Giuseppe Tartini

Giuseppe Tartini was an Italian Baroque composer and violinist, born on 8 April 1692 in Pirano, a town in the Republic of Venice that is now Piran, Slovenia. He died on 26 February 1770 in Padua from gangrene. A highly productive composer, he wrote more than a hundred works for the violin, mostly concertos. His most famous piece remains the Violin Sonata in G Minor, commonly called the Devil’s Trill Sonata.

Tartini’s parents originally planned for him to become a Franciscan friar, which gave him his early musical training. He first studied violin at the collegio delle Scuole Pie in Capodistria (modern-day Koper) and later studied law at the University of Padua, where he also became skilled at fencing. After his father died in 1710, he married Elisabetta Premazore—a woman his father had disapproved of because of her poverty, unknown father, and the fact that she was two years older than Tartini (she was 20, he was 18). Because Elisabetta was a favorite of Cardinal Giorgio Cornaro, the cardinal charged Tartini with abduction. To escape prosecution, Tartini fled to the monastery of St. Francis in Assisi, where he studied under Bohuslav Matěj Černohorský.

According to legend, after hearing Francesco Maria Veracini play in 1716, Tartini was so impressed and dissatisfied with his own skill that he went to Ancona and locked himself in a room to practice. As Charles Burney later wrote, he did this to study bow technique more quietly and conveniently than in Venice, where he had a place in the opera orchestra. His skill improved greatly, and in 1721 he was appointed Maestro di Cappella at the Basilica di Sant’Antonio in Padua, with a contract that allowed him to perform elsewhere. There he befriended composer and theorist Francesco Antonio Vallotti. From 1723 to 1725 he served as chapel master for Count Kinsky in Prague.

Tartini was the first known owner of a 1715 Stradivarius violin, which he gave to his student Salvini. Salvini later passed it to the Polish violinist Karol Lipiński after hearing him play, and the instrument became known as the Lipinski Stradivarius. Tartini also owned and played a 1711 Stradivarius called the ex-Vogelweith. In 1726 he started a violin school that attracted students from across Europe. Over time, he grew more interested in harmony and acoustics, and from 1750 until his death he published several treatises that addressed music theory using mathematics.

Tartini’s hometown of Piran (now in Slovenia) honors him with a statue in the main square, which was originally a Roman harbor. The silted-up port was cleared and redeveloped into Tartini Square, and one of the old stone warehouses is now the Hotel Giuseppe Tartini. His birthday is marked by a concert in the town’s main cathedral.

Almost all of Tartini’s compositions are violin concertos (at least 135) and violin sonatas (at least 100). He also wrote sacred works, including a Miserere (composed between 1739 and 1741 at the request of Pope Clement XII) and a Stabat Mater (1769), as well as trio sonatas and a sinfonia in A. Cataloguing his works is difficult because he never dated his manuscripts and often revised pieces long after they were finished or published. Scholars Minos Dounias and Paul Brainard have tried to divide his output into periods based on stylistic features. Sixty-two manuscripts of his compositions are held at the Biblioteca comunale Luciano Benincasa in Ancona. The composer Luigi Dallapiccola later wrote a piece called *Tartiniana* based on themes by Tartini.

As a music theorist, Tartini is credited with discovering sum and difference tones—an acoustic phenomenon useful for tuning double-stops on string instruments by listening to the “terzo suono.” He published his findings in a 1754 treatise, *Trattato di musica secondo la vera scienza dell’armonia*. His treatise on ornamentation was translated into French in 1771 by a writer known as “P. Denis,” who called it unique. Though it was soon forgotten, it was the first published text devoted entirely to ornament and later provided valuable information for historically informed violin performance after being published in English translation by Sol Babitz in 1956. A more helpful edition for performers was Erwin Jacobi’s 1961 trilingual version, which included the French original, an English translation by Cuthbert Girdlestone, and Jacobi’s own notes.