Tartini
Chester Biscardi
About this work:
Tartini, for violin and piano (1972)
Published by Merion Music, Inc./Theodore Presser Co.: No. 144-40324
The Italian baroque violinist and composer Giuseppe Tartini (1692-1770) spent most of his career in Padua, west of Venice. He enjoyed his greatest success as a performer between 1720 and 1740, but his influence as a pedagogue extended far longer. Tartini’s treatise on violin playing, Traité des agréments, was published posthumously but was apparently circulating widely in manuscript during Tartini’s lifetime, because Leopold Mozart drew on it for portions of his own Violinschule, published in 1756.
Today, Tartini is remembered as the composer of some 125 concertos for violin, various trio sonatas, and about 175 sonatas for violin. The most famous of them is known by the subtitle Trillo del Diavolo, or “Devil’s Trill.” The sonata takes its name from a passage in the last movement in which the violinist sounds two voices simultaneously: one in an extended trill, the other with a countermelody. The passage is notoriously difficult. Tartini is reputed to have composed it after dreaming about the devil playing a melody of astonishing beauty. Tartini sought to recreate that melody in his sonata. Late in life, he related the tale to the English music historian and composer Charles Burney.
One night I dreamt that I had made a bargain with the devil for my soul. Everything went at my command; my novel servant anticipated every one of my wishes. Then the idea suggested itself to hand him my violin to see what he would do with it. Great was my astonishment when I heard him play, with consummate skill, a sonata of such exquisite beauty as surpassed the boldest flights of my imagination. I felt enraptured, transported, enchanted; my breath failed me, and I awoke. Seizing my violin I tried to reproduce the sounds I had heard. But in vain. The piece I then composed, the "Devil's Trill" Sonata, although the best I ever wrote, how far was it below the one I had heard in my dreams!
-Adapted from Dr. Charles Burney's The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1773)
According to Biscardi’s note in the score, Biscardi’s Tartini was also inspired by an adaptation of the Tartini legend by Lois Drapin in her poem "Tartini Dreams Trillo del Diavolo" (1972):
The night Tartini slept, he woke the Devil.
The creature came to him, unchained and crazed.
The rabid dog strikes first at his own master.
The creature came to him whose flesh he craved
And stood before him freed from his horsehair grave.
And Tartini screamed the scream that loosed his soul
His body twisting with his night-hawk call.
© 1972 by Lois Drapin; used by permission.
Tartini is a work that straddles Biscardi’s emergence from the strictures of academia over thirty years ago to the assertion of his own voice as a composer. Although he acknowledges that Tartini employs a twelve-tone row constructed from melodies in the Baroque original, he says the row is ‘loose.’ “It’s the only twelve-tone piece I composed,” he says. “I guess you could think of it as my response to the academic serialist bent that was so prevalent in the early 1970s.” It was written for Tom Moore, a member of the famed Pro Arte Quartet (founded by Rudolf Kolisch and for whom Schoenberg and Bartok wrote their fourth string quartets) in residence at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The published note in the score indicates that the fast-slow-fast, one-movement structure is a miniature representation of the original, three-movement sonata. Biscardi adds, “I’m Italian! My music tends to be lyrical, romantic and dramatic -- that’s what comes through in Tartini.”
- Laurie Shulman © 2003
Year composed: 1972
Duration: 00:07:00
Ensemble type: Chamber or Jazz Ensemble, Without Voice:Keyboard plus One Instrument
Instrumentation: 1 Piano, 1 Violin