Φωτογραφίες

Six o'clock in the morning and Giuseppe Tartini is ready to play his violin...

Giuseppe Tartini was born in piran on April 8, 1692. He was an Italian composer, violinist, and theorist.

Tartini was the first to recommend improvements to the bow to make possible more skillful movements, opening the way to what is now called bow technique.
Tartini studied divinity and law at Padua and at the same time established a reputation as a fencer. While at seminary he was given violin lessons. His father objected to his violin study and cut off his allowance and he was forced to give violin lessons to make money. Before the age of 20 he secretly married a fifteen-year-old girl, the cardinal's niece. Tartini had met the Padre Boemo in Padua when the priest was the organist at the church of San Antonio. It turned out that the Padre later would become the composer Gluck's harmony teacher. Padre asked the abbot of the monastery to offer Tartini refuge, and here Tartini stayed for several years. Life in the monastery was a wholesome experience for the young Tartini. Padre Boemo instructed him in counterpoint and thoroughbass.
Tartini's wife had stayed behind in Padua and had changed her uncle's attitude. The wife's uncle forgave him and allowed him to return to Padua. From then on his fame grew all over Italy. He was regarded as Italy's greatest violinist.


The most popular of his compositions is the so-called "sonata with the devil's trill" (Il trillo del Diavolo). Tartini's story about the sonata goes like this: one night the devil appeared to him in a dream and said "thou art but a cold, unfeeling fiddler, I can do better than that!" Tartini then gave his violin to the devil, who played a very beautiful sonata. Tartini then woke up, and wrote the sonata with the devils trill, which was close to that of the Evil One –or so he thought. It is still greatly admired.

You can hear the piece of this sonata here, played by an angel rather, not the devil :) (Vanessa Mae, a bit kitschy but nice).

Here I liked to show Tartini even if the photo was tor me difficult to make.