Around 1700, Northern Europe was flooded with Italian violin music and players due to cheaper printed music and economic collapse in Italy.
Compositional Technique
Tartini's Pastorale in A major uses the clever trick of tuning the bottom two strings of the violin up a tone to create a unique silvery resonance.
Composer Biography
Giuseppe Tartini, a pre-eminent virtuoso, was also passionately interested in astronomy, fencing, and acoustics, and annotated many of his manuscripts in a secret code.
Composer Biography
A crucial event for Tartini was meeting the virtuoso Francesco Maria Veracini, which led him to withdraw from public life for solitary practice to improve his technique.
Composition History
Tartini's most famous work, 'The Devil's Sonata', was suppressed during his lifetime, and the story behind its creation was only published posthumously.
Composer's Artistic Vision
For Tartini, programmatic elements and sources of inspiration were private matters, unlike the marketing strategies of composers like Vivaldi.
Critical Reception
The skeptical connoisseur Roger North criticized Italian virtuoso fiddlers, including Veracini, describing their music as 'insane' with 'snappes upon snaps like a dog in distraction'.
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