What is it about violin virtuosos and fencing? Like his fellow bow-wielder, the Guadaloupian Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, half-a-century later, Giuseppe Tartini was an avid and reportedly skilled swordsman. And like Bologne he was a composer, the cut and thrust of whose music moved that great man of musical letters Dr Charles Burney to describe him as ‘one of the few original geniuses of our century’.
Having arrived in Padua just months after Tartini’s death in 1770, Burney made a beeline for the composer’s last resting place with all the purposefulness ‘of a pilgrim at Mecca’. Corelli, he noted, had been the young Tartini’s guiding star but, Burney contended, ‘Tartini had surpassed that composer in the fertility and originality of his inventions’. Any difficulties of execution were the result of his ‘consummate knowledge of the fingerboard and the powers of the bow’. And, he added, ‘his want nothing but words to be excellent, pathetic opera songs’. How ironic. At
