Veracini, Overture No. 6 in G minor

Francesco Maria Veracini (1690-1768) was born into a musical family in Florence, Italy. He forged a successful performing career as a violinist in Venice. From there he secured a position in Dresden from 1716 to 1723. Returning to Florence, he spent the next ten years performing and composing primarily oratorios. In 1733 he moved to London where he wrote operas at the same time that Handel was enjoying success writing Italian operas for English audiences.

Veracini earned a reputation as the premier violin virtuoso in all of Europe. The British musicologist Charles Burney, who chronicled much of music history from this period, wrote that in England Veracini played so often “There was no concert now without a solo on the violin by Veracini.”

Writing about Giuseppe Tartini a few weeks ago, I noted a similarity with biographical stories about Nicòlo Paganini, specifically that their phenomenal virtuosity fueled tales that they had made a pact with the devil. (As in our own time, some people seem eager to attribute high achievement to some unfair advantage rather than to hard work.) There are similar tales about Franz Liszt, but the better explanation is that Liszt was so impressed by Paganini’s virtuosity on the violin that he basically locked himself away for three years of hard practice to create that kind of virtuosity on the piano. Tartini had a similar experience after hearing Veracini perform in 1712, dedicating himself to a new level of mastery.