WHERE’S GIUSEPPE
2. TRIESTE Two Of Three
Giuseppe Tartini remains a pale presence in Trieste, although they did name the local music conservatory after him. That and no more.
Finding Tartini is far more difficult than driving a mere half hour south from Trieste. That’s all it takes to reach the small fishing port of Piran along the Slovenian coast. To where he was born and grew up.
Instead I found him in Venice 20 years ago, in the dreary and tiny museum shop of the Academia, Venice’s great art museum. Two undisturbed CDs of his sonatas were there in a shoe box filled otherwise with Vivaldi releases. They who were contemporaries and rivals—“That red priest,” sniffed Tartini.
I’d never heard of Tartini, me who prided myself on knowing music, who had studied violin as a boy. I bought them on a whim, brought them here to France. Listened, and in five minutes I was a goner. Now I’ve got 40 CDs of his music.
The Italian composer Giuseppe Tartini, 1692 – 1770, wrote more than 400 works—how many remains uncertain, concertos, sonatas, trios, symphonies (sinfonia) plus many short works too. He wrote mainly for violin and cello, but also for flute, trumpet, oboe and orchestra. Only a few have been recorded and currently available on cd or vinyl. A great many of his works haven’t even been printed and remain as handwritten scores, shelved away in the stately cobwebs of libraries in Padua, Vienna, Paris and Berkeley, California.
Even the various snatches of his bio on the net are mostly bunk. The contributors ape one another lifting half true and untrue details like chunks until he becomes myth. Or worse, some histories have him foremost as a teacher and period virtuoso, not a brilliant composer of seminal compositions.
If a no-nonsense sketch of his life is wanted read the current Wikipedia article on him. I rate it as severely to the point.
Nevertheless Tartini is still around, somewhat. Despite almost never being performed, admittedly he’s damn difficult to play, nearly impossible to play well. Even sheet music of his works are sometimes inaccessible. He’s not heard on classical music stations. On line the number of downloads of his lesser known works is pathetic.
Much of the mischief comes from the hoary hands of music historians. They seem to be intent on keeping him arcane. That’s a sure injustice.
Go to the recordings to get hold of him. Listening to Tartini I hear first and foremost his thousand melodies. With this I am always struck by the dissonance, the discord with which he embellishes his pieces. These tones are his punctuation and signature. They are also incredibly contemporary.
He’s remarkably expressive, atmospheric, bipolar.
One could declare that he began as a Baroque composer then evolved into a post impressionist. To me he’s a Toulouse Lautrec.
I’m sensitive to this because I live where the painter Count Toulouse- Lautrec lived, quite near Toulouse and 10 miles from the village of Lautrec. I suggest the experiment of listening to Tartini while viewing the paintings of Toulouse-Lautrec especially those of dancers or again of solitary drinkers contemplative as a party roars on about them.
To help those interested in finding Tartini I give here a very brief guide to some performances that for various reasons are important to me. All are on YouTube.
I don’t necessarily offer these as the best, most brilliant of his works or of their performances. His is a very wide array of sounds and tempos hard to qualify. But I think the recordings are all good in the pursuit of him. And all are very good indeed.
FIRE AND TEARS
CONCERTOS. Over his composing life half a century Tartini wrote more than 135 concertos mostly for violin.
One of my favorites is found on YouTube as “Giuseppe Tartini: Violin Concerto in D Minor, D44, Oliver Colbentson (violin).”
Colbentson is but one of the many virtuoso violinist performing Tartini. His is a masterful and rare interpretation in controlled brilliance. He stands out too in this recording for staying on top of Tartini’s music line, often fast and furious, something with which even the most famous violinists sometimes have difficulty. Also he plays the slow movement without affectation.
All the Tartini traits are on show in this composition. I find it astounding: fiery show off violin playing of melody after melody, Tartini has the violin floating poetry to us from its sound board, sung to us on its bow. He’s singing poems to us. Then comes a magisterial movement, an introversion, an inward landscape, Tartini has us off into another world. This ends with a jig movement, his preferred dance, that makes the toes tap unless they’re dead.
In particular this playing gives clear utterance to the strident sometimes dissonant sound that Tartini ‘found,’ wrote about, incorporated in all his music. He called it the Third Sound.
It is made by playing two pure tones so closely together that an acoustical illusion forms of yet another (a third) tone.
In musical theory this is named the “Tartini Tone.”
To me it is also heard often in folk fiddle music.
Another work that deserves to be known is his Violin Concerto D. 22, Concerto Bucolico for violin, strings & b.c. by L’Arte dell’Arco:
I admit preferring Tartini ‘romanticized’ which this is not, to say rendered on contemporary instruments tuned to our ears. He’s heard so very rarely that any distraction from the corpus of his genius is for me lamentable. However this is a great and wondrous presentation.
Trumpet Concerto, D Major, performed by the Hungarian virtuoso Gabor Tarkovi. This rollicking piece was obviously known to Eric Satie.
Cello Concerto in D Major, played by David Amadio. His is a live performance, a brilliant one. A young cellist playing a forever young composer. He saws out the fire and tears of Tartini.
Before leaving his concertos there is Salvatore Accordo, Tartini Violin Concerto in La maggiore, D69: 4thmovement. Largo andante. Simply put one of the most haunting of compositions.
SONATAS
He composed 180 of these. My own favorite a work that leaves me weak is Sonata No 7 in A minor,. It’s played in full and to perfection by Giovanni Guglielmi on the Rivo Alto label. Tartini: Violin Sonata No. 7 in A Minor, B.a1: I. Adagio – II. Allegro – III. Allegro assai. Its like so much of his work, both boisterous and ethereal.
Also listen to Tartini Violin Sonata in D Major, played by Laura Marzadori. It’s first up on the newest album dedicated to him. Keeps up a playful line of melodies that does Tartini justice. To me it lacks a bit of Tartini’s Slavic seasoning.
As well the promo gives that this is a never before recorded performance of the piece. Not true, I have it on an earlier CD. But otherwise it’s fine.
This album is something of a collector’s item as the producer plopped an image on the cover not of of our Italian but of a French composer Cassnea de Mondonville. The mistake was difficult to make. Several portraits of Tartini exist plus four or five busts and statues, even his death mask can be seen on display in Piran. Its got Tartini aficianados snickering into their ruffled cuffs.
Along with the accompanied sonatas, cello and keyboard, he also composed his famous 30 ‘Piccolo Sonatas” or little sonatas for solo violin. This monumental exploration of sound he wrote toward the end of his life, they alone amount to 6 hours of listening and are among the most revered of all violin solo works. In fact they are hailed as the most important after Bach’s and before Brahms’.
I’ll include a musician writing about Tartini: ‘To play Tartini sonatas it is to rip through an obstacle course of trills and finger stretches at lightning speed. He has the performer sawing away with such vigor that occasionally the violin runs actually sound more like a burning bluegrass fiddle or a Hendrix guitar riff than a Baroque sonata, only to drop back into controlled quietude once again. The textures and mood changes that can be pulled out of Tartini’s work are phenomenal for such short pieces (an entire stomata is usually only 18 minutes or less). It’s hair-raising, thrilling stuff . .’
CATCH HIM IF YOU CAN
“Where’s Giuseppe?” Good question because only a generation or so ago he was on the verge of slipping into final obscurity. The modest revival of his work is due to their releases on CDs starting in the 1970s, partly due to a renaissance in Italy of its regional cultures meaning for him that of the Veneto.
Strange for him to be so lost. He was once so well known.
SLAVS AT THE DOOR
And then there is his folk sound. The zest and sadness in Tartini have folk music roots inspired by Venetian gondolier songs, Slovenian and Czech peasant dances.
Tartini was born to an upper class family in the small town of Piran, in 1692. Then known by its Italian name ‘Pirano.’ Along with the entire Dalmatian coast the town had been for centuries a part of the Venetian Republic.
But Piran is now Slovenian and is increasingly Slavic as the Italian-lineage population has diminished. In the back country from Piran the Slavic culture, including music, holds sway.
Music in Tartini’s childhood would have been both Italian ‘academic’ and from the Slavic common people, both Croatian and Slovenian. The Adriatic is a clear water running through Tartini, in Piran it lapped literally at the steps of the Palazzo where he was raised. He would have grown up with the Slavic fisherman songs in his ears just outside his bedroom.
Outside of Italy and Slovenia Tartini is best known in Russia. Russia early on adopted him as a great Slavic composer. The only book on Tartini is a translation from Russian. Under Stalin the regime gave him its imprimatur not just in nationalistic cause but also for his use of folk music in some works, a blend that for them oriented his compositions toward the People.
Slavic influence abounds. His violin teachers were Czech. As a man he lived, played and composed for three years in Prague.
Once in Prague I was dining with acquaintances at a restaurant for locals in an obscure quarter. A gypsy violinist entertained moving from table to table. He was quite accomplished. Coming to our table I asked if he could play Tartini. He looked pleased. “No I can not play the master but I am honored that you ask, thank you.”
PRAY TO SAINT ANTHONY
Anthony is the saint of lost things, so apropos to Tartini. His ghost resides in the crazy eccentric hulk of the Basilica of Saint Anthony in Padua. Tartini was employed there for 50 years as concert master.
Tartini went to Padua from Piran as a boy of 18 to study law at its great university. Padua, where he surely studied in it’s renowned school of fencing. There he fell in teen love with a woman of lower class and older than he who was also very likely the mistress of the local prelate, a Cardinal no less. A power figure so infuriated by this cheeky youth that he chased him out of town and into hiding for three years.
Young Tartini fled to the refuge of a monastery in Assisi either to evade prison or death. These were years when Tartini first devoted himself to a serious study of the violin. When discovered—the story goes — he was performing incognito at a concert and a gust of wind parted a curtain he’d hidden behind revealing him to the audience. He was brought back to Padua not to prison but to the Basilica of Saint Anthony.
From then on Tartini composed to be freshly heard, works performed by him and his friends for the people of Padua. He played them free of charge on a Sunday evening, in the magnificent setting of the Basilica. And the people most assuredly did come to listen.
From the heart Tartini was a Christian Humanist, at heart a gentleman of the folk, peasants and fishermen, conflicting personas that fused in his music.
TO PLAY WELL ONE MUST SING WELL
This is the most famous of Tartini’s sayings coming down to us. Tartini in fact wrote the movements of his sonatas and concertos like operatic arias. Not for voice instead as songs to be sung on various instruments. It’s telling that he played for a while with the Ancona opera.
Alone among great composers he accompanied his compositions with poetry, used like librettos. These poems were written between the lines actually onto the score page itself. Tartini hid them from view in a secret code, a cipher he himself had created for the purpose. This poetry was by famous Italian poets of the day. The assumption is that Tartini hid his poetic inspirations, because they were controversial. There was need to escape criticism by the Church, his employer.
The secret code could not be broken until the 1920s. These coded quotations unfortunately have lent even more mystery and eccentricity to Tartini’s oeuvre.
THAT DAMN TRILL
Every violin virtuoso needs to record The Devil’s Trill, Tartini’s sonata in G minor. It’s Tartini’s most widely (only) known work (sadly).
OK, The Devil’s Trill is a masterpiece, a cult composition. But also a curse on Tartini. Yes it is among the most demanding of all violin compositions however many of his compositions are equal in complexity so bragging rights need not apply. The baggage the Trill carries however, of the occult, spiritualism, has served to overshadow Tartini and his cache of other brilliant compositions.
Madame Blavatsky, theosophist and medium, a pop idol briefly in late Victorian London, wrought some, or most, of the damage. In the 1890s she penned a short story elaborating Tartini and the story of the sonata coming to him in a dream where the devil played it. The account went viral.
The story I believe must be apocryphal, like all myths made up from rumors and conjecture stretched to fit what people wish to believe. Unlike his contemporaries Tartini wrote very few religious pieces, they are almost scandalously sparse in his canon, to be counted on one’s fingers.
That he felt the need for code to mask the poetry he used to interpret his compositions means Tartini would hardly have risked dreaming up a story of the devil coming to give him this sonata. As concertmaster at Saint Antoine it would have been utterly inappropriate. His position was especially delicate.
Music historians now seem to be discrediting the story behind ‘The Devil’s Trill’ yet like most popular stories it lingers on.
THIS AND THAT
–Two violins were owned by Tartini. One was a prized ‘Amati’ bequeathed at his death to one of his nephews. It remained safely in Piran through three centuries. In 1940 to safe guard it from the German invasion this violin was hidden under the stairs of the town hall which were then bricked up.
The other personal violin Tartini commissioned to Stradivarius, made in Cremona in 1717.
–This ‘Strad’ owned for a lifetime by Tartini and on which he wrought his greatest music, came after his death to the Count Lipinski in Breslau. Hence its name, ‘The Lipinski.’ It was valued at five million dollars in 2012. Its worth is more now.
Notoriety increases any old violin’s value. Notoriety came to Tartini’s violin in 2014 when the concert master of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra on walking away from a concert with the violin in hand was tazed. The robber, a local baker, made off with the Strad. The uproar was too much for the baker and the Tartini-Lipinski violin was surrendered a few days later.
–Making his composing even more unusual in addition to the secret-coded poems imbedded in the scores, Tartini who was also passionate for mathematics, proposed Pythagorean models to go with them. This was a basis for his own theory of harmony (published in 1754, 190 pages, still in print).’
–Then there was fencing. Throughout his life fencing kept him on and off in trouble occasioning sometimes lengthy (and swift) departures from Padua. Dueling and its dangers dogged him from his youth into middle age. I’ve read he was considered one of the greatest fencer of his time in Italy. Once he was seriously wounded in his right hand and during a long convalescence he wrote a treatise on left hand bowing.
When a Tartini piece plays I can hear thrust and parry, lunge and retreat, feint and riposte. Passions in all. The emotions that Tartini explored.
Facts do not masterpieces create. To find Tartini one must ‘blow the curtain away’ from his hiding place. YouTube.G.Tartini, Sinfonía Pastoral en Re mayor. Performed perfectly by Cologne’s Collegium Aureum.