Background
He was born in 1687 at Lucca, Iraly. His father was a violinist employed by the city of Lucca.
Geminiani returned to Lucca and took over his father's job.
(This CD is completely devoted to Francesco Saverio Gemini...)
This CD is completely devoted to Francesco Saverio Geminiani s Violin Sonatas Op. 4, which are very peculiar and show Geminiani s attempt to create new musical languages different from Arcangelo Corelli s old school.
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composer music theorist violinist
He was born in 1687 at Lucca, Iraly. His father was a violinist employed by the city of Lucca.
Geminiani returned to Lucca and took over his father's job.
He received lessons in music from Alessandro Scarlatti.
In Rome he met some of the top musicians of the day, and he is thought to have studied with Corelli, the player and composer who did more than anyone else to give the violin the status of difficult yet lyrical solo instrument that it still enjoys today.
Geminiani himself is known to have remained in Lucca until 1704, at which time he probably moved to Rome to seek his fortune in music.
Geminiani did just that, leaving for London in 1714.
There were several reasons why a young Italian musician might have chosen London.
Corelli's music was already extremely popular there, and a talented violinist who could play in the Corelli style was a strong candidate for profitable employment.
The prosperous city's concentration of noble families and a growing middle class ensured a vibrant concert scene, and many potential patrons had traveled to Italy when they were young, as part of a Grand Tour, a voyage through the capitals of Europe that served some of the same functions as the undergraduate semester abroad in modern times.
Even though these sonatas were almost impossible for ordinary violinists to play, they were often reprinted in subsequent decades. In the late 1720, Geminiani augmented the income from these pieces by teaching the violin and by giving concerts in the houses of wealthy patrons.
The latter group raised funds, via subscription to the eventual printed music volumes, to publish a set of six Geminiani arrangements of Corelli violin sonatas for violin and orchestra.
In 1728 the Earl of Essex, one of Geminiani's well-born violin students, put forth the composer's name for the post of master and composer of state music in Ireland, a high-level post and a lucrative one in the days when governments largely controlled the printing business.
Geminiani declined the position, but his reasons for doing so are not clear.
He arrived there with little money but got back on his feet with several public concerts.
Opening a combination concert hall and art gallery called Geminiani's Great Room, he shuttled between Dublin and London between 1733 and 1740 and made a reasonable living.
One famous incident in the annals of Irish traditional music involved Geminiani during his stay in Dublin.
Geminiani took an Irish melody, rewrote it in such a way that the original melody was well hidden, and sent it to be performed for O'Carolan.
After listening to the piece, O'Carolan said, in Gaelic, that it was an admirable piece but that it "limps and stumbles, " and he in turn played a corrected version of the music that restored the original melody.
Although Geminiani's Op. 3 set was by now considered a classic, these new works sold less well than he had hoped.
For the last 15 years of his life, Geminiani devoted himself mostly to instructional treatises, although he did emerge to write music for a pantomime called The Enchanted Forest in 1754.
Beginning with Rules for Playing in a True Taste in 1748, Geminiani wrote six instructional books in all; one was devoted to the art of accompaniment, and another, in 1760, concerned the guitar.
Other violinists had published instructional books before Geminiani, but his were at a higher level than those of any of his predecessors.
His instructional works, aimed at the English market, often used English, Irish, and Scottish folk songs as examples. Geminiani continued to travel to London and Paris through the 17506, but he eventually settled in Ireland as music master to a nobleman named Charles Coote.
Living in Dublin, he gave his last concert in 1760, by which time musical fashions had changed considerably from his heyday.
The idea of a body of "classical" music embodying the best work of the past is of comparatively recent invention; earlier ages tended to discard the old as they discovered the new, and all but the most famous works of even Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach were mostly forgotten in the century after their deaths.
The twentieth century saw an explosion of renewed interest in music of Geminiani's Baroque era, but it was not until very late in the century, when the spectacular virtuosity of Baroque violin music was fully investigated and appreciated, that Geminiani's music was rediscovered.
(This CD is completely devoted to Francesco Saverio Gemini...)
(CD)
One writer at the time suggested that he might have been religiously motivated; the Italian Geminiani was a Catholic, but Ireland at the time was ruled by England, and he would thus have been in the service of Anglicanism, the English state church.
His wheeler-dealer image did not sit well, however, with English music writers.
Other star violinists presented themselves as being in touch with supernatural forces, and Geminiani seemed crass by contrast.
Partly as a result of such attitudes, Geminiani's historical reputation suffered, obscuring his importance in the tradition of violin music even two centuries later.