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L’arte dell’arco by Giuseppe Tartini (review)

2024; Music Library Association; Volume: 80; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.2024.a919063

1534-150X

Nicholas Lockey,

Ancient Mediterranean Archaeology and History

Reviewed by: L'arte dell'arco by Giuseppe Tartini Nicholas Lockey Giuseppe Tartini. L'arte dell'arco. Edited by Matteo Cossu. (Giuseppe Tartini - Edizionenazionale delle opere musicali. Serie VI, Opere didattiche, v. 1) Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2022. [1 score (xxii, 56 p.) ISMN: 979-0-006-56956-4. $126.] Giuseppe Tartini (1692–1770) lived in an era that saw a wealth of acclaimed famous solo violinists who were also celebrated as composers, many of whom sought to variously emulate or distinguish themselves from the internationally acclaimed example of Arcangelo Corelli. Among individuals of Italian descent, Antonio Vivaldi, Francesco Veracini, Francesco Geminiani, and Pietro Locatelli were but a few born within the final decades before the start of the eighteenth century. Each of these musicians had fascinating careers and proved distinctively influential. In Tartini's case, a combination of factors make his significance stand out: a sizeable compositional output almost exclusively dominated by sonatas and concertos featuring the violin, a small but important body of theoretical writings that engaged the attention of several of the leading theorists of the day, and his extensive influence on future generations of violinists. The latter was achieved through his creation of an internationally respected school of violin and composition in Padua, his production of pedagogical works (including didactic compositions and a treatise on ornamentation), and his emphasis on the 'instrumental cantabile' as a parallel to lyrical vocal melody. Indeed, his influence on future generations of violinists and composers can be seen in the number of manuscript sources of Tartini's works with cadenzas and embellishments by his students and admirers (including his student Pietro Nardini), in Leopold Mozart's inclusion of a translation of part of Tartini's treatise on ornamentation in his own Violinschule, the creation of the 'Tartini' bow—longer than most prior bows—to facilitate the expressive legato playing that Tartini promoted, and the persistence into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of performances and editions of his set of variations commonly referred to as L'arte dell'arco (The Art of Bowing). It is precisely because of the continuing pedagogical use of that set of variations for violin and continuo bass that it was selected to launch a new critical edition of Tartini's works. The project is currently slated to comprise approximately twenty-five volumes (several of which will, presumably, be quite large) divided into seven series that will encompass the sacred vocal works, sonatas in one to four parts, concertos, didactic materials, and transcriptions from Tartini's era for various instruments. The need for such an edition, both for this particular piece and Tartini's oeuvre as a whole, could not be greater. Tartini's compositional legacy presents an especially vexing challenge for scholars and performers because the available evidence strongly indicates that he [End Page 568] was often unwilling to settle on a particular, fixed text for a piece. Instead, it appears that he often made changes according to his own shifting theoretical and aesthetic ideas. Even if one assumed that the latest reading represented his most definitive thoughts on a piece (a stance that ignores the validity that Tartini had assigned to each other version along the way), the complex web of sources for his works—the vast majority transmitted in manuscript only—makes it difficult or impossible to establish lines of chronology and deduce authorial intent. The scientific committee of this new critical edition acknowledges that the current state of Tartini research, while having uncovered many new sources and being in a position to draw upon methodologies that make it easier to handle such a difficult source situation, is far from ideal for launching a critical edition. They note (p. vii) that much work is needed and, by implication, suggest that there is a reasonable chance—perhaps more so than one would ideally hope for in producing a critical edition for a composer of Tartini's period—that future discoveries may call into question the reliability or primacy of certain sources or alter our thinking about the interpretation of specific indications in the sources. However, the committee also expresses the hope that this new edition will stimulate further research by making these works more readily available...