Refined taste and purity of tone, we are told, distinguished the playing of Corelli, and to him are attributed the systematization of bowing and the introduction of chord-playing.  He heads the list of musicians who protest against talking where there is music.  On one occasion when his patron was addressing some remarks to another person, he laid down his violin, and on being asked the reason said “he feared the music was disturbing the conversation.”  This did not prevent him from being held in the highest esteem.  After his death Cardinal Ottoboni had a costly monument erected over his grave in the Pantheon, and for many years a solemn service, consisting of selections from his works, was performed there on the anniversary of his funeral.

It was during a period of retirement in the monastery of Assisi that Giuseppi Tartini (1692-1770) resolved to quit the law course in the University of Padua and seek a career with his violin.  He became a great master of this, a composer of works still regarded as classics, and a scientific writer on musical physics.  His letter to his pupil, Signora Maddelena Lombardini, contains invaluable advice on violin practice and study, especially on the use of the bow, and his treatise on the acoustic phenomenon known as “the third sound,” together with his work on musical embellishments, may at any time be read with profit.

It was after hearing the eccentric violinist Veracini that His Satanic Majesty appeared to Tartini in a dream and played for him a violin solo surpassing in marvelous character anything that he had ever heard or imagined.  Trying to write it down in the morning he produced his famous “Devil’s Sonata,” with its double shakes and sinister laugh, a favorite of the violinist, but to the composer ever inferior to the music of his dreams.  It is rather curious that anything of a diabolic nature should be associated with this man of amiable and gentle disposition, whose care of his scholars, according to Dr. Burney, was constantly paternal.  Nardini, his favorite and most famous pupil, came from Leghorn to Padua to attend him, with filial devotion, in his last illness.

The talents of Corelli and Tartini seem to have been combined in the Piedmontese, Giovanni Battiste Viotti (1753-1824), a man of poetic, philanthropic mind, whose sensitive, retiring disposition unfitted him for public life.  Wherever he appeared he outshone all other performers, yet there was constantly something occurring to wound him.  At the Court of Versailles he left the platform in disgust because the noisy entrance of a distinguished guest interrupted his concerto.  In London, after his means had been crippled by the French Revolution, he was accused of political intrigue.