Pietro Nardini is the most famous of Tartini’s pupils. He was a Tuscan by birth. During the years 1753-67 he was employed in the court chapel at Stuttgart. After this he returned to Tartini, and after 1770 was court chapel-master in Florence. His publications included solo sonatas, concertos and various other forms of chamber music. His playing was distinguished by softness and tenderness. In the words of a critic who heard him: Ice-cold princes and ladies of the court have been seen to weep when he played an adagio.
Other violinists associated with the school at Padua founded by Tartini are Pasqualini Bini (b. 1720), Emanuele Barbella (d. 1773), G. M. Lucchesi, Thomas Linley, Filippo Manfreli, a friend and associate of Boccherini’s, and Domenico Ferrari. Finally mention should be made of the Signora Maddalena Lombardini, among the first of the women violinists, who was a pupil of Tartini’s and won brilliant success at the Concerts Spirituels in Paris. She was, moreover, famous as a singer in the Paris opera and later in the court opera at Dresden.
Two of the most famous violinists of the latter half of the century, Felice Giardini and Gaëtano Pugnani, received their training in Turin under Somis, the pupil of Corelli, who is commonly accepted as the founder of a distinct Piedmont school. Giardini settled in London about the middle of the century, after wanderings in Italy and Germany; and here endured a changing fortune as player, teacher, composer, conductor and even impresario. Luck was against him in almost every venture. In 1791 he left London forever, with an opera troupe which he led into Russia. He died at Moscow in 1796.
Pugnani’s life was happier. He was a pupil not only of Somis but of Tartini as well, and though between 1750 and 1770 he gave himself up to concert tours and made himself famous in London and Paris as a player, he was greatest and most influential as a teacher in Turin between 1770 and 1803, the year of his death. Only a few of his compositions, which included operas and church music as well as music for the violin, were published. A great part of the money won by these and his teaching was given over to the poor, and he was not only one of the greatest violinists of his age but one of the most beloved of men. His compositions are noteworthy for a soft charm, rather than for fervor or strength.
Giambattista Viotti, the greatest of his pupils, stands with Corelli and Tartini as one of the three violinists of Italy who have had the greatest influence upon the development of violin music. Through Pugnani he received directly the traditions of the two great men whom he was destined so worthily to follow.
Though it is nearly impossible sharply to differentiate the styles of the host of violinists Italy gave to the world in the eighteenth century, two tendencies show in the total of their work. One of these was towards a noble and restrained style, the model for which Corelli gave to all his successors. The other was towards the surface brilliance of pure virtuosity, which comes out astonishingly in the works of Locatelli. Viotti was a musician of highest ideals, and chiefly through him the traditions that had been inherited from Corelli were brought over into the violin music of a new era.
The time of Viotti is the time of the symphony and the sonata. He is the contemporary of Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and of (among his own people) Clementi and Cherubini. As a composer he gave up writing what had so long been the chief work of the violinist-composers—the sonata with figured bass or simple accompaniment. Only a few sonatas are numbered among his compositions; but he wrote no less than twenty-nine violin concertos with full orchestral accompaniment, all of which show the breadth of the new form of sonata and symphony, which had come out of Italy, through Mannheim to Paris.
III
Before considering Viotti’s work in detail something must be said about the condition of violin music in France during the eighteenth century, and the violinists in Paris, with the assistance of whom he was able to found a school of violin playing the traditions of which still endure. With but one or two conspicuous exceptions, the most significant violinists of the eighteenth century in France came directly under the influence of the Italian masters. This did not always contribute to their material successes; for throughout the century there was a well-organized hostility to Italian influences in one branch and another of music. Nevertheless most of what is good in French violin music of the time owes a great deal to the Italians.
Such men as Rébel and Francœur (d. 1787), who were closely connected with the Académie founded by Lully, may be passed with only slight mention. Both were significant in the field of opera rather than in that of violin music. Their training was wholly French and their activities were joined in writing for the stage. The latter composed little without the former, except two sets of sonatas for violin, which belong to an early period in his life. Francœur advised the use of the thumb on the fingerboard in certain chords, a manner which, according to Wasielewski,[49] is without another example in violin music.