Veracini, Francesco Maria

(b Florence, 1 Feb 1690; d Florence, 31 Oct 1768). Italian composer and violinist. Veracini was born into a family of musicians and artists. His grandfather was one of the first violinists of Florence; his uncle Antonio Veracini was that and a fine composer as well. Francesco Maria’s father Agostino was, ironically, one of the few Veracinis who did not play the violin even as an amateur; he was a druggist and undertaker. Veracini’s early training was provided by his uncle Antonio with whom the promising boy often performed in public. His other instructors in Florence were G.M. Casini and his assistant Francesco Feroci. In particular, Casini, the organist at Florence Cathedral and composer of church music in a highly individual, neo-Palestrinian style, left his mark upon Veracini’s subsequent works. His last teacher was apparently G.A. Bernabei, with whom he may have studied in 1715 when he was in southern Germany. There is no solid evidence that he studied with Corelli, as is sometimes asserted.

Veracini left Florence before Easter 1711. On 24 and 25 December 1711 he was a soloist at the Christmas masses at S Marco, Venice, but was never a regular member of the chapel orchestra (as Caffi claimed). On 1 February 1712 he played at the church of S Maria Gloriosa dei Frari in Venice during a Mass in honour of the new Holy Roman ambassador (the concerto he played is in A-Wn). Although he returned to Florence in spring 1712 for a performance of his oratorio Il trionfo della innocenza patrocinata da S Niccolò, his centre of activity remained Venice, where he played again for the Christmas masses at S Marco in 1712. Evidence suggests (but see Tartini, Giuseppe) that on 10 March 1712 Tartini heard Veracini play in Venice and was so impressed that he fled to Ancona to study the better use of the bow in imitation of the older player. A letter of 1764 from Domenico Palafuti of Florence to G.B. Martini states that Pietro Locatelli studied with Veracini; this was probably in Florence, before the publication of Locatelli’s first sonatas.

From 23 January to 24 December 1714 Veracini appeared in a series of benefit concerts, and as soloist between the acts of operas, at the Queen’s Theatre in London. The year 1715 appears to have been spent in Düsseldorf at the court of Elector Palatine of the Rhine Johann Wilhelm. There Veracini played violin sonatas by Antonio Bonporti and dedicated his setting of an oratorio, Mosè al mar’ rosso, to the elector.

On 26 July 1716 Veracini was again in Venice, where he dedicated a set of 12 solo sonatas to Prince Elector Friedrich August of Saxony. Though knowing that a violinist was not needed at the Dresden court, and that he risked friction with J.B. Volumier, the established director of the orchestra there, the prince persuaded his father to retain Veracini. After another oratorio performance in Florence, 25 January 1717, Veracini travelled to Dresden where he was transferred from the prince’s private employment to the regular court payroll on 20 November 1717. His salary was equal to Heinichen’s, Volumier’s and Johann Schmidt’s, and far exceeded those of the other composers, J.G. Pisendel, Christian Pezold and J.D. Zelenka. In February 1719 Veracini was entrusted with hiring more singers for the court while he was in Bologna and Venice. He returned to Dresden where he remained until 1722, when on 13 August he leapt from a third-storey window in a fit of madness brought on by too much application to music and reading of alchemy, according to Mattheson. Veracini’s treatise hints that there was a plot against his life inspired by jealousy, however.

Having left Dresden before February 1723, Veracini returned to Florence, via Prague, before Easter of that year. That he re-established his reputation as a performer on his return to Italy we learn from Burney’s amusing story in which he arrogantly showed Girolamo Laurenti ‘the way to play the first fiddle’. Nevertheless, the documents from this time (1723–33) most often reveal Veracini as composer and performer of religious music, principally of oratorios produced by lay religious companies, but also of a mass and Te Deum in celebration of the election of the Florentine Pope Clement XII, 20 and 21 July 1730. He also played the violin at private concerts.

Between 9 and 27 April 1733 he made his way back to London, where he began to play so often that Burney reported: ‘There was no concert now without a solo on the violin by Veracini’. Perhaps he began immediately to play for the Opera of the Nobility, Handel’s rival, which presented his first opera, Adriano in Siria, for a run of 20 performances beginning on 26 November 1735, with the composer leading and playing. The same company gave his second opera, La clemenza di Tito, its four performances, 12–23 April 1737, as well as his third, Partenio, 14 March–6 June 1738.

There being no opera in London for the season of 1738–9, Veracini returned briefly to Florence where his uncle, wife and mother had died in his absence. Charles de Brosses heard him play there in 1739, and reported that ‘his playing is just, noble, knowledgeable and precise, but a little lacking in grace’. Burney concurred, writing (also from first hand) that ‘the peculiarities of his performance were his bow-hand, his shake, his learned arpeggios, and a tone so loud and clear, that it could be distinctly heard through the most numerous band of a church or theatre’. All agreed that he was the first, or at least one of the first, violinists of Europe (see illustration).

On 28 February 1741 Veracini was back in London, playing a concerto between the acts of Handel’s Acis and Galatea. Nine days later he gave a concert of his own compositions including ‘A New Eclogue’ of 12 vocal duets entitled Nice e Tirsi. In spring 1741 he appeared at two more benefit concerts, and during autumn 1742 he played concertos as entr’acte music at 21 dramatic performances at Drury Lane. A run of ten performances of his last opera, Rosalinda, an Italian adaptation by Paolo Rolli of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, began on 31 January 1744. Veracini’s inclusion of the popular ballad tune The Lass of Paties Mill in this opera greatly annoyed Burney, who condemned Veracini’s own arias as ‘wild, aukward, and unpleasant; manifestly produced by a man unaccustomed to write for the voice, and one possessed of a capo pazzo’. Though he may have been mad, Veracini was certainly not inexperienced in vocal music. At least half of his known output is for the voice.

In the same year, 1744, Veracini published his finest sonatas, the Sonate accademiche op.2, which also use a ballad tune, Tweed’s Side. The title of this collection suggests that the sonatas were of the sort to be played at private concerts (accademie in Florentine parlance) rather than in theatre, church or chamber; they are not academic in the modern English sense. Burney must have heard them when he attended one of Veracini’s concerts in 1745. It was his last in England, since Burney reported that shortly after it Veracini was shipwrecked crossing the Channel. The composer himself tells us he lost a manuscript at sea.

We next hear of Veracini in a letter of 8 May 1750 from the British envoy, Horace Mann, who heard him play the sonata with Tweed’s Side in Florence. On 7 June 1750 the Marquis d’Orbessan heard him in a performance of Galuppi’s La vittoria d’Imeneo in Turin. Back in Florence, Veracini dictated his first will, 8 March 1751, in favour of an English widow, Mary Jane Atkinson.

Veracini once again became a church musician during his last years in Florence. From 1755 until his death he served as maestro di cappella for the Vallambrosan fathers in the church of S Pancrazio, and from 1758 he filled the same post for the Theatine fathers in the church of S Michele Berteldi (now S Gaetano). In the many accounts of his church performances, Veracini is described as conducting or beating time, but he also continued to play the violin in his old age. On 6 October 1765 and on 15 November 1766 he performed at the grand-ducal court. His last years were therefore active.

A parish priest who knew him characterized Veracini as one who left several good positions because he valued independence more than wealth. The reports of diarists and journalists reveal him as an eccentric and at times even a seeming madman. Burney stressed his arrogance. Hints of all these traits can be found in his treatise, Il trionfo della pratica musicale, which he wrote during his last years in Florence.

Burney remarked that ‘by travelling all over Europe he formed a style of playing peculiar to himself’. The same might be said of his style of composing. His later concertos, when compared to his first (1712), clearly reveal the influence of Vivaldi’s concertos op.3 (1711) which he certainly heard during his years in Venice. His sonatas of 1716 are somewhat like Corelli’s, but use no fugues or imitation, frequently employ repetition in place of sequence, display symmetrical phrasing and show a strong preference for tonic recapitulations. In a word, they seem as modern as those of Tartini and Locatelli published in the 1730s. But the op.1 sonatas of 1721 are more contrapuntal, perhaps owing to the influence of the German composers at Dresden, from whom he certainly got the idea of beginning a suite of dances with a French overture (unheard of in Italian solo sonatas).

Veracini’s operas resemble those of his Italian colleagues in London as to general musical style, but contain more strongly expressive arias (as do Handel’s). The op.2 sonatas clearly show the influence of opera arias in places, but in other places become even more elaborately contrapuntal than those of op.1. Veracini’s increasing interest in the thorough application of fugue, canon, inversion and imitation can be traced in his revisions of Corelli’s op.5 sonatas, in his revisions of his own music, and in his treatise, both in the musical examples (containing revisions of Corelli and Geminiani) and in the text. Having begun as a fashionable progressive, Veracini, in his customarily independent manner, deliberately pursued an eccentric course and eventually expressed his contempt for the homophonic style he once cultivated, equating it with ignorance, laziness and the same immorality which he felt led Handel and others to plagiarism; Veracini himself was original and independent.

WORKS

librettos published unless otherwise stated

operas

all produced London, King's Theatre

oratorios

music lost

church music

cantatas and songs

sonatas

other instrumental works

THEORETICAL WORKS

Il trionfo della pratica musicale, osia Il maestro dell’arte scientifica dal quale imparsi non solo il contrapunto ma (quel che più importa) insegna ancore con nuovo e facile metodo l’ordine vero di comporre in musica, op.3, I-Fc; contains canons, fugues etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BoydenH

BurneyH

FürstenauG

NewmanSBE

J. Mattheson: Critica musica, i (Hamburg, 1722/R), 153, 224, 287

C.F. Cramer, ed.: Magazin der Musik, ii (1785/R), 373ff

C. de Brosses: Lettres familières sur l’Italie, ed. Y. Bézard (Paris, 1931, 2/1969 ed. P.A. Weber)

A.R. Naldo [Arnaldo Bonaventura]: ‘Un trattato inedito e ignoto di F.M. Veracini’, RMI, xlii (1938), 617–35

U. Rolandi: ‘Oratorii stampati a Firenze dal 1690 al 1725’, NA, xvi (1939), 32–9, esp. 38

I. Becker-Glauch: Die Bedeutung der Musik für die Dresdener Hoffeste bis in die Zeit Augusts des Starken (Kassel, 1951)

M. Fabbri: ‘Gli ultimi anni di vita di Francesco Maria Veracini’, CHM, iii (1962–3), 91–6

M. Fabbri: ‘Le acute censure di Francesco M. Veracini a “l’arte della fuga” di Francesco Geminiani’, Le celebrazioni del 1963 e alcune nuove indagini sulla musica italiana del XVIII e XIX secolo, Chigiana, xx (1963), 155–94

H.M. Smith: F.M. Veracini’s ‘Il trionfo della pratica musicale’ (diss., Indiana U., 1963)

M. Fabbri: ‘Appunti didattici e riflessioni critiche di un musicista pre-romantico: le inedite “Annotazioni sulla musica” di Francesco Maria Veracini’, Quaderni della RaM, no.3 (1965), 25–54

M.G. Clarke [White]: The Violin Sonatas of F.M. Veracini: some Aspects of Italian Late Baroque Instrumental Style Exemplified (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1967)

F.C. Ricci: ‘Appunti per una biografia di Francesco Maria Veracini nel bicentenario della morte (1690–1768)’, Annuario dell’Accademia di Santa Cecilia (1968), 155–94

G. Salvetti: ‘Le Sonate accademiche di Francesco M. Veracini’, Chigiana, xxv, new ser., v (1968), 125–41, esp. 127

M.G. White: ‘F.M. Veracini’s “Dissertazioni sopra l’opera quinta del Corelli”’, MR, xxxii (1971), 1–26

J.W. Hill: The Life and Works of Francesco Maria Veracini (Ann Arbor, 1979)

M.G. White: ‘The Life of Francesco Maria Veracini’, ML, liii (1972), 18–35

F.C. Ricci: Note sull'opera violinistica di Francesco Maria Veracini (Rome, 1974)

J.W. Hill: ‘Veracini in Italy’, ML, lvi (1975), 257–76

J.W. Hill: ‘The Anti-Galant Attitude of F.M. Veracini’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel, 1980), 158–96

F.C. Ricci: ‘Presenze di Corelli nell'opera violinistica di Francesco Maria Veracini’, L'invenzione di gusto: Corelli e Vivaldi (Milan, 1982)

J.W. Hill: ‘Oratory Music in Florence, III: the Confraternities from 1655 to 1785’, AcM, lviii (1986), 127–77

J.W. Hill: ‘Antonio Veracini in Context: New Perspectives from Documents, Analysis and Style’, EMc, xviii (1990), 545–62

JOHN WALTER HILL