Scan 17
Violin master works and their interpretation, 1925
12 lines. Read by computer on 3 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1CHAPTER I.
3OUTSTANDING WORKS OF THE OLDER ITALIAN VIOLIN COMPOSERS.
5With regard to the older Italian composers it might be said that during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first of the twentieth century, many of their compositions, written in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, have been "discovered" in various German and Italian libraries by treasure-seekers duly qualified (or the reverse), and have been edited and published by them. Among these works, now and again, we find one by some more important older Italian composer, works which for all they may not be on quite the level of those already known to us, closely approximate them in musical value.
7The great majority of these exhumed compositions with which the market has been flooded, however, are decidedly uninteresting, monotonous and dry as regards invention, and once more prove that even celebrated masters cannot turn out sonatas by the hundred with impunity. Still less are their unworthy imitators able to do so; real, genuine music is something which must be experienced, felt, divined—and then created! It can be imitated only as regards its externals.
9Even geniuses like Corelli, Veracini and Giuseppe Tartini, upon whom Veracini exercised so great an influence, are not free from this reproach of overproduction at the expense of quality, and it must be confessed that the reissue of such compositions often seems to have no other justification than the mistaken piety of the discoverer or a purely commercial reason.
11I cannot help feeling that when in their own day such masters as Mendelssohn and Ferdinand David, after a thorough examination of the manuscripts to be found in the state libraries of Berlin, Dresden and Leipsic, completed their selection, they made generally available all that was most important, all that deserved wider recognition. None among the works discovered (?) toward the end of the past or at the beginning of the present century compare as regards imaginative and creative importance with such works as Tartini's two sonatas in G minor (including the "Devil's Trill")
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