Giuseppe Tartini’s school in 18th-century Padua had a cosmopolitan character. Besides authors coming from various European regions, musicians and other cultural personalities got in contact with him in a net of relations not only with the European musical world but also with the contemporary literary, scientific and politic circles.

Tartini’s pedagogy offered not only musical and instrumental training, but also lessons in composition (some of his students will become composers of operas such as Naumann); even when limited to instrumental teaching, his didactics were strictly linked with vocal qualities and discourse articulation, also feeding on references to traditional music (well-known is the “Aria del Tasso” which forms the basis for a number of sonatas).

In addition to helping students in professional integration, the personal relationship could comprise the defense of religious identity of non-Catholic students. Tartini’s students were members of the nobility, the bourgeoisie, or musicians backed by patrons, amateurs and professionals, students of Padua University and legal practitioners, besides various virtuose from the Venetian Hospitals. They came from Veneto, Northern Italy, Dalmatia, France, Bohemia, Germany, Sweden and, according to the dedication of the print of Sonatas Op. 2, even from the island of Java. The return of Tartini’s students to their countries and the European career of many Italian students of him (such as Nardini or Manfredi), had as a consequence the wide dissemination of Tartini’s cultural heritage, enriched with new elements in a multiplicity of contexts. From Spain to German courts, from Bohemian nobility to English and French public concerts, from church contexts to private academies and to amateurs circles, the influence of his way of making and thinking music feeds the European musical culture between 18th and 19th century, opening roads and leaving traces that will contribute to the creation of new styles and languages under a common cultural horizon, partly at the root of the Classical Style.

The cultural identity of the School stems from the strong personality of the teacher and it resulted in the production of a vast amount of transcriptions, adaptations and copies of Tartini’s compositions, as well as in the application of Tartini’s aesthetical and ideological principles to new musical genders. Therefore Tartini’s School is not strictly a matter of formal or thematic organization of music elements, but it involves an attitude towards music and the choice of features enlarging the palette of stylistic possibilities in the music of both Eighteenth-and Nineteenth-century.

Margherita Canale