(b Venice, 7 April 1763; d London, 16 April 1846). Italian double bass player and composer. A singularly talented musician with a characterful personality and considerable business acumen, he had an extraordinary career. He was also a passionate collector of instruments, music, paintings, snuff-boxes and dolls.
Dragonetti's parents, Pietro Dragonetti and Cattarina Calegari, also had a daughter, Marietta, for whom Domenico provided financial assistance after leaving Venice. Pietro may have been a musician and also a gondolier. Francesco Caffi's biography (1846) is the main source for Dragonetti’s Venetian years. It is said that Dragonetti received instruction from Michele Berini, a bassist in the theatres and at S Marco. He practised assiduously, performed to popular acclaim in the streets of Venice, learnt from friendships with Sciarmadori (a shoemaker) and the violinist Nicola Mestrino and was a member of the Arte dei Suonatori. At the age of 24, three years after his first attempt to join the instrumentalists at S Marco, he was accepted as the fifth of five double bass players on 13 September 1787; by December he had become principal. In 1791 the procurators rewarded him for his rejection of offers from abroad with a payment of 310 lire. By autumn 1794, aged 31, Dragonetti could no longer be retained and on 16 September he left Venice for London with a two-year leave of absence, which was later extended by a further three years. Although he returned to Venice in 1799 in order to finalize his resignation, and visited the city again in 1809, the remainder of his life was based in London.
Dragonetti's career in England was remarkable. Not only did he irrevocably challenge and alter the reception and expectations of his instrument but he also carved out for himself a unique position in music-making in Britain which lasted for more than half a century. At a time when orchestral musicians commanded meagre incomes Dragonetti accumulated wealth and security: in June 1846 his balance at Coutts & Co. stood at £1006 12s. 2d. His popularity and skill formed a unique commodity which allowed him to negotiate suitable payment.
In the 1790s he performed his own compositions to widespread recognition. One critic remarked that Dragonetti ‘by powers almost magical, invests an instrument, which seems to wage eternal war with melody, “rough as the storm, and as the thunder loud”, with all the charms of soft harmonious sounds’ (Bath Chronicle, 14 Nov 1799). Between 1808 and 1814 he was abroad, visiting both Vienna and Venice. After 1815 his income was derived mainly from orchestral work, and his appearances in chamber music, which included popular transcriptions of sonatas by Corelli, Handel and Giuseppe Sammartini, as well as original works by his contemporaries, maintained and consolidated his reputation.
Dragonetti's annual diary featured a fluctuating blend of engagements during the London season at the King's Theatre, the Ancient Concerts, the Philharmonic Society and Drury Lane, various subscription series, and benefit, public and private concerts. During the remaining months he was a familiar figure at provincial festivals and in the homes of the aristocracy. His fees were exceptionally high for an instrumentalist: protracted haggling with the Philharmonic Society led on the one hand to his absence from the London première of Beethoven's Symphony no.9 in 1825, and on the other to his status as the highest-paid orchestral player from 1831 to 1842.
As an alien Dragonetti could not own property – he lived in rented accommodation in Westminster – and was denied suffrage. Although he remained a bachelor, there is evidence that he had close female friends, at least in Venice. Among important friends in England were his pupil the 3rd Duke of Leinster, Vincent Novello, John Barnett, Thomas Greatorex, Samuel Wesley, the Cowden Clarkes, Edward Holmes and Cipriani Potter. Haydn, Beethoven, Cherubini and Spohr were among his many associates.
Dragonetti generally used a three-string double bass, and was particularly fond of the Gasparo da Salò instrument (see illustration) which he bequeathed to S Marco. He favoured tuning in 4ths (A'–D–G): writing to Rossini in 1827, he explained that this arrangement provided a strong, even sound and eased the negotiation of the instrument. He imported strings from Padua. His outwardly curved bow (a model popular until the 20th century in England) ensured a punctuating bass line and suited the rhythmic sequential patterns common in his own compositions.
He composed for his own use, and it is his manuscripts (bequeathed to Vincent Novello, who in turn left them to the British Museum in 1849) which display most clearly his facility as a player. The British Library holds 18 volumes of his works (GB-Lbl Add.17726–17833; for a summary of their contents see Palmer, 1997). They include concertos and concerto-like works (including potpourris) with orchestral accompaniment; quintets for solo bass, violin, two violas and ‘basso’; a duo for cello and double bass; variations on popular operatic arias for solo double bass; obbligato double bass parts for operatic arias; and multi-movement pieces for double bass and piano. Other works include songs, piano pieces and caprices for violin. Composition provided Dragonetti with the means to demonstrate his virtuosity in the genres popular with his audience. His continuing output was crucial – it allowed him to vindicate his instrument – and he recycled and renamed his works. Both Potter and Simon Sechter made adaptations and arrangements at his behest.
He died aged 83, basking in the affection of his many friends. The emotional tribute in The Musical World (9 May 1846) declared:
Dragonetti was not only the greatest performer of his age on the double bass – possessing the finest instinct of true excellence in all that concerns his art – but he had moral qualities of a high order; a benevolent and generous disposition, and an inclination to friendship, which he exercised with judgment and discrimination in men and things.
Dragonetti's personal correspondence for the period 1796–1846 is held at the British Library (Add.17838). Other personal correspondence and papers are held at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; and a collection of letters, manuscripts and other documents concerning Dragonetti, compiled by Arthur W. Hill, is also held there (in the Moldenhauer archive).
V. Novello: ‘Orchestral Sketches’, Musical World, i (1836), 8–16
F. Caffi: Biografia di Domenico Dragonetti (Venice, 1846); repr. in CaffiS [incl. bibliography to 1984]
‘Funeral of Signor Dragonetti’, Musical World, xxi (1846), 222–3
H. Phillips: Music and Personal Recollections during Half a Century (London, 1864)
A.C. White: ‘The Double Bass’, PMA, xiii (1886–7), 98–112
N. Medici di Marignano and R. Hughes, eds.: A Mozart Pilgrimage: Being the Travel Diaries of Vincent and Mary Novello in the Year 1829 (London, 1955/R)
R. Slatford: ‘Domenico Dragonetti’, PRMA, xcvii (1970–71), 21–8
A. Planyavsky: Geschichte des Kontrabasses (Tutzing, 2/1984)
C. Brown: ‘Discovering Bows for the Double Bass’, The Strad, ci (1990), 39–45
T. Bauman: ‘Musicians in the Marketplace: the Venetian Guild of Instrumentalists in the Later 18th Century’, EMc, xix (1991), 345–55
F.M. Palmer: ‘Domenico Dragonetti and the Double Bass in London at the Turn of the Eighteenth Century’, A Handbook for Studies in English Eighteenth Century Music, iv, ed. M. Burden and I. Cholij (Edinburgh, 1993), 35–57
F.M. Palmer: Domenico Dragonetti in England (1794–1846): the Career of a Double Bass Virtuoso (Oxford, 1997) [incl. list of MS sources]
FIONA M. PALMER