In Search of Perfect Harmony: Tartini’s Music and Music Theory in Local and European Contexts

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.