The Sound of Tartini

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 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. In these years, the Conservatorio di Musica di Trieste (duly named after great musician born in Piran in Istria in 1692) has contributed to the study of Giuseppe Tartini’s life and music within the framework of the important Italy-Slovenia Interreg project tARTini (2014–20). The school has not only offered musicological counselling but also promoted the digitalization of musical sources and historical documents, the performance of unpublished music, the digital development of the composer’s thematic catalogue, the creation of a museum of “Tartini Relics” with a virtual tour, recordings and research (https://www.discovertartini.eu/). One of the most significant events of the project was the International Conference “Il suono di Tartini” held in Trieste on 6 and 7 September 2019, whose contributions are here included in this volume. A theme of the conference, which is duly reflected in this volume, was to encourage the union of musicological research and interpretation, and the collaboration between scholar and performer, musicologist and musician.

The rediscovery and reassessment of Tartini must indeed pass through the “practical” research of performers. Many issues, which emerge in performance, are resolved by the interpreter engaged with the concrete business of reviving the performing context of the age. The common thread running through these studies is therefore the search for the “Tartini sound”: to recover the ensembles used in his age, the constructional features of the instruments, the materials of which they were made, and their characteristic sound and timbre, and to offer a reconstruction of that sound world and idea of music by drawing on the period’s attitude to matters of performance, interpretation and expression. Tartini’s musical world presented various important and original features. His contemporaries saw a distinct consistency in the stylistic ideals and interpretational tastes of those working in his circle, associating them with a vocal and discursive approach to music. Significantly, many statements made by Tartini in his letters and theoretical works refer to the art of “singing” on the violin: a manner of singing that depends on the movements of the bow and the inflections of phrasing, which, again according to Tartini, must follow the “sense” of the melody, as if it were some kind of discourse. This is the performing style acknowledged to be a characteristic of his school and, as such, also attributed to an important musician of that circle: the cellist Antonio Vandini, Tartini’s faithful friend, who (according to the musicologist Burney, who heard him play) “plays […] in such a manner as to make his instrument speak”.

This third volume of the series “Giuseppe Tartini and the Musical Culture of the Enlightenment” carries the title The Sound of Tartini: Instruments and Performing practices in His Time. It focuses first of all on analysing the evidence concerning instrument building and sound research relating to Tartini and his circle; then it goes on to look at the personalities of his musician colleagues and examine information on performances at the cappella of the Basilica del Santo in Padua; and finally it concludes with matters concerning Tartini’s influence on later musicians.

After Sergio Durante’s opening article, which summarizes the current state of play on the performance of Tartini’s music and musicological research, this volume is divided into three sections.

The first section, The Production of Sound: Instruments and Bows in Tartini’s Time, is introduced by a wide-ranging article by Donatella Melini that examines the evolution of the bow in the stringed instruments of Tartini’s day through comprehensive research into the iconographic, theoretical and historical sources. Johannes Loescher assesses Italian instrument-making at the time of Tartini, and in particular the Regole of the Paduan instrument maker Antonio Airenti, in connection with the violin fittings preserved among the “Tartini relics”, while Antonino Airenti tackles the issue of reconstructing the type of sound that can be obtained from those surviving relics.

The second section, The Sound Environment at the Basilica del Santo di Padova: Colleagues and Orchestra, focuses both on certain musical personalities with whom Tartini was in close contact at the orchestra of the Basilica and on certain aspects relating to the performing customs at the cappella. While Marc Vanscheeuwijck presents the cello though the personality and work of Antonio Vandini, cellist, colleague and friend of Tartini, Alfredo Bernardini investigates the life and work of the oboist Matteo Bissoli, also working in Padua in Tartini’s day. Domen Marinčič, availing himself of various contemporary sources, studies aspects of performance practice and explores the possibility of performing Tartini’s works (including the orchestral pieces) without the accompaniment of keyboard instruments.

The third section, Tartini’s Sound Legacy: Stylistic Influences, Interpretation and Performing Practice, rounds off the volume first with an article by Federica Nuvoli, who presents the influence of Tartini on the work of Domenico Dall’Oglio, a Paduan violinist who worked at the court of Empress Catherine in Russia. Next, Federico Gon tackles aspects of violin technique such as bariolage in the production of Joseph Haydn, conjecturing that the composer working at Esterházy could have been influenced by the activities of Tartini’s pupils. This section concludes with the article by Dario Marušić on the tradition of folk music for strings in Istria and its ties with the Baroque repertoire, while leaving open the hypotheses on the possible links between Tartini and these repertoires.

We hope that this volume may contribute to opening up further lines of research and, moreover, be of interest to those wishing to approach the versatile and fascinating personality of Giuseppe Tartini in different ways, studying him from the historical, musicological or interpretative points of view, as well as being useful to those interested in the history of taste, style and customs.

Margherita Canale Degrassi

Editor