Italian instrumental composer Giuseppe Tartini is best-known for his daringly original violin music "Devil's Trill Sonata." A famous violin virtuoso 50 years before Niccolo Paganini, he was also a chamber musician, teacher, inventor, and a writer.
He died in Padua on Feb 26, 1770. Unfortunately, most of his works are undated.
Tartini's Early Life
Giuseppe Tartini was born in Pirano on 8 April 1692. A leading exponent of violin technique, he founded a violin playing school and helped establish the modern style of violin bowing.
Tartini's parents wanted him to become a Franciscan priest. He studied law at the University of Padua. After his father's death, he married Elisabetta Premazone, a woman of lower social class. The powerful Cardinal Cornaro disapproved of the marriage and charged Tartini with abduction. Tartini fled prosecution to the convent of St. Francis in Assisi where he started playing the violin.
18th Century Italian Violin Virtuoso
Tartini was considered the greatest Italian violin virtuoso of the 18th-century some 50 years ahead of Paganini who was known to take his hat off at the mention of Tartini’s name. Another admirer of Tartini was Leopold Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's father, a famous violin teacher himself.
The Violinist and Inventor
After abandoning plans for a monastic career, Tartini studied composition and acoustics in Assisi, invented a new violin bow, and gave violin recitals. By 1714, he joined the orchestra at Ancona, and spent time in Venice and Padua where he settled as principal violinist at the basilica of San Antonio. Except for spending three years in Prague, he worked at the basilica until 1765.
The Violin Teacher
In 1728, he founded a school of violin playing in Padua and became known as ‘Master of Nations.’ He had celebrated violinist pupils, including Nardini and J.G. Graun. He discovered ‘resultant tones’ (sometimes referred to as 'Tartini tones') which he called terzo suono (third sound), though this was left for Helmholz to explain in later years.
The Composer
Tartini's has more than 400 compositions, including Violin concertos for strings, Violin sonatas of extreme technical difficulty like the most celebrated Devil’s Trill Sonata, thought to have been played in a dream by the Devil, chamber music (sinfonies and sonatas with single movement variations and violin solo), and sacred music.
Tartini's Books:
- Work on violin playing Traite des agreements de la musique published in 1771 but thought to have been written earlier
- Two treatises on the acoustical foundations of harmony, in which his discovery of the 'difference in tone phenomenon' (Tartini tone) is discussed.
Sources:
- Great composers by Golden Press Pty Ltd (1989)
- The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition, ed. by Stanley Sadie (2000)
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