In Search of Perfect Harmony: Tartini’s Music and Music Theory in Local and European Contexts
Summary
as an exceptional music theorist. Especially after he began to devote himself to
speculative reflections of music, Tartini seems to have been searching for harmony
between music theory (which he studied in depth, even reaching back to ancient
concepts of music) and musical practice (his daily routine as composer and violinist
at St Anthony’s Basilica in Padua and as violin teacher). The present 2nd volume of the
series focuses on both Tartini’s musical language and his theoretical deliberations.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
- Cover
- Title
- Copyright
- About the editor
- About the book
- This eBook can be cited
- Table of Contents
- List of Authors
- Preface
- Introduction: The Tartini Moment (Sergio Durante)
- In Search of Perfect Harmony in Music: Tartini’s Musical Language
- Violin Sonatas by Giuseppe Tartini from the Perspective of Musical-Rhetorical Figures (Baiba Jaunslaviete)
- The Orchestral Accompaniments of Giuseppe Tartini’s Concertos for Violin and Orchestra and the Third-Tone Theory: Hypotheses for an Analysis (Margherita Canale Degrassi)
- Tartini’s Concertos Op. 1 and 2 against the Backdrop of the Venetian Concerto Tradition (Piotr Wilk)
- A Contribution to the Devotional Music of the Eighteenth Century: Giuseppe Tartini’s Spiritual laude (Chiara Casarin)
- “A great commotion of spirit”: Tartini’s “Ancona experience” and the Power of Affective Performance (Alan Maddox)
- In Search of Perfect Harmony in Musical Thought: Tartini’s Theory and Beyond
- Tartini and the Ancients: Traces of Ancient Music Theory in the Tartini–Martini Correspondence (Nejc Sukljan)
- Giuseppe Tartini, the philosophia naturae and the natura-ars Dichotomy: In Defence of natura as the Key to His Traité des agréments de la musique (Walter Kurt Kreyszig)
- “No Other Art than the Imitation of Nature”: Tartini, Algarotti, and the Hermeneutics of Modal Dualism (Bella Brover Lubovsky)
- Tartini’s “Musical Inference” between Epistemology and History of Harmony (Roberta Vidic)
- Understanding Tartini and His Thought: Overcoming Translation Difficulties in the Correspondence between Tartini and Martini (Jerneja Umer Kljun)
- Maestro delle Nazioni: Tartini’s Influence and Reception and Dispersion of His Work (Lucija Konfic)
- Giuseppe Michele Stratico’s Theoretical Thinking: Transgressing the Boundaries of Tartini’s School
- The Reception of Tartini’s Violin Sonatas in Madrid (ca. 1750–ca. 1800)1 (Ana Lombardía)
- The Stylistic Legacy of Giuseppe Tartini’s Violin Concertos as Revealed in the Violin Concertos of Josef Mysliveček and Wolfgang Mozart (Daniel E. Freeman)
- Index
List of Authors
Bella Brover Lubovsky
Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance
bella.brover@jamd.ac.il
Margherita Canale Degrassi
Conservatory of Music “Giuseppe Tartini”, Trieste, Italy
margherita.canale@tiscali.it
Chiara Casarin
University of Padua
chiara.casarin.1991@gmail.com
Sergio Durante
University of Padua
sergio.durante@unipd.it
Daniel E. Freeman
University of Minnesota
freem593@umn.edu
Baiba Jaunslaviete
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music
baiba.jaunslaviete@jvlma.lv
Lucija Konfic
Department for History of Croatian Music of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts
lucijam@hazu.hr
Walter Kurt Kreyszig
University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada
Conservatory of Music Niccolò Paganini, Genoa, Italy
walter.kreyszig@usask.ca
Ana Lombardía
Universidad de Salamanca, Spain
ana.lombardia@usal.es
Alan Maddox
University of Sydney
alan.maddox@sydney.edu.au
Nejc Sukljan
University of Ljubljana
nejc.sukljan@ff.uni-lj.si
University of Ljubljana
jerneja.umerkljun@ff.uni-lj.si
Roberta Vidic
University of Music and Theater Hamburg (HfMT)
roberta.vidic@hfmt-hamburg.de
Piotr Wilk
Jagiellonian University in Kraków
piotr.wilk@uj.edu.pl
Preface
The last few years have seen important occasions to revisit the life and work of the famous violinist, composer, music teacher and music theorist Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770): 2020 was the 250th anniversary of his death and 2022 was the 330th anniversary of his birth. To mark the occasion, the Department of Linguistic and Literary Studies of the University of Padua, the Department of Musicology of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana and the “Giuseppe Tartini” Conservatory in Trieste joined forces and organized three international musicological conferences between 2019 and 2020, exploring topics related to Tartini’s life, work and legacy. The present three-volume series, Giuseppe Tartini and the Musical Culture of the Enlightenment, edited by Margherita Canale Degrassi, Paolo Da Col, Nejc Sukljan, and Gabriele Taschetti, presents a thematically organized selection of the expanded and revised conference papers.
When in 1896 Tartini’s monument was erected in Piran, one of the commemorative records named him as “an artist and scientist of European reputation without an equal” (Amico, 2 August, 1896). Indeed, not many musicians made history both as an outstanding composer (the renowned mathematician, physicist and Tartini’s contemporary Leonhard Euler even called him the greatest composer of the time) and as an exceptional music theorist (beginning from traditional musical-theoretical ideas, Tartini laid the foundation for many later music-acoustical considerations). Especially after he began to devote himself to speculative reflections on music, Tartini seems to have been searching for harmony between music theory (which he studied in depth, even reaching back to ancient concepts of music) and musical practice (his daily routine as composer and violinist at St Anthony’s Basilica in Padua and as violin teacher). The 2nd volume of the series In Search of Perfect Harmony: Tartini’s Music and Music Theory in Local and European Contexts focuses on both Tartini’s musical language and his theoretical deliberations.
After the introductory essay by Sergio Durante, the volume is divided into three parts. The first part, In Search of Perfect Harmony in Music, brings chapters dedicated to Tartini’s musical language. In the first chapter, Baiba Jaunslaviete discusses the use of rhetorical figures in Tartini’s violin sonatas and attempts to determine their influence on his musical style. In the second chapter, Margherita Canale Degrassi looks at possible links between Tartini’s theoretical concepts and compositional practice, in particular the relationship between the third tone and orchestral accompaniment in violin concertos. In the next chapter, Piotr Wilk attempts to position Tartini’s concertos within the tradition of the Venetian concerto of the first half of the eighteenth century by examining and comparing various compositional aspects, while Chiara Casarin’s essay provides a detailed overview of Giuseppe Tartini’s laude. The first part then concludes with Alan Maddox’s discussion of Tartini’s conception of musical effect, based on the famous account of ←9 | 10→the event in the opera house of Ancona where Tartini heard a recitative that profoundly influenced him.
The second part, In Search of Perfect Harmony in Musical Thought, includes four chapters dealing with various aspects of Tartini’s theory. Nejc Sukljan’s discussion of Tartini’s knowledge and use of ancient theorems in his correspondence with Giovanni Battista Martini is followed by three chapters dealing with possible connections between Tartini’s theoretical thought and practical music: Walter Kurt Kreyszig looks for connections between Tartini’s preoccupation with philosophia naturae and musical practice in Traité des agréments; Bella Brover Lubovsky discusses the use of the parallel minor key in the context of Tartini’s correspondence with Francesco Algarotti; and Roberta Vidic discusses the principles of harmony in the context of Tartini’s correspondence with Francesco Antonio Calegari. The final chapter of this part by Jerneja Umer Kljun highlights another interesting approach to Tartini’s theory, namely the translation difficulties in the theoretical letters to Martini.
The third part, Maestro delle Nazioni, concludes the volume with three chapters on Tartini’s influence and the reception and dissemination of his work. Lucija Konfic writes about the theories of Michele Stratico, one of Tartini’s many students; Ana Lombardía sheds light on the hitherto little-known reception of Tartini’s music in Spain; and Daniel E. Freeman clearly shows how important and influential Tartini’s legacy was for subsequent generations of composers, namely Josef Mysliveček and even Wolfgang Mozart.
We hope that this volume will be of interest and use to all who are drawn in one way or another to Tartini’s fascinating personality and diverse musical legacy, whether scholars, performers or simply interested readers.
Nejc Sukljan,
editor
Baiba Jaunslaviete
Jāzeps Vītols Latvian Academy of Music
Violin Sonatas by Giuseppe Tartini from the Perspective of Musical-Rhetorical Figures
Abstract: During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, concepts of musical-rhetorical figures were intensively developed, for the most part, by German theorists. However, in this time period, we can find similar musical formulas also in the works created by composers from other European regions, among them, Tartini. Many scholars have already noted his innovative approach to the expressive possibilities of the violin, bringing it close to human speech or singing. This feature suggested the aim of this chapter – to find out how rhetorical figures used in Tartini’s violin sonatas reflect his musical style.
The theory of musical-rhetorical figures has never been developed to a homogeneous system. However, with all its variability, it provides a valuable basis for comparing how composers interpret typical musical formulas of their time and how they reveal their own stylistic uniqueness through it. Therefore, the research on Tartini’s violin sonatas from this viewpoint could be a significant contribution to the understanding of his musical style.
Keywords: Baroque, Classicism, opera, Metastasio, program music
1 Introduction
Over time, many scholars have provided various explanations of the individual features of Giuseppe Tartini’s musical style. However, one of the aspects where opinions often coincide is regarding the composer’s innovative approach to the expressive possibilities of the violin, bringing it as close as possible to human speech or singing. The first evidence of this is found already in the eighteenth century. In 1789, the well-known English music historian, organist and composer Charles Burney noted: “Many of his adagios want nothing but words to be excellent pathetic opera songs.”1
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Tartini’s music researchers also drew attention primarily to its vocal analogies and the literary sources of inspiration. Several studies were dedicated to more than 70 of his works (concertos ←27 | 28→and sonatas) that are supplemented with poetic mottos,2 borrowed from opera librettos by Metastasio and the poem La Gerusalemme liberata (Jerusalem Delivered) by Tasso. Piotr Wilk concludes that this thematic had already been discussed in the first monographs on Tartini’s concertos and sonatas, as well as in the newest research papers by Maddalena Pietribiasi and Alessio Ruffatti, Sergio Durante and Alessandro Zattarin.3 These mottos have been studied both in an attempt to decipher their sources, which are still not entirely clear today, and striving to reveal the reflection of the literary source in the music. Pierpaolo Polzonetti references Tartini’s biography that allows to explain the parallels with opera in his music: the composer began his career as a violinist in an opera orchestra in Marche.4
Meanwhile, Pierluigi Petrobelli highlights the influence of speech and singing in Tartini’s works, revealing its relation to the aesthetic views of the composer presented in his Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell’ armonia (Treatise on Music according to the True Science of Harmony, 1754). He notes that nature and a manifestation of the naturalness, the human voice, were essential ideals for Tartini. Explaining this idea, Petrobelli cites the Trattato di musica: “If the intention of the Greeks was to move, not indiscriminately but rather by exciting a specific passion, it is surely a certitude of nature that each passion has its own peculiar movements and its particular tone of voice.”5
←28 | 29→As Petrobelli concludes, such an interest in the naturalness and the human voice was strongly expressed in the music by Tartini starting with the 1740s (in the earlier works, the virtuosity was more in the forefront), and this was also characteristic of his latest period: “[…] the musical language of these sonatas is very different from that of the earlier ones; it is a language reduced to its basic elements, and its ‘speaking’ character is emphasized by rests and by the melodic contour.”6
Another author, Martin Staehelin, describes such essential terms as cantabile and sonabile formulated by Tartini himself – it is felt that his sympathy belonged to the first.7
The significant influence of speech, singing and extramusical sources on Tartini’s works inspired the main goal of this chapter – to look at one of his favourite genres, violin sonatas, from the viewpoint of musical-rhetorical figures. Their role will be discussed in the following contexts:
- the unity of sonata cycle,
- the thematic material of individual movements,
- the development of this material.
It is well known that interest in rhetorics among musicians and music theorists increased significantly already on the eve of the Baroque era, the sixteenth century. As noted by Blake Wilson, “musical-rhetorical relations developed along more radical lines in Italy, where they unfolded in the more rarefied air of the humanist courts and academies, which sustained […] [an] interaction between music and emerging theories of vernacular poetry”.8 Meanwhile, the teaching of musical-rhetorical figures (Figurenlehre) originated at the turn of the seventeenth century in Germany where Joachim Burmeister published several treatises on this theme, starting with Hypomnematum musicae poeticae (Notes on Musical Poetics, 1599). However, most intensely, the concepts of figures were developed in the eighteenth century, just during Tartini’s lifetime, for example, by Johann Gottfried Walther in Praecepta der musicalischen Composition (Precepts of Musical Composition, 1708) and Musicalisches Lexicon (Musical Lexicon, 1732), Johann Mattheson in Der Vollkommene Capellmeister (The Perfect Chapelmaster, 1739). In this period, the lists or figures were compiled more with the idea of helping composers to create music by convincingly highlighting specific text details or affects. At the same time, they could be considered an essential tool for analysing the music language. Therefore, such lists are also used enthusiastically by many contemporary scholars in their research of Baroque music.
←29 | 30→As it has been repeatedly noted in musicological literature, German composers of the Baroque age were strongly influenced by Italian music.9 Therefore, it is not surprising that in works by Italian composers, we find analogues for practically all of the figures that got their names from the German Figurenlehre. It also applies to the works by Giuseppe Tartini, who tried to bring his instrumental music as close as possible to vocal music and speech. The closeness of these two areas with rhetoric is especially highlighted in the literature. “Almost always, rhetorical figures have clear declamatory implications,” notes Tom Beghin in The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory.10 Meanwhile, Dietrich Bartel, in his Musica Poetica (Musical Poetics, 1997), summarizes the views by music rhetoric theorist Johann Gottfried Walther: “[…] musica poetica is essentially vocal music in which the ‘music-poet’ was to present the text in a Klang-rede or musical oration.”11
In the treatises created during the seventeenth–eighteenth century, we see a lot of similar features in the explanations of the figures; however, contradictions can also be found. It is one of the reasons why musical rhetoric has not become a terminologically unified theoretical system. Nevertheless, the aim of this chapter is not to go into the contradictions and different understandings but to take, from the offerings of various authors, the terms that seem most suitable for the characterisation of Tartini’s music semantics and his stylistic individuality. The chosen figure definitions will mainly be borrowed from Musica Poetica (1997) by Dietrich Bartel – the monograph that is based on a detailed comparative analysis of their descriptions in various sources.
Details
- Pages
- 340
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783631887837
- ISBN (ePUB)
- 9783631887844
- ISBN (Hardcover)
- 9783631869079
- DOI
- 10.3726/b20325
- Language
- English
- Publication date
- 2023 (January)
- Published
- Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Warszawa, Wien, 2022. 340 pp., 2 fig. col., 104 fig. b/w, 9 tables.