“What is the Highest Virtue of Art?” Violin Music by Tartini, Paganini, Berio, and Sciarrino
Wo l f g a n g S t ä h r
A Dream of a Sonata “And as with all music, the final aim and reason for the basso continuo is nothing but the glorification of God and the recreation of the spirit. Where this goes unheeded, the result is not true music, but an infernal babbling and noise.” Johann Sebastian Bach dictated these drastic words to his students: as a rule and admonition “for the four-part playing of basso continuo or accompaniment.” Soli Deo Gloria: only for the glory of God was music to r esound— anything else was considered evil deception of the worst kind and the devil’s work. How might Bach have judged the ambiguous and confounding Violin Sonata in G minor of his contemporary Giuseppe Tartini, first written in 1713 but later refined and perfected and published p osthumously with the epithet “Le Trille du diable” (“The D evil’s Trill”)? The Italian Tartini was a supremely gifted v iolinist, primo violino e capo di concerto at the Basilica di Sant’Antonio in Padua, founder of a scuola delle nazioni for young European violinists, and also a music theorist with a combative bent— and it was Tartini himself who first put about the legend of his G-minor Sonata having been d ictated to him in a dream. The devil supposedly played it for him, with compelling intelligence and perfect execution, music of such beauty and peculiarity as he had never heard, let alone composed, neither before nor after. Upon waking, he claimed to have tried to write the incomparable work down immediately, reconstructing it from memory and committing it to paper for posterity. 12
