi
Assisi
- Churches :* The Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi is a World Heritage Site. The Franciscan monastery, il Sacro Convento, and the lower and upper church of St Francis were begun immediately after his canonization in 1228, and completed in 1253...
, where he could escape prosecution. While there he took up playing the violin.
Legend says when Giuseppe Tartini heard Francesco Maria Veracini
Francesco Maria Veracini
thumb|150px|Francesco Maria Veracini.Francesco Maria Veracini was an Italian composer and violinist, perhaps best known for his sets of violin sonatas.-Life:Francesco Maria Veracini led a turbulent life...
's playing in 1716, he was impressed by it and dissatisfied with his own skill. He fled to Ancona
Ancona
Ancona is a city and a seaport in the Marche region, in central Italy, with a population of 101,909 . Ancona is the capital of the province of Ancona and of the region....
and locked himself away in a room to practice, according to Charles Burney
Charles Burney
Charles Burney FRS was an English music historian and father of authors Frances Burney and Sarah Burney.-Life and career:...
, "in order to study the use of the bow in more tranquility, and with more convenience than at Venice
Venice
Venice is a city in northern Italy which is renowned for the beauty of its setting, its architecture and its artworks. It is the capital of the Veneto region...
, as he had a place assigned him in the opera orchestra of that city".
Tartini's skill improved tremendously and in 1721 he was appointed Maestro di Cappella
Kapellmeister
Kapellmeister is a German word designating a person in charge of music-making. The word is a compound, consisting of the roots Kapelle and Meister . The words Kapelle and Meister derive from the Latin: capella and magister...
at the Basilica di Sant'Antonio in Padua
Padua
Padua is a city and comune in the Veneto, northern Italy. It is the capital of the province of Padua and the economic and communications hub of the area. Padua's population is 212,500 . The city is sometimes included, with Venice and Treviso, in the Padua-Treviso-Venice Metropolitan Area, having...
, with a contract that allowed him to play for other institutions if he wanted to. In Padua he met and befriended fellow composer and theorist Francesco Antonio Vallotti
Francesco Antonio Vallotti
Francesco Antonio Vallotti was an Italian composer, music theorist, and organist.- Life :He was born in Vercelli. He studied with G. A. Bissone at the church of St. Eusebius, and joined the Franciscan order in 1716. He was ordained as a priest in 1720. In 1722 he became an organist at St...
.
Tartini was the first known owner of a violin made by Antonio Stradivari
Antonio Stradivari
Antonio Stradivari was an Italian luthier and a crafter of string instruments such as violins, cellos, guitars, violas, and harps. Stradivari is generally considered the most significant artisan in this field. The Latinized form of his surname, Stradivarius, as well as the colloquial, "Strad", is...
in 1715, which Tartini bestowed upon his student Signor Salvini, who in turn bestowed it to Karol Lipiński
Karol Lipinski
Karol Józef Lipiński was a Polish virtuoso violinist and composer.-Life:Lipiński was born in Radzyń Podlaski. In 1810 he became the first violin and two years later the conductor of the opera orchestra at Lwów . In 1817 he went to Italy in the hope of hearing Niccolò Paganini...
upon hearing him perform, from which it derives its moniker, the Lipinski Stradivarius
Lipinski Stradivarius
The Lipinski Stradivarius is an antique violin constructed in 1715 by the Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari of Cremona, during Stradivari's "golden period" between 1700 and 1720...
.
In 1726 Tartini started a violin school which attracted students from all over Europe. Gradually Tartini became more interested in the theory of harmony
Harmony
In music, harmony is the use of simultaneous pitches , or chords. The study of harmony involves chords and their construction and chord progressions and the principles of connection that govern them. Harmony is often said to refer to the "vertical" aspect of music, as distinguished from melodic...
and acoustics
Acoustics
Acoustics is the interdisciplinary science that deals with the study of all mechanical waves in gases, liquids, and solids including vibration, sound, ultrasound and infrasound. A scientist who works in the field of acoustics is an acoustician while someone working in the field of acoustics...
, and from 1750 to the end of his life he published various treatises.
Works
Devil's Trill Sonata
The Violin Sonata in G minor, more famously known as the Devil's Trill Sonata is a famous work for solo violin by Giuseppe Tartini , famous for being extremely technically demanding, even today....
", a solo violin sonata that requires a number of technically demanding double stop
Double stop
A double stop, in music terminology, is the act of playing two notes simultaneously on a melodic percussion instrument or stringed instrument...
trill
Trill (music)
The trill is a musical ornament consisting of a rapid alternation between two adjacent notes, usually a semitone or tone apart, which can be identified with the context of the trill....
s and is difficult even by modern standards. (One 19th-century myth had it that Tartini had six digits
Polydactyly
Polydactyly or polydactylism , also known as hyperdactyly, is a congenital physical anomaly in humans, dogs, and cats having supernumerary fingers or toes....
on his left hand, making these trills easier for him to play.) According to a legend embroidered upon by Madame Blavatsky
Madame Blavatsky
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , was a theosophist, writer and traveler. Between 1848 and 1875 Blavatsky had gone around the world three times. In 1875, Blavatsky together with Colonel H. S. Olcott established the Theosophical Society...
, Tartini was inspired to write the sonata by a dream in which the Devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
appeared at the foot of his bed playing the violin.
Almost all of Tartini's works are violin concerti
Violin concerto
A violin concerto is a concerto for solo violin and instrumental ensemble, customarily orchestra. Such works have been written since the Baroque period, when the solo concerto form was first developed, up through the present day...
(at least 135) and violin sonata
Violin sonata
A violin sonata is a musical composition for violin, which is nearly always accompanied by a piano or other keyboard instrument, or by figured bass in the Baroque period.-A:*Ella Adayevskaya**Sonata Greca for Violin or Clarinet and Piano...
s. Tartini's compositions include some sacred works such as a Miserere
Miserere
Miserere may refer to:* Psalm 51, and its musical settings:** Miserere ** Miserere ** Miserere * Miserere by Zucchero* Plaza Miserere, a plaza in Buenos Aires...
, composed between 1739 and 1741 at the request of Pope Clement XII
Pope Clement XII
Pope Clement XII , born Lorenzo Corsini, was Pope from 12 July 1730 to 6 February 1740.Born in Florence, the son of Bartolomeo Corsini, Marquis of Casigliano and his wife Isabella Strozzi, sister of the Duke of Bagnuolo, Corsini had been an aristocratic lawyer and financial manager under preceding...
, and a Stabat Mater
Stabat Mater
Stabat Mater is a 13th-century Roman Catholic hymn to Mary. It has been variously attributed to the Franciscan Jacopone da Todi and to Innocent III...
, composed in 1769. He also composed trio sonatas and a sinfonia in A. Tartini's music is problematic to scholars and editors because Tartini never dated his manuscripts, and he also revised works that had been published or even finished years before, making it difficult to determine when a work was written, when it was revised and what the extent of those revisions were. The scholars Minos Dounias and Paul Brainard have attempted to divide Tartini's works into periods based entirely on the stylistic characteristics of the music.
In addition to his work as a composer, Tartini was a music theorist, of a very practical bent. He is credited with the discovery of sum and difference tones
Combination tone
A combination tone, also called a sum tone or a difference tone , can be any of at least three similar psychoacoustic phenomena. When two tones are played simultaneously, a listener can sometimes perceive an additional tone whose frequency is a sum or difference of the two frequencies...
, an acoustical phenomenon of particular utility on string instruments (intonation of double-stops can be judged by careful listening to the difference tone, the "terzo suono"). He published his discoveries in a treatise Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell'armonia (Padua, 1754). His treatise on ornamentation was eventually translated into French— though when its influence was rapidly waning, in 1771— by a certain "P. Denis", whose introduction called it "unique"; indeed, it was the first published text devoted entirely to ornament
Ornament (music)
In music, ornaments or embellishments are musical flourishes that are not necessary to carry the overall line of the melody , but serve instead to decorate or "ornament" that line. Many ornaments are performed as "fast notes" around a central note...
and, though it was all but forgotten, as only the printed edition survived, has provided first-hand information on violin technique for modern historically informed performance
Historically informed performance
Historically informed performance is an approach in the performance of music and theater. Within this approach, the performance adheres to state-of-the-art knowledge of the aesthetic criteria of the period in which the music or theatre work was conceived...
s, once it was published in English translation by Sol Babitz in 1956. Of greater assistance to such performance was Erwin Jacobi's published edition. In 1961, Jacobi published a tri-lingual edition consisting of the French (basis of the following two), English (translation by Cuthbert Girdlestone
Cuthbert Girdlestone
Cuthbert Morton Girdlestone was a British musicologist and literary scholar. He was educated at Cambridge and the Sorbonne, and thereafter took up the chair in French in Armstrong College, later to be King's College in Newcastle in 1926, a position he held until 1960...
), plus Jacobi's own translation into German (Giuseppe Tartini. "Traite des Agrement de la musique," trans. and ed. Erwin Jacobi. Celle: Hermann Moeck Verlag, 1961). Of significant import, Jacobi's edition also includes a facsimile of the original Italian found in Venice in 1957, copied in the hand of Giovanni Nicolai (one of Tartini's best known students) and including an opening section on bowing and a closing section on how to compose cadenzas not previously known. Another copy (though less complete) of the Italian original was found among manuscripts purchased by the University of Califormia, Berkeley in 1958, a collection that also included numerous ornamented versions of slow movements of concertos and sonatas, written in Tartini's hand. Minnie Elmer analyzed these ornamented versions in her master's thesis at UC, Berkeley in 1959 (Minnie Elmer. "The Improvised Ornamentation of Giuseppe Tartini." Unpublished M.A. thesis. Berkeley, 1959).
Luigi Dallapiccola
Luigi Dallapiccola
Luigi Dallapiccola was an Italian composer known for his lyrical twelve-tone compositions.-Biography:Dallapiccola was born at Pisino d'Istria , to Italian parents....
wrote a piece called Tartiniana based on various themes by Tartini.
His home town, Piran, now has a statue of Tartini in the square, which was the old harbour, originally Roman, named the Tartini Square
Tartini Square
The Tartini Square is the largest and main square in the town of Piran, Slovenia. It was named after a famous violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini, of whom a mounument was made in 1896.-History:...
. Silted up and obsolete, the port was cleared of debris, filled, and redeveloped. One of the old stone warehouses is now the Hotel Giuseppe Tartini. His birthday is celebrated by a concert in the main town cathedral.
62 manuscripts with compositions of Tartini are housed at the Biblioteca comunale Luciano Benincasa
Biblioteca comunale Luciano Benincasa
The Biblioteca comunale Luciano Benincasa is located in Ancona, Italy, in the Palazzo Mengoni-Ferretti, at the central Piazza del Plebiscito .- History :...
.
Fictional portrayal
Tartini is mentioned in Madame BlavatskyMadame Blavatsky
Helena Petrovna Blavatsky , was a theosophist, writer and traveler. Between 1848 and 1875 Blavatsky had gone around the world three times. In 1875, Blavatsky together with Colonel H. S. Olcott established the Theosophical Society...
's The Ensouled Violin, a short story included in the collection Nightmare Tales.
Tartini, the great composer and violinist of the XVIIIth century, was denounced as one who got his best inspirations from the Evil One, with whom he was, it was said, in regular league. This accusation was, of course, due to the almost magical impression he produced upon his audiences. His inspired performance on the violin secured for him in his native country the title of “Master of Nations.” The Sonate du Diable, also called “Tartini’s Dream”—as every one who has heard it will be ready to testify—is the most weird melody ever heard or invented: hence, the marvellous composition has become the source of endless legends. Nor were they entirely baseless, since it was he, himself; who was shown to have originated them. Tartini confessed to having written it on awakening from a dream, in which he had heard his sonata performed by Satan, for his benefit, and in consequence of a bargain made with his infernal majesty.
The folklore of the "Devil's violin", classically exemplified by a similar story told of Niccolò Paganini
Niccolò Paganini
Niccolò Paganini was an Italian violinist, violist, guitarist, and composer. He was one of the most celebrated violin virtuosi of his time, and left his mark as one of the pillars of modern violin technique...
, is widespread; it is a subset of the "Deal with the Devil
Deal with the Devil
Deal With The Devil is the fifth studio album by the American heavy metal band Lizzy Borden released in 2000 .A return to form, featuring a cover by Todd McFarlane.2 covers were recorded...
". Modern variants are Roland Bowman's "The Devil's Violin"], the country song "The Devil went down to Georgia"; the PBS segment on violin in its series "Art" was titled "Art of violin: the devil's instrument".
Tartini's The Devil's Trill is the signature work of a central character in Daniel Silva's The English Assassin. Anna Rolfe, the daughter of a Swiss banker, is a famous violinist and the sonata features prominently in the novel. The story of Tartini's inspirational dream is told.
Tartini's "The Devil's Trill" is also featured in the Japanese Anime Descendants of Darkness
Descendants of Darkness
is a fantasy manga series created by Yoko Matsushita. The story revolves around shinigami. These Guardians of Death work for Enma Daiō, the king of the dead, sorting out the expected and unexpected arrivals to the Underworld...
(Yami no Matsuei). The three part story arc is also named after the song. In the episode, a young Japanese high school student has the ability to play the difficult piece after he becomes possessed by the devil after receiving a cornea transplant
Cornea transplant
Corneal transplantation, also known as corneal grafting, is a surgical procedure where a damaged or diseased cornea is replaced by donated corneal tissue in its entirety or in part...
from the organ donor who was also possessed, himself.
External links
- Giuseppe Tartini Prominent Istrians at istrianet.org
- [ Allmusic Biography]
- NNDB entry and biography
- A Tartini Page with Partial Discography
- Tartini, a computer program that uses combination tones for pitch recognition.
- L'Arte dell'Arco
- Giuseppe Tartini Statue – Microsoft Photosynth