For Every Music Lover: A Series of Practical Essays on MusicMoore, Aubertine Woodward
History
For Every Music Lover: A Series of Practical Essays on Music
Moore, Aubertine Woodward
Music -- History and criticism
Refined taste and purity of tone, we are told, distinguished the playing
of Corelli, and to him are attributed the systematization of bowing and
the introduction of chord-playing. He heads the list of musicians who
protest against talking where there is music. On one occasion when his
patron was addressing some remarks to another person, he laid down his
violin, and on being asked the reason said "he feared the music was
disturbing the conversation." This did not prevent him from being held
in the highest esteem. After his death Cardinal Ottoboni had a costly
monument erected over his grave in the Pantheon, and for many years a
solemn service, consisting of selections from his works, was performed
there on the anniversary of his funeral.
It was during a period of retirement in the monastery of Assisi that
Giuseppi Tartini (1692-1770) resolved to quit the law course in the
University of Padua and seek a career with his violin. He became a great
master of this, a composer of works still regarded as classics, and a
scientific writer on musical physics. His letter to his pupil, Signora
Maddelena Lombardini, contains invaluable advice on violin practice and
study, especially on the use of the bow, and his treatise on the
acoustic phenomenon known as "the third sound," together with his work
on musical embellishments, may at any time be read with profit.
It was after hearing the eccentric violinist Veracini that His Satanic
Majesty appeared to Tartini in a dream and played for him a violin solo
surpassing in marvelous character anything that he had ever heard or
imagined. Trying to write it down in the morning he produced his famous
"Devil's Sonata," with its double shakes and sinister laugh, a favorite
of the violinist, but to the composer ever inferior to the music of his
dreams. It is rather curious that anything of a diabolic nature should
be associated with this man of amiable and gentle disposition, whose
care of his scholars, according to Dr. Burney, was constantly paternal.
Nardini, his favorite and most famous pupil, came from Leghorn to Padua
to attend him, with filial devotion, in his last illness.
The talents of Corelli and Tartini seem to have been combined in the
Piedmontese, Giovanni Battiste Viotti (1753-1824), a man of poetic,
philanthropic mind, whose sensitive, retiring disposition unfitted him
for public life. Wherever he appeared he outshone all other performers,
yet there was constantly something occurring to wound him. At the Court
of Versailles he left the platform in disgust because the noisy entrance
of a distinguished guest interrupted his concerto. In London, after his
means had been crippled by the French Revolution, he was accused of
political intrigue.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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