At the end of the seventeenth century one of Italy’s greatest exports was the virtuoso violinist. Italy was the cradle of many of the advances in the instrument’s construction and also in its playing techniques. A succession of makers in the Cremona region, notably the Stradivari dynasty, were responsible for bringing the instrument to an unparalleled expressive ability; while techniques of violin playing were brought to new heights by the school of violinists around Arcangelo Corelli. Many Italian string players, in fact, would have launched their careers by advertising themselves as pupils of Corelli.
There was ample employment in Italy for violinists at princely courts, at the basilicas that maintained orchestras, and in the opera houses of the cities. But countless players sought fame and fortune north of the Alps. The many small but ambitious courts of Germany and central Europe attracted numerous violinists: as early as the 1620s there were Italian musicians working at the Dresden court. The Dutch Republic was another magnet, partly because of its reputation in music publishing: many an Italian violinist, Corelli and Vivaldi included, made their name through editions issued by Estienne Roger in Amsterdam. Above all, the Italians were drawn to London, whose commercial prosperity and freedom from military strife gave it one of the richest musical cultures of all Europe. For musicians, according to Luigi Mancini, London was ‘the terrestrial paradise’; or, as the German writer Johann Mattheson observed: ‘In these times, whoever wishes to be eminent in music goes to England.’ From the 1690s, therefore, a steady stream of Italian violinists crossed the English Channel to seek their fortune in London, including Francesco Geminiani and Francesco Maria Veracini.
The life of the travelling virtuoso could be hazardous. Journeys by land might be interrupted by highwaymen and carriage accidents; travellers by sea might find themselves shipwrecked or becalmed. And although some journeys might be organised by patrons, there was nothing approaching today’s infrastructure for arranging concert tours. Many musicians must have had to travel in the hope that they would be able to win a livelihood in their foreign destinations. Given the risks and excitements of a travelling virtuoso’s life, it is not surprising that their biographies are filled with colourful incidents. Some violinists engaged in contests of virtuosity; Giuseppe Tartini was an expert fencer; Veracini jumped from a third-floor window in a fit of madness. Above all, though, the colour of their lives stemmed from their quasi-magical power to entrance an audience with their playing.
One of the most travelled virtuosos of the age was Francesco Geminiani (1687–1762). Like many violinists he trained in Corelli’s circle in Rome, and then in 1714 came to London. It was an opportune moment to visit, for Corelli’s music was immensely popular in England at the time. Not only could Geminiani bask in the reflected glory of his teacher, he also made arrangements of Corelli’s solo violin sonatas op.5 for orchestra. Such reworkings were not always well received: Veracini accused Geminiani of ‘reheating’ his master’s music, offering the same ‘eternal stew’ rather than cooking something afresh. Yet these arrangements filled a strongly felt need in England. Corelli’s Op.5 solos were too hard for many players, but his op.6 concerti grossi did not pose such technical challenges and were keenly played by music clubs and amateur orchestras. What better, then, than to orchestrate the op.5 pieces as concerti grossi? Tonight we hear the climax of the set, the variations on La Follia. The piece is based on a catchy harmonic formula that may have been associated with a Portuguese dance of noisy excess and cross-dressing. Certainly Corelli-and Geminiani in turn-caught some of this spirit in the excited, even riotous violin variations that follow. In making this arrangement, Geminiani may have had particular insights into the original: he claimed he had discussed the solo version with Corelli, ‘and heard him acknowledge the Satisfaction he took in composing it, and the Value he set upon it’.
Geminiani’s great rival in London was Francesco Maria Veracini (1690–1728). Even by the standards of his contemporaries, Veracini was exceptionally well-travelled: besides working in London, he had also played in Bologna, Florence, Venice, Düsseldorf, Dresden and Prague. He was notorious for his eccentric and wilful character, as seen in his outbursts against Geminiani; indeed, the extreme mobility seen in his career may have reflected an inability to hold down a steady job. Yet he was also renowned for his violin technique, so much so that he often provoked envy among lesser musicians. According to an eye-witness account by Charles Burney, ‘the peculiarities of his performance were his bow-hand, his shake, his learned arpeggios, and a tone so loud and clear that it could be distinctly heard through the most numerous band of a church or theatre’. Veracini’s compositions also show a confident and independent musical voice. Because he had travelled so widely, he was familiar with Italian, German and French styles; and his compositions combine a cosmopolitan air with an engaging originality in their themes.
A somewhat less turbulent career was pursued by Pietro Locatelli (1695–1764). To be sure, he spent much of his twenties and early thirties travelling, with visits to many German courts including Berlin, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main, Kassel and Munich. But by 1729 he had settled in Amsterdam, which would be his home for the remaining thirty-five years of his life. Here he adopted a more relaxed lifestyle, collaborating with the publishing house of Estienne Roger to issue numerous collections of his own music. He also held concerts every Wednesday at his house, but preserved a social exclusiveness and mystique by playing only before gentlemen.
Locatelli’s op.3 Capriccios, though published in Amsterdam in 1733, were probably written during his travels in the 1720s and first performed during a visit to Venice. In these pieces he offered a unique variant upon the violin concerto as popularised by Antonio Vivaldi. Both the opening movement and the finale start like a conventional solo concerto, with a regular alternation between the orchestral ritornello and the episodes for the soloist. But near the end of both movements, the soloist has an immense cadenza, written out by Locatelli, full of triple stopping and other technical challenges. Only after several minutes of such solo pyrotechnics is the movement eventually closed by an orchestral ritornello. Tonight’s piece bears the title Harmonic labyrinth, with a subtitle indicating that it is easy to enter but hard to exit. Other composers gave such a name to maze-like, convoluted displays of chromatic harmonies, but Locatelli was probably alluding to the awesome challenges of the cadenza (or capriccio). Truly this is a movement that is easy to begin, but much harder to end successfully.
The least known composer in tonight’s programme is Giacomo Facco (1676–1753). Although he too was Italian, he began his career in the south of the Italian peninsula, serving the Spanish nobility who governed Naples. Later he moved to Madrid to act as music-master to the infants Luis, Carlos and Ferdinando; he here wrote many operas and serenatas, often with Spanish words. Few of his instrumental works survive, apart from a collection of concertos, Pensieri adriarmonici, published in Amsterdam in 1720–1. Tonight’s concert includes a rare opportunity to hear the E flat major concerto from this publication.
Despite their frequent journeys, the virtuoso violinists of the early eighteenth century often found that their paths crossed; then, as now, the music business could be a small world. Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770), for instance, was reportedly spurred on in his violin studies by an encounter with Veracini in 1716. He was so impressed with Veracini’s bowing technique that he spent the next two years intensively practising his own. Later, his technical prowess was acknowledged in his reputation as a teacher; he created a ‘School of the Nations’ at Padua, where violinists from across Europe came to study with him. Yet in much of Tartini’s music, the technical feats are secondary to a pervasive lyricism; the goal of the soloist’s dexterity is to beguile the audience with melodious or sometimes overtly emotional passages. The Concerto in D minor ‘Ombra diletta’ D44 opens with a simple triadic theme, far from the virtuoso figuration of Locatelli or Vivaldi; while the finale has delicate slurred motifs, echoed between the instruments. Tartini’s autograph manuscript for this piece includes algebraic calculations based on the number of bars of the finale; slightly less cryptic is the piece’s subtitle, with its reference to a beloved shadow, perhaps hinting at a source of poetic inspiration.
Our concert ends with pieces by undoubtedly the most famous of the Italian virtuoso violinists, Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741). Yet despite his fame he was relatively little travelled. He spent almost all his career in Venice, either working in its opera-houses or as music-master in the orphanage of the Pietà; he also had a sojourn in Mantua, and made brief forays to Vienna, Prague and some courts in Bohemia. Two factors, though, allowed him to win wide renown without further travel. Firstly, he published books of his concertos through the Amsterdam firm of Roger, and many of these became international bestsellers among musicians. Secondly, because Venice was such a tourist attraction for wealthy north Europeans, he found that foreign patrons often visited him and bought copies of his music as a souvenir. Through such connections he also gained many commissions from north of the Alps, writing music for venues as diverse as the Schouwberg theatre in Amsterdam, the Dresden court of the Elector of Saxony, and the Bohemian court of Count Wenzel von Morzin; there is little evidence, though, that he visited all these places.
Of the music by Vivaldi in tonight’s concert, the Concerto in G minor for strings RV156 exemplifies the compact form that he favoured when not writing for a solo instrument. The outer movements have Vivaldi’s customary passion and dash, with the added spice of a chromatic bass against syncopated upper parts at the start. The middle movement is more like a trio sonata, albeit with the addition of a viola part. Far more expansive is the Concerto in D major for violin RV210, where the presence of the soloist allows for long virtuoso episodes. Here both outer movements start as if fugues, with each string section entering in turn with the theme; but solo virtuosity soon takes over, interrupted by occasional chromatic detours. The slow movement is a classic Vivaldian combination of a lyrical solo line with a pulsing accompaniment for upper strings only. This concerto was published in Amsterdam in 1725 as part of Vivaldi’s Op.8 collection, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione; through the circulation of copies via the music-trade, Vivaldi achieved a presence at the courts of Europe far more pervasive than had he visited them in person.
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