Giuseppe Tartini - Lettere e documenti / Pisma in dokumenti / Letters and Documents - Volume / Knjiga / Volume II

451 LETTERS public eye for forty-five years and should be intimately known to all). With the pure know-alls, practitioners, the learned, the satirists and buffoons I shall no longer waste time. I am old and I have a much more important thing to accomplish. Don’t let this frankness with which I express myself here shock Your Reverence. You will see it in greater quantity in these two public booklets, if you have the patience to read them. If the times for keeping quiet and simulating are now past, the present is the time to talk; and it certainly is time to speak loudly and clearly, and there is a need for it. This doesn’t mean I will claim to be able to herd cats. Anyone who wishes to deny the known truth is welcome to deny it as much as he wishes: he offends himself, not the truth. The latter will always triumph either later or in due course, and no human conspiracy can prevent it from rising to the surface someday. I am truly sure of this, and I form a faction all on my own by not appreciating at all what the physicists and mathematicians have claimed and claim with regard to the science and what the professors of counterpoint have said and say about the art, where it does not agree with the science. I publicly rise up against everybody. I know I can clearly convince them and I am sure that as much as they shall deny it with their words (though never with reasons, no matter how loud they shout that I am a petulant madman and visionary), the truth which I propose and uphold will one day be absolutely approved. But here Your Reverence will ask me why I need to declare my position with such emphasis and obstinacy: I go my way, the others go theirs, and that’s the end of it. No, I answer; it is indeed necessary that the whole profession knows my position. Given that no other professor has presently appeared in public with works on counterpoint but Your Reverence, to you, as the most authoritative of all, I must address myself for this position of mine to be made known. I therefore grant you ample discretion, indeed I entreat you, to communicate it either privately or publicly, as best it. suits you, to whomsoever (no one excepted), so that everybody knows it. And if they believe they can dissent, they may have sufficient time, leisure and reason for the purpose. I must add one other necessary thing. And it is that this statement of mine, which I here lay bare, has nothing to do with the respect, esteem and veneration that I inviolably preserve for Your Reverence and many other most worthy living professors. On this point, my character of honesty will always be unalterable; and as much as I may dissent from all in musical opinion, I shall always be the most respectful of everyone in public and in private, as distinctly I declare myself, and remain Your Reverence’s most humble, devoted and obliged servant Giuseppe Tartini Padua, 16 February 1767