Despite Tartini's important place in musical history,
he remains known to most musicians only as the composer
of the "Devil's Trill" violin sonata. Born on the
Istrian peninsula in 1692, Tartini was the son of a
minor government official in the city of Pirano (now
Piran, Slovenia). Although his parents had selected a
monastic life for Tartini when he was very young, in
1708 he rejected his clerical training to pursue a
course of instruction in music. Soon, however, he seems
to have enrolled at t...(+)
Despite Tartini's important place in musical history,
he remains known to most musicians only as the composer
of the "Devil's Trill" violin sonata. Born on the
Istrian peninsula in 1692, Tartini was the son of a
minor government official in the city of Pirano (now
Piran, Slovenia). Although his parents had selected a
monastic life for Tartini when he was very young, in
1708 he rejected his clerical training to pursue a
course of instruction in music. Soon, however, he seems
to have enrolled at the University of Padua as a
student of law, and was more famed during his younger
days as a dueler and swordsman than as a trained
musician. Despite still officially being a candidate
for the priesthood, Tartini married in 1710, and,
having thereby incurred the wrath of the Paduan bishop,
found it necessary to hide out in the monastery at
Assisi for a time. He put his time to good use:
apparently he made a rigorous study of music, and by
1714 he seems to have found employment with the opera
orchestra at Ancona.
Reunited with his wife in 1715, Tartini spent the next
several years trying to perfect his violin technique.
The legend is that he heard the virtuoso Francesco
Veracini perform and resolved to live in isolation
until he could accomplish the same amazing feats of
dexterity. By 1720, he was engaged as soloist and
leader of the orchestra at St. Anthony's in Padua.
Until an arm injury in 1740 seriously limited his
career, Tartini fulfilled his duties at St. Anthony's
even as he built a widespread reputation as the leading
violinist of his day. He made an extended visit to
Prague between 1723 and 1726. Officially retiring from
St. Anthony's in 1765, Tartini remained active as a
teacher until a mild stroke, which he suffered in 1768,
incapacitated him even further. Tartini died in 1770,
the year of Beethoven's birth.
Tartini was the founder of an important school of
violin playing, subsequently disseminated by such
noteworthy pupils as Pietro Nardini and Johann Gottlieb
Naumann. Because he did not seek fame as a composer,
very little of Tartini's music was published during his
lifetime. Some 135 violin concerti and over 200 violin
sonatas (some of which, however, are spurious) still
survive in manuscript form. A smattering of sacred
vocal works (such as the Stabat Mater composed during
the final year of his life) and a few sinfonias, trio
sonatas, and four-part sonatas round off Tartini's
considerable output. In addition to his activities as a
violinist and composer, Tartini became increasingly
interested in theories of acoustics and harmony as the
years went by, and his 1754 theoretical treatise
Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell'armonia
attempts to account for contemporary harmonic thinking
in terms of the overtone series and to promote
Tartini's own discovery of "sub-tones" in that series.
Despite its lofty intentions (or perhaps because of
them) the Trattato is not a particularly accurate or
informative text; it does, however, provide great
insight into the mind of this remarkable musician.
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